Alaska Vail, Isaac Newton

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. I have a /ac simile itnpiession of the ouly stone tablet yetfoutid ina "cliff dwelling/' On it is the aneieiit serpent symbol a& pther hiero-glyphs; ahowinK prwoly, as I thiqit, ike progression ofcanopy vaporsfrom the eguato^td ikepoles.. An -enlarged picture of this tablet, witha foil explanation of its meat^g, will be ami free to every paid-pp snb-'ntacribe^ of the ANNimAH Wobi,d (24ipage monthly, |i.op per year)beginning With Vplvtv., i8^, and to others on receipt of 25 centa. Thiswonderful tablet has,pMtilefJ the tpost learned archaeologists. Thedffi-cials of the Smithsonian institution declan^ that Pfeop. Richard OwN.

"There is doubtless much truth in what ypu say. etc." ^Pftoif.Wii. Dawson, Sk. ,"I hbpe men of science will give your claims the credit they de-

Vgerve." Frbs. Wm. F. WarAbn."I have read yohr thoughts with the keenest relish. They areahead pf; anything else I have secn,^'; . RKV* D. Evans.

"I can now at the age of Sg, s^ iight thtsopgh the rift in the cloudsMhgitig over tbe delu^." ' .^ ^ P.,lH;^B^fcL.Springfield, JtbH. ' . :^>, . ';{ ' ';'^-. : t% ."\ ' ' ' '"Your views faave given me more light on Oenesis and creation than

all else rever' read,"- ' .' ;/ : , 'UyV-n. ' .vlliW, 0ijAddreis nil others to I. i. VAlt, ^' v ^JiAitor Annular Worlds \ '

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"^S THEORIES rise and fall, the world grows wise,^j and he who learns as a philosopher learns, learns to1^11 unlearn and prizes the opportunity to "let go" astheories begin to sink in the great ocean of error. I be-lieve there is a road that "leads to all truth." The timemay come when men travelling that road can mount thestepping stones that lead up to Truth's grand Citadel.We have seen theories come and go, as mere ephemeralupheavals in the sea of time, and I here present another.This of course is planted on time's eternal sillsa thingnot born to die, and in the day its overshadowing branch-es fill mankind's sky there may be "no darkness at all."

I wish to use the world-wide interest now taken in theNorth-world gold problem to disseminate a few originalthoughts among thinking men, as well as among thos:who will heedlessly rush into the perils to be encounteredin the nugget lands of the Arctic World. I ask the read-er to follow carefully and patiently the line of argumentI am about to pursue, and which I have been presentingon all suitable occasions for more than a quarter of acentury. At the end of this treatise on Alaskan gold,the reader will find some verbal quotations from my pub-lished writings, which will convince him that this theory


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ALASKA.of world-making and gold-planting here presented, is notnow given for the first time, and that the discovery ofrich gold fields in the frozen North did not give it birth.It is no ex post factor production. Its birth dates backinto the sixties when the writer as a young man lecturedon this theme, and there are many of his pupils who willgladly testify that the Annular Theory was their teach-er's "hobby" then.

The idea presented in brief, is, that this planet of oursonce had a system of rings, as the planet Saturn hasnow. I have called it the Annular Theory from the Lat-in word annulus a ring. It first suggested itself to mymind as I sought a philosophical explanation of the No-achian deluge, and several years after its conception, Ipublished in pamphlet form (20 pages) ''The Earth'sAqueous Ringy or '^''The Deluge and Its Cause,'' provingfrom the very nat'^re of the flood-narrative that all theworld-deluges the earth ever saw must have come fromthe earth's Annular system. In this same volume it wasspecifically claimed that the entire ocean came as annularinstallments from supra aerial vapors via the polar re-gions, which vapors were the source and cause of all theGlacial Epochs the earth ever had and were laden withmineral and metallic matter. This book was publishedin the year 1874 and I have copies left as witnesses of thefact.

In the present effort I will try first to convince myreaders that the earth once had an annular system.This I will have to do by following a line of strictly phil-osophic inquiry into the various stages of world-growthas affirmed by the past and present conditions of theglobe. Then I will attempt to show what elements com-posed the earth rings; and that gold was necessarily oneof those elements. Finally I will present the proofs thatin the inevitable and progressive collapse of these rings

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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 3the polar regions of a planet must receive by far thegreatest part of the matter composing them, and that be-cause gold was no insignificant part of those rings, thepolar lands must be the richest gold regions of the earth.

The present physical conditions of the earth, as I un-derstand them, are not accidental in any sense. As thelily and the rose have a beginning and a subsequent ca-reer responsible to conditions inexorable and despotic, soa world starts on its eternal round under the ministrationof law, and the most subtle variations in the results ofthe primal impress of potencies can be but responseslinked in everlasting union. This being the case, in or-der to follow up the grand progression of conditions inworld evolution, as planned by the Infinite Mind, it ispreeminently essential that we should know what the pri-mal conditions of the earth were. Then knowing theseconditions and knowing the law regulating them, we canat least hope to erect a theory that will not falla glorythat cannot die. Until we can plant our feet on this rockwe must admit that we are floating at sea.

In this age of tirelees research we have come to knowvery positively what some of the primal conditions of theearth were. The one all potent conditionthe conditionfrom which utter necessity has passed a grand array ofoverflowing and over-towering consequences down to ourday is what is known among all intelligent men as the

MOLTEN STATE OF THE PRIMITIVE EARTH.At this our starting point let us be sure that we are

right and I ask the reader to see that the writer does notslip from this rock. It is well known by geologistswhose eagle eyes have pierced the. earth to its granitesills, that its oldest sedimentary beds now rest on what wasonce an igneous mass. The sedimentary formations areof great thickness, estimated variously at from ten to forty


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ALASKA.miles, or even more, and such is the testimony of the low-ermost beds that I suppose the geological world, with noimportant exception, stands solidly in support of the prop-osition that the earth was once an igneous liquid mass.

But we can bring other witnesses to testify in thi"case. It must be conceded that all worlds in all essentialsare made alike. This is what countless millions of starsand suns afl5rm. Every sphere that scintillates in theempyrean must be a molten globe. The spectroscope af-firms the proposition and tells us across the mighty voidof space that all worlds begin their career alikeswaddledin garments of flame as our sun is swaddled now ; rockedin its cradle of fire inveterate, as every other sun is rockedtoday. Thus our earth was once a glittering star, sosurely as law is law. But the chief witness we have closeat hand, whose testimony nothing can impeach, is thegreat ocean of water that rolls around the earth. Weknow that every drop of it was formed v\ fire. If Iplunge a cold steel rod for an instant in the hottest fur-nace, I find it covered with little globules of water, andthus we learn that water is being formed in the most fer-vent fires. That is what every fire on earth is doingtoday. Every furnace and volcano is pouring its tributeof water into the air.

I stand on the ocean's shore. The truest, strongestand most daring and dauntless witness of earth testifiesbefore me. If every drop of these mighty waters wasborn in flame, what was the immeasurable and titanicmight of the earth's primal furnace from which thesewaters came? Now the chemist wants no other proofthan the deposition of oceans that the world was once amolten sphere. Then as oceans affirm an igneous or sunstate of worlds, so a sun state or molten condition ofworlds, on the other hand, affirms the birth of oceans.The man of sense then looks out upon God's empire of

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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET.

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inveterate fires and knows what is going on all over theuniverse. He knows that oceans are being born and sentto the skies from every flaming star and sun. Then heconcludes that this is not all that these world-furnaces aredoing, for the spectroscope at his side affirms that, associ-ated with ocean vapors, mineral and metallic vapori i\deon steeds of flame.

I turn back to earth in its childhood and knowing anocean roi.o around it today and knowing, too, that itsprimal history is fire-impressed upon its bosom, I see itwith every drop of these waters soaring as a vapor can-opy on highwinged in perpetual flight about a hot andseething globe. I look down the ages and see these va-pors have fallen back to mother earth. I see the earthablooma scene of activity and life, and the chemist tellsme that every leaf and blade that flutters in the breeze,every tree that towers above, every animal that lives, doesso because in an age gone by the molten earth gave birthto interchanging and undying energies. The very mount-ains rise and look down upon the plain because the earthwas once a star.

I take up a glass of ocean water and subject it to astrict and honest analysis. I find in it a trace of goldbut enough of it to show that vast millions of it arelocked up in the oceanic waters. How did it get there?plainly it was associated with the steaming vapors as theyarose from the molten earth. In predicating then, thatpresent world-energies and present world-conditions arebut the echoes awakened in the fires of the molten earth,one also predicates that the distribution of the gold andother metals and minerals now found on and in the earthcrust is a direct resultant of that former state of the earth.In other words if the earth had never been an igneousspere, the iron, lead, copper, silver and gold now foundin the North-world would not be there. If the earth's


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ALASKA.primal fires had not been kindled the oceans had not beenmade; rivers would not flow; clouds would not form;rains would not fall; plants would not grow; man, as heis, would not have been, and earth would be a mightydesolation. Without a molten age there could not havebeen a Cambrian age. The Silurian, Devonion and Carbon-iferous ages whose aqueous formations incase the worldwith all their wondrous hoard of wealth, would not,could not have been as we see them today.

