Not a word
about this, or we are all undone. Let the Americans and the English
know that we have gold in these mountains, then we are ruined. They
will rush in on us by thousands, and crowd us to the wall--to the
death."
So spoke the old Russian governor, Baranov, at Sitka, in 1804, to one
of his Slavonian hunters, who had just drawn from his pocket a
handful of golden nuggets. Full well Baranov, fur trader and
autocrat, understood and feared the coming of the sturdy, indomitable
gold hunters of Anglo-Saxon stock. And thus he suppressed the news,
as did the governors that followed him, so that when the United
States bought Alaska in 1867, she bought it for its furs and
fisheries, without a thought of its treasures underground.
No sooner, however, had Alaska become American soil than thousands of
our adventurers were afoot and afloat for the north. They were the
men of "the days of gold," the men of California, Fraser, Cassiar,
and Cariboo. With the mysterious, infinite faith of the prospector,
they believed that the gold streak, which ran through the Americas
from Cape Horn to California, did not "peter out" in British
Columbia.
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