374 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
On our way up Klondike Valley, between Bear Creek and the 
mouth of Hunker Creek, we stopped to visit the last of the old drift 
mines in the Klondike Valley, where a party of 21 men were working 
on tribute in the frozen gravel, which is here 40 feet deep, for which 
they paid a royalty of 20 per cent of the gold recovered to the owner 
of the claim. The accompanying diagram, showing a section of the 
working drawn to scale, and a sketch of the surface arrangements 
(pl. 4), will convey an idea of the method adopted in this field by 
miners with a limited amount of capital at their disposal. 
A shaft is sunk to the rock surface where the pay streak occurs, and 
from this a tunnel or heading is driven 50 yards in one direction to 
the boundary of the claim or the limit of the little field that can be 
worked easily from one shaft. When this distance is reached a 
drift is made in the gravel at right angles to the main tunnel on each 
side along the boundary, so that the working plan is like the letter 
T to begin with. Then the whole area is gradually worked back 
Fia. 4.—Section across Bonanza Valley at Lovett Hill (vertical scale double horizontal). P.S., position 
of pay streak of coarse gold at bottom of white channel gravels in bed of old valley. 
toward the shaft on a method corresponding to what in coal-mining 
is known as the ‘‘long-wall system.” It is not a true long-wall 
method, however, as no wall is required to hold up the frozen roof, 
which is very strong and needs no support near the working face. 
In mining a coal seam the thin ‘‘holing” picked or cut out under 
the coal is the least valuable part, and the thick stratum above it 
is what the miners are after. But in the case under notice the 
opposite principle holds. The thin stratum next the bedrock is 
the only valuable part. It is, however, too hard frozen to be imme- 
diately removed. To undercut the hard mass, lines of horizontal 
holes are bored close to the bedrock into which pipes with sharp 
points are driven 4 or 5 feet, and connected with a pipe from a boiler 
at the pit mouth. Steam is thus injected by means of these steam 
points, as they are called, for from 6 to 12 hours, and the holing is 
thawed till it is quite soft and can be easily excavated with picks and 
shovels. Each steam point requires steam equal to about one horse- 
power, and thaws from 1 to 3 cubic yards per shift. This thawed 
gravel is wheeled away in barrows and emptied into a bucket or 
skip at the pit bottom. The bucket is hoisted to the surface by a 
steam winch, and by an ingenious arrangement travels along an 
aerial ropeway and is tipped automatically into the sluicebox. All 
the surface labor required is that of a man in the sluicebox to throw 
