While most people come to Alaska just to get work, there are some who are seriously thinking of taking up a homestead or going prospecting for gold. Someone has said that prospecting is too much of a gamble. To me, prospecting is just as good or as bad as any other legitimate business. It’s all a gamble and so is life. You take a long chance of making a stake--you sure do--but some other kinds of business don’t pay either. In anything you do you are always taking a chance--even in taking a wife. 

Once the Missus and I had a little spat. During the heat of the debate, she said, “When I first married you, I thought you were a perfect gentleman, but I soon found out you were just an ordinary man.”

And when I opened my big mouth, I said, “Is that so? By heck, when I married you, I thought you were an angel, but you are just a woman.”

So it is with prospecting. We think it is an easy way to make a lot of dough--just strike it lucky and you are a millionaire. Here is a report on my first experience as a prospector. But first, let me tell you that I came to Alaska to get rich and then go back to “God’s country.” I had already picked out a nice place somewhere in Oregon. That was fifty years ago. I am still here and like it better every year, and, unless my horoscope tells me different, I’ll be buried here--but not as a millionaire.

In 1909, I took “French leave” from the Alaska Steamship boat, the Dolphin, in Skagway. In Dawson, Yukon Territory, I got a job as a steward on the Hannah, a river sternwheeler. During the winter, I had my first experience as a prospector. Sometime during the month of December, we left Dawson, pulling a sled by the neck.

We arrived on claim No. 154 above Discovery on Thistle Creek. The gold streak was anywhere from 10 to 30 feet from the surface and was reached by sinking a shaft from three to four feet wide and six feet long, down to the pay streak. Sinking this shaft and working the pay streak is made difficult by the fact that from the surface to the greatest depth that has yet been reached the ground is always frozen, and a process of firing is used to thaw out the ground. A brush and wood fire is built at the bottom of the shaft which burns all night and thaws out the ground from 8 to 14 inches. 

We had a windlass and my partner used to go down in the shaft in a wooden bucket. Slowly, I let him down. Sometimes we moved the bucket up and down several times to get rid of the noxious gases. This was caused by the fire. When all was well, my partner, who was at the bottom of the shaft, shoveled the gravel into the wooden bucket. I then hauled it up and slid it away from the hole where we dumped the waste. The average progress in the shaft was about eighteen inches per day. When all waste was taken out, we cut wood for the next fire for the night. The thermometer stood between 60 and 70 below zero.

Once I had not taken the double bitted axe into the house to warm it up. I took a swing at a spruce tree which was frozen so hard, that it was harder than the steel of my axe. The result--a large chunk the size of a dollar broke off the steel axe. 

After three weeks of sinking this shaft, one day my partner shouted from the bottom of the shaft, “We have struck bedrock.”

Being a greenhorn in prospecting, I asked, “What does that mean?”

“It’s the solid rock of the earth, and if there is any pay it should be here,” my partner said. “Send me down a gold pan and when the last bucket comes up I’ll send you up a pan of gravel, sand and bedrock material from the bedrock. We will take it to the cabin and see if we have pay.” The buckets came up fast now. Only a few more, and then my partner would come out. 

It must have been at least 70 below zero. Nevertheless, the dirt, as the miners call it, came up steaming hot. While my partner was picking and shoveling, I took off my Siwash mitts and started scratching in the warm muck. Suddenly I saw something glistening--a small pebble the size of a navy bean. I held it in my hand and a feeling came over me such as I had never felt before. 

I knew it was gold and I felt that we were rich. 

My partner woke me from my reverie by shouting, “What’s the matter up there?”

“Oh,” I said, “I’ve got a gold nugget.”

“You’ve got what?”

“A gold nugget,” I replied. 

“You’re sure it ain’t Cheechako gold which looks like gold, but really is mica and usually found in schist formations?”

I insisted it was gold. 

“Well,” he said, “send it down in the bucket.”

“But Frank,” I said, “we’ll lose it.”

“No, no,” he said, “just spit on it and stick it to the bottom. It will stay all right.”

I let the bucket down very carefully for fear it might strike the wall of the shaft and we would lose the nugget. When the bucket was down, he took out the small nugget and scratched it with his knife. Looking up, he said, “That’s a real gold nugget. Take me up.” In his arm he held the gold pan with pay dirt. While I made supper, Frank got a tub and filled it with snow. We had no water all winter -- only what we melted from snow.

That night we had supper, consisting of brown beans and bacon and apple pie made from dried apples. Talking about beans and dried apples reminds me that Frank was the man who made a fairly good prospector out of me and also a cook. Well do I remember how he showed me the art of cooking beans: First, parboil, then add bacon in the bottom, dried onions and salt and pepper. 

