Forty-two years after Carmack made the discovery which brought thousands of gold-seekers to the north, the Klondike gravels continue to yield their golden treasure
to the hands of man.
Where once the pioneer miners panned, rocked and sluiced, eight dredges are now separating the gold from the placer gravels. Their number will soon be augmented by the ninth dredge, now under construction on Upper Sulphur Creek, and the tenth will soon be started and will probably be completed before winter.
From 600 to 700 men find employment five to six months of the year in the mining operations of the Yukon Consolidated Gold Mining Corporation. This company has proven ground to continue its work for at least 20 to 30 more years, and it is said that there is much more ground available which the company has not as yet taken up. None of the hill ground is being worked now, but future development will be in this direction.
No Draglines
At the present time the company does not operate any draglines but it is said that some of the proven property of the company will have to be operated by this method.
Average depth of the ground is 30 feet. Most of the ground is frozen and is thawed by the cold-water method. Most in use now for thawing operations is the chisel-bit point, but several new installations will be the half-inch open-end pipe.
Three of the eight dredges now in operation are large boats with 16-
foot buckets and operate at depths up to 50 feet. They were built by Yukon Gold, one of the early-day development companies. The smaller boats have a bucket capacity of five to seven feet and operate at depths up to 30 feet. All Dawson dredges have wooden hulls. Dredge No. 8 is using new rivetless buckets.
Power is furnished by hydro-electric plant operating the year-round. There is a new Peters Diesel emergency standby plant in Dawson.
Transfer Dredge
Dredge No. 1 at Remington on Dominion Creek is to be torn down this fall and completely repaired at the Bear Creek shops and transferred to Hunker Creek next summer, where stripping operations are now in progress.
Dredge No. 2 is now operating near Bear Creek.
Dredge No. 3 now working near Arlington at the mouth of Hunker, has about two years work left there, after which that section will be worked out.
Dredge No. 4, well up Bonanza, is reworking tailings, and will turn back to re-dredge the Lower Klondike to Dawson.
Dredge No. 5 and No. 6 are operating at the mouth of Sulphur. Middle and Upper Sulphur are the scene of operations of Dredges No. 8 and No. 9. Water for the operations is supplied by a 16-mile ditch. The ditch is fed by two 800-horsepower synchronous motors pumping into a ditch 230 feet above. This installation is equipped with a unique surge-control.
Dredge No. 7 is working on Quartz Creek.
Dredge No. 10 is to be constructed on Middle Dominion, where original Yukon Dredge No. 1 once operated, and will work downstream.
At present there are few small operators in the field, most of the gold being produced by the one big company.
There are no quartz mines in operation in the Klondike, although it is said there are hard-rock properties worth developing.
Working Old Ground
Dredges are now working over much of the old ground which was dredged years ago, and it is said that many more miles of the old creeks will be re-dredged. Some of the ground now being re-dredged is at the mouth of Bonanza Creek, near Lovett Gulch. The old steam-thawing process, first employed, is said not to have made it possible to reach and work the bedrock with the efficiency now obtained by the cold-water thawing process.
The large 16-foot dredges, on the Klondike, built originally by the late Col. Joseph W. Boyle, are still in operation, and are gradually being rebuilt and modernized, and are the largest dredges in the North.
A long stretch of Hunker Creek, which was not dredged by the early dredge operators because of the extremely heavy over-growth of tundra, is now being stripped with hydraulic giants, and will be dredged by the big company.
It is reported that many claims in the Klondike long ago abandoned after first being worked, are again being staked - and the prospects are that the Klondike will continue a great placer gold producer for many years to come.
