232 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



inspired by the fact that the rent of a house is about half its value, 

 and that 60 per cent, is an ordinary rate of interest for loans. 

 Laborers' wages are £2 a day. Although almost anything required 

 may be purchased in Dawson, all goods have been imported at great 

 expense into a country which of itself has produced nothing but gold 

 and wood. The freight rates on the White Pass route are about six 

 cents a pound, and £23 a ton may be paid from Vancouver to Dawson. 



The mining camp is situated to the southeast of Dawson at a dis- 

 tance of about thirteen miles. The productive area is about thirty 

 miles square, and is bounded on the north by the Klondike Eiver, on 

 the west by the Yukon Eiver, and on the south by the Indian Eiver. 

 The district is a gently undulating upland or plateau, attaining an 

 average height of nearly 3,000 feet above the Yukon, and intersected 

 by deep flat-bottomed valleys which radiate from its central and highest 

 point, a rounded hill named the Dome. The valleys are separated by 

 hog-backed ridges; the whole district is fairly thickly wooded with 

 spruce and poplar except on the summits of the ridges ; the bottoms of 

 the valleys are occupied by flat marshy bogs, and the streams are rarely 

 more than ten feet broad. The bog, which is from five to ten feet 

 thick, is frozen at a short depth below the surface and keeps the under- 

 lying gravel, which may be from ten to thirty feet thick, permanently 

 frozen right down to the bed-rock. 



The principal streams are known as creeks; the short steep tribu- 

 taries which flow into them as ' gulches'; and the streamlets which feed 

 these as 'pups.' The most important creeks are from seven to ten miles 

 in length, and are productive over perhaps half their course, so that 

 there may be about fifty miles of richly productive gravel in the dis- 

 trict. I was informed that one stretch of three and one half miles on 

 El Dorado Creek produced no less than £6,000,000 of gold. 



Eecently constructed government roads lead from Dawson to the 

 camp and connect the various creeks; they were being completed at 

 the time of our visit, and were still very rough or almost impassable 

 at some points among the creeks ; numerous rudely built but fairly com- 

 fortable 'road-houses' afford lodging to the traveler. A small town of 

 log cabins, known as Grand Forks, has sprung up at the junction of 

 the two most famous creeks, Bonanza and El Dorado, and is inhabited 

 by perhaps 1,200 miners and others. There is another small town 

 named Cariboo on Dominion Creek. 



The creeks no longer present the dreary appearance of bog and 

 forest, which made them look so unpromising to the early prospectors ; 

 the hillsides have been largely stripped of their timber, and the 

 valley bottoms are in many parts the scene of active mining opera- 

 tions and rendered unsightly by machinery; the mining is also 

 carried on upon the hillsides at a height of 300 or 400 feet, where 



