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WINTER PROSPECTORS ABOVE "FORTY-MILE"
THE GOLD PROSPECTOR
OF TODAY
By H. CORT LOWE
Y E L L O W gold with its dull. to better advantage. And to all comes
satiny glow virgin from the the quiet satisfaction of a living wrested
earth, irregular shaped, is from the most taintless of soutces and a
something that comparatively virile life spent at Nature's own door­
few people, outside of mining way. And there is always just around
camps, have seen. There is a lure in its the corner the lure of the big strike,
yellow depths, a call to possession, that urgent and haunting, as potent as at any
amounts almost to a fever. The stories time since the white man discovered a
that come down from the North of the yellow metal in the North.
discovery and the romance and the ad­ The procedure of the small operator
venture of the ceaseless search, the call is fascinating. Ground forty, sixty, two
that leads men to live the lives of her­ hundred feet deep is worked. At a depth
mits, of moles burrowing under ground, of two hundred feet the gravel is frozen
risking rheumatism, accident and frost­ as firmly as at the surface. No tembite,
are as glamorous today as was the perature at that latitude, of course,
lurid call of the Klondike and the Forty- could freeze this ground down from the
Mile country, the call that first led men surface. It has been frozen layer upon
into the frozen North.
layer as it steadily worked itself into
The big operator today moves yards place in the eons of time since the mas­
more of gravel than were dreamed of in todon roamed the same hills and valleys.
the olden days and more efficiently and Incidentally, it has been the lot of scores
quicker. But the little outfits, two or of miners to dig up on bedrock mam­
three men working together, work also moth tusks and bones of the same extinct
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