The Forty-Sixers

A slow-speaking, nail-hard adventurer was walking around the town of Yellowknife last week in a bright golden haze. Ulric Joseph ("Spud") Arsenault, a trapper and prospector in the Northwest Territories, had staked out 20 likely-looking claims about 50 miles north of Yellowknife last year. Last week Beaulieu Yellowknife Mines, Ltd. agreed to pay him $100,000 cash for his properties, give him 250,000 shares of stock (worth 50-c- a share to start) in the new company organized to develop them.

Yellowknifers were only mildly astonished. Such things had happened with delightful frequency in the most exciting mine area in the Western Hemisphere.

Better than Hollywood. Yellowknife is a storybook mining town on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, 700 miles north of Edmonton, in the cold, desolate subArctic where temperatures fall sometimes to 60DEG below zero. Traces of gold were first discovered there in 1898. But fur-trapping was the area's No. 1 business until, one fall day in 1934, Prospectors C. J. Baker and H. M. Muir found high-grade ore on the shore of Yellowknife Bay. Then the gold rush was on.

War nipped it. Gold-mining, a nonessential industry, was stopped. But last week ex-servicemen were heading north in droves. The Negus mine was already back in production. The Con mine (Consolidated Mining & Smelting) and the Giant Yellowknife mine (expected to be the area's biggest producer) would be producing soon, as would a half-dozen others. Besides, some 250 other companies, most of them new and almost all of them with the alluring word "Yellowknife"* in their names, were busy prospecting, drilling, promoting and hoping. They had plenty of reason for hope. With all its curtailments and setbacks, Yellowknife has already produced more than $14,000,000 worth of gold (up to the end of 1944), and has created many a private fortune.

Frank Salerno, 24, a tall, wavy-haired radio man from Denver, went to Yellowknife last year for a vacation. On a hunch, he staked out 18 claims. The payoff: $175,000.

Bill Johnson, 64, from Snohomish, Wash., a veteran of the Yukon who says that prospecting in Yellowknife "is easier than anywhere else," was chief cook at the Con mine until 1938. Since then he has staked 34 claims, now has several hundred thousand shares of gold stock worth anywhere from 17-c- to 50-c--a share.

Yellowknife, spread out over a rocky peninsula and the hub of a 200-sq.-mi. staking area, has become a throbbing, roistering place of 3.000 people, quick riches, hard living, crudity and fun. Said one amazed visitor: "Just like a movie set, only more so." The restaurants have a frontier ring to their names: Lil's Place, the Wildcat Cafe, Ruth's Roving Hornet. The one movie house shows three-year-old films. The traditions of the "mushers" of the dog sleds are carried on by the "cat skinners" who drive the caterpillar trains (tractors and sleds) which bring supplies across the snow from Edmonton. Passenger service to & from Yellowknife, as well as to outlying claims, is furnished by Canadian Pacific Airlines and by bush pilots in small planes like ski-or pontoon-equipped Noorduyn Norsemen.

No Klondike. Hunting for gold in the wild, bleak country north of Yellowknife is simple. The main requirements are guts, patience, a grubstake and a $5 license which permits a prospector to file up to six claims a year. A claim is staked out simply by driving stakes into the ground to mark a 1,500-sq.-ft. plot. To keep the claim, a prospector must do $100 worth of work on it a year, such as excavating four cubic yards, or diamond-drilling 15 feet. Last week there were some 15,000 claims in good standing. In the year ending last March 31, nearly 10,000 claims were filed in the office of Mining Recorder Fred Fraser.

Morally, Yellowknife is no Klondike. By comparison with wide-open Dawsori in the 18903, Yellowknife is a well-run Sunday school. Prices are low. There are no gambling houses, no prostitution. Most of the inhabitants of the town's one-cell jail are drunks who got too obstreperous. With little crime about, Yellowknife's three Mounties have other jobs. In emergencies, they must deliver babies. They care for the dead, even to digging graves. It took 82 sticks of dynamite recently to blast one grave in Yellowknife's frozen ground.

* The name stems from the hand-made copper, yellow-looking knives used by the area's Indians.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.