CHAPTER X

Treadwell! Could any mine employing stamps have a more inspiring name, unless it be Stampwell? It fairly forces confidence and success.

Douglas Island, lying across the narrow channel from Juneau, is twenty-five miles long and from four to nine miles wide. On this island are the four famous Treadwell mines, owned by four separate companies, but having the same general managership.

Gold was first discovered on this island in 1881. Sorely against his will, John Treadwell was forced to take some of the original claims, having loaned a small amount upon them, which the borrower was unable to repay.

Having become possessed of these claims, a gambler's "hunch" impelled him to buy an adjoining claim from "French Pete" for four hundred dollars. On this claim is now located the famed "Glory Hole."

This is so deep that to one looking down into it the men working at the bottom and along the sides appear scarcely larger than flies. Steep stairways lead, winding, to the bottom of this huge quartz bowl; but visitors to the dizzy regions below are not encouraged, on account of frequent blasting and danger of accidents.

It is claimed that Treadwell is the largest quartz mine in the world, and that it employs the largest number of stamps--nine hundred. The ore is low grade, not yielding an average of more than two dollars to the ton; but it is so easily mined and so economically handled that the mines rank with the Calumet and Hecla, of Michigan; the Comstock Lode mines, of Nevada; the Homestake, of South Dakota; and the Portland, of Colorado.

The Treadwell is the pride of Alaska. Its poetic situation, romantic history, and admirable methods should make it the pride of America.

Its management has always been just and liberal. It has had fewer labor troubles than any other mine in America.

There are two towns on the island--Treadwell and Douglas. The latter is the commercial and residential portion of the community--for the towns meet and mingle together.

The entire population, exclusive of natives, is three thousand people--a population that is constantly increasing, as is the demand for laborers, at prices ranging from two dollars and sixty cents per day up to five dollars for skilled labor.

The island is so brilliantly lighted by electricity that to one approaching on a dark night it presents the appearance of a city six times its size.

The nine hundred stamps drop ceaselessly, day and night, with only two holidays in a year--Christmas and the Fourth of July. The noise is ferocious. In the stamp-mill one could not distinguish the boom of a cannon, if it were fired within a distance of twenty feet, from the deep and continuous thunder of the machinery.

In 1881 the first mill, containing five stamps, was built and commenced crushing ore that came from a streak twenty feet wide. This ore milled from eight to ten dollars a ton, proving to be of a grade sufficiently high to pay for developing and milling, and leave a good surplus.

It was soon recognized that the great bulk of the ore was extremely low grade, and that, consequently, a large milling capacity would be required to make the enterprise a success. A one-hundred-and-twenty-stamp-mill was erected and began crushing ore in June, 1885. At the end of three years the stamps were doubled. In another year three hundred additional stamps were dropping. Gradually the three other mines were opened up and the stamps were increased until nine hundred were dropping.

The shafts are from seven to nine hundred feet below sea level, and one is beneath the channel; yet very little water is encountered in sinking them. Most of the water in the mines comes from the surface and is caught up and pumped out, from the first level.

The net profits of these mines to their owners are said to be six thousand dollars a day; and mountains of ore are still in sight.

Our captain obtained permission to take us down into the mine. This was not so difficult as it was to elude the other passengers. At last, however, we found ourselves shut into a small room, lined with jumpers, slickers, and caps.

Shades of the things we put on to go under Niagara Falls!

"Get into this!" commanded the captain, holding a sticky and unclean slicker for me. "And make haste! There's no time to waste for you to examine it. Finicky ladies don't get two invitations into the Treadwell. Put in your arm."

My arm went in. When an Alaskan sea captain speaks, it is to obey. Who last wore that slicker, far be it from me to discover. Chinaman, leper, Jap, or Auk--it mattered not. I was in it, then, and curiosity was sternly stifled.

"Now put on this cap." Then beheld mine eyes a cap that would make a Koloshian ill.

"Must I put _that_ on?"

I whispered it, so the manager would not hear.

"You must put this on. Take off your hat."

My hat came off, and the cap went on. It was pushed down well over my hair; down to my eyebrows in the front and down to the nape of my neck in the back.

"There!" said the captain, cheerfully. "You needn't be afraid of anything down in the mine now."

Alas! there was nothing in any mine, in any world, that I dreaded as I did what might be in that cap.

There were four of us, with the manager, and there was barely room on the rather dirty "lift" for us.

We stood very close together. It was as dark as a dungeon.

"Now--look out!" said the manager.

As we started, I clutched somebody--it did not matter whom. I also drew one wild and amazed breath; before I could possibly let go of that one--to say nothing of drawing another--there was a bump, and we were in a level one thousand and eighty feet below the surface of the earth.

We stepped out into a brilliantly lighted station, with a high, glittering quartz ceiling. The swift descent had so affected my hearing that I could not understand a word that was spoken for fully five minutes. None of my companions, however, complained of the same trouble.

It has been the custom to open a level at every hundred and ten feet; but hereafter the distance between levels in the Treadwell mine will be one hundred and fifty feet.

