But
glowing reports continued to trickle down the Yukon, and a few of the
old-timers went up to see. They looked over the ground--the
unlikeliest place for gold in all their experience--and they went
down the river again, "leaving it to the Swedes."
Again the Northland turned the tables. The Alaskan gold hunter is
proverbial, not so much for his unveracity, as for his inability to
tell the precise truth. In a country of exaggerations, he likewise
is prone to hyperbolic description of things actual. But when it
came to Klondike, he could not stretch the truth as fast as the truth
itself stretched. Carmack first got a dollar pan. He lied when he
said it was two dollars and a half. And when those who doubted him
did get two-and-a-half pans, they said they were getting an ounce,
and lo! ere the lie had fairly started on its way, they were getting,
not one ounce, but five ounces. This they claimed was six ounces;
but when they filled a pan of dirt to prove the lie, they washed out
twelve ounces.
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