Volume 2 - ElectricCanadian.com

164 HISTORY OF THE BANKcommunity in Dawson, they realized that the confidence ofthe public was the prime essential to the building up of a goodbusiness. In many cases exaggerated ideas as to the value ofgold dust from various claims were held. Whenever a scepticwas encountered, with an imaginary grievance on the score ofthe bank's assays, he was invited to come in with his dust,watch it melted and watch the bricks weighed, and then receivea clipping from his brick which he could take to San Francisco,get assayed there and compare with the bank's assay certificate.This offer often worked like a charm when no amount ofargument could have succeeded, and in some instances it wasaccepted and the correctness of the bank's assay was fullyestablished. More often, however, the mere offer convincedthe complainant of the good faith of the bank's officers.In a number of cases angry men produced assay certificatesfor gold mined from the same claims and which had alreadybeen assayed on the Coast in the autumn of 1897, and based onthese their demands for higher returns than the bank's assaywould allow. It invariably transpired that they had taken thefineness shown by the other assay and had never troubled toascertain the actual returns in currency per ounce of gold dust,which of course showed the loss in melt occasioned by theimpurities in the gold dust.Faced with such an enormous amount of business, andwith facilities for handling it which were as yet only crude, itwas clearly impossible, before shipment, to attempt to runinto bricks all the dust that was purchased. The procedurefollowed was to make a careful selection of an average sampleof about fifty ounces from each lot, run this into a brick andassay it, and ship the balance in dust, carefully identifiedby the number on the sack with the written record of thebrick bearing the corresponding number. Even then themelting and muffle furnaces were run to full capacity all season,so that had any other course been adopted fewer melts andassays must have been made, and the bank's business wouldhave been restricted accordingly. In addition to the business