Google
This is a digital copy of a book that was preserved for generations on Hbrary shelves before it was carefully scanned by Google as part of a project
to make the world's books discoverable online.
It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject
to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books
are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover.
Marks, notations and other maiginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the
publisher to a library and finally to you.
Usage guidelines
Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the
public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we liave taken steps to
prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.
We also ask that you:
+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for
personal, non-commercial purposes.
+ Refrain fivm automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system: If you are conducting research on machine
translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the
use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.
+ Maintain attributionTht GoogXt "watermark" you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find
additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.
+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just
because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other
countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can't offer guidance on whether any specific use of
any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book's appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner
anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liabili^ can be quite severe.
About Google Book Search
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google Book Search helps readers
discover the world's books while helping authors and publishers reach new audiences. You can search through the full text of this book on the web
at |http : //books . google . com/|
•^
«f
' ,' • '
' t ^ .V
(
M
' K
•■'. /
V ' ^., t
V
J , A
I y
( >
r :■ T .-,
.'. ''
.i. I
QENERAL LIBRARY
OF
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
PRKSBNTKn B"?
.!^3(:>vX.....WsJs£!U<5^..
Ui
.5.
J''?-T
loecT
■' /
J ,
, ;
•y\ ^. .^
iiU^
« . •'.. ». ►j'-
. \
.' ■•»
'. -1
/ '^
. ,', >
■■' ">-'''■.■
, t-
' l ' '
', '' '
'\ . \
\ 1
i
-^. '
'' .-^-^
-, - f "
Mm
, f
■^ r
, ' < '' I, ,'
•1^
\ <
't r ...
.. M
■• ."; ^';J'
'(
. ^.
\ 1 . 1
') • V
4.^''
, \
V
; ' r
-t- /-:
^ :'
t ■.
>■ •:''' /•
(•■ •.
•■ : -ti
7 -■-;.■■ ■- t
^•<
> .^ :
'/
•.j='-
' !
^i ; r
v 1 ^.
.:^:,' • Ai
i, T •■ _'
■'! , '''
1
■'■•''
\
r
' V
•1
' 1 -
• '
V*
,,? ;
-.. ,
*; 1
K
i
.
I s
p V.
1 .'
•-i''
■j: •-:
^ \:
■■>,
/
*
\..
, :!'
.■I ' \
- ■- • , '■-.
#
' /■'
V, V
''1 . '■
. ', '' V
-.-/
•■ '),
' • y f -;■
I ' ■'
r' ' >
Y .
' f
.'5-.
. I
'■J
I . -
f
«%,.
'..{>
' /'
A
., ')
»
/-
Land of the Nugget. Why? |
EIJITOR OF THE "ANNULAR WORLD."
A Critical Examination of Geological and
other Testimony, showing how and
,why Gold Was Deposited in
Polar Lands.
Copynghted i9«, by I
PASADENA, CAt.,
1897.
V
I liave a fac simile impression of Uie only stone tablet yet found in
a *' clitf dWlling." On it is the ancient setfeni symbol and other hiero-
glyphs* showing plainly, as I think, the progression of canopy vapors '
from the equaior to the poles,. An enlarged picture of this tablet, with
a full explanation of its meaning, Will be sent free to every paid-up snb>
subscriber of the Ankui^ar Wori^d <24-page monthly, |i.oo per year)
beginning with Vol. iv., 1898, and to others on receipt of 25 cents. This
Woncterfnl tablet has puzzled the most learned archaeologists. The offi-
cials of the Smithsonian Institution declared that **no|cey to its inter- ^
pretation had been found. ^' I think I have that iSr^jV. I
in the last ten years I have received, I suppose, a thousatid
testimonials like the following:
^* Vour Annular Theory is very satlsfa^ry to me. etc. '*
Vvffg?. Richard Owen.
, "There-is doubtless much truth in what yon say, etc.'*
Prof. Wm. Dawson, Sr,
**I hope men of science will give your claims the credit they de-
serve.'* Prss. Wm. F. Warren.
*'I have read your thoughts with the keenest relish. They are
ahead of anything else I have seen.** - ^Kv. D. Evans.
: Box 279, Z<yUfa City^ Iowa.
"I can now at the age of 83, see light through the rift in the clouds
hanging over the deluge.** E. P. iNOKRSOiyi..
Springfield. Kan.
'* Your views have given me more light on Genesis and creation than
all else I ever read.'^ . O. W. Ogden.
Prosperity, IV. Va.
1
*' I*ve been an M. E. minister for 30 years. In all mv search I have
seen nothing that pleases me so-much as your thoughts.^*
Jolietville^Md. REV. J. N. pARR, M. D.
"And above all the ffand Divine is not lost sight of.*' .
San Diego, Cal^ CARRIE W1I.WAMS.
**I believe yoM are bringing a great truth to the Jtnowledge of the
world.** H. M. Shipman.
Alliance t Ohio.
"Your ideas must lead up to a correct theology.*^
S-ofauger, CaL __^ D. WHITE.
Address all orders to I. N. VAIL,
Editor Annular Worldy
Pasadena, Cai..
♦_*■. - "j.* S-'jiea
o
r^
I
The Land of the Nugget. Why ?
S THEORIES rise and fall, the world grows wise,
and he who learns as a philosopher learns, learns to
unlearn and prizes the opportunity to **let go" as
theories begin to sink in the great ocean of error. I be-
lieve there is a road that "leads to all truth." The time
may come when men travelling that road can mount the
stepping stones that lead up to Truth's grand Citadel.
We have seen theories come and go, as mere ephemeral
upheavals in the sea of time, and I here present another.
This of course is planted on time's eternal sills — 2l thing
' ? not bom 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 the
North-world gold problem to disseminate a few original
thoughts among thinking men, as well as among those
who will heedlessly rush into the perils to be encountered
in the nugget lands of the Arctic World. I ask the read-
er to follow carefully and patiently the line of argument
I am about to pursue, and which I have been presenting
on all suitable occasions for more than a quarter of a
century. At the end of this treatise on Alaskan gold,
the reader will find some verbal quotations from my pub-
f lished writings, which will convince him that this theory
2 ALASKA,
of world-making and gold-planting here presented, is not
now given for the first time, and that the discovery of
rich gold fields in the frozen North did not g^ve it birth.
It is no ex post fado: production. Its birth dates back
into the sixties when the writer as a young man lectured
on this theme, and there are many of his pupils who will
gladly testify that the Annular Theory was their teach-
er's "hobby" then.
The idea presented in brief, is, that this planet of ours
once had a system of rings, as the planet Saturn has
now. I have called it the Annular Theory from the Lat-
in word annulus a ring. It first suggested itself to my
mind as I sought a philosophical explanation of the No-
achian deluge, and several years after its conception, I
published in pamphlet form (20 pages) ''The Earth's
Aqueous Ring,'' or ''TTie Deluge and Its Cause,' ^ proving
from the very nature of the flood-narrative that all the
world-deluges the earth ever saw must have come from
the earth's Annular system. In this same volume it was
specifically claimed that the entire ocean came as annular
installments from supra aerial vapors via the polar re-
gions, which vapors were the source and cause of all the
Glacial Epochs the earth ever had and were laden with
mineral and metallic matter. This book was published
in the year 1874 and I have copies left as witnesses of the
fact.
In the present effort I will try first to convince my
readers 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-growth
as affirmed by the past and present conditions of the
globe. Then I will attempt to show what elements com-
posed the earth rings; and that gold was necessarily one
of those elements. Finally I will present the proofs that
in the inevitable and progressive collapse of these rings
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET 3
the polar regions of a planet must receive by far the
greatest part of the matter composing them, and that be-
cause gold was no insignificant part of those rings, the
polar lands must be the richest gold regions of the earth.
The present ph3rsical conditions of the earth, as I un-
derstand them, are not accidental in any sense. As the
lily and the rose have a beginning and a subsequent ca-
reer responsible to conditions inexorable and despotic, so
a world starts on its eternal round under the ministration
of lawy and the most subtle variations in the results of
the primal impress of potencies can be but responses
linked in everlasting union. This bemg the case, in or-
der to follow up the grand progression of conditions in
world evolution, as planned by the Infinite Mind, it is
preeminently essential that we should know what the pri-
mal conditions of the earth were. Then knowing these
conditions and knowing the law regulating them, we can
at least hope to erect a theory that will not fall — a glory
that cannot die. Until we can plant our feet on this rock
we must admit that we are floating at sea.
In this age of tirelees research we have come to know
very positively what some of the primal conditions of the
earth were. The one all potent condition— the condition
from which utter necessity has passed a grand array of
overflowing and over-towering consequences down to our
day is what is known among all intelligent men as the
MOLTEN STATE OP 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 not
slip from this rock. It is well known by geologists
whose eagle eyes have pierced the earth to its granite
sills, that its oldest sedimentary beds now rest on what was
once an igneous mass. The sedimentary formations are
of great thickness, estimated variously at from ten to forty
4 ALASKA,
miles, or even more, and such is the testimony of the low-
ermost beds that I suppose the greological world, with no
important 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 this
case. It must be conceded that all worlds in all essentials
are made alike. This is what countless millions of stars
and suns afiirm. Every sphere that scintillates in the
empyrean must be a molten globe. The spectroscope af-
firms the proposition and tells us across the mighty void
of space that all worlds begin their career alike — swaddled
in garments of flame as our sun is swaddled now ; rocked
in its cradle of fire inveterate, as every other sun is rocked
today. Thus our earth was once a glittering star, so
surely as law is law. But the chief witness we have close
at hand, whose testimony nothing can impeach, is the
great ocean of water that rolls around the earth. We
know that every drop of it was formed in fire. If I
plunge a cold steel rod for an instant in the hottest fur-
nace, I find it covered with little globules of water, and
thus we learn that water is being formed in the most fer-
vent fires. That is what every fire on earth is doing
today. Every furnace and volcano is pouring its tribute
of water into the air.
I stand on the ocean's shore. The truest, strongest
and most daring and dauntless witness of earth testifies
before me. If every drop of these mighty waters was
born in flame, what was the immeasurable and titanic
might of the earth's primal furnace from which these
waters came? Now the chemist wants no other proof
than the deposition of oceans that the world was once a
molten sphere. Then as oceans affirm an igneous or sun
state of worlds, so a sun state or molten condition of
worlds, on the other hand, affirms the birth of oceans.
The man of sense then looks out upon God's empire of
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET, 6
inveterate fires and knows what is going on all over the
universe. He knows that oceans are being bom and sent
to the skies from every flaming star and sun. Then he
concludes that this is not all that these world-furnaces are
doing, for the spectroscope at his side affirms that, associ-
ated with ocean vapors, mineral and metallic vapors ride
on steeds of flame. ^
I turn back to earth in its childhood and knowing an
ocean rolls around it today and knowing, too, that its
primal history is fire-impressed upon its bosom, I see it
with every drop of these waters soaring as a vapor can-
opy on high — winged in perpetual flight about a hot and
seething globe. I look down the ages and see these va-
pors have fallen back to mother earth. I see the earth
abloom — ^a scene of activity and life, and the chemist tells
me that every leaf and blade that flutters in the breeze,
every tree that towers above, every animal that lives, does
so because in an age gone by the molten earth gave birth
to interchanging and undying energies. The very mount-
ains rise and look down upon the plain because the earth
was once a star.
I take up a glass of ocean water and subject it to a
strict and honest analysis. I find in it a trace of gold
but enough of it to show that vast millions of it are
locked up in the oceanic waters. How did it get there?
plainly it was associated with the steaming vapors as they
arose from the molten earth. In predicating then, that
present world-energies and present world-conditions are
but the echoes awakened in the fires of the molten earth,
one also predicates that the distribution of the gold and
other metals and minerals now found on and in the earth
crust is a direct resultant of that former state of the earth.
In other words if the earth had never been an igneous
spere, the iron, lead, copper, silver and gold now found
in the North- world wotdd not be there. If the earth's
6 ALASKA.
primal fires had not been kindled the oceans had not been
made; rivers would not flow; clouds would not form;
rains would not fall; plants would not grow; man, as he
is, would not have been, and earth would be a mighty
desolation. Without a molten age there could not have
been a Cambrian age. The Silurian, Devonion and Carbon-
iferous ages whose aqueous formations incase the world
with all their wondrous hoard of wealth, would not,
could not have been as we see them today.
Water is a fiie-formed compound, and without the
fire-bom oceans what would our world be like? Air is a
fire-made product of the molten earth and what would this
planet be without air? Fuel is a fire-made product of the
molten age and without it earth would be a dead waste.
When we look from the physical to the metaphysical
world it does not take the thinker long to see that our
thinking and our thoughts are linked to the energies as
caused by an igneous activity in an age gone by. It
seems as though the Infinite' Mind has so interwoven all
things in the macro-cosmos with primitive igneous ener-
gies that the philosopher is forced to look back into the
great world-furnace of archaean times to find the true
solution 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 to
prove that when the earth's watery vapors went to the
skies, all else that a melted earth could send aloft went
with those waters. I want the reader to see that I do not
state this proposition amiss. Many years ago I gave a
lecture in the great lead mining region of Joplin, Ma
I saw the great columns of smoke rising from a hundred
furnaces and told my audience that there was enough
lead vapor lost in cloudland to pay all the expenses of the
great lead plants, and added, there is a fortune awaiting
the man who will invent some means to gaJEher those es-
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 7
caping vapors and distil them. Today each of those
furnaces is furnished with an appliance by means of
which the lead vapors are condensed and saved, and the
lead thus secured is one of the chief sources in the manU'
facture of white lead which yields great income to the
mine owners. I have been told that the lead thus saved
is almost sufficient to pay all mining and reducing ex-
penses. I have also been told that the inventor of this
appliance was once a pupil of mine.
