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4 THE NATURE OF GOLD MINING B ill Hiscock traveled for seven months from his home in New Zealand by way of Hawaii, Vancouver, B.C., Chilkoot Pass, and Dawson City before he finally reached Bonanza Creek in November 1898. Following a lead on a possible share in a mining claim, he and his two partners hauled their sleds from Dawson to “the center of the rich gold strike that had caused the rush.” His diary recorded the scene: WegotsomemilesuptheBonanzabeforewecametoanyclaimsbeingworked. Then we began to see a windlass with a heap of dirt; and gravel being frozen toalldepthshastobethawedout,withwoodfires,usuallyputinintheevening and left to burn during night time. In the morning the thawed earth, from 4 to 5 inches to 8 or 9 inches, is hoisted by windlass in a wooden bucket, tipped out and in 20 minutes it is frozen solid again and remains there until the spring comes.1 Like the labor of transportation, the labor of mining was an intensely cultural process through which miners carried their industrial economy north, including the commodification so characteristic of Yukon transportation. Like transportation, the actual work of digging gold from the earth also connected miners to nature, to heaps of dirt and gravel, frozen to all depths. Such labor brought miners new knowledge of the natural world and transformed the gold creeks into new places. 89 In Alaska and the Yukon at the turn of the twentieth century, the specific natural world in which placer miners worked was formed by riparian ecosystems, the rivers and creeks tributary to the Yukon on either side of the U.S./Canadian border, and the banks, forests, and bogs along those rivers and creeks (maps 6 and 7). Gold was literally embedded within these larger physical systems, which of course contained all sorts of nature besides gold: soil, rock, gravel, permafrost, ice, water, vegetation, forests, salmon, moose, caribou, and other living organisms. Northern ecosystems drew energy from the sun and produced all of these living things quite oblivious to the presence of gold. Because their culture valued gold so highly, gold miners sought only one small part of the diverse organic and inorganic physical world that comprised the northern creeks, and that particular part usually lay deep underground . For centuries, yearly rounds of freezing, thawing, and erosion had 90 / The Nature of Gold Mining Moosehide Dawson City Grand Junction Mining Camp F o r t y M i l e R i v e r D e a dwood Creek Swedish Creek Galena Creek Moosehide Creek H u n k e r C reek T o o M u c h G o l d C r e e k A l l G o l d C r e e k Klondike River E l D o r a d o Creek B o n a n za Creek Indian River Q u a r t z C r e e k S u l f u r C r e e k Dominion Creek Yukon Rive r Y u k o n R i v e r 0 5 10 miles N map 6. The Klondike goldfields, Yukon Territory worked gold free from quartz or granite and washed it as dust and fragments into creeks. Because gold was substantially heavier than anything else, it sank into the gravels that formed the beds of the streams, and came to rest when it hit something dense enough to stop it. Sometimes this was heavy gravel, sometimes clay, sometimes solid rock. Miners called this substance—whatever stopped the gold—bedrock. Although regular streams like Bonanza Creek in the Yukon contained gold in their bedrock, gold lay as well in the bedrock beneath older streambeds, which lay either underground , far below surface creeks, or far above them on hillsides. To get at gold in all of these places, miners took the whole ecosystem apart. The work of gold mining was the work of disassembly, and it left the creeks truly in pieces. Gold seekers stripped vegetation from the earth, rerouted streams, and completely altered long stretches of stream valleys. In order to produce gold, they consumed whole ecosystems, or rather the pieces of whole ecosystems, broken into constituent parts in the form of endless piles of wood and dirt and carefully channeled streams of water. Miners remade wood and water into consumer commodities, to be used as tools for the extraction of gold. They turned the solar energy in wood and water, stored and...

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