372 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
in a short time, but not being educated to use wealth properly, it was 
mostly misused and spent in debauchery. The greatest quantity 
produced in the district was in 1900, when the output reached 
nearly four and a half million pounds sterling. One man, Dick Lowe 
by name, is said to have got out of a fractional claim, 86 feet by 300 
feet in area, £120,000, but I was told he spent it in a few years and 
died in poverty. Others got and wasted as much or more. Cormack 
was said to be working as a coal miner and Henderson was in 1913 a 
Government pensioner. One of the quickest fortunes was made 
by two men who in 27 hours cleaned up gold to the value of £13,000. 
Many stories are told of the proceedings at Klondike in these ‘‘golden 
days” which are not for edification, and the moral is that wealth 
too easily and quickly acquired is apt to be the opposite of a blessing 
to mankind. 
At the height of the boom in the winter of 1899 the population of 
Dawson City is said to have reached 25,000, and that of the whole 
district 50,000. All these people did not make fortunes, while many 
lost their lives in the attempt, and soon the richest of the placers 
became exhausted and the exodus began. At the time of my visit 
Dawson City had a population of only 2,000, and the place was in a 
sorry condition, while the surrounding district was almost depleted 
of drift miners. 
When good gold was found the Government, out of the revenue 
from the duty that was paid, set to work with exemplary speed to 
construct roads up the main creeks and over the hills, which greatly 
facilitated and cheapened transport. We went up Klondike Valley 
and Hunker Creek by one of these roads, spent the night in the little 
rest house near the summit in the snow that had begun to fall, and 
next day returned by Eldorado and Bonanza Creek. My little 
party of three was fortunate enough in being conveyed round this 
60-mile run by Mr. J. W. Boyle in his motor car, not without con- 
siderable difficulty and risk at perilous places. Mr. Boyle is the able 
head of the Boyle Concessions (Litd.), one of the two large and 
prosperous companies now engaged in extracting the remaining gold 
left by the drift miners. Besides showing us great hospitality, 
Mr. J. W. Boyle, in common with many other kind hosts in Dawson 
City, gave the visitors much valuable information about the present 
condition of the gold industry and the methods that are taken to 
succeed in accomplishing by modern science and capital what in 
the hands of poor and uneducated men would be a perfectly hopeless 
task. 
The gold in the Yukon field is, as has been said, derived originally 
from many small veins widely disseminated in the metamorphic 
schists of the surrounding locality. Large and productive veins 
have not been found but attempts have been made to work small 
