Excerpt from Across Widest America: Newfoundland to Alaska, With Impressions of Two Years' Sojourn on the Bering Coast Profusely Illustrated St. John's itself is the capital of the Island colony and the chief seat of its commerce. The story of its career as a centre of population is the story of many another centre of small beginnings and long periods of adolescence. It rose from the ashes to which it was reduced in the desastrous fire of 1892; its buildings are con sequently modern and substantial. But notwith standing its up-to-date aspect, there is a quaint ness about the city that is peculiarly its own. With its South-side Hill and its enormous heaps of cod-fish, its fresh salt breezes and its unsavory seal oil, its generous hospitality and its insular customs, its picturesque Quidi Vidi Lake and its breakneck streets, its summer heat and its ice bergs, St. John's is a city of contrasts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905 edition. Excerpt: ...of 1901, and from the beginning, success crowned the efforts of the miners. Results have shown that there is gold in all the creeks of Seward Peninsula. The beds of ancient rivers--and there are many such up there---filled with shifting gravel and erosions from the hillsides, are being thoroughly inspected, and usually turn out very rich, every hillside hitherto touched with the pick and shovel yielding gold dust in more or less paying quantities. Notwithstanding the limited number of the miners, and the shortness of the working season, less than five months, five million dollars in gold-dust have been washed out of the Seward Peninsula every _year since the discovery. There is, however, one drawback to placer mining in that country. Individual miners, who have so far had the Peninsula to themselves, have learned by experience that single-handed they cannot fight against the climate and the short season. Four months out of twelve is the limit of a miner's activity; the other eight are spent in forced idleness. Capital, therefore, is needed to develop the claims on a large scale, and to work them out quickly. Just as soon as capitalists awake to the possibilities of that wonderful country, a period of tremendous activity and corresponding prosperity will surely set in. And still it is the solitary miner, with his pan and shovel, his tent and outfit, who prowls about the hills and discovers the gold. One of the symptoms of the gold fever is the desire to go prospecting for the metal, the farther away the better. Since 1900, the whole of Seward Peninsula has been tramped over a dozen times from Norton Bay to Kotzebue Sound. There are many streams draining it northward into the Arctic, notably the Kougarok, Imnachuk, and Keewalik. The...