Government and in which the bulk of the gold has been found, has a total
area, approximately, of 192,000 square miles, of which 150,768 square
miles are included in the watershed of the Yukon. Illustrating this, so
that it may appeal with definiteness to the reader, it may be said that
this territory is greater by 71,100 square miles than the area of Great
Britain, and is nearly three times that of all the New England States
combined.

"A further fact must be borne in mind. The Yukon River is absolutely
closed to navigation during the winter months. In the winter the
frost-king asserts his dominion and locks up all approaches with
impenetrable ice, and the summer is of the briefest. It endures only for
twelve to fourteen weeks, from about the first of June to the middle of
September. Then an unending panorama of extraordinary picturesqueness is
unfolded to the voyager. The banks are fringed with flowers, carpeted
with the all-pervading moss or tundra. Birds countless in numbers and of
infinite variety in plumage, sing out a welcome from every treetop.
Pitch your tent where you will in midsummer, a bed of roses, a clump of
poppies and a bunch of bluebells will adorn your camping. But high above
this paradise of almost tropical exuberance giant glaciers sleep in the
summit of the mountain wall, which rises up from a bed of roses. By
September everything is changed. The bed of roses has disappeared before
the icy breath of the winter king, which sends the thermometer down
sometimes to seventy degrees below freezing point. The birds fly to the
southland and the bear to his sleeping chamber in the mountains. Every
stream becomes a sheet of ice, mountain and valley alike are covered
with snow till the following May.

"That part of the basin of the Yukon in which gold in greater or less
quantities has actually been found lies partly in Alaska and partly in