As may be seen, the buried treasures of these gravel beds were to be won in these pioneer years only by dint of exhausting labor and frightful hardship.  They would never have been found at all had not the bars and shores of the streams yielded gold at the surface level.  Yet the extraordinary richness of these gravels, from which as much as $50,000 might be obtained as the result of a winter’s work, excited men’s imaginations to the utmost, and the stream of gold-seekers continued year after year until Dawson grew to be a well-built and populous city and the yearly output of the Klondike mines amounted to more than $16,000,000.

The difficulty in reaching the mines grew less year by year.  As early as 1898 a railway was begun across the White Pass.  It now extends from Skagway more than a hundred miles inland, the lakes and streams being traversed by steamers, so that the purgatory of the early prospectors has been converted into the “broad and easy way” of the later sinners.  The old method of burning into the frozen soil has also been improved on, steam being now used instead of fire and the pay-dirt reached much more rapidly and cheaply by its aid.

The Klondike region, though largely prospected and worked by Americans, is not in Alaska, Dawson lying sixty miles east of the border.  The streams of Alaska itself, so far as they have yet been worked, are far less promising, and yet Alaska has a golden treasure house of its own that may yet prove as prolific as the Klondike itself.

This is at Nome, on the shores of Bering Sea, about twenty-five degrees of longitude nearly due west from Dawson, and a hundred and fifty miles north of the mouth of the Yukon.  Here the sands of the sea itself and of its bordering shores have proven splendid gold bearers and have attracted a large population to that inhospitable region, in latitude sixty-five degrees north; here has grown up a city containing 25,000 inhabitants, and here may be seen the most northerly railroad in the world.

In 1898 a soldier, in digging a well on the beach at Nome, saw in the sands thrown up that alluring yellow glint which has led so many men to fortune and so many to death.  The story of his find came to the ears of an old prospector from Idaho, who, too ill to go inland, was stranded in the military station of Nome.  Spade and pan were at once put to work and in twenty days the fortunate invalid found himself worth $3000 in gold.

At Nome the gold was first found in the beach sands and even in the sands of the sea adjoining the beach, old Neptune being forced to yield part of the treasures he had taken to himself.  Later, the bench of higher land stretching back from the beach and the sides of the down-flowing creeks were found to be gold-bearing, the bench gravels being from forty to eighty feet thick, with gold throughout.  A heavy growth of moss covers this coastal plain, under which lie the frozen gravels, which are softened by the use of steam and thus forced to give up their previous freight.  That is all we need say about the gold product of Alaska, further than to sum up that the territory yields about $10,000,000 per year, or with the Klondike about $25,000,000, these equalling nearly one-third the total production of the United States.  Here is a fine showing for a region once deemed worthless.