Now the conclusion drawn from this is inevitable.
These puny artificial fires for reducing lead ores were
able to vaporize and send a large quantity of lead to the
skies. But every pound of that lead was once in the
molten earth — in the very midst of a furnace a thouand
times more competent to send it aloft. There is then no
avoiding the conclusion that lead vapors went up with
the watery vapors formed in the same world furnace.
They floated together on high and when those watery
vapors came back to the earth the lead came with them.
Other witnesses equally emphatic speak from our
mints, in fact from every mint of the earth where gold,
silver and copper are reduced for coining. In these mints
it is found necessary to use the greatest precaution to
avoid the loss of gold vapors. They rise in the flues and
pipes, condense and fall as dust on the roof and floors of
every apartment connected with them, and thousands of
dollars of gold dust are saved every year by cleaning up
the pipes etc Gold vapor is ever present in the reducing
apartments and the very clothing of the workmen about
the furnace becomes laden with it and is burnt and made
to give up its gold. This too be it understood is all
caused by the puny fires of man. If gold is so readily
vaporized how did the world's great hoard of wealth act
when the mighty fires of the world's alembic gathered it
from the earth's inmost depths? Plainly every atom of
8 ALASKA.
it that heat could gather from the earth's bosom was va-
porized and carried aloft and made to mingle with the
watery skies. Gold is so readily volatilized that a
sphere which contained it could not be molten and not
load the surrounding air with it. It is vaporized in heat
that would not melt iron or steel. A gold nugget will
vanish as vapor at a temperature of 2100® but pure iron
or steel cannot be fused at such a heat. It will begin to
flow 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 than
that every sun and star the eye can see, is hot enough to
send its gold to the skies, if it has any of it: But we
need not speculate here. Every world certainly has gold
if analogy has any force in arguments. But in this dis-
cussion I care not whether other molten worlds have gold
or not. I know the molten earth had a vast amount of
it and all men know too that it was volatilized and sent
to the skies.
The same course of igneous action, without the shad-
ow of a doubt, forced every metal and mineral that the
earth's heat could vaporize, into the flaming skies. Thus
the primitive or molten earth was simply enveloped by
an atmospliere of mineral and metallic vapors. But let
us bear in mind that all the primeval waters of the globe
were in that hot and flaming atmosphere. There is no^
guess work here. This is plainly Nature's plan of world-
making. See now the wisdom oi the Infinite in all this.
How could man get a pound of iron, gold, silver or any
other metal if the power that watched the childhood of
the earth had not gathered these metals from its bosom
by inveterate heat and lifted them into the heavens and
held them there till the molten planet grew cold and then
received them back again, planting them in and on the
outer ^2^/ where man can secure them.
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET 9
These metals have returned to the earth; the primeval
waters have also come back. They went to the skies to-
gether for they arose from the same furnace, they floated
in the same primeval air, in fact they all together made
the atmosphere and what an atmosphere it must have
been! Prom that atmosphere many thousand miles in
depth, the superficial beds were largely deposited but
here I must refer the reader to my Barth's Annular
System.
Now, have I stated anything but demonstrable facts?
Surely we cannot push the molten earth aside in this ar-
gument, for if we did, witnesses would crowd in from the
very stars and condemn us. With a molten earth we
have an ocean-maker and a metal extractor and sublimer.
With a molten earth we have a primitive atmosphere
that was laden with gold^ silver^ iron^ lead and every other
metal that immeasurable heat could carry aloft from a
boiling and raging sphere. That molten earth grew
cold. That watery ocean fell. The metal vapors condensed
long before the watery vapors did, but they also fell and
they must be found on the earth's crust and within it.
The reader should bear in mind that this whole pro-
cess was under the beck of law. I<aw regulated the rise
and fall of vapors then, just as it regulates their rise and
fall today. Then, however, the vapors arose from the
earth's own heat. Now they rise and condense under
the influence of solar heat. But heating and cooling pro-
cesses operated then as now. It was the age when the
condensation and formation of mineral and metallic clouds
took place. But in the fall of these primitive vapors we
should bear in mind that they had been driven to a great
height. It has been calculated that the molten earth
had an atmosphere over 200,000 miles in depth. Now
this great atmosphere rotated with the earth as a part
of it, say once in 24 hours. Some physicists say it must
10 ALASKA.
have rotated in half that time. But that is rapidly
enough for my purpose.
^ At that rate of rotation the condensing vapors on the
bounds of the primitive atmosphere 200,000 miles deep,
were whirled through space at the rate of 50,000 miles
per hour. But it is well known that everything that
moves around the earth at the rate of more than 17,000
miles an hour cannot fall to its sutface. If that great at-
mosphere had been but 100,000 miles deep the outer va-
pors had moved 25,000 miles an hour as a revolving mass
and could not fall. This was the condition of things for
unknown ages. All that time the rotating mass exerted
a tremendous centrifugal force at the equator but no
force whatever at the poles. Anyone can see that all
the vapors on the bounds of the atmosphere, in fact all
the matter in the primitive atmosphere, during the ig-
neous era, above a certain height, went toward the equa-
tor, for the simple reason that the greatest impelling en-
ergy operated to carry it thither.
I certainly have not made my claims too strong. As
a great revolving mass, hot and seething to its inmost
depths, forever driving metallic and aqueous vapors as far as
it could into space, there is no avoiding the conclusion that
such vapors were carried originally from the poles to the
equatorial skies. Now I cannot in this small volume
take up space enough to show how all this matter gath-
ering at the equator during the igneous period, formed in-
to rings. I must refer the reader to my Earth* s Annular
System where it is made very plain.
The process of world-makinjg^ then, as I see it, thus far
is very simple. A molten earth, a great mineral, metal-
lic and aqueous atmosphere involving it Finally, those
atmospheric materials were carried out still farther and in-
to the equatorial regions. There they condense and from
utter necessity form into rings. But while this is going,
*' •
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET 11
the earth is gradually cooling and in course of time heat
ceases to repel terrestrial matter, and then comes the
turning point in world processes. Vapors that were held
aloft simply by heat in the lower atmosphere, began to
lose their support and return to the earth's surface. Law,
however, still held the sway. As these lower vapors,
now condensing, fell, where did they fall? So long as
the earth rotates, it lifts as it were, all falling matter that
floats near the equator and in a certain measure prevents
its fall there, but does not so prevent it from falling at the
poles. So that during that long period of time when the
earth was cooling and permitting the lower vapors to des-
cend, they must have floated slowly and constantly to the
poles. North and South, and there they must have fallen.
Following thus a line of philosophic sequences from
the first, we are forced to admit that during the ages of
igneous activity, vapors were lifted and forced toward the
equator but that during the decadence of igneous action
and gradual cooling, all returning matter moved toward
the poles to fall. How can we escape this conclusion?
But here we must note other regulating conditions.
The primitive atmosphere was very heavy. Laden with
a vast amount of minerals and metals of the earth's crust
as admitted by eminent men, that atmosphere was capa-
ble of supporting mineral and metallic clouds at a vastly
greater height than the atmosphere of today is capable of
supporting aqueous clouds, It has been calculated that
the barometric column of mercury equivalent to the pri-
meval atmosphere was about 22,000 inches high or more
than a third of a mile. Instead of an atmosphere press-
ing on the earth 15 pounds to the square inch it was an
atmosphere that pressed more than 10,000 pounds to the
square inch. So says the physicist, but to be on the safe
side I will reduce it to one tenth of this, nay, I will
reduce it to onehundreth and j^et we have an atmosphere
12 ALASKA,
dense enough to float clouds of golden dust higher than
the loftiest clouds of today.
Then too we must note that watery vapor was the
universal vehicle that aided to support the metallic dust
of the primitive atmosphere. Watery vapors formed
around each golden grain as a neucleus just as it forms
about a grain of dust today. So that we may look back
to a time when the vast oceans floated as clouds of aque-
ous vapors in which the gold of a world was locked, and
we must follow those vapors back to the earth from
which they came.
But let us remember that the great mass of these va-
pors long before the decline began had been driven into
the equatorial skies. Let us remember that as these
uppermost vapors rotated with a velocity of more than
17,000 miles an hour they could not fall even after the
earth cooled, while the lowermost vapors rotating less
than 17,000 miles an hour could fall and did fall. And
as we have seen, such vapors as did condense and fall,
fell more largely in those regions where there was less
centrifugal force exerted and fell least where the centrifu-
gal force was greatest. It is plain that from the premise
of a molten earth all vaporized matter, aqueous, mineral
and metallic, that fell back to the earth immediately, as
it cooled, fell from the equator toward the poles, and all
of it that has not been carried, since it fell, toward the
equator, lies still in those mighty storehouses of the
earth. North and South. Gold, silver, copper, lead,
zinc, nickle and every other metal that existed in the low-
er primeval atmosphere lie there in their mother lodes and
from these lodes the rest of the earth has been supplied,
and other lodes formed — other gold regions formed.
Here are a few quotation from The Earth* s Annular
System: (Page 65.) *'Now all the fusible and vaporizable
minerals in the earth's crust must have existed to the
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 18
same extent in the upper vapors just as all the minerals
and metals in the Sun must be represented in the heated
vapors around it. Every other hot and burning world
must exhibit the same thing, ^c 4: 4c A certain de-
gree of heat in the burning earth kept the aqueous vapors
suspended on high. A greater degree of heat sent up,
in their order of fusibility, the minerals and metals of the
earth, as they bubbled up as from a boiling crucible, ^c i^
The earliest sedimentary rocks must, if our theory be
true, contain the heaviest minerals and metals of the
crust, and also of the purest form, i^ i^ i^ (P^^ge 68).
^^This iron and this copper and silver and goldy were dis-
tilled in the fiery furnace of the primitive earth and sent up
amid the aqueous vapors on high. What else could have
planted them in strata of aqueous beds? What else
could have made metallic beds on the outside of the
earth.** (Page 79.) *'In the northern hemisphere the
archaean beds are heaviest toward the North. Now if
they were thickest and heaviest near the equator the
Annular Theory would fail to explain it. But a mo-
ment's reflection must show that it does explain its north-
ern development as no other theory can.** (1885.)
Following strictly a line of philosophic argument it
must be seen that for a vast period of time after the earth
became cold and rigid, and the lower vapors had descend-
ed, a vast ocean of aqueous, mineral and metallic exhala-
tion remained on high and continued to revolve around
the earth, and in the equatorial skies. As these
outer vapors condensed and continued to revolve
independently around the earth they occupied less
and less space and hence ring formations began. The
outer rim of vapors could not unite with the inner vapors
in mass, for the reason that the former moved much more
rapidly than the latter. The rim of this wheel moved
faster than its hub and the two parts must have separ-
14 ALASKA.
ated as the mass coadensed and contracted. Thus we
must have had at least two rings, an inner and an outer
one. But a further examination shows that as the mass
contracted many rings were formed. That universal ele-
ment — water, was one of the many that composed those
rings. As a universal solvent, it contained gold, and
contained it most abundantly in the superheated state;
in that superheated state it rolled for ages in the skies,
and as a vehicle it bore its load of gold back to the earth.
It is not necessary for me to enter into the consider-
ation of how these rings broke loose from their ancient
moorings and fell. We know they have fallen, and we
know, too, that the earth contains what they contained.
If they contained gold, the earth's crust has it now. If
they contained aqueous vapor, the ocean has it now.
During the past few years I have shown in the pages of
the Annular World the most positive proof that prim-
itive and prehistoric man saw at least two vapor canopies
or vapor heavens and worshipped them as gods. I have
also shown in that journal that a ring as it declines must
become a canopy as it falls from the equator to the poles.
Such canopies as now hide the true surfaces of Saturn
and Jupiter are my witnesses here Jupiter's canopy has
been seen to drop a part of itself at one of his poles. Wit-
nesses of this kind force me to the conclusion, that as
we have the most abundant legendary evidence of the
ravages of an overwhelming deluge, and of the opening
and falling of heavens, and as all such heavens must
have been canopies or vapor heavens, I am forced to ad-
mit that man has seen some of the last remnants of the
annular system of the earth.
I^t us look a little into this legendar3^ testimony, for
it is plain that if man saw the remnants of these primal
vapors, then annular matter and canopy vapors contin-
ued to fall all through geological ages and closed the
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 16
great drama of world making in very recent times.
The most ancient account which comes down from
Latin sources distinctly affirms that their oldest god was
Caelum or Heaven, and that this deity after ruling for a
long time was dethroned and banished. Now all legends
must flow from some basic truths ^nd the inference drawn
from this, is that the ancient Latins worshipped the heav-
ens as a deity, and as that heaven passed away, it was a
vapor heaven, in fact a canopy of vapors, and if so, it
must have come from the earth's annular system, as prim-
itive vapors on their way to the poles.
