The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-09-18
ALONG THE YUKON RIVER.

|
 Forests on its Banks-Gold Mining in
 Our Most Northern Possessions
 From the Chicago Daily Inter-ocean.l
 ''The mother of gold" is the name
 Humboldt gave Alaska, and the latest
 news from it's shining shores confirms
 the fact anew. Not the least part of
 the cargo of a Chicago-owned merchant
 ship, just in from the Arctic circle, was
 gold dust. MT. c. A, Weare tells the particulars, as also other interesting points of the trip, which he made as an
 off1cer-treasurer-of a trading oompa-
 ny which has for the past four years
 carried on an active commerce with
 those northernmost territories of Uncle | Sam.
 T have only within the hour arrived from Alaska" said Treasurer Weare to | the reporter q left Seattle, Wash,
 for Alaska on Wednesday, June 5, on ! the steamer Excelsior. We had aboard the ship about five hundred and fifty tons of freight and sixty odd passen- gers, besides our coal-she carries three hundred and fifty tons of coal. We | made the passage out through the Sound, the Straits of San Juan de Fuca, and made due southwest to the lower end of the Aleutian Islands, and thence through the Unimock Pass, touching at Dutch harbor, among the Alaska is lands, That is the last port of entry where a United States custom house collector is stationed. Our course taken then was north through Behring Sea, We passed Pribylov Island, Nun amac Island, St. Matthew's Island, and St. Lawrence Island.
 Bending our course to the north | Arctic coast, of which the initial point | is Cape Hope, from that vicinity we di- rected our ship due east along the north Arctic coast, traversing Norton's Sound, passed Cape Darvy, and thence round to St. Michaels harbor, on St.
 Michael's Island There the steamer l P. B. Weare met the ocean steamer,
 and the two vessels exchanged cargoes, I've giving them provisions and mer- l chandise of divers kinds and receiving
 in our turn the yellow fruitage of the mines in gleaming gold dust and, of | course, great treasures in furs
 "The P B. Weare is the company s l steamer, which plies the great inland 1 sea of the Yukon river, one of the mightiest waterways of the globe The
 river gets into St. lMichaePs harbor by passing over, literally overfowing, the
 continuous sand bars that seek to shut | up the river the overflow skirting the | western Alaskan coast for about eighty miles, between Romanoff Point and | Stewards Island. That is the way the company's boat gets out from the Yu- kon river and gets back into 1t. When | the boat is once in the Yukon river it
 makes the passage of about seventeen hundred miles up the river to the diff l ferent posts along 1t, among them the | Catholic and Russian missions, Circle
 City, forty miles, and lastly, Fort ,Cud- | ahy, fully seventeen hundred miles up l the river.
 ''The object of our trip and of those | investments there is to trade on this river with the miners and the natives. These are the newly discovered gold | fields of Alaska, where the develop
 ment, of course, is as yet more or less
 crude but still very rich. There win l tered in the Yukon valley about fifteen hundred miners last winter, and proba- l bly, the men will be increased to at least two thousand during next winter. ] The process of obtaining the gold is by l placer mining, and is done in the sum- mer months in the usual way by slui- cling. The entire country is covered by l a growth of moss, which all has to be | stripped off and the earth thawed down l to the pay rock Of course during the summer months the sun will thaw the l earth where the creek beds are shallow | enough, but a great deal of fire and l burning has to be resorted to in order I to get down where the earth Is deeper
 over the surface of the pay rock. | There is a great deal of convenient l timber on the Yukon river and Its trib- utaries mostly fir, pine and cotton, | three-foot logs being about the largest. There is a sufficient quantity for all the
 needs of the present.
 '"The Yukon river is navigable for
 about 1,S0o miles for steamboats.
 It has five outlets, and yet, as I have | intimated, no direct, practicable chan nel to the ocean has been discovered | heretofore. it's mouth at this season of | the year being, for about forty miles, filled with bars and islands. For some
 six or eight hundred miles up the river | the water is very feep, and would be navigable by middfe-sized ocean steamers if there were any way to get
 in over the sand bars at the mouth. | The river averages from one mile to l ten miles wide for eight hundred miles,
 and above that it averages about one | and a half miles wide for the next eight hundred miles. The waters of the Yu-
 kon drain a country in extent as large
 as the United States east of the Missis-
 sippi river. The country is mountain ous, but the mountains are not very high. They have evidently been
 ground off by the glacier period in | those canons. The valleys are filled in
 with these washings from the noun tains, and it is in these canons and
 valleys that the gold dust is found,
 along the sides of these hills and noun
 tains. It is found everywhere along
 the Yukon river and in the sands of the
 river. It is estimated that about two
 to three million dollars of gold dust has
 been taken out of the Yukon river in 1 the past five or seven years, but a. rec
 ord of it does not appear in the public
 record, for the reason that the miners
 bringing It out, as rule, go to the first | assay office and pass it through and | sell it, without mentioning where it is