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Schieffelin, was their lifeline to the outside world. Their arrangement with the great Alaska Commercial Company in San Francisco was a casual one. In the early years they were on its payroll, but remained free to prospect if they wished. Later they operated as independent contractors, buying their goods from the company but trading on their own.
    Sometimes they worked together, as partners; sometimes separately. There were other traders scattered along the river working under similar arrangements with the A.C. Company – but it was Harper, McQuesten, and Mayo, far more than the others, who were responsible for the mining development of the Yukon.
    It is not always realized that a series of smaller gold rushes into the Yukon Valley took place before the Klondike stampede, and that Dawson City was preceded by several mining camps that sprang up along the river in the ten years before the great strike. The gold along the Yukon was placer gold, or “free gold” – gold that had long since been ground into dust and nuggets and so could be mined by any man with a shovel and a pan and a strong back. It is more immediately rewarding than hardrock or vein gold since it requires no large resources of money and machinery to wrest it from the earth.
    By 1886 some two hundred miners had crossed over the Chilkoot Pass and gradually worked their way three hundred miles down the Yukon to the mouth of the Stewart River, on whose sand-bars they panned out, in a single year, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of fine placer gold. At once McQuesten and his colleagues built a trading post at the Stewart’s mouth, and, sensing that the human flow would increase, McQuesten left for San Francisco to order more supplies from the Alaska Commercial Company.

    That winter Harper persuaded two prospectors to try the waters of the Fortymile River, which joined the Yukon another hundred miles farther downstream. Here they found the gold that had eluded Harper, and it was good coarse gold that rattled in the pan, the kind that every miner seeks. With a fickleness that distinguishes the true gold-seeker, the men along the Stewart deserted their diggings and flocked to the new strike. Harper, in a panic, saw what was coming: as soon as the news leaked back up the river and across the mountain barricade to the outside world, men by the hundreds would tumble over the peaks and pour down to the new diggings on the crest of the spring torrents. But there was not food enough in the land to supply this horde; he must get word out to McQuesten to increase his order or there would be starvation along the Yukon.
    Harper felt like a man in a sound-proof prison. To all intents, the interior of the northwest was sealed off from the world by winter. The nearest point of civilization was John Healy’s trading post on Dyea Inlet on the far side of the Chilkoot. In between lay an untravelled wilderness which few men had negotiated in winter. Who would carry Harper’s message?
    The volunteer was no hardened musher but a steamboat man named Tom Williams, who, with an Indian companion, set off on a terrifying journey. On the two men plunged for five hundred miles, over the hummocks of river ice and the corpses of fallen trees, through the cold jungles of the Yukon forests and up the slippery flanks of the mountains. By the time they reached the Chilkoot their rations had petered out and their dogs were dead of cold, hunger, and fatigue. At the summit of the pass a blizzard was raging, and travel became impossible. They clawed a cave out of the snow and crouched in it, their faces, fingers, and feet blackened by frostbite, their only sustenance a few mouthfuls of dry flour. When this ran out, the Indian hoisted the exhausted Williams onto his back and stumbled down the slope of the pass until he could carry him no farther. Then he dropped him into the snow and staggered on until he reached Sheep Camp, a long-time halting-point on the edge of the tree line. It was