KLONDYKE.

Klondyke!  The word and place that has startled the civilized world is to-day a series of thriving mining camps on the Yukon River and its tributaries in the Canadian Northwest Territories.

Prior to August 24, 1896, this section of the country had never been heard of.  It was on this day that a man named Henderson discovered the first gold.

On the first day of the following month the writer commenced erecting the first house in this region and called the place Dawson City, now the central point of the mining camps.

Dawson City is now the most important point in the new mining regions.  Its population in June, 1897; exceeded 4,000; by June next it cannot be less than 25,000.  It has a saw-mill, stores, churches, of the Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist and Roman Catholic denominations.  It is the headquarters of the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police, and perfect law and order is maintained.

It is at Dawson City that the prospector files his claims with the Government Gold Commissioner, in the recording offices.

Dawson City faces on one of the banks of the Yukon River, and now occupies about a mile of the bank.  It is at the junction of the Klondyke River with the Yukon River.  It is here where the most valuable mining claims are being operated on a scale of profit that the world has hitherto never known.  The entire country surrounding is teeming with mineral wealth.

Copper, silver and coal can be found in large quantities, but little or no attention is now being paid to these valuable minerals, as every one is engaged in gold-hunting and working the extraordinary placer mining claims already located.

The entire section is given up to placer mining.  Very few claims had been filed for quartz mining.  The fields of gold will not be exhausted in the near future.  No man can tell what the end will be.  From January to April, 1897, about $4,000,000 were taken out of the few placer claims then being worked.  This was done in a territory not exceeding forty square miles.  All these claims are located on Klondyke River and the little tributaries emptying into it, and the districts are known as Big Bonanza, Gold Bottom and Honker.

I have asked old and experienced miners at Dawson City who mined through California in Bonanza days, and some who mined in Australia, what they thought of the Klondyke region, and their reply has invariably been, “The world never saw so vast and rich a find of gold as we are working now.”

Dawson City is destined to be the greatest mining camp in the history of mining operations.