Dawson City, which had sprung up in an Arctic night, was situated, they said, near the junction of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers, had a population when the miners left of 3,500, was laid out on modern lines with sixty-foot avenues and fifty-foot streets and had all the ambitious scope of a bonanza town with a few score log cabins and innumerable tents.

While the voyagers on the Excelsior were still telling their marvelous stories in San Francisco fuel was added to the fire by the arrival at Seattle of the steamer Portland, also straight from St. Michael, with sixty miners aboard and over $700,000 in gold. The excitement aroused by the arrival of the Portland surpassed even that of the earlier arrival, and it had hardly touched the wharf before hundreds of men in Seattle were crowding over one another to get an opportunity to board her for her return trip to the mouth of the Yukon.

These miners had been hunting for gold in the Yukon country for years. Some of them had found it in generous quantities lying in the streams and in the beds of creeks flowing into the Yukon just west of the spot where the river crosses the boundary between Alaska and Brit

ish America-along Forty-mile Creek, Sixtymile Creek and Birch Creek. They would have continued digging along these creeks for months longer content with the moderate but certain returns of their labors had it not been for the sudden discovery on the Klondike pouring into the Yukon over on the British side, of gold nuggets so large and handily found that, carried away with the news, they pulled up stakes and abandoned in a day the claims upon which they had been toiling for months. Circle City, the largest camp in the Yukon district, was deserted over night, and Dawson City, at the junction of the Klondike and the Yukon, sprang into being in a day. This was a year ago, at the beginning of the short summer season. The gold the returning miners brought to San Francisco. and Seattle was the product of that summer's pickings. They worked the Klondike and the banks of two creeks flowing into it, which they called appropriately the Eldorado and the Bonanza, until winter shut in on them, and for nine months of the cheerless Arctic season they lay huddled over their gold, until the breaking up of the ice in the following June gave them their first chance to escape back home with their

treasure. They had been shut out from the world for nine months as completely as if they had been dead. They did not even know the result of the election for President. They were strangers in their own country.

The Portus B. Weare is a little steamer, owned by a transportation company, which makes the trip up and down the Yukon three or four times every summer, and on this boat the miners loaded their gold and left their fortune-banks behind. They steamed 2000 miles down the river to the diminutive port of St. Michael, on the coast of Behring Sea, there to take passage on steamers bound for home.

St. Michael is situated on an island ninety miles north of the mouth of the Yukon. It is the most important station of the coast for all the Yukon region, and, in fact, the only one so far as freight and supplies are concerned. On June 27, at noon, the Portus B. Weare, the first passenger steamer to arrive from up the river, came steaming around the low headland and drowned the frantic cheering of the crowds on the two boats lying there with its hoarse whistle. The Portland and Excelsior, drawing in excess of nineteen feet of water, were obliged to lie out