The old Pelasgian Greeks have sent down to our time
a legend almost identical with that of the Latins. It tells
us that the primeval deity was Ouranos (Heaven) and
that after he held the celestial throne for a long time he
was driven from his throne by Kronos, the god of time.
In other words, we are told that the original heavens was
an ephemeral one, and therefore a vapor canopy on its way
from the earth's annular system to the poles.
The ancient Hindus worshipped the god Varuna.
Now, Sanscrit scholars tell us that Varuna and the Greek
Ouranos came from one and the same root, which signi-
fies a water heaven^ the root Var meaning water. Now,
this Hindu deity also passed away and gave his throne
over to such deities as Kala=:time, Agni=solar fire, and
other celestial characters. In other words, Varuna was
an ephemeral heaven — a vapor canopy, and the earth's
ring system comes plainly into view.
The ancient Egyptians worshipped a god called Can-
opus. He was a water-god and the water-jar was his
hierogl^'^ph. The name is plainly the original for our
word canopy, and this deity was vanquished in a contest
between solar fire and water spirits^ and it is impossible
not to see canopy progression here, — the banishment of
ephemeral or water heavens.
16 ALASKA.
The old Chinese legends present similar thought, but
I find in old Japanese thought the most overwhelming
testimony yet Their legends state that in very ancient
times the heavens were very dose to the earth, and that in
a great contest between the solar fires and the water
spirits ^^ the old heaven passed utterly away,** and more-
over, as this old heaven passed away it is said a new sun
came into power.
The Scandinavians have a legend of a conflict of a
sealed heaven which once upon a time opened and let in
the solar legions which upon marching over heaven's
bridge, broke it down. The ancient Parsiis speak of
"Heaven's Floating Bridge** and their Sun Mithras was
a concealed god. The Egyptians also worshipped Amen,
a name for heaven, but the meaning of the word is * 'hid-
den** and we plainly have the concealing canopy or the
hidden heavens. They also worshipped Amen Ra, the
* 'concealed sun."
These ancient memorials present to us the most over-
whelming testimony that infant man saw and worshipped
a vapor canopy which passed away and permitted a hid-
den sky and a hidden sun to come into view. These
legends are but a drop in the bucket. Before me is a
pile of Mss. of over 400 foolscap pages and I see it la-
belled *^71ie Gods Unveiled.*' It presents the world's evi-
dence that infant man saw this world overcanopied by a
vapor heaven on its march to the poles. I do not then
have to rely on astronomic and geologic evidence that
the earth once had an Annular System. Man saw its last
remnants. He worshipped that canopy as a god, as a
god it was banished and a new sun and sky came into
view as it passed away.
•f
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 17
I conceive that no objeAion can be urged against my
claim that even our bibles teach us this great truth. As
all other ancient peoples saw a water heaven come and
go — ^a vapor canopy reign and fall, it would be strange
indeed if the Mosaic cosmogony did not reveal the same
thing. When, then, I read in the first chapter of Gene-
sis that ''God called the firmament (Shama3rim) heaven,"
I say that the scribe who wrote that sentence or enter-
tained that thought, supposed that the Hebrew heaven
was a water heaven, for shamayim means ''there waters"
(sham=there, and mayim=waters). In other words, the
ancient Hebrew held the same belief that all other races
did — that the skies were a watery expanse — ^a canopy of
vapors. Then again I read in this connexion that the
"spirit of God moved on the face of the waters." Now
mankind — Hebrews and all others — ^always held that
God and the gods lived and moved an high. Then those
"waters" were on high also, and the canopy is plainly
alluded to. Again it is said "God made a firmament in
the 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 the
firmament (heaven) fi-om the waters which were above the
firmament.''^
Now I care not how men regard these ancient writ-
ings, one thing is positively certain, at the time these
thoughts were entertained, humanity knew or thought
they knew that there were waters on high. If there
were waters above the firmament, then those waters
were a revolving canopy , for they could not remain there
for a moment unless they were a revolving mass. In
other words, the Hebrew writings positively affirm that
a vapor canopy arched the skies of primitive man. But
a canopy could not exist without making a greenhouse
world, an Eden earth. Then why are we so doubting
18 ALASKA.
when our bibles tell us that the infieint race lived in an
Eden clime? If man went naked in Bden, earth was
covered by a vapor roof, just as the planet Jupiter is now.
In such a greenhouse world it could not rain, as the sun
must shine on the earth's surface to cause a mingling of
currents, and without currents it cannot rain, and my
bible tells me there was a day when the '*Lord God had
not caused it to rain on the earth." This is the same
thought I find among other races, and it does not fail to
substantiate the claim I have made that the early races
saw a great vapor roof on high. Now if there ever was
a time when it did not rain on the earth, then the sun
did not shine on the earth's surface. The sky and sun
were concealed. No stars could be seen at such a time
except in the polar skies, fix>m 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 concealed
heaven and a concealed sun are world-wide conceptions.
The whole conception of man in Bden, his connection
with the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge are
based on the one rock of inexorable law^^ and that law is
the one that has presided, as the earth's crust was built
to a large extent by the wreck of canopies. A concealed
heavens and sun are seen all through the vast realm of
Mythology, and the thought forces us to admit the reign
and fall of canopies, for the thought is fixed in the grand
arcanum of humanity's cradle time.
As I turn away fit>m this wonderful scene, I recall the
^'Golden Age" of Hesiod and antediluvian man. What
ever gave rise to the thought that man once lived free
from toil? What originated the idea that man once
lived to eight or nine hundred years? The immortal
*I most here refer the reader to my ** Bden's Flaming Sword,**
wherrin I have connected these world scenes with a world can-
opy, and haye explained this whole tragedy of Bden. See last of
tms yolmne.
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 19
thought must have originated in adlual faAs of some
kind. When I look back into an Bden worid» such as
must 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 a
cessation of vital adlivities. Life in a greenhouse world
was life where solar activities and chemism were held in
check. The sunbeam, as we have it today, is a ripening
agent As the living plant is hastened to its destined
end under solar power through the mysterious touch of
a vivifying and vitalizing energy, so the living being
ripens and matures and is gathered under the inexorable
sway of the sunbeam. The solar ray has a destroying
power and a building power.
Plainly the building power of the sunbeam is placed
in 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 dead
shows a world covered with animal forms such as could
not obtain at this day in a natural state. Long life in a
tropic world, made such by a canopy which sifted out the
maturing and death-dealing power of the sunbeam seems
to have chara<5lerized several of the geologic ages. But
the dead, the mighty and abounding dead! What a tale
they tell for all time! A world of life brought to a close,
by what means ? A canopy competent to make a world
of exuberant life, was equally competent to crush out
that life in its polar down&U. I cannot see a world of
life destroyed by any other possible cause than the fall of
canopies. The march of deadly winter tells the tale.
There is Alaska's mighty dead. There is the reign of
eternal winter on the ruins of tropic life. Tell me the
cause. It is idle for man to look further than canopy
evolution for the all adequate cause of the earth's stages
of modem geologic times.
20 ALASKA.
All these things speak of Edenic life, followed by
snow and flood. I need not be told that man lived in
an Eden world, nor that he was naked, for it was
warm. But a change came on. He was now clothed in
the skins of animals. In other words, a canopy was fall-
ing at the poles as snow, and a chill was creeping over
the earth. Let us remember that snows only can make
a warm world cold. Here, too, we must admit that if
canopy snows were falling then, the canopy was growing
thinner at the equator, and Bden made by a canopy must
disappear. Then we hear that man was deprived of his
Eden home. But tell us why was a warm earth chilled
at the very time man's Eden was taken from him? I say
it was another of earth's great revulsions by which the
planet and all things thereon were lifted highen The
immortal records I have quoted tell a tale that all intel-
ligent men will admit to be true. But strange that men
must find it verified first in the nugget land of the firozen
north.
But there is another chapter yet untold. What does
the 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 Eden
home. In other words Genesis has recorded the fadt
that one vapor heaven had passed away. The very thing
that almost every race and tongue has memorialized in
song and legend. What does it mean ? It means the
march and fall of canopies, while man looked on as a
helpless vidtim of the world change. But what does the
new canopy mean? for man lives 800 years. It means
still another canopy fall. It means the march of snow and
flood. 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 victims of inexorable
rm
fate ? We are t
that mighty de)
that no man of
What caused tl
opened then. '
fore, and the <
bounds into v;
the sun beginf
decline, and \
flood man's I
dies at three \
Now theif
dence to prof
plain . terms i
the underst^
this be tru^
here, and s^
could onb
Then agaij
nature affil
Now why]
forth becaL
saw the heavens stripped. T
The source of all celestial floods was ** broken up."
Then again the narrative states that the law was made
a sign that there would be no more floods from on high,
which means nothing if it does not mean that all flood
canopies are ended. So long as no canopies spread, the
bow may be seen and becomes a sign of security. Man
saw the wondrous transition. He saw the heavens
cleared, and he knew the bow meant the end of exotic
floods. The very heavens proclaimed the fadt, and there-
fore it was the voice of Grod.
Thus the Hebrew people have preserved undying
memorials of the reign and fall of vapor canopies, just as
22 ALASKA.
Other peoples have done. They saw two canopies come
and go. Go where we will, back into the nighttime of
antiquity, and we see this grand drama of evolving skies.
The libraries of old Nineveh and Babylon tell it in terms
too plain to be long misunderstood. I have given but a
tithe of the available testimony on this point found in
old-world thought, but I have given enough to show that
man has seen canopies fall, and this is all the evidence I
want to prove that this earth once had an Annular Sys-
tem. Now the consequences of the progressive collapse
of that system are recorded all along the ages.
The Geologic Record is simply the record of marching
vapor canopies ending their career at the poles. It is
idle to study that record without this fadt in view. My
readers can see what all this testimony means, without
much more on my part. It means that the fire-formed
oceans came back to the earth via the poles, all along the
ages. It means that countless millions of wealth fell as
the waters fell, and that more largely in polar lands; and
from the very nature of things, that wealth to a vast ex-
tent yet lies locked in and beneath this frozen crust of
polar lands.
Let us now refledt that this legendary evidence cannot
be thrown out of court. It must have weight with the
world's intelligent jury, for, as the investigator and sifter
of traditions goes back into the darkness of antiquity, he
sees more plainly the meaning of these fossils of thought-
strata. Men may call these traditions the twaddle of the
infant race, but that cannot crush nor impeach their evi-
dence. They affirm and will affirm till an incredulous
world is forced to admit that man saw the last remnants
of the Earth's Ring System. This I say will be the last
and irrevocable verdict of the court now sitting on this
case. The result of this verdidl must be the overthrow
of long-established opinions in almost every field of
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 28
thought, but the old-school geology will be one of its
more hapless victims. For if man saw the last falling
remnants of an annular system, the race lived for unknown
centuries under a Jupiter-like canopy, and such canopies
are all-competent to make all the warmer ages the world
ever saw, and their name is legion. If they made the
warm ages, their polar fall made all the ^'lu Agesy If
they made these they were the most competent world
wreckers and strata formers of the whole geologic past.
I look back on the confines of Azoic time, then, and
see some adequate cause for the close of the Cambrian
age. I see an ocean has so changed its waters as to nurse
the rudimental forms of life. That oceanic change speaks
of a vast addition of water, and thus a polar downfall
comes to view away back in the midnight past. But this
is not alL Bven there we see the wreck of continents,
which an ice age is most competent to afifect, and a polar
downfall is again aflSrmed. Prom that time forward we
see a constant progression of ages, and vainly we look for
an adequate cause if we stop the testimony of rings. The
oceans change again and again, and every change means
additions, and additions mean polar snows and climatic
change and the glaciers' march. We see, too, the cli-
matic changes and the ice-god's track. Not once, nor
twice, but all through the ages. I ask the reader to find,
if possible, a cause for this march of ages, if we ate to put
the earth's rolling canopies aside. Is there anything
now existing to augment our oceans, crush out life-forms,
and send glaciers and floods over the earth? No! not
while the rainbow shines, for the source of such things
has been "broken up."
As I see it, this age will go on till the end of time, but
other ages did not. The simple fsxA that age has suc-
ceeded age is all the evidence we need to prove that the
reign and fisdl of canopies has brought the earth to its
24 ALASKA.
present state. Thus I am led to predicate that the fall of
the first or innermost ring of the earth's annular S3rstem
closed the Cambrian age» the fall of the next ring closed
the next age; the fall of the third closed the third, and so
on down to the age of man, who has seen at least two
g^reat vapor canopies come and go. The deluge closed
the golden age of man. But here I want to be under-
stood. Though the deluge was the last downfall of waters
that could come from on high, it was still more than
two thousand years before the last of the vapors fell from
the polar skies, of which I have the strongest legendary-
proof. I must therefore press this idea of modem polar
snowfalls a little further. There was a time within the
range of human history when the climate of the north
world was much milder than it is today. It is well known
that 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 of
northern Europe penetrated with their frail vessels where
ironclads scarce dare to venture now. The mere fact that
Greenland's ancient settlements are no more, speaks oflF
climatic change, and shows that the advancing rigors of
arctic lands have driven them away. Snowfalls., I am
sure, are the only cause. About that time the north-
world ** poured forth from her frozen loins " "countless
hordes of barbarous" Goths, Visigoths, Huns and Van-
dals, who spread over all southern Europe and even into
Africa. What started these armies from the north ? They
were in search of more genial lands. Then back of it
all is the fact of climatic change. If the north world
was capable oi producing ''hordes of barbarians" for the
invasion of more genial climes, then it was a warmer
world than it now is. If it was warm enough to fill those
regions to overflowing with inhabitants, we need look no
farther for evidence that the north polar snows inoreased.