Water is a fire-formed compound, and without thefire-born oceans what would our world be like? Air is afire-mad( product of the molten earth and what would thisplanet be without air? Fuel is a fire-made product of themolten age and without it earth would be a dead waste.When we look from the physical to the metaphysicalworld it does not take the thinker long to see that ourthinking and our thoughts are linked to the energies ascaused by an igneous activity in an age gone by. Itseems as though the Infinite Mind has so interwoven allthings in the macro-cosmos with primitive igneous ener-gies that the philosopher is forced to look back into thegreat world-furnace of archaean times to find the truesolution of the great problem of Earth and Man.

The problem of a molten earth as thus seen compre-hends a great many others. No argument is needed toprove that when the earth's watery vapors went to theskies, all else that a melted earth could send aloft wentwith those waters. I want the reader to see that I do notstate this proposition amiss. Many years ago I gave alecture in the great lead mining region of Joplin, Mo.I saw the great columns of smoke rising from a hundredfurnaces and told my audience that there was enoughlead vapor lost in cloudland to pay all the expenses of thegreat lead plants, and added, there is a fortune awaitingthe man who will invent some means to gather those es-


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET.caping vapors and distil them. Today each of thosefurnaces is furnished with an appliance by means ofwhich the lead vapors are condensed and saved, and thelead thus secured is one of the chief sources in the manu-facture of white lead which yields great income to themine owners. I have been told that the lead thus savedis almost sufficient to pay all mining and reducing ex-penses. I have also been told that the inventor of thisappliance was once a pupil of mine.Now the conclusion drawn from this is inevitable.These puny artificial fires for reducing lead ores wereable to vaporize and send a large quantity of lead to theskies. But every pound of that lead was once in themolten earthin the very midst of a furnace a thouandtimes more competent to send it aloft. There is then noavoiding the conclusion that lead vapors went up withthe watery vapors formed in the same world furnace.They floated together on high and when those wateryvapors came back to the earth the lead came with them.

Other witnesses equally emphatic speak from ourmints, in fact from every mint of the earth where gold,silver and copper are reduced for coining. In these mintsit is found necessary to use the greatest precaution toavoid the loss of gold vapors. They rise in the flues andpipes, condense and fall as dust on the roof and floors ofevery apartment coauerted with them, and thousands ofdollars of gold dust are saved every year by cleaning upthe pipes etc. Gold vapor is ever present in the reducingapartments and the very clothing of the workmen aboutthe furnace becomes laden with it and is burnt and madeto give up its gold. This too be it understood is allcaused by the puny fires of man. If gold is so readilyvaporized how did the v/orld's great hoard of wealtli actwhen the mighty fires of the world's alembic gathered itfrom the earth's int lost depths? Plainly every atom of


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8 ALASKA.it that heat could gather from the earth's bosom was va-porized and carried aloft and made to mingle with thewatery skies. Gold is so readily volatilized that asphere which contained it could not be molten and notload the surrounding air with it. It is vaporized in heatthat would not melt iron or steel. A gold nugget willvanish as vapor at a temperature of 2100** but pure ironor steel cannot be fused at such a heat. It will begin toflow at 2900. Now we know that iron not only is molt-en in our sun but that vast oceans of it are there in a va-por state. It is idle then to conclude otherwise thanthat every sun and star the eye can see, is hot enough tosend its gold to the skies, if it has any of it: But weneed not speculate here. Every world certainly has goldif analogy has any force in arguments. But in this dis-cussion I care not whether other molten worlds have goldor not. I know the molten earth had a vast amount ofit and all men know too that it was volatilized and sentto the skies.

The same course of igneous action, without the shad-ow of a doubc, forced every meial and mineral that theearth's heat could vaporize, into the flaming skies. Thusthe primitive or molten earth was simply enveloped byan atmosphere of mineral and metallic vapors. But letus bear in mind that all the primeval waters of the globewere in that hot and flaming atmosphere. There is noguess work here. This is plainly Nature's plan of world-making. See now the wisdom ot the Infinite in all this.How could man get a pound of iron, gold, silver or anyother metal if the power that watched the childhood ofthe earth had not gathered these metals from its bosomby inveterate heat aiid lifted them into the heavens andheld them there till the molten planet grew cold and thenreceived them back again, planting them in and on theouter crust where man can secure them.


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ANNULAR WORLD. 9dragging it westward in opposition to the radial motionof the earth. I assume that the moon attracts the watersor they would not move toward it. But the moon isnearly 240,000 miles away, and I am forced to admit thatthe attracting mass of the south world must have thesame eflfect. Well, I see the effect, and the cause isplainly at hand. Now if the superior attractive force ofthe south world is capable of drawing the oceans thither,then^it was capable of drawing more canopy matter thith-er. Hence, when an earth-ring descended into the at-mosphere laden with primitive exhalations, their inev-itable tendency was to float more largely southward andto fall more largely in the Antarctic region.Now men may say this evidence is too slender. But,however slender, we see how the dial finger points. Iawait the justification of this forecast. When the expe-dition now fitting for the south polar regions, demon-strates that the pendulum vibrates faster there than atany other part of the earth, then men will see why thereare more waters there, and possibly they may admit thatthere are more of the heavy metals there too. But whywait for an expedition to settle this problem? I claimthat laT^? has already settled it. The waters are there,and the y are there according to the law of attraction, andtherefore there are more of the heavy metals to attract.The waters are there and therefore the pendulum willvibrate more rapidly there. If I draw my conclusions onslender evidence, what shall I say of the conclusions ofthe old-school geologists ?We know enough about South American gold, locat-ed, as usual, on the east side of the Andes, to predicatea little as to its original source. It is as plain as day,that if the great amount of placer gold on the easternslopes of the Andes came from quartz, and other rocks ofthat range, it has no 'ht to be there. If South American


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10 ANNUI,AR WORLD.gold came exclusively from the rock beds of the Andesduring the ages of denudation and attrition, by all meansthe west side of that range should be the gold field, whichit is not But where did the ancient inhabitants of Peruget their gold ? Were they smelters ? Were they quartzcrushers ? Did they cyanide ? The Peruvian placers ofamazing wealth, yet unexhausted after unknown centu-ries of gold gathering, tell the tale.

For millions of years the successive canopies of thesouth fell as metal-laden, gold-laden snows on the Ant-ardlic continent. Glaciers formed mountain high, andmoved as gla'-ier ice, outward toward the ea. Millionsof icebergs broke off and floated toward the equator. Ontheir way the eastward motion of the rotating earth causedthem to fall back to the west, and like the icebergs nowlodging on the Labrador coast, these lodged on the eastside of the Andean sea bottom, then a ridge sleeping inthe deep. Later in geologic time this great mountainrange, a continuation of the great Laurentian upthrustof North America, arose from the sea. But icebergs stillfloated and lodged along its ocean-washed walls. Therethey melted, there they dropped their loads of goldgold nuggets, formed as hailstones are formed today,gold grains, gold dust.Now will the old school tell us how and why placergold fields are so exclusively located on the eastern slopesof this great American mountain range ? Will they tellus why a mountain range running east and west as somedo in North America, is more apt to have placers on itsnorthern than its southern slope ? Will they tell us whythey do not like to invest in the new school's stock of"whys?"

I want to be understood here. I do not say thatthere are no very rich lodes in the polar regions. On thecontrary, all gold-bearing rocks of all ages, if the theory


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ANNULAR WORLD. 11be true, must be richer than the same rocks are in otherregions, but the placers will not lead the miner to thespot. Canopy falls that filled the placers in modern geo-logic times, filled the rocks as they were forming in otherages. A captious critic has said that the ' ' Vailian the-ory claims that there is no quartz in Alaska." Vailnever made such a claim, but just the reverse. Thesame must be said of granite and porphyry, and everyrock originally formed out of dust sent up from the moltenearth, for that dust came home via the poles along withtheir gold. When, then, I say men cannot find themother lode in Alaska, I do not say it is not a land ofquartz; and when it is said the placer filled with golddoes not point to gold-bearing quartz, it is not even in-timated that no quartz beds are close by.

