r prospecting for new ones. As
they said of themselves, they were the kind of men who are always caught
out with forks when it rains soup. In the stampede that followed the
news of Carmack's strike very few old miners took part. They were not
there to take part. But the men who did go on the stampede were mainly
the worthless ones, the new-comers, and the camp hangers on. And while
Bob Henderson plugged away to the east, and the heroes plugged away to
the west, the greenhorns and rounders went up and staked Bonanza.

But the Northland was not yet done with its joke. When fall came on and
the heroes returned to Forty Mile and to Circle City, they listened
calmly to the up-river tales of Siwash discoveries and loafers'
prospects, and shook their heads. They judged by the calibre of the men
interested, and branded it a bunco game. But glowing reports continued
to trickle down the Yukon, and a few of the old-timers went up to see.
They looked over the ground--the unlikeliest place for gold in all their
experience--and they went down the river again, "leaving it to the
Swedes."

Again the Northland turned the tables. The Alaskan gold hunter is
proverbial, not so much for his unveracity, as for his inability to tell
the precise truth. In a country of exaggerations, he likewise is prone
to hyperbolic description of things actual. But when it came to
Klondike, he could not stretch the truth as fast as the truth itself
stretched. Carmack first got a dollar pan. He lied when he said it was
two dollars and a half. And when those who doubted him did get
two-and-a-half pans, they said they were getting an ounce, and lo! ere
the lie had fairly started on its way, they were getting, not one ounce,
but five ounces. This they claimed was six ounces; but when they filled
a pan of dirt to prove the lie, they washed out twelve ounces. And so it
went. They continued valiantly to lie, but the truth continued to outrun
them.

But the Northland's hyperborean laugh was not yet ended. When Bonanza
was staked from mouth to source, those who had failed to "get in,"
disgruntled and sore, went up the "pups" and feeders. Eldorado was one
of these feeders, and many men, after locating on it, turned their backs
upon their claims and never gave them a second thought. One man sold a
half-interest in five hundred feet of it for a sack of flour. Other
owners wandered around trying to bunco men into buying them out for a
song. And t