THE LAND OP THE NUGGET. 25
and readered much of that land too cold iat human prog-
I can see no other adequate cause for the invasion of
the Roman empire by northern races. I can see no other
competent cause for the abandonment of the once pros-
perous colonies in the far north. Certainly these would
never have been planted there under conditions obtaining
there today. I turn to the old annals of Greece, Rome,
Scandinavians and other ancient races, and I find the
most undoubted proof that all those peoples saw the
northern sky clouded with canopy vapors long after the
heavens 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 to
testify.
I quote myself again: '' Immediately upon the decline
of an equatorial ring into the lofty regions of attenuated
air, it is converted into a belt and it gravitates toward the
poles, the points where gravity is strongest and where the
centriftigal force is zero. Hence it must follow that but
a small part of the Annular S3rstem fell in the equatorial
world." Now as I have claimed from the very first that
gold was one of the vaporized metals of the earth, and
one readily diffused as a vapor among watexy vapors, it
follows that my daim Aat it has returned and is now
hoarded about the frozen poles, is no afterbirth, no ex post
facto thought. The earth's annular S3rstem was certainly
made up of aqueous, mineral and metallic vapots, as I
have endeavored to show in all my writings on this theme.
I could quote a hundred paragraphs from tiliem, Showing
that I am not stating my claims now for the first.
Because gold, silver, iron, lead, etc., went as fiery
sublimations to the skies and into the earth's ring system,
they also came back along the track they went. It is
now not as much a hypothesis as it is a &ct, as every
26 ALASKA.
thinker must admit. The geologist knows very well that
I 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 seems
that he ought long ago to have urged Annular World
Evolution to the front, where it is bound to go when men
with eyes wide open come upon the stage.
I have witnesses yet to put upon the stand whose tes-
timony will be an3rthing but satisfetctory to the old-school
geologist. I refer to the
GRBAT ICB AGES.
How often the icy heel of inveterate winter has
crushed a world of exuberant life we need not know. It
is sufficient to know that again and again the ice-king
has marched over a tropic earth. If we could see his
deadly trail but once that would be enough, for such a
trail defies explanations with the earth's rins: system out
of view. It might as well be stated now as later that a
world cannot grow cold without the aid of snows. Worlds
don't grow cold in order that snows may faHl. Snows
fall and tropic scenes vanish because they fiedl. Had men
attended to this fact, what an amount of fruitless theoriz-
ing might have been avoided. But before I go ftuther, I
must quote Vail again. This time from the ^^ Deluge and
lis Causes y*^ i874» page 14. **A body of exterior waters
skirting the atmosphere, having its motion gradually di-
minished, would gradually descend toward the earth and
must have spread to the poles by the mere force of grav-
ity. ^ ^ ^ Animals in the polar regions would be
suddenly entombed in snow, which in after times would
be converted into glacier ice; and those animals would be
preserved until relieved by the retreating mass containing
them. Well, what are the &cts? Today may be found
the skeletons of the hairy mammoth imbedded in 'fiure^
dear ice y* * * * the whole carcass preserved, their
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET 27
hair, skin and eyes; their flesh becoming the food of
wolves and bears; the contents of their stomachs undi-
gested, showing that they luxuriated in coniferous forests
up to the very time or day of their death. These facts
give no room for speculation. Their history was written
then, and from it we glean the incontestible evidence that
they 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 in
their graves*"^
Since the beginning of the present century many car-
casses of both the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros
have been found in the frozen north. The first mammoth
was found in 1799 in the glacier near the mouth of the
Lena river in Siberia. It was exposed by the melting
away of the ice wall» and hung for a long time in the lofty
escarpment, *' forty feet above the earth's surface and two
hundred feet below the top of the glacier." Plainly that
animal was overtaken by falling snows, for, be it remem-
bered, ''pure, dean glacier ice" is only formed from
snow. The conclusion must be that very recently in geo-
logic time the mammoth and his huge congeners roamed
in 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 bones
and teeth scattered all over the north. Then we must
conclude that there was a time when all that north-land
was free from the chains of winter.
The condition in which the Siberian mammoth was
found, the condition in which a number of others have
since been found, gives no possible escape from the con-
clusion that the snows that buried them was an avalanche
from the Arctic skies. Putrefaction had not even begun.
The tissues of the flesh, the blood vessels and the vesicles
showed that death was sudden, and that too in a snow-
28 ALASKA.
made grave. In one instance the very pupil of the mon-
ster's eye was preserved entire. All these conditions
have been known for nearly a century, and it would seem
that men could not £Edl to see that such a sudden burial
demands a sudden down-rush of snows. Then, too, with
Jupiter's canopy apparently forcing its evidence of polar
iedls into court, how has it ever happened that men who
stand foremost in the ranks of the learned, have not long
since recognized the claim that the earth's annular system
was the grand agent in this mighty world catastrophe?
With this fact recognized, Alaska's gold field ceases to
be a puzzle, for the same cause that was competent to
glaciate a tropic world gave the placers their amazing
wealth, as will be shown later. I ask how can reasonable
men for a moment doubt canopy declension with all these
things in view? But in the day that canopy progression
is a recognized £act, the polar deposition of gold becomes
recognized also, for the inveterate fires of the molten
earth forbids any other conclusion. The same snows that
made this vast desolation, went as vapor, gold-laden, to
the telluric heavens. If, then, the mammoth and his
compeers are sealed in the ice and snows of a firozen world,
they testify also of the immeasuraUe wealth hoarded
away at the beck of annular law.
The reader must now see that the claims I have made
as to Alaska's gold depends upon the truth or untruth of
the annular theory. If the earth once had rings and can-
opies, they made this northern land a storehouse of m^als.
Well, have we not had evidence enough that the earth
once had rings in the &ct that the Arctic world was
the dumping ground of annular snows? On the other
hand, if the earth never saw canopy processes, my
daim for the annular origin of Arctic gold and other met-
allic wealth is void. The whole thmg hinges on the
daim that God made this earth according to Annular
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 29
I<aw, and that law is announced from every sun and star
of God's empire.
Shall man wait till Jupiter drops its canopy; till Sat-
urn's rings collapse and Mars' so-called ''canals" pass
from view to become convinced that the Earth is not an
accident? Will the ablest teachers and scholars continue
to exploit the most absurd theories to account for the Ice
Ages, when every schoolboy ought to know that our
oceans could never have come from their primitive home
on high, except as canopies and canopy snows? The
great Lord Kelvin, whose name need but be mentioned
to give authority to his claim, could settle the great Ice
Age problem with but a hint that the snows of the glacial
periods came from Jupiter-like canopies that once inclosed
the earth. But instead of this, what has he done? Giv-
en his efforts to convince mankind that the earth, retiring
from solar heat, became inclosed in glacial snows. All
this in the face of the fetct that no one knows that the
earth can get snows by withdrawing from the sun.
Men who have ascended in balloons might give him some
evidence of the temperature of interplanetary space. And
he might also learn something from the fact that the earth
is about three millions of miles frurther from the sun in
our summer, in the northern hemisphere, than in winter.
All such theorists overlook this one essential : The
earth must have an increase of solar heat to cover itself
with snow. Vaporization must come first, or snows can-
not form. Snow formation is tuark, and there must be
energ3'^ behind snow formation. The earth could no more
become glaciated by decreasing solar heat than an ocean
steamer could increase its speed by putting out its fires.
It cannot be denied that the more snow and the more ice
that are formed, the more energy in the form of heat is
required. What, then, must have been the heat «iergy
to glaciate the earth again and again ? It seems
90 ALASKA.
to me that when men support the "CroUian theory" of
glaciation, they subvert the very law necessary to sup-
port. But where was the heat that vaporized the waters
that formed the snows that a canopy let down upon the
earth? One does not have to go far to find it It was
the energy of a molten earth that supplied the snows of
every ice age this world ever saw.
The idea of gathering heat from a sun, ninety-two
millions of miles away, to vaporize enough of our ocean
in order to cover the earth with ice! If we could get the
heat we could also get the vapor, but how will we get
the heat to vaporize the seas and the cold to freeze them,
both at the same time? This may do for Lord Kelvin
and his satellites, but the annular student will say '*not
any, thanks.'' The simple fadt is, as I have said before,
the earth grew frigid because the snows fell upon it. The
snows did not fall upon it because the earth became
frigid. The sooner men learn this great fadt the sooner
will they mount the high plane of Anntdar I^w, and then
there will be * 'clear sailing."
Men seem to have forgotten the fa<ft that the energies
of an igneous earth have not died out. And why they
call 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 have
failed 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 great
Barth tell the tale of her own exhaustless energies! Hear
her announce the law of world-making. Hear her wit-
nesses speaking from a thousand fields, all asserting that
this earth once had an annular system whose gradual and
progressive collapse made the earth's crust as we see it
today.
The earth's unquenchable fires staked out its own
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 31
placers, laid its own iron sills, built its own mighty treas-
uries in and on the crust, and God, the I^w Giver, saw
that it was done as un&thomable wisdom originally
planned. The grand intent is seen when we can peep in
and see the plan carried out.
This theory of the glaciation of continents is not an
ex post facto birth either. I quote again, the ''Deluge and
Its CausCy^ (pAgc '9> 1874): ** There was a time when a
great part of the land of the earth was covered by a vast
moving glacier. Its track is seen on every continent In
many places it must have been more than a mile in
depth. "^ ^ ^ Nothing but a fall of snow could have
formed this mighty mass, and that snow must have fallen
from space. Thus a succession of rings approaching the
earth, and then expanding by the force of gravity into
belts, and finally falling, would seem to account for those
great cataclysms of modem geologic times."
Seeing these thoughts have been published very
nearly a quarter of a century, in which time the greatest
minds have grappled with this problem, it is but due to
the Annular Theory that it be given a part of the world's
attention, and I trust men will pardon me for using the
present excitement about the great gold discovery in the
north world to bring it more diredlly into view. Since
from the very first I have claimed that not only gold
and silver, but all metals that could be vaporized, were
carried into the ring system and back again via the poles,
and since in the same proportion, as all other theories
£iil 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 by
an avalanche of canopy snows, it will be safe to claim
that this same potent agent of world changes was an act-
ive fadlor away back in geologic time. Prom the very
time the earth's fires grew tame, fiiUing vapors began to
32 ALASKA.
chill those lands first. Above all others, those regions
were the first prepared for life's forms. So that life of all
kinds mnst have radiated fix>m those lands as well as
mineral wealth. Then, too, we are forced to admit that
the first snowfalls were richer in metals than the later
ones.
Here we want to pause and listen awhile to paleozoic
testimony respedUng those great snowfiaUs of the remote
geologic past. Many eminent geologists have claimed
that the evidence of glacial action extends back into the
very midnight of geologic time. If it be tme that the
presence of bonlders is evidence of glacial action, then
the 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 the
Cambrian 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 find
these boulders in astonishing quantities. Vast beds of
them lie as conglomerate among the coal strata of the
world, and boulders have occasionally been found even in
the coal veins themselves. The Permian and Cretaceous
beds 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 of
abounding animal life. It was an age when astonishing
hordes of the hugest animals possessed the earth. Their
remains are found on every continent — I might say in
every land, and their total extinction at the end of that
age, tells a tale of invererate winter and involving snow —
a day when huge icebergs floated upon tilie oceans and
rivers, 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
THE LAND OF THE NUCGET. 8S
undonbted signs of a long and perpetual summer even up
to the very poles; when we see that the world was just
rescued from the ravages of a long and fatal winter, we
feel like asking what melted those icy chains. At that
time deluges vast beyond human conception rushed along
a thousand valleys from the melting glaciers. What
made those glaciers melt so rapidly and hastily yield to
the advance of summer? How could a frozen world grow
warm in such haste as to flood the earth ? Do we hear of
glacial floods now ? Such floods, as I think, can never oc-
cur till a greenhouse roof is reared anew. Another ring
descended and enveloped a world of snow and ice. The
greenhouse earth was formed in spite of the ice and snows
that held the mastodon and his congeners in their wintry
graves A greenhouse roof, a world of ice! Anyone can
see the result. The ice must give way, and that speed-
ily. I hold that no other world-condition in the line of
material world-evolution could have forced the glaciers to
so hastily release the continents and bring summer on
again.
As we thus come to know the character of the world-
changes of modem geologic times, we see the canopy
coming more plainly into view. But if such rushing and
crowding changes in medial latitudes tell of canopies and
their hothouse consequences, what are we to conclude
when we know that the very poles have been the scenes
of tropic life ? Can human reason contrive anything more
competent than a vapor canopy to melt and banish polar
ice-fields?