The Alaskan miner, it seems to me, need not pushinto the utmost wilds of Alaska to find gold. From thosehigh lands the glaciers have moved down to the sea alongevery valley, and supposing the same warm sea wavesdashed upon them as they reached the coast, as now dashon those coasts, I see no reason why the whole shore ofSouthern Alaska is not one great placer. The fadt thateastern Si^"="'ia is a vast gold placer, points to the fadlthat all Behring's sea bottom must also be one. Andfurther, if there are currents of water dragging the bot-tom of Behring's strait, carrying off the light particles, itmust be leaving the gold behind, and I look forward tothe day when ships will find such curreiits and, anchoringover them, will dredge gold from the deep. I^et us re-member that the ocean there is a modern innovationthat when its waters poured over that land it involved agold region, and the gold is there still, and every currentmoving over that submerged shore is carrying its cover-ing away, so that there must be in that sea regions wheregold lies stripped of its covering and awaiting the sea-


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12 ANNULAR WORI.D.man's dredge. Find the sea currents of these waters andfind gold. Sink deep wells on the coast near the mouthsof Alaska's numerous valleys opening toward the sea,and find gold there. Take the Copper River valley as asample. Why not prospedl its mouth as deeply as pos-sible for the gold hidden there ? Failing to find what issought for in that valley, follow the stream up to itssources and over the divide. On the northern slope of thatdivide I would expedl to find gold. I would say thesame thing of all of Alaska's south-bound streams. Onthe other slope of the divide, gold should be found. Thismakes the region immediately soiith of the Yukon more agold region than the region diredlly on the north of thatstream. For the same reason I would expect richer goldlands on the northern slope of the divide between theYukon valley and the polar sea. In a general way Iwould expect more placer gold on the eastern and north-ern slopes than on the western and southern. Then,again, all things being equal, I would sooner look forgold on the concave shore of a stream than on the oppo-site or convex shore in the elbow of a stream.

The reader can now see that every time a canopy felland the waters retreated to the seawhen polar snowsmelted and poured their waters along a thousand valleys,the light materials of earth would be borne awa y and theheaviest would remain behind where the ice and snowmelted. Gold, a very heavy metal, then must to a vastextent lie where it fell. But is it not plain that all thesefloods of water urging their way to the sea have simplymade the ocean what it is today ?

"ophir's golden wkdge."I must now bring the work on this volume to a close,

though there is one more thought which ought to havehad a place herein. That land of fabulous golden hoards,known to Solomon and all the east three thousand years


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ANNULAR WORLD. 13agowhere was it ? How in the world has its locationpassed so utterly from human knowledge, like a dream ofthe night? Ships laden from that mysterious shore car-ried gold by the ton to enrich Hebrew temples alone.Persia, Arabia, Greece and Egypt gathered immeasur-able wealth in that far-off and now unknown land, audgold was "plenteous as stones." (II. Chron., i, 15.) Ittook Solomon's ships three years to make the trip.Away back in the centuries when Karnak, Thebes, Baby-lon, Mycenae and Troy shone forth in golden splendor."Ophir's Wedge of Gold" was the wealth of tribes andthe god of nations. I can only say now that I have cer-tainly located that land in thefar north.Had I space in this book for forty pages more, I couldbring another phase of the Annular Theory into view, bywhich it can be plainly shown that the word Ophir wasoriginally a name for the north land. But to make thisplain \ would have to bring many classic and biblicalwitnesses into court and thus, far transcend the limits in-tended for this volume. I must therefore leave the workfor other times. However, I will, Deus volens, publish'^ophir's Golden Wedge'' in pamphlet form (32 pages) ifthe sale of 200 copies at 25c each can be assured. Some-where in lands now fettered down, it may be for ever, insnows and ice, the ships of Tarshish obtained their goldas well as ivory. In one of the processions bearing ivory,sculptured on Eastern walls, a white bear is seen, andthis means much as north world testimony.

As the philosophic student must now see, if the An-nular Theory be true, there are some momentous ques-tions which have long since been considered settled, thatmust in the near future receive a thorough revision. Isuppose it will be a long time before such men as thosewho champion the Crollian theory of terrestrial glacia-tion, the vegetation theory of the origin of coal, the


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14 ANNULAR WORLD.quartz rock origin of placer gold, can be convinced thatthey have the "cart in front of the horse" all the time.To say the least, it is very strange that such eminentmen as Lord Kelvin, acknowledged to be the "prince ofphysicists," cannot see the self-stultifying argument thatpresents a cold world first and the snows afterward, whichis a physical impossibility. Refrigerate a world and youput out the very fire you must have to lift the vapors tothe air to form snow. This ''prince ofphysicists^' shouldcome home, and learn how canopies fall and how thatsnows fall first and refrigeration comes in consequence.And yet these men will call this " Vailian nonsense.Well, I have the horse va front, where he should be.

Then that coal problem! This " prince of physicists"only echoes the great world's opinion when he says thatvegetation made all the carbon beds (coal veins) of theearth, while it is a fa


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ANNULAR WORLD. 15lode alone. No annular student would seek it fromplacer signs. Keep the horse in front.Two days ago the writer of these lines, in respose toan invitation, delivered an address before the SouthernCalifornia Academy of Sciences, held in lyos Angeles,Cal. In the course of his ledlure he brought to view theremarkable evidence found in legendary thought, whichplainly establishes the fadt that man saw at least twoephemeral heavens pass away, and was therefore an eyewitness to the fall of canopies. When the speaker satdown, one of the most learned men in the audience, agenuine representative of old-school touch-me-not-ism,objected to the theory and made a strong effort to crushit because, as he said, " it is founded wholly upon myth-ology and theology." As the learned gentleman, how-ever, had the "cart before the horse," as usual, the the-ory was not crushed.

The author of this theory, from the very hour hemade the discovery that legendary thought was connedl-ed with canopy processes, has never dreamed that theEarth's Annular System was "founded on mythologyand theology." Neither is the canopy conccpi'on foundedon them, nor can it be. On the contrary, mythology andtheology, as human produdls, are founded on the Earth'sAnnular System, and on canopy processes. In otherwords, if the earth never had a ring system or a vaporheaven, mythology and theology would never have pre-sented the features they do today. The ancient Greeks,Romans, Hindus, Egyptian, Japanese and other peoples,would never have preserved the thought for more than4000 years that an old heaven passed awaythat newheavens came to view; that the sun, moon and stars werehidden by a water heaven, if the earth never had rings,and canopies, the wreck of rings. For this reason I saythe Annular System is not "founded on mythology,"


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16 ANNULAR WORLD.

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but that mythology is founded on the Annular System.This continual practice of going "wrong end fore-most" and forever in the same old "rut" will bring le-gitimate fruits, as it has in the past, and I certainly wouldomit a duty if I failed to put the reader in a way to learnall he can about the great problem of Annular Evolu-tion. I will be pardoned then, if in these last pages ofthis volume I devote some space to the character of someof the books that have been published in an effort to sup-port this growing theme.I am sorry to say I have no more copies of the Earth'sAnnuh,r System for sale. I have revised, and enlarged itto the extent of two chapters, and the second edition willcontain nearly 500 pages. I have never been able to getbook publishers and dealers to take any commercial riskin its publication and sale, and I am thus forced to pub-lish it myself. And just as in the publication of the firstedition, I must secure enough subscribers before makingthe venture, to secure me against financial loss. Sub-scriptions are coming in slowly, but fast enough to showthat it must be republished in the near future. The oldedition was a book, cloth bound, 5x7 inches, and sold fortwo dollars, by mail. The new edition will be somelarger, same size of type as this volume, elegantly boundin two or more styles and sold for the same price. Per-sons who want to learn the grand and unmistakable"Story of the Rocks" as they testify in behalf of theEarth's Annular System and the reign and fall of cano-pies, in the building of the earth's crust, the augmenta-tion of oceans, the birth and death of races, and the greatpolar snowfalls that locked down in eternal death thegiant mammals of the earth, can learn the lesson and thetrue meaning of world stages in that volume.


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 17I conceive that no obje(5lion can be urged against my

claim that even our bibles teach us this great truth. Asall other ancient peoples saw a water heaven come andgoa vapor canopy reign and fall, it would be strangeindeed if the Mosaic cosmogony did not reveal the samething. When, then, I read in the first chapter of Gene-sis that "God called the firmament (Shamayim) heaven,"I say that the scribe who wrote that sentence or enter-tained that thought, supposed that the Hebrew heavenwas a water heaven, for shamayim means "there waters"(sham=there, and mayim=waters). In other words, theancient Hebrew held the same belief that all other racesdidthat the skies were a watery expansea canopy ofvapors. Then again I read in this connedlion that the"spirit of God moved on the face of the waters." NowmankindHebrews and all othersalways held thatGod and the gods lived and moved on high. Then those"waters" were on high also, and the canopy is plainlyalluded to. Again it is said "God made a firmament inthe midst of the waters." That is the firmament which"God called heaven" was in the midst of celestial waters.Again, God "divided the waters which were under thefirmament (heaven) from the waters which were above thefirmament. 'Now I care not how men regard these ancient writ-ings, one" thing is positively certain, at the time thesethoughts were entertained, humanity knew or thoughtthey knew that there were waters on high. If therewere waters above the firmament, then those waterswere a revolving canopy, for they could not remain therefor a moment unless they were a revolving mass. Inother words, the Hebrew writings positively affirm thata vapor canopy arched the skies of primitive man. Buta canopy could not exist without making a greenhouseworld, an Eden earth. Then why are we so doubting


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18 ALASKA.when our bibles tell us that the infant race lived in anEden clime? If man went naked in Eden, earth wascovered by a vapor roof, just as the planet Jupiter is now.In such a greenhouse world it could not rain, as the sunmust shine on the earth's surface to cause a mingling ofcurrents, and without currents it cannot rain, and mybible tells me there was a day when the "Lord God hadnot caused it to rain on the earth." This is the samethought I find among other races, and it does not fail tosubstantiate the claim I have made that the early racessaw a great vapor roof on high. Now if there ever wasa time when it did not rain on the earth, then the sundid not shine on the earth's surface. The sky and sunwere concealed. No stars could be seen at such a timeexcept in the polar skies, from which the vapors fell.Why was it ever conceived by man that these condi-tions once obtained? Simply because they did obtain,and the idea is fossilized in world thought. A concealedheaven and a concealed sun are world-wide conceptions.The whole conception of man in Eden, his connedtionwith the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge areba.sed on the one rock of inexorable law,* and that law isthe one that has presided, as the earth's crust was builtto a large extent by the wreck of canopies. A concealedheavens and sun are seen all through the vast realm ofMythology, and the thought forces us to admit the reignand fall of canopies, for the thought is fixed in the grandarcanum of humanity's cradle time.

