The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Cariboo Trail, by Agnes C. Laut
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Title: The Cariboo Trail
A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia
Author: Agnes C. Laut
Release Date: September 1, 2009 [EBook #29885]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CARIBOO TRAIL ***
Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: The first Legislative Assembly of Vancouver Island
_Back Row_--J. W. M'Kay, J. D. Pemberton, J. Porter (Clerk)
_Front Row_--T. J. Skinner, J. S. Helmcken, M. D., James Yates
After a Photograph]
THE
CARIBOO TRAIL
A Chronicle of the Gold-fields
of British Columbia
BY
AGNES C. LAUT
TORONTO
GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY
1916
_Copyright in all Countries subscribing to
the Berne Convention_
{v}
CONTENTS
Page
I. THE 'ARGONAUTS' . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. THE PROSPECTOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
III. CARIBOO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
IV. THE OVERLANDERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
V. CROSSING THE MOUNTAINS . . . . . . . . . 68
VI. QUESNEL AND KAMLOOPS . . . . . . . . . . 80
VII. LIFE AT THE MINES . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
VIII. THE CARIBOO ROAD . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE . . . . . . . . . . 110
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
{vii}
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE FIRST LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF
VANCOUVER ISLAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
After a photograph.
THE CARIBOO COUNTRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _Facing page_ 1
Map by Bartholomew.
SIR JAMES DOUGLAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 10
From a portrait by Savannah.
INDIANS NEAR NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. . . . . . . . . . . . " " 12
From a photograph by Maynard.
IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 28
From a photograph.
A GROUP OF THOMPSON RIVER INDIANS . . . . . . . . . . . " " 36
From a photograph by Maynard.
SIR MATTHEW BAILLIE BEGBIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 38
From a portrait by Savannah.
A RED RIVER CART . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 58
From a photograph.
WASHING GOLD ON THE SASKATCHEWAN . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 62
From a photograph.
{viii}
IN THE YELLOWHEAD PASS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 64
From a photograph.
UPPER M'LEOD RIVER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 66
From a photograph.
THE CARIBOO ROAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 100
From a photograph.
INDIAN GRAVES AT LYTTON, B.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . " " 102
From a photograph.
[Illustration: Map of the Cariboo Country]
{1}
CHAPTER I
THE 'ARGONAUTS'
Early in 1849 the sleepy quiet of Victoria, Vancouver Island, was
disturbed by the arrival of straggling groups of ragged nondescript
wanderers, who were neither trappers nor settlers. They carried
blanket packs on their backs and leather bags belted securely round the
waist close to their pistols. They did not wear moccasins after the
fashion of trappers, but heavy, knee-high, hobnailed boots. In place
of guns over their shoulders, they had picks and hammers and such stout
sticks as mountaineers use in climbing. They did not forgather with
the Indians. They shunned the Indians and had little to say to any
one. They volunteered little information as to whence they had come or
whither they were going. They sought out Roderick Finlayson, chief
trader for the Hudson's Bay Company. They wanted provisions from the
company--yes--rice, flour, ham, salt, pepper, sugar, and tobacco; and
at the smithy they {2} demanded shovels, picks, iron ladles, and wire
screens. It was only when they came to pay that Finlayson felt sure of
what he had already guessed. They unstrapped those little leather bags
round under their cartridge belts and produced in tiny gold nuggets the
price of what they had bought.
Finlayson did not know exactly what to do. The fur-trader hated the
miner. The miner, wherever he went, sounded the knell of fur-trading;
and the trapper did not like to have his game preserve overrun by
fellows who scared off all animals from traps, set fire going to clear
away underbrush, and owned responsibility to no authority. No doubt
these men were 'argonauts' drifted up from the gold diggings of
California; no doubt they were searching for new mines; but who had
ever heard of gold in Vancouver Island, or in New Caledonia, as the
mainland was named? If there had been gold, would not the company have
found it? Finlayson probably thought the easiest way to get rid of the
unwelcome visitors was to let them go on into the dangers of the wilds
and then spread the news of the disappointment bound to be theirs.
He handled their nuggets doubtfully. Who knew for a certainty that it
was gold anyhow? {3} They bade him lay it on the smith's anvil and
strike it with a hammer. Finlayson, smiling sceptically, did as he was
told. The nuggets flattened to a yellow leaf as fine and flexible as
silk. Finlayson took the nuggets at eleven dollars an ounce and sent
the gold down to San Francisco, very doubtful what the real value would
prove. It proved sixteen dollars to the ounce.
For seven or eight years afterwards rumours kept floating in to the
company's forts of finds of gold. Many of the company's servants
drifted away to California in the wake of the 'Forty-Niners,' and the
company found it hard to keep its trappers from deserting all up and
down the Pacific Coast. The quest for gold had become a sort of
yellow-fever madness. Men flung certainty to the winds and trekked
recklessly to California, to Oregon, to the hinterland of the country
round Colville and Okanagan. Yet nothing occurred to cause any
excitement in Victoria. There was a short-lived flurry over the
discovery in Queen Charlotte Islands of a nugget valued at six hundred
dollars and a vein of gold-bearing quartz. But the nugget was an
isolated freak; the quartz could not be worked at a profit; and the
movement suddenly died out. {4} There were, however, signs of what was
to follow. The chief trader at the little fur-post of Yale reported
that when he rinsed sand round in his camp frying-pan, fine flakes and
scales of yellow could be seen at the bottom.[1] But gold in such
minute particles would not satisfy the men who were hunting nuggets.
