188 J. E. McGrath — The Alaskan Boundary Survey. 



portions of the territory have not proven inaccessible to those 

 solitary searchers for the precious metal, and everywhere they 

 have found " color," but up to the present time no place has paid 

 steadily and well, except the small river called by the natives 

 Chitandipeh, and by the whites Forty Mile creek. Here last 

 season there were about 150 white men, and when we left camp 

 Davidson in June, 1891, it was the only river below Pelly, except 

 the Kuyukuk, on which mines were worked. The lower part of 

 the Forty Mile is abandoned now, but the richest ground is in the 

 gulches near the head of the creek, and it is estimated that it 

 will be several years before their treasured are all extracted. 

 Mayo and McGuesten are the traders who supply these men with 

 stores, and they told me that their shipments of gold dust for 

 the past year amounted to $40,000, and this, they estimated, was 

 a little less than one-half of the total output of the creek. The 

 regular mining season lasts for only about three months, but 

 some men do a little winter mining, which is extremely laborious. 

 It necessitates first chopping a great quantity of cord-wood, 

 Avhich then has to be hauled to the bar that is being worked. 

 Here it is heaped up in piles and fired, and then the thawed 

 ground is dug out and piled on some bank above high Avater, 

 and when summer comes and the- ice goes it is taken down 

 and washed out. In the winter of 1889-1890 three men took 

 out 23,000 buckets of dirt, Avhich netted them $1,000 apiece for 

 their three months of the hardest kind of mining work known. 

 The largest nuggets ever found in Alaska have been found on 

 Forty Mile creek ; one was shown us which was worth $56, and 

 in last July a man named Nelson took out a nugget worth $260. 

 The evidences that Alaska gives on all sides of the existence of 

 gold will always tempt men to go there, but' real exhaustive ex- 

 aminations of her streams will not be made until the miners feel 

 sure that when they return to the trading posts after a long sea- 

 son's prospecting they can depend upon finding food there. As 

 affairs are managed now, they must return to the stations in the 

 middle of their short working season to see what the steamboat 

 has brought, and no one can tell when some accident will happen to 

 the one steamer that connects the interior with Saint Michael, and 

 force all hands to leave the country or else face the possibility 

 of starvation, as was the case in the fall of 1889. It is a very risky 

 venture trying to live on the country in the interior of Alaska. 