As I turn away from this wonderful scene, I recall the'''Golden Age" of Hesiod and antediluvian man. Whatever gave rise to the thought that man once lived free"from toil? What originated the idea that man oncelived to eight or nine hundred years? The immortal

*I must here refer the reader to my " Eden's Flaming Sword,"wherein I have connected these world scenes with a world can-opy, and have explained this whole tragedy of Eden. See last ofthis volume.

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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 19thought must have originated in adlual fadls of somekind. When I look back into an Eden world, such asmust have existed every time a ring descended and a can-opy overarched the earth, I see life prolonged as a neces-sary result of solar exclusion. Sun exclusion means acessation of vital adlivities. Life in a greenhouse worldwas life where solar adlivities and chemism were held incheck. The sunbeam, as we have it today, is a ripeningagent. As the living plant is hastened to its destinedend under solar power through the mysterious touch ofa vivifying and vitalizing energy, so the living beingripens and matures and is gathered under the inexorablesway of the sunbeam. The solar ray has a destroyingpower and a building power.

Plainly the building power of the sunbeam is placedin the ascendency in a greenhouse world. A vapor can-opy, then, was favorable to long life every time it over-vaulted the earth. One glance at the tertiary deadshows a world covered with animal forms such as couldnot obtain at this da}' in a natural state. Long life in atropic world, made such by a canopy which sifted out thematuring and death-dealing power of the sunbeam seemsto have charadlerized several of the geologic ages. Butthe dead, the mighty and abounding dead! What a talethey tell for all time! A world of life brought to a close,by what means? A canopy competent to make a worldof exuberant life, was equally competent to crush outthat life in its polar downfall. I cannot see a world oflife destroyed by any other possible cause than the fall ofcanopies. The march of deadly winter tells the tale.There is Alaska's mighty dead. There is the reign ceternal winter on the ruins of tropic life. Tell me thecause. It is idle for man to look further that, canopyevolution for the all adequate cause of the earth's stagesof modem geologic times.


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SO ALASKA.All these things speak of Edenic life, followed by

snow and flood. I need not be told that man lived inan Eden world, nor that he was raked, for it waswarm. But a change came on. He was now clothed inthe skins of animals. In other words, a canopy was fall-ing at the poles as snow, and a chill was creeping overthe earth. Let us remember that snows only can makea warm world cold. Here, too, we must admit that ifcanopy snows were falling then, the canopy was growingthinner at the equator, and Eden made by a canopy mustdisappear. Then we hear that man was deprived of hisEden home. But tell us why was a warm earth chilledat the very time man's Eden was taken from him? I sayit wa5 another of earth's great revulsions by which theplanet and all things thereon were lifted higher. Theimmortal records I have quoted tell a tale that all intel-ligent men will admit to be true. But strange that menmust find it verified first in the nugget land of the frozennorth.

But there is another chapter yet untold. What doesthe great longevity of man in antediluvian time mean ?If it means anything at all, it holds up to our gaze an-other canopy, some 2000 years after man lost his Edenhome. In other words Genesis has recorded the fadlthat one vapor heaven had passed away. The very thingthat almost every race and tongue has memorialized insong and legend. What does it mean ? It means themarch and fall of canopies, while man looked on as ahelpless vidlim of the world change. But what does thenew canopy mean ? for man lives 800 years. It meansstill another canopy fall. It means the march of snow andflood. It means a golden age crushed, perhaps forever,by snows in polar lands and floods in medial latitudes.Have we ever heard of a flood in which humanity real-ized once again that they were the vidtims of inexorable


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 21byin

wasin

fall-over

if

musthis

I saytheThe

intel-men

does

an-Edenfadt

thingin

theas athe

and

real-

fate ? We are told there was a flood. The memorials ofthat mighty debacle have come down to us in such a waythat no man of intelligence will now dispute the fadt.What caused that flood? They tell us the heavens wereopened then. If this be true, then they were closed be-fore, and the concealed heaven and sun of other racesbounds into view. In other words, a canopy rolls away,the sun begins his rule, and man's great longevity mustdecline, and here we learu that immediately after theflood man's age is reduced and in a few generations hedies at three score and ten.

Now there are some muster links in this chain of evi-dence to prove that a canopy rolled away. It is said inplain terms that the rainbow came then into vicvv, withthe understanding that man had not seen it before. Ifthis be true, the question of canopy evolution is settledhere, and settled forever, as anyone can see. A rainbowcould only come as tlie vapor heavens passed away.Then again the flood narrative states that the God ofnature affirmed that that was the last flood from heaven.Now why did such an announcement go forth? It wentforth because it was 'x proclamation of the skies. All mensaw the heavens stripped. The last ring had descended.The source of al! celestial floods was " broken up."

Then again the narrative states that the law was madea sign that there wouid be no more floods from on high,which means nothing if 't does not mean that all floodcanopies are ended. So long as no canopies spread, thebow may be seen and becomes a sign of security. Mansaw the wondrous transition. He saw the heavenscleared, and he knew the bow meant the end of exoticfloods. The very heavens proclaimed the fadl, and there-fore it -vas the voice of God.

Thus the Hebrew people have preserved undyingmemorials of the reign and fall of vapor canopies, just as


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22 ALASKA.Other peoples have done. They saw two canopies comeand go. Go where we will, back into the nighttime ofi:ntiquity, and we see this grand drama of evolving skies.Tixe libraries of old Nineveh and Babylon tell it in termstoo plain to be long misunderst'' od. I have given but atithe of the available testimony on this point found inold- world thought, but I have given enough to show thatmaa has seen canopies fall, and this is all the evidence Iwant to prove that this earth once had an Annular Sys-tem. Now the consequences of the progressive collapseof that system are recorded all along the ages.

The Geologic Pecord is simply the record of niarchingvapor canopies encing their career at the poles. It isidle to study that record without this fa


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present state. Thus I am led to predicate that the fall ofthe first or innermost ring of the earth's annular systemclosed the Cambrian age, the fall of the next ring closedthe next age; the fall of the third closed the third, and soon down to the age of man, who has seen at least twogreat vapor canopies come and go. The deluge closedthe golden age of man. But here I want to be under-stood. Though the deluge was the last downfall of watersthat coula come from on high, it was still more thantwo thousand years before the last of the vapors fell fromthe polar skies, of which I have the strongest legendaryproof. I must therefore press this idea of modern polarsnowfalls a little further. There was a time within therange of human history when the climate of the northworld was much milder than it is today. It is well knownthat one thousand years ago there were prosperous settle-ments and even villages in Greenland and Spitzbergen,where now eternal ice is king. The hardy seamen ofnorthern Europe penetrated with their frail vessels whereironclads scarce dare to venture now. The mere fact thatGreenland's ancient settlements are no more, speaks ofclimatic change, and shows that the advancing rigors ofarctic lands have driven them away. Snowfalls, I amsure, are the only cause. About that time the north-world "poured forth from her frozen loins " "countlesshordes of barbarous" Goths, Visigoths, Huns and Van-dals, who spread over all southern Europe and even intoAfrica. What started these armies from the north ? Theywere in search of more genial lands. Then back of itall is the fact of climatic change. If the north worldwas capable o{producing "hordes of barbarians' for theinvasion of more genial climes, then it was a warmerworld than it now is. if it was warm enough to fill thoseregions to overflowing with inhabitants, we need look nofarther for evidence that the north polar snows increased.


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 25and rendered much of that land too cold for human prog-ress.

I can see no other adequate cause for the invasion ofthe Roman empire by northern races. I can see no othercompetent cause for the abandonment of the once pros-perous colonies in the far north. Certainly these wouldnever have been planted there under conditions obtainingthere today. I turn to the old annals of Greece, Rome,Scandinavians and other ancient races, and I find themost undoubted proof that all those peoples saw thenorthern sky clouded with canopy vapors long after theheavens opened at the equator and the sun shone in there.All which forces the conclusion that man saw vapor can-opies. Hence the gold-laden vapors must be allowed totestify.