At each level a station, or chamber, is cut out, as wide as the shaft, from forty to sixty feet in length, and having an average height of eight feet. A drift is run from the shaft for a distance of twenty-five feet, varying in height from fifteen feet in front to seven at the back. The main crosscut is then started at right angles to the station drift.

From east and west the "drifts" run into this crosscut, like little creeks into a larger stream.

No one has ever accused me of being shy in the matter of asking questions. It was the first time I had been down in one of the famous gold mines of the world, and I asked as many questions as a woman trying to rent a forty-dollar house for twenty dollars. Between shafts, stations, ore bins, crosscuts, stopes, drifts, levels, and _winzes_, it was less than fifteen minutes before I felt the cold moisture of despair breaking out upon my brow. Winzes proved to be the last straw. I could get a glimmering of what the other things were; but _winzes_!

The manager had been polite in a forced, friend-of-the-captain kind of way. He was evidently willing to answer every question once, but whenever I forgot and asked the same question twice, he balked instantly. Exerting every particle of intelligence I possessed, I could not make out the difference between a stope and a station, except that a stope had the higher ceiling.

"I have told you the difference _three times_ already," cried the manager, irritably.

The captain, back in the shadow, grinned sympathetically.

"Nor'-nor'-west, nor'-by-west, a-quarter-nor'," said he, sighing. "She'll learn your gold mine sooner than she'll learn my compass."

Then they both laughed. They laughed quite a while, and my disagreeable friend laughed with them. For myself, I could not see anything funny anywhere.

I finally learned, however, that a station is a place cut out for a stable or for the passage of cars, or other things requiring space; while a stope is a room carried to the level of the top of the main crosscut. It is called a stope because the ore is "stoped" out of it.

But winzes! What winzes are is still a secret of the ten-hundred-and-eighty-foot level of the Treadwell mine.

Tram-cars filled with ore, each drawn by a single horse, passed us in every drift--or was it in crosscuts and levels? One horse had been in the mine seven years without once seeing sunlight or fields of green grass; without once sipping cool water from a mountain creek with quivering, sensitive lips; without once stretching his aching limbs upon the soft sod of a meadow, or racing with his fellows upon a hard road.

But every man passing one of these horses gave him an affectionate pat, which was returned by a low, pathetic whinny of recognition and pleasure.

"One old fellow is a regular fool about these horses," said the manager, observing our interest. "He's always carrying them down armfuls of green grass, apples, sugar, and everything a horse will eat. You'd ought to hear them nicker at sight of him. If they pass him in a drift, when he hasn't got a thing for them, they'll nicker and nicker, and keep turning their heads to look after him. Sometimes it makes me feel queer in my throat."

No one can by any chance know what noise is until he has stood at the head of a drift and heard three Ingersoll-Sergeant drills beating with lightning-like rapidity into the walls of solid quartz for the purpose of blasting.

Standing between these drills and within three feet of them, one suddenly is possessed of the feeling that his sense of hearing has broken loose and is floating around in his head in waves. This feeling is followed by one of suffocation. Shock succeeds shock until one's very mind seems to go vibrating away.

At a sign from the manager the silence is so sudden and so intense that it hurts almost as much as the noise.

There is a fascination in walking through these high-ceiled, brilliantly lighted stopes, and these low-ceiled, shadowy drifts. Walls and ceilings are gray quartz, glittering with gold. One is constantly compelled to turn aside for cars of ore on their way to the dumping-places, where their burdens go thundering to the levels below.

At last the manager paused.

"I suppose," said he, sighing, "you wouldn't care to see the--"

I did not catch the last word, and had no notion what it was, but I instantly assured him that I would rather see it than anything in the whole mine.

His face fell.

"Really--" he began.

"Of course we'll see it," said the captain; "we want to see everything."

The manager's face fell lower.

"All right," said he, briefly, "come on!"

We had gone about twenty steps when I, who was close behind him, suddenly missed him. He was gone.

Had he fallen into a dump hole? Had he gone to atoms in a blast? I blinked into the shadows, standing motionless, but could see no sign of him.

Then his voice shouted from above me--"Come on!"

I looked up. In front of me a narrow iron ladder led upward as straight as any flag-pole, and almost as high. Where it went, and why it went, mattered not. The only thing that impressed me was that the manager, halfway up this ladder, had commanded me to "come on."

_I?_ to "come on!" up that perpendicular ladder whose upper end was not in sight!

But whatever might be at the top of that ladder, I had assured him that I would rather see it than anything in the whole mine. It was not for me to quail. I took firm hold of the cold and unclean rungs, and started.

When we had slowly and painfully climbed to the top, we worked our way through a small, square hole and emerged into another stope, or level, and in a very dark part of it. Each man worked by the light of a single candle. They were stoping out ore and making it ready to be dumped into lower levels--from which it would finally be hoisted out of the mine in skips.

The ceiling was so low that we could walk only in a stooping position. The laborers worked in the same position; and what with this discomfort and the insufficient light, it would seem that their condition was unenviable. Yet their countenances denoted neither dissatisfaction nor ill-humor.

"Well," said the manager, presently, "you can have it to say that you have been under the bay, anyhow."

"_Under the_--"

"Yes; under Gastineau Channel. That's straight. It is directly over us."