I cannot imagine any other agent in God's universe
at work to make the frigid poles regions of exuberant
life, and so long as I see the omnipotent canopy thus at
work on yonder *' king of planets," as God's material
vicegerent in the building of world -crusts, I say I am
forced to fall back on this rock, and I do not believe any
84 ALASKA.
earthly power can drive me from it. Prom this Gibraltar
the annular student looks over the vast graveyard of the
Tertiary and Quartemary dead, and ceases to marvel that
age has succeeded age and life followed life in the very
midst of the mightiest earth revulsions. He looks back
to a time when a great part of the northern hemisphere
was incased in vast continental glaciers. In the ordinary
course of things as he sees them now, he can imagine no
possible way by which the grip of implacable winter can
be loosened. But figuring on canopy processes as he sees
them at work in the solar system on at least three of our
sister planets, he may contemplate how the energies of a
molten world can even come to bear on an ice-inclosed
earth and change it to an Bden, as it has again and again
in ages past.
Looking back he can see a ring, by a slow but steady
decline, enter the atmosphere at the earth's equator.
The rotating earth and the buoyant power of the air
check its downward motion in front while it pushes on-
ward from above. As an inevitable result he sees that
ring spread sidewise into the form of a belt, and slowly but
surely it forms a canopy over the whole earth, because of
its tendency to fall to the poles. Into that canopy he sees
the solar orb pouring its immeasurable flood of heat. In
that vapor mass the sunbeams gather strength. Beneath
that canopy, as the temperature increases as it naturally
would under such a greenhouse roof, no glacier could last
very long. It speedily melts, and floods rush in headlong
flight to the sea. Tell me, how else could *' floods im-
measurable'' flow from continental glaciers ? And yet it
is the united judgment of geologists that such floods did
occur. Well, if they did, the canopy must be allowed to
testify, and if the canopy takes the stand, foundations
will tremble and pillars tumble.
Let Saturn and Jupiter speak and men will wonder i
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 36
it be needful to freight the past with such millions of
years as is usual to account for world changes. How
long would it take for a glaciated earth to shift its ice as
floods to the sea under such a hot-house roof? I think
it would be a mild, if not a poor canopy, that could not
in less than a hundred years transfer the mightiest glacier
to the ocean and transform a world of death to one of bloom.
But I do not offer any figures now. I only suggest that
when the geologist of the old school shall have been bom
anew and shall become a pradtical annular student, he
will have little inclination to regard our beautiful earth
as an old, decrepit thing.
Is there anything improbable in these claims? Are
we not rather forced to these conclusions the very moment
we make the molten earth our fortress? There is the
tropic earth, a tropic pole. Suddenly as the dash of a
hurricane it is transformed into a vast desolation. The
hairy mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros tell the tale
and tell it truthfully. // came as a stroke/ Either this,
or evidence is worthless. These huge denizens of an
Eden earth luxuriated in polar pasture on the very day
of their death. It did not require millions of years to
bury the mammoth in his snowy grave. Though he
may have had his last long sleep during the reign and fall
of dynasties, and uncounted ages may have rolled away
as he lay immured in walls of ice.
Thus while it may be that millions of years rolled by
during an existence of tropic life, and millions of years
may have passed while the earth lay covered with its icy
mantle, yet the transition from a frigid condition to a
tropic state or from a tropic state to an ar<5iic one, re-
quires but a very short time. The snow and ice of polar
lands today must be largely the result of the last canopy
fall. In the far north or far south it is hardly probable
that snows can fall now to any great extent. Moisture-
96 ALASKA.
laden air would soon drop its load when chilled by polar
cold, and I assume that today polar snowfalls are largely
confined to the outskirts of the frozen world. As no
canopy can come now to melt the polar ice and make a
warm world, it will be a long, long time before the Ar<ftic
and Antardtic lands will bloom again, if they ever do.
GOIJ) CARRIED PROM 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 the
modem. For this reason we find more gold in the oldest
glacial beds. Hence to be an expert gold-hunter or gold-
finder one must be able to distinguish the old glacial
formations from the recent. This, of course, is a difficult
task, and must be done on the spot and by one acquaint-
ed with glacial adlion.
In this age millions of huge icebergs break away from
the ice-coasts of the polar regions, both north and south,
and 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 has
gone 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 the
produ'As of the molten earth and planting them in the
stratified supercrust within the reach of man. Suppose
the icebergs, that now come down from the ftozjtn north
through Davis' strait and Baffin's bay and lodge by the
thousand on the coast of Newfoundland and the ''banks,"
were laden with gold, it is plain that in course of time
the sea botton of these lodging grounds would become
rich with gold, which no quartz bed ever yielded.
Now there are such beds scattered all over the known
earth. Let us look at this feature. To a certain extent,
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 87
what 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 determined
the tracks of the icebergs, their lodging ground and
dumping sites. The depression in which Baffin's waters
flow determine the track of the north Atlantic icebergs,
and their lodging ground alsa Hence the millions of
boulders that rest on the sea bed of the Labrador coast
are lying there today because in an age gone by that de-
pression was made. Now on the west coast of North
America is the primitive earth fold, as all geologists well
know. At a later age this ridge was extended from the
Arctic ocean through the United States, Mexico and
South America. This ridge determined the course of the
polar currents in the ancient ocean.
Icebergs formed from downfalls of canopy snows and
laden with gold, broke from their polar moorings and
floated seaward only to be urged westward against this
mighty earth-wall. Those from the north floated south-
ward and westward because the earth rotated eastward.
It is easily seen, therefore, what was the ancient strand-
ing-ground of the icebergs of the Azoic and Paleozoic seas
in the northern hemisphere. In the south polar regions
the bergs floated northward only to be carried westward
against the infant Andes by the eastward motion of the
earth, and hence we see the lodging grounds of bergs in
the southern hemisphere. For this reason and this alone,
then, the annular student would expect to find gold re-
gions scattered aU along the east side of this world wall. I
do not say that gold cannot be found on the west of this
great coast ridge. I say that as the vehicles that carried
gold from polar lands must have lodged for ages uncount-
ed and uncountable on the east side, the richest gold fields
of the Pacific coast must lie on the east of this mountain
38 ALASKA,
fold, and I am willing to leave the decision of the case
with the world's jury.
Whether you find a gold region in British Columbia,
the United States, Mexico or South America, the law of
annular progression demands that it be on the eastern
flanks of the coast ridge. As these icebergs have floated
since the birth of oceans and continents, one would natu-
rally conclude that a vast amount of gold must have been
carried from the polar lands toward the equator. There
were other walls than this great primitive one in the west
and northwest of North America. There were other
stranding grounds for laden bergs, but the geologist
knows of none like the Pacific fold. On the east of the
** Rockies'* there was plainly another depression in the
ancient sea. A critical study of this leads me to conclude
that this depression extended from the Ozark ridge to the
present polar sea. It afforded a grand highway for these
gold-laden ships of the gods. Need we wonder, then,
that the environs of Pike's Peak, standing right in their
path, should gather in their cargoes of gold and other
metals.
In regions where mountain folds run east and west
and opportunity given for ocean currents to strike against
them, I would expect to find gold fields on the north side
of such walls. North of the great lakes is the I^auren-
tian Ridge, extending from the I<abrador coast westward
to the Pacific coast mountains, another of earth's oldest
wrinkles. For immeasurable ages the polar waters
dashed against this ancient shore. In places along its
northern slope the ancient icebergs must have gathered
as they do today on the ''banks" and I<abrador coast.
There they lodged and dropped their wealth, and I assume
there must be rich gold fields along that ancient stranding
ground.}
There is a great depression in the ridge where the
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 39
Red River of the North and the head waters of the Mis-
sissippi come together. Through this depression the
the north polar waters must have been carried, and
in a vast region about this depression and northward
from it, I would locate a gold field. Gold seekers need
not expect to find placer gold in Canada on the southern
slopes of this ridge, but there are abundant reasons for
expecting to find it on the north of it. In Asia the great
Altai ridge was another such barrier against polar water,
and I see no reason why southern Siberia is not rich in
gold placers, as also the eastern slopes of the Ural mount-
ains. Eastern Siberia, located so near to Alaskan high
lands, where in all ages the glacier has formed and melted
again and again, ought to be phenomenally rich in gold
placers.
There is a great gold field in Southern Africa. I
must bring it in here, a witness of great importance. To
do this I will simply quote from VaU's Annular Worlds
Vol. II, No. 21 : ** When gold was found among the aque-
ous deposits of South Africa, the old-school geologists, as
usual, would not credit the fact until forced to. The
whole region of gold deposits there is an old sea bed, and
the 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 as
much gold among the lake beds of Scotland.' All this
comes because geologists fail to recognize the fact that
the 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 the
great 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
40 ALASKA.
ring system, there need be no 'anomalies.' Earth-rings
were the homes of all the metals that could be lifted by
dissolving fires. This planet could not be in a molten
state without filling the terrestial skies with such distilla-
tions, and the law of annular decline demands that these
should float toward the polar world in order to come back
to the earth's surface. Law demands that these vapor
bodies, laden with their fire-formed riches, should linger
on the bounds of the atmosphere and return through the
ages.
"With this plan of gold deposition, we look back into
Permean time and see a great vapor-laden canopy with
its golden wealth, hanging like a molten heaven over the
earth. See it part at the equator. One-half of it rides
slowly 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 roUs on this continent of snows becomes
a continent of ice, piled mountain high. But let us re-
member that it is ice laden with the metallic dust of the
molten earth. At that time South Africa was a part of
the ocean's bed. The ice fields of the south moved from
the 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 of
ancient Africa, as in an edd3dng sea, just as we see them
today o£f the ' banks ' at Newfoundland. There, in warm
waters, they melted and dropped their load.
''Thus the gold, once native in the infant planet,
raised by immeasurable heat from the lowest depths and
lodged in the celestial waters, found a temporary resting
place amid southern snows, and thence borne by ice, found
a final home in the sea-forming beds of South Africa."
I presume that every intelligent man acquainted with
the gold deposits of South Africa knows that it must have
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 41
been carried in the sea to its lodging place. But what
carried it, and whence came it? I must urge that the
iceberg was the vehicle, and the south-land the region
from which it came. One thing must be admitted, that
the gold in this old sea bed in South Africa was not
ground out of quartz beds, for there are no such beds
there from which it could have been derived. As new
gold discoveries are made, the intelligent miner turns
away and disregards old ideas. The idea that gold came
originally only from quartz rock in the neighborhood of
the placers, must be given up. The Cripple Creek gold,
the gold rock of Southern California, and the Alaskan
gold, all prove that it is found in various kinds of rock.
Pull many a gold seeker has spent his life and his wealth
to find a gold-bearing rock simply because he saw signs
of placer gold near by. Gold-bearing rock tnay have
yielded placer gold, but many a miner has found gold
rock 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 gold
lode on the hillside because he has found gold sands be-
low. He will learn the evidences of glacier action. He
will study topography and above all, he will study
the Annular Theory and learn of the world processes that
have made the earth as it is. I quote again (Annular
World, Vol. II, No. 24):
''A little more experience in gold mining will lead the
thinker clear away from the old-school idea that all gold
is derived from primitive rock. The evidence is cumu-
lative that very little placer gold was ever contained in
rock beds. Very recently Peter I^. Trout, an intelligent
miner, who has had large experience in various gold-
yielding lands, spent several months in Alaska and has
given some cold and stubborn facts regarding the gold in
42 ALASKA.
that region. There hi the very region (under the Arctic
circle) where gold must have reached the earth from its
home in the skies, it should be found in almost every
kind of rock. But above all» it should be found there in
abundance in the form of grains and dust as it fell from
the skies, amid the glacial snows that fell there from the
earth rings. It should be found there incorporated with
the very glaciers that have held some parts of that land
in their icy grasp for thousands of years.
"Peter L. Trout found gold dust and ruby sand on
the sur£ftce of the glacier that environs Mount Pairweath-
er, at a height so far above any gold-bearing rock in that
region as to forbid its having been derived from it. Now
teU us, brothers of the old school, where that gold and
ruby sand came from ? "
Here is a gold-bearing glacier. If that glacier, like
the great Greenland glaciers, could move into the sea and
give birth to icebergs, these would float thousands of
miles, perhaps, before in melting, they would drop their
golden sands.
**If Mount Fairweather glacier is gold-bearing, why
may not other Arctic and Polar glaciers contain gold?
If that glacier did not get its gold from gold-bearing
rocks which it had crushed into sand, it certainly did get
it from the earth's annular system — ^from canopy snows.
Then I say it may be a fact that some of the glaciers of
the polar north are gold-bearing, for they may be some
of the very ancient remains of snows that fell away back
in the ages. Again, it is very possible that those exotic
snows, that fell in recent geologic times, may have carried
gold from the skies, and if so, the icebergs that now float
from the north world and melt in the deep, may yet be
distributing their golden hoards over the earth.
Here is what Peter L. Trout sa3rs about the origin of
the gold on Mount Fairweather glacier: ''This gold cer-
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET ^
tainly never came from qfaartz veins, as it was fmnd in
meteoric dust, and heaven is the only place I can think of
that it could come from, or the ethereal blue vault above
us, or wherever meteoric dust comes from/' Heaven
certainly was once its home — ^not the meteor's heaven,
but the telluric heaven; the heaven whither inveterate
fires sent it in ages gone by, and where it floated for mil-
lions of years in revolving rings, belts and canopies, and
whence it fell in the fullness of its time.