I quote myself again: " Immediately upon the declineof an equatorial ring into the lofty regions of attenuatedair, it is converted into a belt and it gravitates toward thepoles, the points where gravity is strongest and where thecentrifugal force is zero. Hence it must follow that buta small part of the Annular System fell in the equatorialworld." Now as I have claimed from the very first thatgold was one of the vaporized metals of the earth, andone readily diffused as a vapor among watery vapoi^, itfollows that my claim that it has returned and is nowhoarded about the frozen poles, is no afterbirth, no ex postJacto thought. The earth's annular system was certainlymade up of aqueous, mineral and metallic vapors, as Ihave endeavored to show in all my writings on this theme.I could quote a hundred paragraphs from them, showingthat I am not stating my claims now for the first.

Because gold, silver, iron, lead, etc., went as fierysublimations to the skies and into the earth's ring system,they also came back along the track they went. It isnow not as much a hypothesis as it is a fact, as every


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thinker must admit. The geologist knows very well thatI am not straining a point here, and as he knows, too,that Edenic conditions have once, if not many times, ob-tained in lands now locked down with eternal ice, it seemsthat he ought long ago to have urged Annular WorldEvolution to the front, where it is bound to go when menwith eyes wide open come upon the stage.

I have witnesses yet to put upon the stand whose tes-timony will be anything but satisfactory to the old-schoolgeologist. I refer to the

GREAT ICK AGES.How often the icy heel of inveterate winter hascrushed a world of exuberant life we need not know. Itis sufficient to know that again and again the ice-kinghas marched over a tropic earth. If we could see hisdeadly trail but once that would be enough, for such atrail defies explanations with the earth's ring system outof view. It might as well be stated now as later that aworld cannot grow cold without the aid of snows. Worldsdon't grow cold in order that snows may fall. Snowsfall and tropic scenes vanish because they fall. Had menattended to this fact, what an amount of fruitless theoriz-ing might have been avoided. But before I go further, Imust quote Vail again. This time from the ''Deluge andIts Causes y'* 1874, page 14. "A body of exterior watersskirting the atmosphere, having its motion gradually di-minished, would gradually descend toward the earth andmust have spread to the poles by the mere force of grav-ity. * * * Animals in the polar regions would besuddenly entombed in snow, which in after times wouldbe converted into glacier ic6; and those animals would bepresented until relieved by the retreating mass containingthem. Well, what are the facts? Today may be foundthe skeletons of the hairy mammoth imbedded in 'pure,clear ice, ^ * * * the whole carcass preserved, their


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 27thattoo,ob-

mentes-

hasIt

hisa

outa

Ianddi-andbe

be

hair, skin and eyes; their flesh becoming the food ofwolves and bears; the contents of their stomachs undi-gested, showing that they luxuriated in coniferous forestsup to the very time or day of their death. These factsgive no room for speculation. Their history was writtenthen, and from it we glean the incontestible evidence thatthey were suddenly overwhelmed by a downfall of snow.Cuvier said that these animals ' were frozen up immedi-ately after death.' He might have said they perished intheir graves. '

Since the beginning of the present century many car-casses of both the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceroshave been found in the frozen north. The first mammothwas found in 1799 in the glacier near the mouth of theLena river in Siberia. It was exposed by the meltingaway of the ice wall, and hung for a long time in the loftyescarpment, " forty feet above the earth's surface and twohundred feet below the top of the glacier." Plainly thatanimal was overtaken by falling snows, for, be it remem-bered, "pure, clean glacier ice" is only formed fromsnow. The conclusion must be that very recently in geo-logic time the mammoth and his huge congeners roamedin vast numbers in what is now the frozen north world.We are forced to this conclusion both by these well-pre-served bodies in ice and the vast quantities of their bonesand teeth scattered all over the north. Then we mustconclude that there was a time when all that north-landwas free from the chains of winter.

The condition in which the Siberian mammoth wasfound, the condition in which a number of others havesince been found, gives no possible escape from the con-clusion that the snows that buried them was an avalanchefrom the Arctic skies. Putrefaction had not even begun.The tissues of the flesh, the blood vessels and the vesiclesshowed that death was sudden, and that too in a snow-


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28 ALASKA.made grave. In one instance the very pupil of the mon-ster's eye was preserved entire. All these conditionshave been known for nearly a century, and it would seemthat men could not fail to see that such a sudden burialdemands a sudden down-rush of snows. Then, too, withJupiter's canopy apparently forcing its evidence of polarfalls into court, how has it ever happened that men whostand foremost in the ranks of the learned, have not longsince recognized the claim that the earth's annular systemwas the grand agent in this mighty world catastrophe ?With this fact recognized, Alaska's gold field ceases tobe a puzzle, for the same cause that was competent toglaciate a tropic world gave the placers their amazingwealth, as will be shown later. I ask how can reasonablemen for a moment doubt canopy declension with all thesethings in view ? But in the day that canopy progressionis a recogfnized fact, the polar deposition of gold becomesrecognized also, for the inveterate fires of the moltenearth forbids any other conclusion. The same snows thatmade this vast desolation, went as vapor, gold-laden, tothe telluric heavens. If, then, the mammoth and hiscompeers are sealed in the ice and snows of a frozen world,they testify also of the immeasurable wealth hoardedaway at the beck of annular law.

The reader must now see that the claims I have madeas to Alaska's gold depends upon the truth or untruth ofthe annular theory. If the earth once had rings and can-opies, they made this northern land a storehouse of metals.Well, have we not had evidence enough that the earthonce had rings in the fact that the Arctic world wasthe dumping ground of annular snows? On the otherhand, if the earth never saw canopy processes, myclaim for the annular origin of Arctic gold and other met-allic wealth is void. The whole thing hinges on theclaim that God made this earth according to Annular

db


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 29I^aw, and that law is announced from every sun and starof God's empire.

Shall man wait till Jupiter drops its canopy; till Sat-urn's rings collapse and Mars' so-called "canals" passfrom view to become convinced that the Earth is not anaccident? Will the ablest teachers and scholars continueto exploit the most absurd theories to account for the IceAges, when every schoolboy ought to know that ouroceans could never have come from their primitive homeon high, except as canopies and canopy snows? Thegreat I^ord Kelvin, whose name need but be mentionedto give authority to his claim, could settle the great IceAge problem with but a hint that the snows of the glacialperiods came from Jupiter-like canopies that once inclosedthe earth. But instead of this, what has he done? Giv-en his efforts to convince mankind that the earth, retiringfrom solar heat, became inclosed in glacial snows. Allthis in the face of the fact that no one knows that theearth can get snows by withdrawing from the sun;Men who have ascended in balloons might give him someevidence of the temperature of interplanetary space. Andhe might also learn something from the fact that the earthis about three millions of miles further from the sun inour summer, in the northern hemisphere, than in winter.

All such theorists overlook this one essential : Theearth must have an increase of solar heat to cover itselfwith snow. Vaporization must come first, or snows can-not form. Snow formation is work^ and there must beenergy behind snow formation. The earth could no morebecome glaciated by decreasing solar heat than an oceansteamer could increase its speed by putting out its fires.It cannot be denied that the more snow and the more icethat are formed, the more energy in the form of heat isrequired. What, then, must have been the heat energyrequired to glaciate the earth again and again ? It seems


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30 ALASKA.to me that when men support the "CroUian theory" ofglaciation, they subvert the very law necessary to sup-port. But where was the heat that vaporized the watersthat formed the snows that a canopy let down upon theearth ? One does not have to go far to find it. It wasthe energy of a molten earth that supplied the snows ofevery ice age this world ever saw.

The idea of gathering heat from a sun, ninety-twomillions of miles away, to vaporize enough of our oceanin order to cover the earth with ice! If we could get theheat we could also get the vapor, but how will we getthe heat to vaporize the seas and the cold to freeze them,both at the same time ? This may do for Lord Kelvinand his satellites, but the annular student will say "notany, thanks." The simple fadl is, as I have said before,the earth grew frigid because the snows fell upon it. Thesnows did not fall upon it because the earth becamefrigid. The sooner men learn this great fadl the soonerwill they mount the high plane of Annular Law, and thenthere will be "clear sailing."Men seem to have forgotten the fadl that the energies

of an igneous earth have not died out. And why theycall upon the sun to accomplish what is plainly an impos-sibility, shows the grand struggle the old-school geolo-gist is maintaining in order to exist. Now if men havefailed to produce a glacial theory that will stand the test,after nearly a century of the keenest searching and calcu-lating, is it not about time to come home and hear the greatEarth tell the tale of herown exhaustless energies! Hearher announce the law of world-making. Hear her wit-nesses speaking from a thousand fields, all asserting thatthis earth once had an annular system whose gradual andprogressive collapse made the earth's crust as we see ittoday.