Once, he was mad at me. Before coming into the cabin he had found six or ten beans in the snow.  “Hey you young fellow, do you know that you are throwing good grub away? Next time when you pour off the water outside the cabin and beans fall out, pick them up. If you don’t you’ll wish you had before spring. We have a long winter ahead and the nearest store is 400 miles away.”

The apple pie, too, brings back memories. There was a squirrel who used to sit outside the cabin on the woodpile--chattering at us.

“I’ll have to shoot that squirrel,” said my partner. “He’s up to no good.”

Our stores were cached in wooden boxes in the woodshed. One day we discovered that the dried apple box was empty. That was the end of the squirrel. We could find no place where the squirrel had cached our fruit. But when my partner needed his boots because it was getting wet in the bottom of the shaft, he pulled them down from where they were hanging on the ridge pole near the ceiling of the cabin. Lo and behold, it rained dried apples and all sorts of fungus. Mr. Chipmunk had found a hole under the eave of the cabin, stole the dried apples and used his rubber for a cache.

But back to prospecting. After sufficient snow had been melted into water, my partner took the pan with pay dirt and there, by candlelight, crouching on his knees, he gave the pan several rapid whirls and shakes. Gold, being heaviest, will go to the bottom.

I watched him, looking at the gold pan and him while the candle was throwing shadows of a gigantic man on the wall. Holding the pan up, he looked at it intently.

The same feeling came over me again -- G O L D !

Gold is quiet--makes straight that which is not right.

In a little while a small rim of tiny specks of gold lay at the bottom of the pan. After it was thoroughly cleaned, we put it on a little gold scale. We had several pennyweights or about one dollar and eight cents to the pan.

“Well, my boy,” Frank said, “If this holds out, we will be rich.”

That night I was the happiest man in the world. We lay there talking until way late, and when, at last, my partner started to snore, I was still wide awake. One question was uppermost in my mind--what to do with all the money.

Naturally, the first thing I was going to do was to go back to Holland where I would find my old dad repairing shoes. Oh, how I hated the shoemaker’s bench. They tried to make a shoemaker out of me, but they gave up trying when I ran away. 

Now, I said to myself, this is what I’m going to do. The bench, table, shoes, tools -- I will throw the whole kaboodle out of the window. I won’t even bother to open the window, just throw it through the glass -- no more work for the Old Man.

Mother, who always wanted a sewing machine, had it already delivered to the house. I gave a party for my sisters and brothers--eight of them. When they left, I presented each of them with an envelope containing about $10,000. After my pipe dream, I too fell asleep.

The next day we drifted in the shaft to the left and found only a few specks. Next day we worked to the right and drew a blank. We found that as the pay streak was only a few inches wide, there was not enough pay to make wages. 

We drifted on the paystreak, hoping against hope that maybe she would widen out. But when our grub began to get low, we started talking about going back to Dawson. We figured there wasn’t enough gold in the dump to warrant waiting until spring and washing it in sluice boxes so we made a hand rocker. A rocker is simply a box, two feet by three feet in size. It is made in two parts, the top being shallow, with a heavy sheet iron bottom punched full of half inch holes. The other part has an inclined shelf over which is placed a piece of blanket. It resembles the old fashioned cradle. 

We first took the rocker down into the shaft to clean up, and then worked on the surface. We had a large fire to melt snow for it. It takes plenty of water to wash gold out of several tons of dirt. As we did not have a steel plate for our rocker, we took a length of our stove pipe, flattened it out, punched holes in it and used it. But it lasted only a week or so--the rocks wore it out in short time. 

So we took another length of pipe which lasted about the same time. We kept on taking stove pipe until we only had a piece left. By this time, we could not cook in the cabin any longer but it made little difference for we were almost out of grub anyway. 

We divided our gold nuggets and had $182 apiece for six month’s work. We hiked back to Dawson by way of the Black Hills and Scraggy Creek, living on bannock made from flour, melted snow and rabbits. In fact, I ate so much rabbit that, after that trip I have never eaten another rabbit. I am still afraid to look a rabbit in the face.

The moral of this story is: Always remember that a prospect is not a mine and a mine is always a prospect. I did not make a fortune, but I was severely bitten by the gold bug.

You may get over being bitten by mosquitoes or gnats, but once you are bitten by the gold bug you never, never, never fully recover.

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Published with permission from the family of Gerrit “Heinie” Snider.