WADA, FAMOUS JAP MUSHER, COMES INTO HIS OWN IN NORTH

After Spending Nearly Twenty Years in Alaska and Making Many Extraordinary Journeys, He Strikes Gold.

After spending nearly twenty years in Alaska, during which time he made many most extraordinary journeys and performed wonderful feats of endurance, Jujire Wada, the celebrated Japanese musher, at last has come into his own. He and his partner, John F. Baird, have made a strike on a tributary of the Tuluksak River, a tributary of the Kushkokwim, across a low divide from the recently discovered Aniak diggings.

They have obtained 500 acres of the property, and already have taken out considerable gold by the crudest methods.

This is the second strike Wada has made in the North. He was interested in a rich claim at Nome in 1899, but in 1900, during the Noyes reign of corruption a receiver was appointed, and when Wada got the claim back a year later, it had been denuded of its precious metal.

After offering to make a trip from the Pacific to the Atlantic through the Northwest passage traversed by Roald Amundsen, but failing to get backing for the journey, Wada left here more than a year ago, and stampeded to Good News Bay, where a strike had been made by Frank H. Waskey, Alaska's first delegate to Congress. The country there was all staked, and he moved on to the Iditarod.

Goes Over Divide.

Hearing of the Aniak discovery last January, the intrepid musher made a trip into that country, and finding everything located, continued over the divide to Bear Creek, a stream running into the Tuluksak.

Here he found four men working. They had taken out $12,000 by sniping. Wada immediately staked for himself and his partner, and then returned to Iditarod. He took his partner and a hand drill into the new find, and they sank several holes, finding pay in all but one. They panned out several ounces in the spring, and later started to dig a bedrock drain. This work being too great for them alone, Wada again came out, and went to Ruby City, and thence to Fairbanks. From the metropolis of the Tanana he journeyed to Nome, and thence to Seattle.

There were sixteen men and their outfits on the stream when the noted Japanese musher left the new diggings, and more were coming in. About twenty-five outfits were working at Aniak. Many of the old-timers from Nome and Fairbanks have gotten in on the ground floor on the New Eldorado.

Wada Very Conservative.

Wada is somewhat conservative in talking about the new strike.

"Just say we have got some good prospects, and an excellent chance of making some money," was the way he put it. Wada recalled that when he brought the first news of the gold strike at Fairbanks to Dawson, a lot of coldfooted miners who later stampeded there and were too lazy to work, came back and threatened to hang him for circulating false reports. The field at that time had produced more than $1,000,000, and later it repaid the purchase price of Alaska about five times over.

Bear Creek, on which the discovery was made, is about four feet to bedrock in the upper reaches, and its deepest ground is about eight feet. The gold is the second highest grade ever brought out of Alaska. Although dull and dirty in appearance, it yields $19.40 an ounce at the assay office. The ground is thawed. The creek is seventeen miles long and for a distance of nine miles from its mouth it is timbered with spruce and birch. Above that nothing but willows and alders grow. There is no big game in the country, but an abundance of spruce hens and ptarmigan, which are caught in the winter and pickled for the summer meat supply.

Wada will leave for San Francisco in a few days and will return to the North about two weeks hence.