The earth's unquenchable fires staked out its own


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 31placers, laid its own iron sills, built its own mighty treas-uries in and on the crust, and God, the Law Giver, sawthat it was done as unfathomable wisdom originallyplanned. The grand intent is seen when we can peep inand see the plan carried out.

This theory of the glaciation of continents is not anex postfacto birth either. I quote again, the ^'Deluge andIts Cause,'' (page 19, 1874): "There was a time when agreat part of the land of the earth was covered by a vastmoving glacier. Its track is seen on every continent Inmany places it must have been more than a mile indepth. * * * Nothing but a fall of snow could haveformed this mighty mass, and that snow must have fallenfrom space. Thus a succession of rings approaching theearth, and then expanding by the force of gravity intobelts, and finally falling, would seem to account for thosegreat cataclysms of modern geologic times."

Seeing these thoughts have been published verynearly a quarter of a century, in which time the greatestminds have grappled with this problem, it is but due tothe Annular Theory that it be given a part of the world'sattention, and I trust men will pardon me for using thepresent excitement about the great gold discovery in thenorth world to bring it more diredlly into view. Sincefrom the very first I have claimed that not only goldand silver, but all metals that could be vaporized, werecarried into the ring system and back again via the poles,and since in the same proportion, as all other theoriesfail to account for the ice ages, the canopy theory ad-vances, I am content to leave it with the world's jury.

If it be true that the last great ice age was caused byan avalanche of canopy snows, it will be safe to claimthat this same potent agent of world changes was an adl-ive fadlor away back in geologic time. From the verytime the earth's fires grew tame, falling vapors began to


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chill those lands first. Above all others, those regionswere the first prepared for life's forms. So that life of allkinds must have radiated from those lands as well asmineral wealth. Then, too, we are forced to admit thatthe first snowfalls were richer in metals than the laterones.

Here we want to pause and listen awhile to paleozoictestimony respedling those great snowfalls of the remotegeologic past. Many eminent geologists have claimedthat the evidence of glacial action extends back into thevery midnight of geologic time. If it be true that thepresence of boulders is evidence of glacial action, thenthe question of snowfalls in the early ages is readily set-tled, for we find boulders scattered all along the ages.Numbers of them have been found in the rocks of theCambrian and Huronian, and when we come to the Silu-rian and Devonian strata, we find them in greater quan-tities. When we enter the Carboniferous age we findthese boulders in astonishing quantities. Vast beds ofthem lie as conglomerate among the coal strata of theworld, and boulders have occasionally been found e\en inthe coal veins themselves. The Permian and Cre.^ceousbeds show the same evidence. However, in the Tertia-ries we have the most abundant evidence of the alterna-tion of warm and cold ages.

The Tertiary, above all other ages, was the time ofabounding animal life. It was an age when astonishinghordes of the hugest animals possessed the earth. Theirremains are found on every continentI might say inevery land, and their total extinction at the end of thatage, tells a tale of invererate winter and involving snowa day when huge icebergs floated upon the oceans andrivers, and continents of ice moved over the land.

When, however, we come down to more modem geo-logic times and find another warm age, and see the most

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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 33undoubted signs of a long and perpetual summer even upto the very poles; when we see that the world was justrescued from the ravages of a long and fatal winter, wefeel like asking what melted those icy chains. At thattime deluges vast beyond human conception rushed alonga thousand valleys from the melting glaciers. Whatmade those glaciers melt so rapidly and hastily yield tothe advance of summer? How could a frozen world growwarm in such haste as to flood the earth ? Do we hear ofglacial floods now ? Such floods, as I think, can never oc-cur till a greenhouse roof is reared anew. Another ringdescended and enveloped a world of snow and ice. Thegreenhouse earth was formed in spite of the ice and snowsthat held the mastodon and his congeners in their wintrygraves. A greenhouse roof, a world of ice! Anyone cansee the result. The ice must give way, and that speed-ily. I hold that no other world-condition in the line ofmaterial world-evolution could have forced the glaciers toso hastily release the continents and bring summer onagain.

As we thus come to know the character of the world-changes of modern geologic times, we see the canopycoming more plainly into view. But if such rushing andcrowding changes in medial latitudes tell of canopies andtheir hothouse consequences, what are we to concludewhen we know that the very poles have been the scenesof tropic life ? Can human reason contrive anything morecompetent than a vapor canopy to melt and banish polarice-fields?

I cannot imagine any other agent in God's universeat work to make the frigid poles regions of exuberantlife, and so long as I see the omnipotent canopy thus atwork on yonder "king of planets," as God's materialvicegerent in the building of world-crusts, I say I amforced to fall back on this rock, and I do not believe any


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earthly power can drive me from it. From this Gibraltarthe annular student looks over the vast graveyard of theTertiary and Quarternary dead, and ceases to marvel thatage has succeeded age and life followed life in t^e verymidst of the mightiest earth revulsions. He looks backto a time when a great part of the northern hemispherewas incased in vast continental glaciers. In the ordinarycourse of things as he sees them now, he can imagine nopossible way by which the grip of implacable winter canbe loosened. But figuring on canopy processes as he seesthem at work in the solar system on at least three of oursister planets, he may contemplate how the energies of amolten world can even come to bear on an ice-inclosedearth and change it to an Eden, as it has again and againin ages past.

Looking back he can see a ring, by a slow but steadydecline, enter the atmosphere at the earth's equator.The rotating earth and the buoyant power of the aircheck its downward motion in front while it pushes on-ward from above. As an inevitable result he sccs thatring spread sidewise into the form of a belt, and slowly butsurely it forms a canopy over the whole earth, because ofits tendency to fall to the poles. Into that canopy he seesthe solar orb pouring its immeasurable flood of heat. Inthat vapor mass the sunbeams gather strength. Beneaththat canopy, as the temperature increases as it naturallywould under such a greenhouse roof, no glacier could lastvery long. It speedily melts, and floods rush in headlongflight to the sea. Tell me, how else could "floods im-measurable" flow from continental glaciers ? And yet itis the united judgment of geologists that such floods didoccur. Well, if they did, the canopy must be allowed totestify, and if the canopy takes the stand, foundationswill tremble and pillars tumble.

Let Saturn and Jupiter speak and men will wonder if:>!'


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 86it be needful to freight the past with such millions ofyears as is usual to account for world changes. Howlong would it take for a glaciated earth to shift its ice asfloods to the sea under such a hot-house roof? I thinkit would be a mild, if not a poor canopy, that could notin less than a hundred years transfer the mightiest glacierto the ocean and transform a world ofdeath to one ofbloom.But I do not oflFer any figures now. I only suggest thatwhen the geologist of the old school shall have been bornanew and shall become a pradlical annular stud\. "t, hewill have little inclination to regard our beautiful earthas an old, decrepit thing.

Is there anything improbable in these claims? Arewe not rather forced to these conclusions the very momentwe make the molten earth our fortress? There is thetropic earth, a tropic pole. Suddenly as the d^sii of ahurricane it is transformed into a vast desolatiou. Thehairy mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros tell the taleand tell it truthfully. // came as a stroke! Either this,or evidence is worthless. These Imge denizens of anEden earth luxuriated in polar pasture on the very dayof their death. It did not require millions of years tobury the mammoth in his snowy grave. Though hemay have had his last long sleep during the reign and fallof dyna.sties, and uncounted ages may have rolled nwayas he lay immured in walls of ice.

Thus while it may be that millions of years rolled byduring an existence of tropic life, and millions of yearsmay have passed while the earth lay covered with its icymantle, yet the transition from a frigid condition to atropic state or from a tropic state to an ar


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86 ALASKA.laden air would soon drop its load when chilled by polarcold, and I assume that today polar snowfalls are largelyconfined to the outskirts of the frozen world. As nocanopy can come now to melt the polar ice and make awarm world, it will be a long, long time before the Ardticand Antardtic lands will bloom again, if they ever do.

GOLD CARRIED FROM POLAR LANDS.In ancient times gold-laden vapors fell more abund-

antly than they did in more recent geologic times.Hence ancient glaciers were more richly stocked than themodern. For this reason we find more gold in the oldestglacial beds. Hence to be an expert gold-hunter or gold-finder one must be able to distinguish the old glacialformations from the recent. This, of course, is a difficulttask, and must be done on the spot and by one acquaint-ed with glacial adlion.

In this age millions of huge icebergs break away fromthe ice-coasts of the polar regions, bo'^i north and south,pnd move with the water currents into more genial seas,and melting, drop the loads of minerals they contain,scattering them broadcast on the sea bottom. This hasgone on, as we have seen, since the first ocean fell. Mil-lions of years since the earth was fit for the abode of man,the gold-laden iceberg tottered from the world's lofty ice-crowns and floated toward the equator, thus carrying theproducts of the molten earth and planting them in thestratified supercrust within the reach of man. Supposethe icebergs that now come down from the frozen norththrough Davis' strait and Baffin's bay and lodge by thethousand on the coast of Newfoundland and the "banks,"were laden with gold, it is plain that in course of timethe sea botton of these lodging grounds would becomerich with gold, which no quartz bed ever yielded.Now there re such beds scattered all over the knownearth. Let us look at this feature. To a certain extent.

