The next morning Henderson went on alone up the Klondike to Gold Bottom.  Carmack, by this time aroused, took a short cut afoot for the same place.  Accompanied by his two Indian brothers-in-law, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charley, he went up Rabbit Creek (now Bonanza), crossed into Gold Bottom, and staked near Henderson’s discovery.  On the way up he had panned a few shovels on Rabbit Creek, and he showed Henderson “colours” he had obtained.  Henderson made him promise, if he found anything on the way back, that he would send up one of the Indians with the news.  Henderson also agreed to pay for his service, for he seemed to feel that they were on the verge of something big, and he wanted to make sure.

Carmack returned down Rabbit Creek.  While he was taking a sleep on the bank about half a mile below the mouth of what was to be known as Eldorado, Skookum Jim tried his luck, and from surface prospects got from ten cents to a dollar to the pan.  Carmack and his brother-in-law staked and hit “the high places” for Forty Mile, where they filed on the claims before Captain Constantine, and renamed the creek Bonanza.  And Henderson was forgotten.  No word of it reached him.  Carmack broke his promise.

Weeks afterward, when Bonanza and Eldorado were staked from end to end and there was no more room, a party of late comers pushed over the divide and down to Gold Bottom, where they found Henderson still at work.  When they told him they were from Bonanza, he was nonplussed.  He had never heard of such a place.  But when they described it, he recognized it as Rabbit Creek.  Then they told him of its marvellous richness, and, as Tappan Adney relates, when Henderson realized what he had lost through Carmack’s treachery, “he threw down his shovel and went and sat on the bank, so sick at heart that it was some time before he could speak.”

Then there were the rest of the old-timers, the men of Forty Mile and Circle City.  At the time of the discovery, nearly all of them were over to the west at work in the old diggings or prospecting for new ones.  As they said of themselves, they were the kind of men who are always caught out with forks when it rains soup.  In the stampede that followed the news of Carmack’s strike very few old miners took part.  They were not there to take part.  But the men who did go on the stampede were mainly the worthless ones, the new-comers, and the camp hangers on.  And while Bob Henderson plugged away to the east, and the heroes plugged away to the west, the greenhorns and rounders went up and staked Bonanza.

But the Northland was not yet done with its joke.  When fall came on and the heroes returned to Forty Mile and to Circle City, they listened calmly to the up-river tales of Siwash discoveries and loafers’ prospects, and shook their heads.  They judged by the calibre of the men interested, and branded it a bunco game.  But glowing reports continued to trickle down the Yukon, and a few of the old-timers went up to see.  They looked over the ground—­the unlikeliest place for gold in all their experience—­and they went down the river again, “leaving it to the Swedes.”