methods for getting the gold. It was formerly considered impossible to
work after the month of September, but experience has now conclusively
proved that much may be accomplished during the winter months. The
working year is therefore three times as long as it used to be, and the
time formerly wasted in idleness is now profitably employed. The
difficulty of winter mining is, of course, enormously increased by the
fact that the ground is frozen. Every foot of it must be thawed, either
in sinking or drifting, by small fires. The shallower mines are worked
during the summer in the open air, but when the gravel is more than six
feet deep a shaft is sunk, and dirt enough removed to allow space to
work in. Thus the gold seeker with a log hut close to the mouth of his
shaft and provided with plenty of food and fuel may pass a whole winter
in comparative comfort. About a ton of dead ground can be dumped daily,
and a few hundred pounds of pay gravel. The latter is piled up until the
spring when the thaw comes. It is then "panned" or "rocked" without
difficulty, for here, unlike Western Australia, there is no lack of
water.[81]

[Footnote 81: For further particulars anent gold-mining in the Klondike,
see "Through the Gold Fields of Alaska," by Harry de Windt.]

Steam power has now supplanted these more or less primitive methods on
the most important claims, but here again the enormous duty levied by
the Canadian Government on machinery of all kinds, was, while we were at
Dawson, causing universal indignation. A single visit to the creeks
sufficed for me, for although Dawson was free from mosquitoes, the
diggings swarmed with them. And, talking of mosquitoes, no one
unacquainted with Alaska can be aware of the almost unbearable suffering
which they are capable of inflicting upon mankind. Brehm, the famous
naturalist, has furnished about the best description of a luckless
prospector caught in the toils. "Before a man knows," says the
professor, "he is covered from head to foot with a dense swarm,
blackening grey cloths and giving dark ones a strange spotted
appearance. They creep to the unprotected face and neck, the bare hands,
and stockinged feet, slowly sink their sting into the skin, and pour the
irritant poison into the wound. Furiously the victim beats the
blood-sucker to a pulp, but while he does so, five, ten, twenty other
gnats fasten on his face and hands. The favourite points of attack are
the temples, the neck, and t