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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 87what became ridges and mountain folds in azoic or arch-aean times, remained ridges and folds through the ages.As a matter of course, these ridges determined the direc-tion of ancient sea currents, and hence also determinedthe tracks of the icebergs, their lodging ground andd... ->ing sites. The depression in which BaflSn's v/aters*lc determine the track of the north AViantic icebergs,and their lodging ground also. Heace the millions ofbouiders that rest on the sea bed of the Labrador coastart lying there today because in an age gone by that de-pression was made. Now on the west coast of NorthAmerica is the primitive earth fold, as all geologists wellknow. At a later age this ridge was extended from theArctic ocean through the United States, Mexico andSouth America. This ridge determined the course of thepolar currents in the ancient ocean.

Icebergs ^ormed from downfalls of canopy snows andladen witb ;roM, broke from their polar moorings andfloated '^ ; !"^ only to be urged westward against thismighty a ' *y/''l. Those from the north floated south-ward and w ' Wfcid because the earth rotated eastward.It is easily seen, ciierefore, what was the ancient strand-i.ig-ground of the icebergs of the Azoic and Paleozoic se'tSin the northern hemisphere. In the south polar regionsthe bergs floated northward only to be carried ;v^stv/ardagainst the infant Andes by the eastward motion of theearth, and hence we see the lodging grounds of bergs inthe so I ern hemisphere. For this reason and this alone,then, ';;.- annular student would expect to find gold re-gions scuiiarcd all along the east side of this world wall. Ido not say that gold cannot be found on the west of thisgreat coast ridge. I say that as the vehicles that carriedgold from polar lands must have lodged for ages uncount-ed and uncountable on the east side, the richest gold fieldsof the Pacific coast must lie on the east of this mountain


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fold, and I am willing to leave the decision of the casewith the world's jury.Whether you find a gold re- 'oi in British Columbia,

the United States, Mexico or Sc J lerica, the law ofannular profession demands tha^. be on the easternflanks of the coast ridge. As these icebergs have floatedsince the birth of oceans and continents, one would natu-rally conclude that a vast amount of gold must have beencarried from the polar lands toward the equator. Therewere other walls than this great primitive one in the westand northwest of North America. There were otherstrandmg grounds for laden bergs, but the geologistknows of none like the Pacidc fold. On the east of the"Rockies" there was plainly another depression in theancient sea. A critical study of this leads me to concludethat this depression extended from the Ozark ridge to thepresent polar sea. It afforded a grand highway for thesegold-laden ships of the gods. Need we wonder, then,that the environs of Pike's Peak, standing right in theirpath, should gather in their cargoes of gold and othermetals.

In regions where mountain folds run east and westand opportunity given for ocean currents to strike againstthem, I would expect to find gold fields on the north sideof such walls. North of the great lakes is the Lauren-tian Ridge, extending from the Labrador coast westwarato the Pacific coast mountains, another of earth's oldestwrinkles. For immeasurable ages the polar watersdashed against this ancient shore. In places along itsnorthern slope the ancient icebergs must have gatheredas they do today on the ' ' banks ' ' and Labrador coast.There they lodged and dropped their wealth, and I assumethere must be rich gold fields along that ancient strandingground.

There is a great depressioti in the ridge where the


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 39Red River of the North and the head waters of the Mis-sissippi come together. Through this depression thethe north polar waters must have been carried, andin a vast region about this depression and northwardfrom it, I would locate a gold field. Gold seekers neednot expect to find placer gold in Canada on the southernslopes of this ridge, but there are abundant reasons forexpecting to find it on the north of it. In Asia the greatAltai ridge was another such barrier against polar water,and I see no reason why southern Siberia is not rich ingold placers, as also the eastern slopes of the Ural mount-ains. Eastern Siberia, located so near to Alaskan highlands, where in all ages the glacier has formed and meltedagain and again, ought to be phenomenally rich in goldplacers.

There is a great gold field in Southern Africa. Imust bring it in here, a witness of great importance. Todo this I will simply quote from Vail s Annular World,Vol. II, No. 2 1 : "When gold was found among the aoue-ous deposits of South Africa, the old-school geologists, asusual, would not credit the fact until forced to. Thewhole region of gold deposits there is an old sea bed, andthe metal was borne thither from other regions. An emi-nent English geologist, when he looked over the field,declared himself 'unable to account for the anomaly.'Another one said he ' would have expected to find asmuch gold among the lake beds of Scotland.' All thiscomes because geologists fail to recognize the fact thatthe gold dust of the world was made in the earth's sub-liming fires and sent to the skies amid its fire-formed va-pors.

" If men would consent to open their eyes and see thegreat earth's primal exhalations, gold and all other met-als, to a vast amount, lifted from the earth's deepest bo-som to the heavens in the age of fire, and formed into a


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40 ALASKA.ring system, there need be no 'anomalies.' Earth-ringswere the homes of all the metals that could be lifted bydissolving fires. This planet could not be in a moltenstate without filling the terrestial skies with such distilla-tions, and the law of annular decline demands that theseshould float toward the polar world in order to come backto the earth's surface. I^aw demands that these vaporbodies, laden with their fire-formed riches, should lingeron the bounds of the atmosphere and return through theages.

" With this plan of gold deposition, we look back intoPermean time and see a great vapor-laden canopy withits golden wealth, hanging like a molten heaven over theeartli. See it part at the equator. One-half of it rides;lowly toward the north world, the other gravitates slow-ly toward the south world. There, in the course of cen-turies, it falls amid the snow piles of the Antarctic conti-nent. As time rolls on this continent of snows becomesa continent of ice, piled mountain high. But let us re-member that it is ice laden with the metallic dust of themolten earth. At that time South Africa was a part ofthe ocean's bed. The ice fields of the south moved fromthe continent to the sea, and by ocean currents were car-ried toward the equator. We see, in imagination, thou-sands of great southern icebergs borne to this spot ofancient Africa, as in an eddying sea, just as we see themtoday off the ' banks ' at Newfoundland. There, in warmwaters, they melted and dropped their load."Thus the gold, once native in the infant planet,raised by immeasurable heat from the lowest depths andlodged in the celestial waters, found a temporary restingplace amid southern snows, and thence borne by ice, founda final home in the soa-foiming beds of South Africa."

I presume that every intelhgent man acquainted withthe gold deposits of South Africa knows that it must have


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 41been carried in the sea to its lodging place. But whatcarried it, and whence ca, e it? I must urge that theiceberg was the vehicle, and the south-land the regionfrom -.hich it came. One thing must be admitted, thatthe gold in this old sea bed in South Africa was notground out of quartz beds, for there are no such bedsthere from which it could have been derived. As newgold discoveries are made, the intelligent miner turnsaway and disregards old ideas. The idea that gold cameoriginally only from quartz rock in the neighborhood ofthe placers, must be given up. The Cripple Creek gold,the gold rock of Southern California, and the Alaskangold, all prove that it is found in various kinds of rock.Full many a gold seeker has spent his life and his wealthto find a gold-bearing rock simply because he saw signsof placer gold near by. Gold-bearing rock may haveyielded placer gold, but many a miner has found goldrock and yet no gold placers near by.

Since the placers may have been water deposits, car-ried by sea currents, or morainic drift carried by glaciers,the wise miner will not spend a fortune to find a goldlode on the hillside because he has found gold sands be-low. He will learn the evidences of glacier action. Hewill study topography and above all, he will studythe Annular Theory and learn of the world processes thathave made the earth as it is. I quote again (AnnularWorld, Vol. II, No. 24):"A little more experience in gold mining will lead thethinker clear away from the old-school idea that all goldis derived from primitive rock. The evidence is cumu-lative that very little placer gold was ever contained inrock beds. Very recently Peter L. Trout, an intelligentminer, who has had large experience in various gold-yielding lands, spent several months in Alaska and hasgiven some cold and stubborn facts regarding the gold in


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42 ALASKA.that regfion. There in the very region (under the Arcticcircle) where gold must have reached the earth from itshome in the skies, it should be found in almost everykind of rock. But above all, it should be found there inabundance in the form of grains and dust as it fell fromthe skies, amid the glacial snows that fell there from theearth rings. It should be found there incorporated withthe very glaciers that have held some parts of that landin their icy grasp for thousands of years.

"Peter 1,. Trout found gold dust and ruby sand onthe surface of the glacier that environs Mount Fairweath-er, at a height so far above any gold-bearing rock in thatregion as to forbid its having been derived from it. Nowtell us, brothers of the old school, where that gold andruby sand came from?"

Here is a gold-bearing glacier. If that glacier, likethe great Greenland glaciers, could move into the sea andgive birth to icebergs, these would float thousands ofmiles, perhaps, before in melting, they would drop theirgolden sands.