When I think of the vast ice cap of the south world
and recall the fadl that it does not require such vast ages
to produce them, nor such to banish them, I am not slow
to suggest that that mighty glacier now covering the Ant-
ardlic continent may be composed largely of gold-laden
snow. Certain it is, that icebergs have floated for mil*
lions of years from that frozen land, and certain it is that
land has been capped again and again by gold-laden
snows. But let us now turn to the
AI^ASKAN 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 in
highly silicious waters and falling gold could fall and sink
and 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 would
be gold in another kind of a matrix. Now as the north
world, during all the ages, must have been a dumping
ground for mineral matter from on high, I cannot conceive
that quartz beds carrying gold can be a characteristic of
polar lands, but that gold veins will likely be found in
almost any kind of rock, and instead of gold running in
v^VQSonly^ I would rather expect to find this metal all
through the rock mass.
44 ALASKA,
Now Alaska is a grand upheaval. The gold-bearing
rocks of ages past are cast up to the wear of storm and
frost and the grinding of glaciers. The upturned beds
were formed of the minerals and metals falling there in
ages past, and are necessarily rich in mineral wealth.
Ages of frost and glacier action have been reducing these
rocks to dust At the same time, the gold in the glaciers
has mixed with that which past ages stored in the earth's
crust This process has gone on from very early geologic
times. From the very nature of this northern upthrust,
it is a region of land-locked basins where glaciers could
form, and afford no opportunity for icebergs to carry
away their wealth. In all ages these ice fields melted on
the spot and dropped their gold. As tropic conditions
came and passed away, gold-laden glaciers melted and
others 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, then
Alaska, from the very nature of world conditions, is a
land rich with celestial treasures.
It must be conceded that during the many glacial
periods that the earth has witnessed, Alaska was emi-
nently the glacier's home. When canopies revolved
about 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 to
receive its snowy hoard. When canopies rode on high,
the air was under greater pressure, and clouds buoyed
in the atmosphere would gather there as now — when con-
ditions were favorable. As glacial winters began in the
north 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 earth
rotated eastward and lodged on the Alaskan mountains,
and the great primal folds of the continent would again
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 45
become the storage ground for the wealth of canopies.
This leads me to further urge the claim that the whole
eastern slope of the coast mountains of British America
and Alaska is pre-eminently the
LAND OF THB NUGGET.
That mysterious power that forms the crystal, the
frost-work on the window pane, the snowflake falling
through the air, formed the gold grains and the nugget.
The same process that produces the hailstone from watery
vapor today at a certain temperature, formed hailstones
of gold in ages gone by when a higher temperate pre-
vailed. There was a time when the temperature of the
atmosphere 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 as
hailstones 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 countless
millions of these in the crust today. Well in the loftier
heights, in the steaming vapors, the golden grains and
nuggets formed. They rode higher in the primitive at-
mosphere than the more refra<Slory metals — metals more
diflScult to vaporize. For this reason they formed a part
of the ring system. For this reason they revolved around
the earth in canopies with great velocity and moved in
spiral paths to the poles, falling there with the very
snows that formed glaciers on the Alaskan uplift.
These nuggets have been found in vast quantities in
the frozen north, always in placers, and they never came
from quartz beds, for the process that is competent to
pulverize quartz rock must have ground all quartz nug-
gets to powder also.
For this reason, and for many others, men cannot rea-
46 ALASKA.
sonably claim that all placer gold was ground out of
quartz 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, but
that this rock, as well as porphyry and granite, may con-
tain them, because sky-formed accretions — ^gold hail-
stones — ^falling first from the sky and carried by ice and
dropped into forming beds, must yet lie where they fell.
I must say, however, that the miner who seeks the
sources of placer gold in the hillsides and mountain walls
of Alaska will not find them. In his search for them,
however, he may find very rich gold-bearing rock, as he
does in other lands. The long experience of practical
miners should teach the prospector that quartz and its
kindred rocks do not moulder down before the frosts of
winter and the rains of summer so readily as some have
claimed.
One might put quartz under the stamp and possibly
get an occasional nugget from it, but would it not be
hard on the nugget ? I can also conceive that a glacier
might push hills aside and obliterate river channels, and
even crush and pulverize rock and release its gold, but
the process in this case would be hard on the glacier as
well as the nugget. But, putting humor aside, many a
practical miner, led by the fallacious reasoning of the old
school, has spent all his means and worn out his life in
efforts to find the virgin lode, because in the valley be-
low a few nuggets were found. When I have seen so
much fruitless toil in this dire<Slion, I have said why not
let the placer speak for itself? Here is a bed of stratified
earth plainly formed at the bottom of the sea or a lake.
Here are pebbles, boulders, sky-formed accretions, eta,
— witnesses representing foreign as well as neighboring
formations, and no one who regards this evidence in its
true import will put a particle of value on the presence of
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 47
gold in the placer as an indication that it came from a
rock in situ in the hillsides above. Now every man
should know that every ounce of gold that he finds in a
placer, whether in the form of dust or grain or nuggets,
combined or uncombined with other matter, was once
lifted to the terrestrial heavens. An earth of boiling and
raging minerals won't allow any other conclusion. Grant-
ing that vast quantities of gold came back in primitive
times and became locked in the forming beds, we have
no right to say that it all came^ back before the watery
vapor did.
As surely as man saw a vapor canopy reign and fall
(and he says he has seen it), so surely have the ages seen
vast snowfalls and showers of celestial gold, and every
evidence urges the fieidt into recognition that much of
that gold now lies in the placers of the world just as it
fell. Alaska is above most regions one of placers, and
above most regions a land of glaciers. It is a land of ice-
filled valleys and wide cafions, whose bottoms are cov-
ered with ice of unknown thickness, and yet on the sur-
face of these ice fields lies a soil that in many places
support great forests of huge trees. These soil-covered
and forest-covered glaciers must be very ancient, and
while some of them may have formed as glaciers now
form, there are strong grounds for claiming that they
were formed as canopies fell. For, in some places where
they have exposed walls, not only have seams of earth
been found in the solid ice, but mammoth bones and the
remains of forests, and in some places the soil on the sur-
face of these ice fields contain nugget gold.
Plainly, the soil-covered and forest-clothed glaciers
are very ancient, and for this reason are gold-bearing;
and enough of this metal has been obtained firom the very
glacier itself to prove this to be true. If, then, hot va-
pors bore gold to the skies and canopy snows bore it back
48 ALASKA.
to the earth, why not mine the glacier itself for the moth-
er lode?
Alaska is a frozen land — a land whose surface only
thaws during summer. The earth in many places is
known to be frozen hundreds of feet in depth. (See
Earth's Annular System, pi^es 190 to 200.) In Siberia
it is claimed that frost and ice in some places extend seven
hundred feet beneath the sur£EU!e. But how could earthy
matter freeze to that depth? Everyone who has any
knowledge of the temperature of mines, can see an over-
towering difficulty here. Suppose the Annular Theory
be allowed a voice. Hear what it says on this point:
Under this frozen soil, under the ancient glacier whose
age may be reckoned by milleniums, lie the nugget and
golden sands. How in the world did they get there, if
they were ground out of the rock by glacial action?
Were they washed from the rocks in situ, by floods, to the
top of the glaciers and made to sink through it to the
bottom? If the nugget's home wete in the soil that lies
on top of the glacier, then the old school might take some
satisfaction in the fact. But the &ct is, it is just where
the annular student wants to find it, and the satisfaction
is his. For one hundred thousand years, it may be,
Alaska's ten thousand valleys, ice-filled and forest-cov-
ered, have concealied their gold deposits, and in all that
time the warring elements have not added an ounce of
gold, nugget or dust, to those concealed hoards. Neither
the grinding ice nor the crushing heel of winter in all
that time has added a mite of gold to the hidden wealth
under frozen Alaska or frozen Klondyke; and precious
little have they ever added to any other golden hoard.
I will srant that the gold found in the talus or soil
now covering so much of the perpetually frozen earth in
that north land may in part have been derived from the
disintegrated rock, but the time has come when this great
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 49
problem of placer gold in connection with glacial action
will receive a radical and merciless overhatding in the
light of the molten earth and annular world-making.
It may be that Siberian and Alaskan gold may teach the
geologist and physicists that they have misinterpreted
the geological record from the very first rude lines cut by
the chisel of Time on earth's rocky piles.
The overtowering question is: Why is gold found in
such vast quantities in the north world ? No grinding up
of rocks can explain that. If ice crushing explains why
we find gold in mountainous Alaska; why has not mount-
ainous Europe given us abundant placer gold? The gla*
cier can't quarry out gold unless it is at hand. There it
is under the Arctic circle, and the question is: Why there?
Perhaps it is not generally known that more than half the
gold gathered in the Russian empire is found under the
Arctic circle in Eastern Siberia, almost on the threshold
of Alaska. Yankee pluck and enterprise are badly need-
ed there, it would seem.
IvCt it be understood, then, that Alaskan gold as it
exists in places that have been sealed for ages under froz-
en mud and sand, intermixed with layers of ice of great
thickness, was not ground from any "mother lode."
The very mud, clay, sand, etc., may have fisdlen with the
snows. If snows descended te glaciate a world, they car-
ried immeasurable quantities of mineral sublimations —
tellurio-cosmic dust. From this fund, I presume, the
glacial **till" and ** boulder clays" have been derived in
greater part. Of course in polar lands they fell Tvith the
snows in the frozen state and one can readily imagine de-
pressions filled, valleys obliterated and plains covered
hundreds of feet deep with such frozen materials. Now
such frozen materials are known to exist, and in the ab-
sence of any other plausible method of accumulation, I
assume that the frozen strata were made by progressive
60 ALASKA.
canopy folk. Now if this be true time will prove it true,
and there I leave it.
I think the northern gold discovery is a wonderful
verification of the Annular Theory, but I am not urging
the claim that the Alaskan gold field is a marvel to in-
duce gold seekers to rush headlong into the dangers of
that land. I am simply using this gold discovery to ad-
vance what I am sure is a greater discovery. With this
greater discovery the intdligent Mner may learn the
most valuable lesson, and future generations will know
more about these great store-houses of the earth. And
now let me whisper in the reader's ear: There must be
hidden, in the north land beds, immeasurable quantities
of the heavier
HYDRO-CARBONS.
When the earth was a molten sphere, it was a smoking
worU, Carbon was one of the most abundant elements
of the earth, and it will not take the chemist long to tell
what became of that carbon when the earth was boiling
up in mineral fury from its depths. That carbon went to
the skies, just as unconsumed carbon goes there as smoke
from ten million furnaces today. Today, however, in its
nascent state the carbon unites with oxygen in the air,
and is consumed. But in that primeval atmosphere oxy-
gen had greater affinity for other elements which it greed-
ily devoured and left the carbon unconsumed. Oxygen
and hydrogen rushed into combination, so also oxygen
with molten iron, calcium, sodium and other minerals.
But the unconsumed carbon went aloft amid hot and
steaming aqueous vapors. Now the inevitable result.
The gas maker will tell us he injects steam into his retort
with his carbon to make a hydro-carbon or an oxy-hydro
carbon. In this way he forms a number of oily carbon
products, burning gas, etc.
But in that day when the Great Chemist put his car-
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET 51
bons into the retort of retorts and poured superheated
aqueous vapors over them, what did He make? If the
puny fires of man can today make hydro-carbons — ^fuel to
illumine and bum at will, what infinite quantities did
the world's titan retort make? All the hydrogen this
world has, all the carbons on the earth and in it, were in
the molten world, and when those hot carbon forms came
in contact with flaming hydrogen, there is no mistaking
the result. Now we begin to see some of the grand re-
sults of the mighty energies awakened by a world fur-
nace. If we could, by any possibility, measure the oceans
of hydro-carbons, such as the oil now running from mil-
lions of wells, we might form some idea of what every
shining star is doing today. The same furnace that
made the oceans and atichored them on high, made all
the oils of the earth's rocky beds and anchored them on
high also.
These oils went from the earth's annular S3rstem over
the equator to the polar regions and about the circles, and
there they fell. There also fell all the other carbons that
the world's great alembic could gather from the fiery
mass, and this includes all the coals of the earth. This,
of course, is geologic heresy. But it is Annular Law
none the less. I say, then, there must be vast beds of
petroleum rock in the polar lands, for there was the
world's great dumping grounds for all the fire-bom prod-
ucts of the primitive earth. When the world's great fund
of fuel in the temperate zones shall have been exhausted
in the ages to come, in polar lands, both north and south,
men will mine not only the metals that now lie there, but
they will carry, on the world's great highwa3rs, millions
of tons of oil and coal from there to other lands.
The fact that the material that formed the oil rock
was more easily transported, renders it probable that the
greater part of the lighter hydro-carbons was carrried
62 ALASKA.
from the poles and and only the heavier ones left there.
