Volume 2 - ElectricCanadian.com

THE YUKON ADVENTURE 177required, and every year the supply became more difficult toobtain and involved longer hauls. Thus work went on duringthe winter, the miner testing his work frequently by "panning,"in order to keep on the "pay streak." By spring the resultantdump had assumed large proportions; in some cases, wheremany men were working, it was colossal. The spring sunthawed these dumps, which had of course become frozen, andthe dirt was then shovelled into sluice-boxes, with riffles toretain the gold and black sand when the head of water, runinto the sluice-box from the flume, carried off the dirt andgravel. After some hours' shovelling and sluicing, the workwould be stopped in order to ascertain the result or "clean-up,"and this process continued until the dump had been "washedup." Another and more primitive way of cleaning up was byshovelling the dirt into a rocker which was worked by hand.Such methods as are described above were the only ones inuse in the early days of the camp, but they gradually gaveplace to improved devices. Boilers and pipes supplied steamfor thawing purposes and a steam winch operated the bucketsin the shafts.Later, these buckets were made self-emptying,and pumps and labour-saving machinery were installed.Summer-working, or ground-sluicing on a larger scale, wasintroduced at an early date. About four years after the campwas established, extensive hydraulic works and huge dredgesbegan to be employed. In the early days the supply of waterfor sluicing had been more or less precarious, and its failureoften meant a tragedy. Later on, the building of large damsto conserve the water, and of flumes or pipes to carry it longdistances, became a separate enterprise. These later methodsinvolved an enormous outlay of capital such as was not dreamedof in the joyous early days of the camp.Large numbers ofdredges have for years been operating on low-grade ground,which could only have been worked at a loss by the primitivemethods described above. The worked-over ground of earlierdays on various creeks has also been rehandled by dredges withexcellent results. As may be supposed, these large hydraulic