hen Eldorado "showed up." It was far, far richer than
Bonanza, with an average value of a thousand dollars a foot to every foot
of it.

A Swede named Charley Anderson had been at work on Miller Creek the year
of the strike, and arrived in Dawson with a few hundred dollars. Two
miners, who had staked No. 29 Eldorado, decided that he was the proper
man upon whom to "unload." He was too canny to approach sober, so at
considerable expense they got him drunk. Even then it was hard work, but
they kept him befuddled for several days, and finally, inveigled him into
buying No. 29 for $750. When Anderson sobered up, he wept at his folly,
and pleaded to have his money back. But the men who had duped him were
hard-hearted. They laughed at him, and kicked themselves for not having
tapped him for a couple of hundred more. Nothing remained for Anderson
but to work the worthless ground. This he did, and out of it he took
over three-quarters of a million of dollars.

It was not till Frank Dinsmore, who already had big holdings on Birch
Creek, took a hand, that the old-timers developed faith in the new
diggings. Dinsmore received a letter from a man on the spot, calling it
"the biggest thing in the world," and harnessed his dogs and went up to
investigate. And when he sent a letter back, saying that he had never
seen "anything like it," Circle City for the first time believed, and at
once was precipitated one of the wildest stampedes the country had ever
seen or ever will see. Every dog was taken, many went without dogs, and
even the women and children and weaklings hit the three hundred miles of
ice through the long Arctic night for the biggest thing in the world. It
is related that but twenty people, mostly cripples and unable to travel,
were left in Circle City when the smoke of the last sled disappeared up
the Yukon.

Since that time gold has been discovered in all manner of places, under
the grass roots of the hill-side benches, in the bottom of Monte Cristo
Island, and in the sands of the sea at Nome. And now the gold hunter who
knows his business shuns the "favourable looking" spots, confident in his
hard-won knowledge that he will find the most gold in the least likely
place. This is sometimes adduced to support the theory that the gold
hunters, rather than the explorers, are the men who will ultimately win
to the Pole. Who knows? It is in their blood, and they are capable of
it.

PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA.
_Feb