There, however, is the home of the graphitic carbons and
the anthracites, and there they will be found. There
must be found the heaviest oils of the earth, and all the
heavier hydro-carbons and oxy-hydro-carbons. There
must be found the heaviest and the purest coals. I mean
coal with the most carbon and the least ash. In faA I
would expect coal to be found in both the north and the
south polar regions that contain no ash at all. I do not
see how all the earth's great fund of carbon could pos-
sibly have existed in God's retort of inveterate fire, and
and not make all the alotropic forms of carbon from the
lightest to the heaviest and purest
What would my brother geologists think if, in the
future, great beds of coal should be found in Alaska
which contain little or no ash ? Would he still say that
all coal is derived from vegetation, which, as all men
know, contains ash in abundance? I leave the subject
to the test of time, knowing that if men drive me from
the rock of the Annular Theory, the Rock will still be
where God put it. Suppose the future should reveal fuel
carbons imbedded in eternal ice, just as it fell from the
skies with canopy snows. Would men say such fuel was
once a vegetation? Well, it will be found there, just
where the annular student wants to find it, but just
where the old-school geologist don't want to find it.
When men come to see that all the original carbons of
the earth must have come home via the poles, they will
see why we have such vast beds of the purest coal
under the very Ardtic Circle and almost none under the
equator, where in all ages vegetation has been king.
When men come to see this primitive origin of carbon
fuel, they will understand why the old Cambrian beds
contained such masses of almost pure carbon long before
vegetation existed.
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET 53
Suppose, now, we were to find the coals graded ac-
cording to purity and value and quantity in both the
northern and southern hemispheres from the equator to-
ward the poles. If this theory be true, in South America
and Africa, the best coals and the greatest mass of them
should be found in the most southern parts of those
countries. Now, so far as the South American coals are
witnesses in the case, their testimony is emphatic. The
Patagonian coals are far ahead of those in Buenos Ayres,
both in quantity and quality, and those in the latter
country excel those in Brazil. The nearer the equator
the less is the quantity and poorer is the coal. This
gradation of coal latitudinally is another rock over which
the old-school geologist cannot climb, nor can he get
around it*
Alaska is a stupendous primitive upheaval, and for
this reason the purest metals and minerals of all the ages
are brought together and within the reach of man. It is
the world's great available storehouse. I suppose the
reader can now see the meaning of a molten earth. Sup-
pose immeasurable fires had taken no part in the evolu-
tion of this globe. By what possible means, then, could
the oxygen and hydrogen of the planet have been
brought together in the making of oceans? Without the
aid of the planet's reducing flames, how could man today
get a pound of iron, lead or gold without going into the
inmost depths of the earth for it ? For these metals must,
in that case, have been disseminated in grains and dust
all through the mass. For this reason I see Wisdom in
*I cannot pursue this momentous question further in this vol-
ume. I have treated it in three chapters in my Earth* s Annular
System^ and the reader who would know more of the primitive
and true origin of coal, is referred to that volume. Also to the
author's lectures on the ''Coal Problem*' and the *' Waters Above
the Firmamenit** wherein it is treated in all its phases.
64 ALASKA.
a molten world. I see that Vulcan's forge and hammer
have reduced the rock-formed earth for man's accommo-
dation. I see those metals all carried to the heavens and
held there till the earth grew cold and ready to take them
back into its outer crust. Without this world process
this planet would not have been fit abode for the sentient
races now upon it.
When we recall the faA that all the world's great
mineral wealth came back from its celestial anchorage
by way of the polar skies; that especially the heavy prod-
udls of the earth's primeval furnace must largely remain
where they fell, we cannot avoid the conclusion that
Ardlic and Antar<5Hc lands are the metallic and fuel
treasuries of the world and of all worlds. When God
rocked the infJEint orbs in their fiery cradles and started
suns on their grand courses, it would seem he had man's
inventive aims and eternal necessities in view. We now
see why stars shine and suns bum. The grand intent of
Omnipotence is emblazoned everywhere. In the turning
of spheres and bowing of poles there is as much a plan
as one can behold in the evolution of a lily or a rose.
We look with amazement upon Saturn and his rings.
In the grand and eternal dance of worlds the day must
come when men will see these rings no more. As Law
presides over the destiny of orbs, the outer rings of an
annular system must form into moons and the inner ones
into canopies, and canopies must fall and add stratum to
stratum, age to age and life to life. Thus the earth and
all worlds are lifted from plane to plane. When I see
Saturn's and Jupiter's canopies striated with dark bands,
and remember that these worlds also were once flaming
suns — smoking worlds — ^how can I avoid the conclusion
that I am looking at sooty carbons? What else than
unbumt fuel can I find in the whole realm of elements
known to qian, to wedge into those vapors so brilliantly
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 66
white? They are worlds being built up by annular proc-
esses — ^by the fall of canopies, laden with all the mineral
and metallic wealth that fire could lift to the skies. For
uncounted milleniums, perhaps, canopy dust and vapors,
fiery sublimations must fall and build Satumian and Jov-
ian strata and deepen their oceans. In their dense and
heavy atmospheres that dust must fall in all lands, but
more largely at the poles than elsewhere. These falls
may not be catastrophic, but yet they might be.
The mysterious evolution of Jupiter's canopy be-
comes, in the light of annular law, the most emphatic
and unimpeachable witness of canopy world-making.
For thirty years I have watched the stupendous changes
of a mineral and metal-laden ocean of vapors, making
every effort possible to reach the surface of the planet and
that, too, via his poles. Jupiter's canopy is plainly the
wreck of an annular system, revolving measurably inde-
pendently of the planet's own rotation. I fancy Jupiter's
*' golden age" may be now in the noon of its progress,
or it may be its * 'tertiary time." Certainly it is not a
hot world, as is claimed; for the strongest evidence in
favor of such a claim fails when tested. But as that can-
opy is now falling, what vast continents of snows must
eventually mass themselves about Jupiter's poles. What
deluges must augment its oceans! and this leads me one
step further on.
Our oceans say, as they roll their waters up ten thou-
sand river channels, that they are today many fathoms
deeper than they were just previous to the last great ice
age. If all the ocean waters had fallen in primitive geo-
logic times, the earth having absorbed vast quantities of
them, the seashore must have been at a lower level, the
world over, than formerly, so that now the rivers would
run rapidly and pitch headlong into the sea through high
alluvial walls. But where, in the whole earth, do we
56 ALASKA.
find this feature? The ocean is today a vast basin filled
to overflowing by modem augmentation. One cannot
contemplate the contour of continents as they now exist
and philosophically conclude otherwise. Today there
sleeps in the very midst of the Pacific ocean a vast conti-
nent, once the scene of human a<5tivity, as* the submerged
works of human hands prove. Dana, America's great
geologist, said it was a vast sunken continent But this
could not be the case, for if that continent sank the
waters would recede from the coasts of the earth and the
rivers would pitch into the sea, which they do not. (On
this theme see Earth's Annular System, pages iii to
155)
But the I^w is not done forecasting yet. It declares
H that the south polar world is also a land of nuggets. In-
deed, I have no hesitation in claiming that if we follow
the indications made apparent by the plan of annular ev-
olution, the south world is the greater and richer store-
house of the metals. When I recall the great continental
casement of Antardlic ice, so far exceeding the northern
ice fields in dimensions; when I recall the fadl that the
great bulk of oceanic waters have gathered about and
toward that region, I am led to ask why are these things
so? and but one philosophic answer comes in reply. If
the oceans' waters have gathered in greater quantities
about the southern pole it is because they have bben at-
trailed thither more than they have been attra<5led to the
northern pole. In other words, the Antarctic world has
greater attraction than the Arctic. In other words, a
mass of metal that would weigh a pound in the Arctic
world will weigh more than a pound in the Antarctic.
The pendulum will vibrate more rapidly at the latter
place. I say these things must be so because that region
has got possession of the world's great ocean.
When I see our moon lifting a great tidal wave and
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 67
di'^ggioR it westward in opposition to the radial motion
of the earth. I assume that the moon attracts the waters
or they would not move toward it. But the moon is
nearly 240,000 miles away, and I am forced to admit that
the attracting mass of the south world must have the
same effect. Well, I see the effect, and the cause is
plainly at hand. Now if the superior attractive force of
the 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 and
to 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. I
await 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 at
any other part of the earth, then men will see why there
are more waters there, and possibly they may admit that
there are more of the heavy metals there too. But why
wait for an expedition to settle this problem? I claim
that law has already settled it. The waters are there,
and they are there according to the law of attraction, and
therefore there are more of the heavy metals to attract.
The waters are there and therefore the pendulum will
vibrate more rapidly there. If I draw my conclusions on
slender evidence, what shall I say of the conclusions of
the old-school geologists ?
We know enough about South American gold, locat-
ed, as usual, on the east side of the Andes, to predicate
a little as to its original source. It is as plain as day,
that if the great amount of placer gold on the eastern
slopes of the Andes came from quartz, and other rocks of
that range, it has no right to be there. If South American
58 ALASKA.
gold came exclusively from the rock beds of the Andes
during the ages of denudation and attrition, by all means
the west side of that range should be the gold field, which
it is not But where did the ancient inhabitants of Peru
get their gold? Were they smelters? Were they quartz
crushers? Did they cyanide? The Peruvian placers of
amazing wealth, yet unexhausted after unknown centu-
ries of gold gathering, tell the tale.
For millions of years the successive canopies of the
south fell as metal-laden, gold-laden snows on the Ant-
ardlic continent. Glaciers formed mountain high, and
moved as glacier ice, outward toward the sea. Millions
of icebergs broke ofif and floated toward the equator. On
their way the eastward motion of the rotating earth caused
them to fall back to the west, and like the icebergs now
lodging on the Labrador coast, these lodged on the east
side of the Andean sea bottom, then a ridge sleeping in
the deep. Later in geologic time this great mountain
range, a continuation of the great Lauren tian upthrust
of North America, arose from the sea. But icebergs still
floated and lodged along its ocean-washed walls. There
they melted, there they dropped their loads of gold —
gold nuggets, formed as hailstones are formed today,
gold grains, gold dust.
Now will the old school tell us how and why placer
gold fields are so exclusively located on the eastern slopes
of this great American mountain range ? Will they tell
us why a mountain range running east and west as some
do in North America, is more apt to have placers on its
northern than its southern slope? Will they tell us why
they do not like to invest in the new school's stock of
•*whys?"
I want to be understood here. I do not say that
there are no very rich lodes in the polar regibns. On the
contrary, all gold-bearing rocks of all ages, if the theory
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 59
be true, must be richer than the same rocks are in other
regions, but the placers will not lead the miner to the
spot. Canopy falls that filled the placers in modern geo-
logic times, filled the rocks as they were forming in other
ages. A captious critic has said that the ** Vailian the-
ory claims that there is no quartz in Alaska." Vail
never made such a claim, but just the reverse. The
same must be said of granite and porphyry, and every
rock originally formed out of dust sent up from the molten
earth, for that dust came home via the poles along with
their gold. When, then, I say men cannot find the
mother lode in Alaska, I do not say it is not a land of
quartz; and when it is said the placer filled with gold
does 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 push
into the utmost wilds of Alaska to find gold. Prom those
high lands the glaciers have moved down to the sea along
every valley, and supposing the same warm sea waves
dashed upon them as they reached the coast, as now dash
on those coasts, I see no reason why the whole shore of
Southern Alaska is not one great placer. The fadl that
eastern Siberia is a vast gold placer, points to the fa<5l
that all Behring's sea bottom must also be one. And
further, if there are currents of water dragging the bot-
tom of Behring's strait, carrying off the light particles, it
must be leaving the gold behind, and I look forward to
the day when ships will find such currents and, anchoring
over them, will dredge gold from the deep. I^et us re-
member that the ocean there is a modem innovation —
that when its waters popred over that land it involved a
gold region, and the gold is there still, and every current
moving over that submerged shore is carrying its cover-
ing away, so that there must be in that sea regions where
gold lies stripped of its covering and awaiting the sea-
60 ALASKA.
man's dredge. Find the sea currents of these waters and
find gold. Sink deep wells on the coast near the mouths
of Alaska's numerous valleys opening toward the sea,
and find gold there. Take the Copper River valley as a
sample. Why not prospedl its mouth as deeply as pos-
sible for the gold hidden there? Failing to find what is
sought for in that valley, follow the stream up to its
sources and over the divide. On the northern slope of that
divide I would expedl to find gold. I would say the
same thing of all of Alaska's south-bound streams. On
the other slope of the divide, gold should be found. This
makes the region immediately south of the Yukon more a
gold region than the region dil-edtly on the north of that
stream. For the same reason I would expect richer gold
lands on the northern slope of the divide between the
Yukon valley and the polar sea. In a general way I
would expect more placer gold on the eastern and north-
em slopes than on the western and southern. Then,
again, all things being equal, I would sooner look for
gold 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 fell
and the waters retreated to the sea — when polar snows
melted and poured their waters along a thousand valleys,
the light materials of earth would be borne away and the
heaviest lyould remain behind where the ice and snow
melted. Gold, a very heavy metal, then must to a vast
extent lie where it fell But is it not plain that all these
floods of water urging their way to the sea have simply
made the ocean what it is today ?
•*ophir's golden wkdgs."
