The Alaska citizen., 1910-08-13

drawn rom bret t1dIlt or lne ldleS of the early Australian gold dig gings. will be upset on your first introduction to Kalgoorlie You have travelled 37O miles from Perth. din ed. slept. and breakfasted in the train in as much comfort as if you had been travelling in England or France. and you find yourself in prosperous. but apparently not over busy. provincial town, with broad streets, tramways, churches, good hotels. shops and the usual well ap- pointed hospitable Australian club house, where you may read most of the London papers within a month of their publication, or look on from a comfortable chair at a game of bowls played on perfect green under rows of electric lights in the cool of the evening.
 The streets of Kalgoorlie are not paved with gold, although it is one of the richest gold fields in the world They are covered with a fine. red dust which blows about very unpleasantly in the hot weath- CT But yet you may see. as I saw within actual touch of the pave ments. some enterprising adyentur- CT shaking the red soil in cradle and extracting enough from it of the precious grains to make the labor worth his while and there are shafts sunk in the very middle of some of the streets. though not the most frequented.
 But the town has for the most part settled down to an ordinary, well organized industry A great tide of civilization, responsibility steady, responsible work has washed away the adventure and the wicked ness the fierce ardor and reckless profusion The mine managers draw large salaries and settle disputes with the trade unions to which their men belong; the stock exchange keeps business hours in a handsome building. and no longer buys or sells the open air; the gold escort no longer clatters off with horses and rifles on it's long journey through he waterless brush, but watches a safe in railway van; the women and children no longer sleep in tents or live in constant, labori- ous, dreary picnic, but in trim villas with pretty gardens. go to school, and to church on Sundays, show their smart hats and dresses at the pretty race course. where the grass is kept green all the year round. and flowers bloom in profusion round the lawns and about the stands.
 But if you climb up to some point of vantage and look over the town you see that it is not like other Australian country towns. It spreads itself widely over the flat, red plain. iron chimneys. well stayed rise high above the roofs. Gigantic, timbered poppetheads stand over the mine shafts, huge mounds of tailings still retaining some of their gold, some of them with truck lines laid on them, are heaped up as high as if Nature had heaped them there. The houses thin out towards the out skirts, and seem to have been dump little white shanties with no sign of green about them, and a few bet ter ones here and there with pepper trees and little gardens The eye takes in the long lines of stacked tireWood for the furnaces-no coal is used at Kalgoorlie-the iron skips loaded with ore drawn along the overhead wires, and the empty ones going back to the mine alongside
 
 closes in on every side limitless level of monotony, broken only by a few low hills, holding out no promise, no refreshment to eye or spirit. It is as if Nature had tried to cover up her buried treasure with the shabbiest of carpets so that GOV etous man should never suspect that in this dreary spot out of the beau tiful places in the world he could find anything worth the finding
 We put on old, stained suits of khaki, took our stand in the narrow cage and dropped 1850 feet down the boarded shaft, the higher tun- nels of the mine, now jet black caves, now dimly lighted, flashed past us We lit candles and went along the rough-hewn passages there are many miles of them in the different levels-from which the ore had been extracted They were roughly roofed and held up by huge timbers here and there, and the narrow tramway line ran along their rock floors At the end of one an | hydraulic drill was pounding and laundering at the hard rock, mak- | ;,o .aI, II