We immediately decided that we had seen enough of the great mine, and cheerfully agreed to the captain's suggestion that we return to the ship. We were compelled to descend by the perpendicular ladder; and the descent was far worse than the ascent had been.

On our way to the "lift" by which we had made our advent into the mine, we met another small party. It was headed by a tall and handsome man, whose air of delicate breeding would attract attention in any gathering in the world. His distinction and military bearing shone through his greasy slicker and greasier cap--which he instinctively fumbled, in a futile attempt to lift it, as we passed.

It was that brave and gallant explorer, Brigadier-General Greely, on his way to the Yukon. He was on his last tour of inspection before retirement. It was his farewell to the Northern country which he has served so faithfully and so well.

One stumbles at almost every turn in Alaska upon some world-famous person who has answered Beauty's far, insistent call. The modest, low-voiced gentleman at one's side at the captain's table is more likely than not a celebrated explorer or geologist, writer or artist; or, at the very least, an earl.

"After we've seen our passengers eat their first meal," said the chief steward, "we know how to seat them. You can pick out a lady or a gentleman at the table without fail. A boor can fool you every place except at the table. We never assign seats until after the first meal; and oftener than you would suppose we seat them according to their manners at the first meal."

I smiled and smiled, then, remembering the first meal on our steamer. It was breakfast. We had been down to the dining room for something and, returning, found ourselves in a mob at the head of the stairs.

There were one hundred and sixty-five passengers on the boat, and fully one hundred and sixty of them were squeezed like compressed hops around that stairway. In two seconds I was a cluster of hops myself, simply that and nothing more. I do not know how the compressing of hops is usually accomplished; but in my particular case it was done between two immensely big and disagreeable men. They ignored me as calmly as though I were a little boy, and talked cheerfully over my head, although it soon developed that they were not in the least acquainted.

A little black-ringleted, middle-aged woman who seemed to be mounted on wires, suddenly squeezed her head in under their arms, simpering.

"Oh, Doctor!" twittered she, coquettishly. "You are talking to _my husband_."

"The deuce!" ejaculated the Doctor, but whether with evil intent or not, I could not determine from his face.

"Yes, truly. Doctor Metcalf, let me introduce my husband, Mr. Wildey."

They shook hands on my shoulder--but I didn't mind a little thing like that.

"On your honeymoon, eh?" chuckled the Doctor, amiably. The other big man grew red to his hair, and the lady's black ringlets danced up and down.

"Now, now, Doctor," chided she, shaking a finger at him,--she was at least fifty,--"no teasing. No steamer serenades, you know. I was on an Alaskan steamer once, and they pinned red satin hearts all over a bride's stateroom door. Just fancy getting up some morning and finding my stateroom door covered with red satin hearts!"

"I can smell mackerel," said a shrill tenor behind me; and alas! so could I. If there be anything that I like the smell of less than a mackerel, it is an Esquimau hut only.

Somebody sniffed delightedly.

"Fried, too," said a happy voice. "Can't you squeeze down closer to the stairway?"

Almost at once the big man behind me was tipped forward into the big man in front of me--and, as a mere incident in passing, of course, into me as well. We all went tipping and bobbing and clutching toward the stairway.

Life does not hold many half-hours so rich and so full as the one that followed. As a revelation of the baser side of human nature, it was precious.

My friend was tall; and once, far down the saloon, I caught a glimpse of her handsome, well-carried head as the mob parted for an instant. The expression on her face was like that on the face of the Princess de Lamballe when Lorado Taft has finished with her.

Suddenly I began to move forward. Rather, I was borne forward without effort on my part. A great wave seemed to pick me up and carry me to the head of the stairway. I fairly floated down into the dining room. I fell into the first chair at the first table I came to; but the mob flowed by, looking for something better. Every woman was on a mad hunt for the captain's table. My table remained unpeopled until my friend came in and found me. Gradually and reluctantly the chairs were filled and we devoted ourselves to the mackerel.

In a far corner at the other end of the room, there was a table with flowers on it. With a sigh of relief I saw black ringlets dancing thereat.

"Thank heaven!" I said. "The bride is at the captain's table."

"Ho, no, ma'am," said the gentle voice of the waiter in my ear. "You're hat hit yourself, ma'am. You're hin the captain's hown seat, ma'am. 'E don't come down to the first meal, though, ma'am," he added hastily, seeing my look of horror. For the first, last, and, I trust, only, time in my life I had innocently seated myself at a captain's table, without an invitation.

After breakfast we hastened on deck and went through deep-breathing exercises for an hour, trying to work ourselves back to our usual proportions.

I should like to see a chief steward seat that mob.

I was greatly amused, by the way, at a young waiter's description of an earl.

"We have lots of earls goin' up," said he, easily. "Oh, yes; they go up to Cook Inlet and Kodiak to hunt big game. I always know an earl the first meal. He makes me pull his corks, and he gives me a quarter or a half for every cork I pull. Sometimes I make six bits or a dollar at a meal, just pulling one earl's corks. I'd rather wait on earls than anybody--except ladies, of course," he added, with a positive jerk of remembrance; whereupon we both smiled.