I must now bring the work on this volume to a close,
though there is one more thought which ought to have
had a place herein. That land of fabulous golden hoards,
known to Solomon and all the east three thousand years
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 61
ago — where was it? How in the world has its location
passed so utterly from human knowledge, like a dream of
the 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-ofif and now unknown land, and
gold was **plenteous as stones." (II. Chron., i, 15.) It
took 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 and
the god of nations. I can only say now that I have cer-
tainly located that land in the far north.
Had I space in this book for forty pages more, I could
bring another phase of the Annular Theory into view, by
which it can be plainly shown that the word Ophir was
originally a name for the north land. But to make this
plain I would have to bring many classic and biblical
witnesses into court and thus, far transcend the limits in-
tended for this volume. I must therefore leave the work
for other times. However, I will, DeHn zxa/if^fiiLpublish
^^Ophir^s Golden Wedged* in pamphlet form (32 pages) if
the sale of 200 copies at 25c each can be assured. Some-
where in lands now fettered down, it may be for ever, in
snows and ice, the ships of Tarshish obtained their gold
as well as ivory. In one of the processions bearing ivory,
sculptured on Eastern walls, a white bear is seen, and
this 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, that
must in the near future receive a thorough revision. I
suppose it will be a long time before such men as those
who champion the Crollian theory of terrestrial glacia-
tion, the vegetation theory of the origin of coal, the
62 ALASKA.
quartz rock origin of placer gold, can be convinced that
they have the **cart in front of the horse" all the time.
To say the least, it is very strange that such eminent
men as Lord Kelvin, acknowledged to be the '* prince of
physicists,'' cannot see the self-stultifying argument that
presents a cold world first and the snows afterward, which
is a physical impossibility. Refrigerate a world and you
put out the very fire you must have to lift the vapors to
the air to form snow. This ^^ prince ofphysicisis'^ should
come home, and learn how canopies fall and how that
snows fall first and refrigeration comes in consequence.
And yet these men will call this **Vailian nonsense."
Well, I have the horse in fronts where he should be.
Then that coal problem! This ** prince of physicists"
only echoes the great world's opinion when he says that
vegetation made all the carbon beds (coal veins) of the
earth, while it is a fadl which every schoolgirl ought to
know that vegetation can't make carbon. Carbon makes
vegetation/ For more than half a century dilEculties
mountain high have piled up in front of this question.
The annular theory sweeps every one of them away, and
simply because its gallant steed goes m front.
From all over this land — from the ends of the earth
the geological cry goes forth that Alaskan gold rock gave
up its gold to the all-devouring glacier to be carried away.
Whereas, in all ages, it was the gold-laden glacier and
berg that gave the gold to the rock. The innumerable
multitude who, at the beck of the old school, sought the
mother lode from the placer signs, or sought the placer
signs from the mother lode, and so uniformly failed, may
yet learn that if the Annular Theory of gold deposition
had been pushed to the front fifty years ago, millions of
dollars had been saved, and what is more, thousands of
valuable lives had been spared. My conscience would
sting me if I did not souQd the warning. Let the mother
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 63
lode alone. No annular student would seek it from
placer signs. Keep the horse in front.
Two days ago the writer of these lines, in respose to
< an invitation, delivered an address before the Southern
California Academy of Sciences, held in Los Angeles,
^ Cal. In the course of his ledture he brought to view the
remarkable evidence found in legendary thought, which
plainly establishes the fadl that man saw at least two
ephemeral heavens pass away, and was therefore an eye
witness to the fall of canopies. When the speaker sat
down, one of the most learned men in the audience, a
genuine representative of old-school touch-me-not-ism,
objedled to the theory and made a strong effort to crush
it 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 he
made the discovery that legendary thought was connedl-
ed with canopy processes, has never dreamed that the
Earth's Annular System was ''founded on mythology
and theology." Neither is the canopy conception founded
on them, nor can it be. On the contrary, mythology and
theology, as human produAs, are founded on the Earth's
Annular System, and on canopy processes. In other
words, if the earth never had a ring system or a vapor
heaven, mythology and theology would never have pre-
sented the features they do today. The ancient Greeks,
^ Romans, Hindus, £g3'ptian, Japanese and other peoples,
^ would never have preserved the thought for more than
^ 4000 years that an old heaven passed away — that new
heavens came to view; that the sun, moon and stars were
hidden by a water heaven, if the earth never had rings,
and canopies, the wreck of rings. For this reason I say
the Annular System is not *' founded on mythology,"
64 ALASKA.
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 would
omit a duty if I failed to put the reader in a way to learn >i
all he can about the great problem of Annular Evolu-
tion. I will be pardoned, then, if in these last pages of
this volume I devote some space to the character of some
of 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's
Annular System for sale. I have revised, and enlarged it
to the extent of two chapters, and the second edition will
contain nearly 500 pages. I have never been able to get
book publishers and dealers to take any commercial risk
in its publication and sale, and I am thus forced to pub-
lish it m3rself. And just as in the publication of the first
edition, I must secure enough subscribers before making
the venture, to secure me against financial loss. Sub-
scriptions are coming in slowly, but fast enough to show
that it must be republished in the near future. The old
edition was a book, cloth bound, 5x7 inches, and sold for
two dollars, by mail. The new edition will be some
larger, same size of type as this volume, elegantly bound
in two or more styles and sold for the same price. Per-
sons who want to learn the srrand and unmistakable
* 'Story of the Rocks" as they testify in behalf of the
Earth'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 great -^
polar snowfalls that locked down in eternal death the
giant mammals of the earth, can learn the lesson and the
true meaning of world stages in that volume. Inviting
the reader to send his or her name (but no money tmtil
advised), ordering one or more copies when published,
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET. 65
I shall be more than pleased to record it and make pleas-
ant acquaintances.
The Gods Unveiled is the title of the second volume of
the Earth's Annular S3r8tem. I have spent more than
ten years in preparing it and it is now ready for the press,
but awaiting looo names as in the above volume, same
type and style and size of page, over 400 pages, price $2.
The reader may not admire the title, but when he shall
have finished reading the book, he will say it is properly
named. It proves, so far as the philosophy of dying his-
tory can prove an3rthing, that mythology is the fossilized
records of canopy times. The rolling canopy is the key.
The day must come when many a stronger hand than
mine will take this key and unfold to the view of aston-
ished humanity more than a Columbian discovery. As
it is, I have presented in this volume, as I think, the
most undoubted proof that man saw the pure, clear sky
come into view as an infant heaven hid by nursing clouds
and fed by golden bees (stars) after two ephemeral vapor
heavens had been banished by the god of order and law.
To one who is interested in this line of study every page
of mythology thus becomes an actual discovery of some-
thing new. To me it has been one interminable line of
startling revelations. All this is because I certainly have
found the key that unlocks this grand storehouse of prim-
itive thought. Mythology \& fossilized history, and I aver,
knowing what I say, that every phase of it has a meaning
that the Annular Theory only can interpret. A myth
once explained is no longer a myth, and as it is the prov-
ince of the annular student to explain thenty he is by that
act converting mjrth into golden truth.
This may seem like large talk and strong lan^age,
but I have pushed this thought far enough into the mid-
night wilds of antiqtdty to be conscious of the fact that
the grandest canopy processes startled the early races and
66 ALASKA.
left in the head and heart of humanity an impress that
started und3ring echoes down the ages. The imagery of
canopy scenes — celestial wars between dragon enemies
and solar warriors, is ambered in the very words, acts
and religions of mankind, as the image of a star is pho-
tographed on the astronomer's chart. Seeing these
things as I do, I feel that I can do nothing less than de-
sire the student to partake of what has been to me a con-
tinual feast.
Eden's Flaming Sword — What Was Itf In this pam-
phlet of 48 pages I have shown that the God of nature
has irretrievably closed Eden's gate to man by the can-
opy's march to the polar north. In the day of Eden's
immunities a canopy growing thin revealed a flaming
sun on high, surrounded by a iSiaming halo, ''a sword
that turned every way.*' I have shown how the Hebrew
cherubim were the same as the Assyrian **kerubi," now
known as sun-guards by eastern scholars. This links
the Trees of I^ife and Knowledge with canopy scenes and
gives them their first philosophic explanation.
Thus while everyone must admit a physical Eden
under physical conditions, with its two **trees" actual
physical features on the canopy, the changes wrought in
connection with man's expulsion were plainly an inevi-
table repetition of those telluric transformations chron-
icled in the geologic column. I think I have shown very
plainly what the mysteries of Eden were. The * 'serpent"
receives in this volume its first and only philosophic ex-
planation, while its t3rpical signification is made clear.
Here is a fruitftd field of thought, which no minister,
teacher or student should neglect. Price by mail, 25c.
The Coal Problem^ 44 pages, pamplet. Price, 25c.
Here are some of the subjects on which it treats: A
Smoking World. Peat Bog Fuel Planetary Belts. Car-
bon Belts. Jupiter^ s Oceans. Coal Beds. Graphite Car-
^\
THE LAND OF THE NUGGET 67
hon Beds in Snow and Ice. Fossil Vegetation in CoaL
Oscillation of Sea and Land. Coal an Aqueous Deposit.
Equatorial Coals. Southern Hemisphere Coals y etc., etc.
The Great Red Dragon is a pamphlet showing that
all races looked to the vapor heavens as the home of the
water spirit^ and that Dragon was that spirit's name. The
The evidence on this point is conclusive beyond a doubt.
And when we read of a ** war in heaven," in which the
dragon was vanquished and cast down to the earth, we
may rest assured that we have a record of the solar forces
in conflict with vapor foes. I have, I think, made this
fact very plain. I have but few copies of this book left.
It has been revised and enlarged to 40 pages. It has
been more sought for than any other pamphlet, and the
new edition will be issued in the near future. I com-
mend this volume to the thoughtful attention of all. In
connection with this monograph is the enlarged picture
of the **Serpent Tablet" found in one of the **cliff dwell-
ings" of Southern Colorado. This tablet is the only
specimen of hieroglyphs ever found in those ancient
dwellings, and it is most valuable because it shows that
the cliff dwellers had a system of hieroglyphic in writing,
and because it shows that those people saw the march of
canopy vapors from the equator to the poles. The tablet is
simply a stone volume. The author of these pages has,
as he thinks, given its only interpretation, which will be
published in the second edition of the Great Red Dragon,
with an enlarged picture of the original, sold together for
35c, or each (pamphlet and picture separately) for 25c.
The Deluge and its Cause — Here is one more little
volume I will call the reader's attention to, the first the
author of this theory ventured to infliift upon the public.
It may be the first ever published on this subjedl.
Whether this be so or not, I have no little pride in parad-
ing it as a memorial — the conception, in great part, of a
68 ALASKA.
.:?l
young brain carious to look at the ''other sid^* of things. «^';{
Published in 1874, it contained at that early day the * \'
groundwork of the Annular Theory, in which the polar
trend of canopies, laden with metallic exhalations, is set ^,
forth as one of the chief agents in effe<$Ung geologic V <
changes. I have resolved never to revise it, save to elim- \ ^. 1
inate a few typographical errors, so that all editions have
and will be the same identical book so far as it can be, . : 1
even to type, size, color of cover, etc., as published when
tremblingly I sent it forth. Its fate and the immediate
fate of its author for publishing it, need not now be told
— a monograph of twenty pages sold, as a curiosity, for
ten cents.
To keep this theory in view the author has cham-
pioned it in season and out of season, and the reader may
be surprised to learn that the efforts made have cost more
in adlual outlay of money than has been received in cash
returns; but such is a fadl, and such it may always be — a
serious drawback to the growth of Annui^ar Truth.
All these publications are designed to put the various
phases of the Annular Theory before the reader. The
end .is not yet. The day is at hand when men, who are
abundantly more competent than the author of this the-
ory, will conclusively show that all ancient scriptures
must be explained according to Annular World Evolu-
tion,
'.I' A
^ K
; ^ach of the following publications is* a witness
in. favor of Annular World-mal^ijig.
1. The Earth's Annular System.— 400 pages, clotli;
5x7 inclies, by mail $2.
(Now revised and enlarged, and awaiting subscribers
for new edttioti.) ^
2.- The True Origin of Coal.— -Pamphlet 44 pages
3. Eden's FlMuing Sword*— PampMet 48 pages,
4. Eden's Golden Cross and Crown.-^ About 40
pages, 25c, , (Awaiting aqo subscribers.)
6. Ikei Deluge and Its Cause. — 20 pages, 10c.
6. T]^6 Annular World.— Monthly, 20 pages, loc
7. Trtte Origin of Oil and Gas.-^Leaflet ledure,
IOC.
8. Tiie Waters Above the Firmament.— Leaflet
» •
leftare^ 5c.
9- The Great Bed Dragon.— 30 pages, 250.
(But few copies left Will be republished.)
Nos. I, and 2 are chiefly geological. Nos. 3 and
4 are biblical and legendary. No. 5 is the first essay
on the Annular Theory, published first in 18^74. No.
6 largely mythological facts. Nos. 7 and 8 are lect-
ures delivered in Ohio in 1886. No. 9 proves the
world-serpent of all people to have been the spirit of
celestial waters. The whole list of single copies (ex-
cluding No. i) can be had for $1.2 5*
I. N. Vail,"
Pasadena, Cal.
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11