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 then 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.