"If Mount Fairweather glacier is gold-bearing, whymay not other Arctic and Polar glaciers contain gold ?If that glacier did not get its gold from gold-bearingrocks which it had c. tshed into sand, it certainly did getit from the earth's annular systemfrom canopy snows.Then I say it may be a fact that some of the glaciers ofthe polar north are gold-bearing, for they may be someof the very ancient remains of snows that fell away backin the ages. Again, it is very possible that those exoticsnows, that fell in recent geologic times, may have carriedgold from the skies, and if so, the icebergs that now floatfrom the north world and melt in the deep, may yet bedistributing their golden hoards over the earth.

Here is what Peter L. Trout says about the origin ofthe gold on Mount Fairweather glacier: "This gold cer-


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 48tainly never came from quartz veins, as it was found inmeteoric dust, and heaven is the only phce I can think ofthat it could come from, or the ethereal blue vault aboveus, or wherever meteoric dust comes from." Heavencertainly was once its homenot the meteor's heaven,but the telluric heaven; the heaven whither inveteratefires sent it in ages gone by, and where it floaievl for mil-lions of years in revolving rings, belts and canopies, andwhence it fell in the fullness of its time.When I think of the vast ice cap of the south worldand recall the fadl that it does not require such vast agesto produce them, nor such to banish them, I am not slowto suggest that that mighty glacier now covering the Ant-ardtic continent may be composed largely of gold-ladensnow. Certain it is, that icebergs have floated for mil-lions of years from that frozen land, and certain it is thatland has been capped again and again by gold-ladensnows. But let us now turn to the

ALASKAN PLACERS.I have said that placer gold can be no reliable sign of

gold veins in the hills above. I have shown how ice-bergs melting drop their burden to the bottom of the sea.If in primitive times quartz beds were being formed inhighly silicious waters and falling gold could fall and sinkand mix with the forming bed at the bottom of the sea,then gold veins would be formed in a matrix of quartz.But if any other kind of a bed was forming then, it wouldbe gold in another kind of a matrix. Now as the northworld, during all the ages, must have been a dumpingground for mineral matter from on high, I cannot conceivethat quartz beds carrying gold can be a characteristic ofpolar lands, but that gold veins will likely be found inalmost any kind of rock, and instead of gold running inveins only, I would rather expect to find this metal allthrough the rock mass.


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44 ALASKA.Now Alaska is a grand upheaval. The gold-bearingrocks of ages past are cast up to the wear of storm and

frost and the grinding of glaciers. The upturned bedswere formed of the minerals and metals falling there inages past, and are necessarily rich in mineral wealth.Ages of frost and glacier action have been reducing theserocks to dust At the same time, the gold in the glaciershas mixed with that which past ages stored in the earth'scrust. This process has gone on from very early geologictimes. From the very nature of this northern upthrust,it is a region of land-locked basins where glaciers couldform, and afford no opportunity for icebergs to carryaway their wealth. In all ages these ice fields melted onthe spot and dropped their gold. As tropic conditionscame and passed away, gold-laden glaciers melted andothers formed in their places, only to drop their hoards.Anyone can see that if those ancient ice ages were pro-duced by the fall of primitive or canopy vapors, thenAlaska, from the very nature of world couditions, is aland rich with celestial treasures.

It must be conceded that during the many glacialperiods that the earth has witnessed, Alaska was emi-nently the glacier's home. When canopies revolvedabout the earth and floated to the northern skies to fall,Alaska's mountains lifted their lofty heads to the sky,and thus above all other northern lands was situated toreceive its snowy hoard. When canopies rode on high,the air was under greater pressure, and clouds buoyedin the atmosphere would gather there as nowwhen con-ditions were favorable. As glacial winters began in thenorth world, currents of air must have started in vigor-ous flight toward the equator. These snow-laden cur-rents, of course, would fall back westward as the earthrotated eastward and lodged on the Alaskan mountains,and the great primal folds of the continent would again

li!


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 45become the storage ground for the wealth of canopies.This leads me to further urge the claim that the wholeeastern slope of the coast mountains of British Americaand Alaska is pre-eminently the

LAND OF THE NUGGET.That mysterious power that forms the crystal, the

frost-work on the window pane, the snowflake fallingthrough the air, formed the gold grains and the nugget.The same process that produces the hailstone from wateryvapor today at certain temperature, formed hailstonesof gold in ages gone by when a higher temperate pre-vailed. There v/as a time when the temperature of theatmosphere was such that mineral rains and mineral hail-stones were the order of the day. In the lower air min-eral exhalations arose only to condense and fall back.But as they condensed mineral masses formed just ashailstones are now formed. Irregularly rounded in form,after riding as long as they could in the mineral atmos-phere they fell back to the earth, and we see countlessmillions of these in the crust today. Well in the loftierheights, in the steaming vapors, the golden grains andnuggets formed. They rode higher in the primitive at-mosphere than the more refradlory metalsmetals moredifficult to vaporize. For this reason they formed a partof the ring system. For this reason they revolved aroundthe earth in canopies with great velocity and moved inspiral paths to the poles, falling there with the verysnows that formed glaciers on ttie Alaskan uplift.

These nuggets have been found in vast quantities inthe frozen north, always in placers, and they never camefrom quartz beds, for the process that is competent topulverize quartz rock must have ground all quartz nug-gets to powder also.

For this reason, and for many others, men cannot rea-


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46 ALASKA.sonably claim that all placer gold was ground out ofquartz beds by ice movements, etc. Yet this is the well-known opinion forced upon us by old-school empiricism.I do not say that nuggets are not found in quartz, butthat this rock, as well as porphyry and granite, may con-tain them, because sky-formed accretionsgold hail-stonesfalling first from the sky and carried by ice anddropped into forming beds, must yet lie where they fell.I must say, however, that the miner who seeks thesources of placer gold in the hillsides and mountain wallsof Alaska will not find them. In his search for them,however, he may find very rich gold-bearing rock, as hedoes in other lands. The long experience of pradlicalminers should teach the prospe


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48 ALASKA.to the earth, why not mine the glacien itself for the moth-er lode?

Alaaka is a frozen landa land whos** surface onlythaws during summer. The earth in many places isknown to be frozen hundreds of feet in depth. (SeeEarWs Annular System, pages 190 to 200.) In Siberiait is jla'.med that frost and ice in some places extend sevenhundred feet beneath the surface. But how could earthymatter freeze to that depth? Everyone who has anyknowledge of the temperature of mines, can see an over-towering difficulty here. Suppose the Annular Theorybe allowed a voice. Hear what it says on this point:

Under this frozen soil, under the ancient glacier whoseage may be reckoned by milleniums, lie the nugget andgolden sands. How in the world did they get there, iftbey were ground out of the rock by glacial action?Were they washed from the rocks in situ, by floods, to thetop oi the glaciers and made to sink chrough it to thebottom ? If the nugget's home weie in the soil that lieson top of the glacier, then the old school might take somesatisfaction in the fact. But the fact is, it is just wherethe annular student wants to find it, and the satisfactionis his. For one hundred thousand years, it may be,Alaska's teu thousand valleys, ice-filled ^nl forest-cov-ered, have cr>:icealed their gold deposits, and in all thattime the warring elements have not added an ounce ofgold, nugget or dust, to those concealed hoards. Neitherthe grinding ice nor t^e crushing heel of winter in allthat time has added a mite of gold to the hidden wealthunder frozen Alaska or frozen Klondyke; and preciouslittle have they ever added to any other golden hoard.

I will grant that the gold found in the talus or soilnow covering so much of the perpetually frozen earth inthat north land may in part have been derived from thedisintegrated rock, but the time has come when this great


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THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 49problem of placer gold in connection with glacial actionwill receive a radical and merciless overhauling in thelight of the molten earth and annular world-making.It may be that Siberian and Alaskan gold may teach thegeologist and physicists that they have misinterpretedthe geological record from the very first rude lines cut bythe chisel of Time on earth's rocky piles.

The overtowering question is: Why is gold found insuch vast quantities In tiie north world ? No grinding upof rocks can explain that. If ice crushing explains whywe find gold in mountainous Alaska; why has not mount-ainous Europe give i us abundant placer gold? The gla-cier can't quarry out gold unless it is at hand. There itis under the Arctic circle, and the question is: Why there?Perhaps it is not generally known that more than half thegold gathered in the Russian empire is found under theArctic circle in Eastern Siberia, almost on the thresholdof Alas^^a. Yankee pluck and enterprise are badly need-ed there, it would seem.

I^et it be understood, then, that Alaskan gold as itexists in places that havc^ been se. led for ages under froz-en mud and sand, intermixed with layers of ice of greatthickness, was not ground from any "mother lode."The very r>iud, cla^ , sand, etc., may have iallen with thesnows. If snows descended to glaciate a world, they car-ried immeasurable quantities of mineral sublimationstellurio-c(juiiic dust. From this fund, I presume, theglacial "til

Documents

Alaska Vail, Isaac Newton