and, after a few miles, leaving that, we
turned up Jack Wade Creek and pursued it far up towards its head ere we
reached the road-house for the night.

[Sidenote: THE FORTYMILE]

We were now on historic ground, so far as gold mining in Alaska is
concerned. The "Fortymilers" bear the same pioneer relation to gold
mining in the North that the "Fortyniners" bear to gold mining in
California. Ever since 1886 placers have been worked in this district,
and it still yields gold, though the output and the number of men are
alike much reduced. It is interesting to talk with some of the original
locators of this camp, who may yet be found here and there in the
country, and to learn of the conditions in those early days when a
steamboat came up the Yukon once in a season bringing such supplies and
mail as the men received for the year. It was here that the problem of
working frozen ground was first confronted and solved; here that the
first "miner's law" was promulgated, the first "miners' meeting" dealt
out justice. Your "old-timer" anywhere is commonly _laudator temporis
acti_, but there is good reason to believe that these early, and
certainly most adventurous, gold-miners, some of whom forced a way into
the country when there were no routes of travel, and subsisted on its
resources while they explored and prospected it, were men of a higher
stamp than many who have come in since. The extent to which that early
prospecting was carried is not generally known, for these men, after the
manner of their kind, left no record behind them. There are few creek
beds that give any promise at all in the whole of this vast country that
have not had some holes sunk in them. Even in districts so remote as the
Koyukuk, signs of old prospecting are encountered. When a stampede took
place to the Red Mountain or Indian River country of the middle Koyukuk
in 1911-12, I was told that there was not a creek in the camp that did
not show signs of having been prospected long before, although it had
passed altogether out of knowledge that this particular region had ever
been visited by prospectors.

[Sidenote: "SNIPING ON THE BARS"]

As the Fortymile is the oldest gold camp in the North, some of its trail
making is of the best in Alaska. In particular the trail from the head
of Jack Wade Creek down into Steel Creek reminded one of the Alpine
roads in its bold, not to say daring, engineering. It drops from bench
to bench in great sweeping curves alw