It required treatment by quicksilver. Though Maclean, the chief factor
at Kamloops, kept all the specks and flakes brought to his post as
samples from 1852 to 1856, he had less than would fill a half-pint
bottle. If a half-pint is counted as a half-pound and the gold at the
company's price of eleven dollars an ounce, it will be seen why four
years of such discoveries did not set Victoria on fire.
It has been so with every discovery of gold in the history of the
world. The silent, shaggy, ragged first scouts of the gold stampede
wander houseless for years from hill to hill, from gully to gully, up
rivers, up stream beds, up dry watercourses, seeking the source of
those yellow specks seen far down the mountains near the sea.
Precipice, rapids, avalanche, winter storm, take their toll of dead.
Corpses are washed down in the spring floods; or the {5} thaw reveals a
prospector's shack smashed by a snowslide under which lie two dead
'pardners.' Then, by and by, when everybody has forgotten about it, a
shaggy man comes out of the wilds with a leather bag; the bag goes to
the mint; and the world goes mad.
Victoria went to sleep again. When men drifted in to trade dust and
nuggets for picks and flour, the fur-traders smiled, and rightly
surmised that the California diggings were playing out.
Though Vancouver Island was nominally a crown colony, it was still,
with New Caledonia, practically a fief of the Hudson's Bay Company.
James Douglas was governor. He was assisted in the administration by a
council of three, nominated by himself--John Tod, James Cooper, and
Roderick Finlayson. In 1856 a colonial legislature was elected and met
at Victoria in August for the first time.[2] But, {6} in fact, the
company owned the colony, and its will was supreme in the government.
John Work was the company's chief factor at Victoria and Finlayson was
chief trader.
Because California and Oregon had gone American, some small British
warships lay at Esquimalt harbour. The little fort had expanded beyond
the stockade. The governor's house was to the east of the stockade. A
new church had been built, and the Rev. Edward Cridge, afterwards known
as Bishop Cridge, was the rector. Two schools had been built. Inside
the fort were perhaps forty-five employees. Inside and outside lived
some eight hundred people. But grass grew in the roads. There was no
noise but the church bell or the fort bell, or the flapping of a sail
while a ship came to anchor. Three hundred acres about the fort were
worked by the company as a farm, which gave employment to about two
dozen workmen, and on which were perhaps a hundred cattle and a score
of brood mares. The company also had a saw-mill. Buildings of huge,
squared timbers flanked three sides of the inner stockades--the
dining-hall, the cook-house, the bunk-house, the store, the trader's
house. There were two bastions, and from each cannon pointed. Close
to the {7} wicket at the main entrance stood the postoffice. Only a
fringe of settlement went beyond the company's farm. The fort was
sound asleep, secure in an eternal certainty that the domain which it
guarded would never be overrun by American settlers as California and
Oregon had been. The little Admiralty cruisers which lay at Esquimalt
were guarantee that New Caledonia should never be stampeded into a
republic by an inrush of aliens. Then, as now, it was Victoria's boast
that it was more English than England.
So passed Christmas of '57 with plum-pudding and a roasted ox and
toasts to the crown and the company, though we cannot be quite sure
that the company was not put before the crown in the souls of the
fur-traders.
Then, in March 1858, just when Victoria felt most secure as the capital
of a perpetual fur realm, something happened. A few Yankee prospectors
had gone down on the Hudson's Bay steamer _Otter_ to San Francisco in
February with gold dust and nuggets from New Caledonia to exchange for
money at the mint. The Hudson's Bay men had thought nothing of this.
Other treasure-seekers had come to New Caledonia before and had gone
back to San Francisco disappointed. But, in March, these {8} men
returned to Victoria. And with them came a mad rabble of gold-crazy
prospectors. A city of tents sprang up overnight round Victoria. The
smithy was besieged for picks, for shovels, for iron ladles. Men stood
in long lines for their turn at the trading-store. By canoe, by
dugout, by pack-horse, and on foot, they planned to ascend the Fraser,
and they mobbed the company for passage to Langley by the first steamer
out from Victoria. Goods were paid for in cash. Before Finlayson
could believe his own eyes, he had two million dollars in his safe,
some of it for purchases, some of it on deposit for safe keeping.
Though the company gave no guarantee to the depositors and simply
sealed each man's leather pouch as it was placed in the safe, no
complaint was ever made against it of dishonesty or unfair treatment.
Without waiting instructions from England and with poignant memory of
Oregon, Governor Douglas at once clapped on a licence of twenty-one
shillings a month for mining privileges under the British crown. Thus
he obtained a rough registration of the men going to the up-country;
but thousands passed Victoria altogether and went in by pack-train from
Okanagan or rafted across from Puget Sound. {9} The month of March had
not ended when the first band of gold hunters arrived and settled down
a mile and a half below Yale. Another boat-load of eight hundred and
fifty came in April. In four months sixty-seven vessels, carrying from
a hundred to a thousand men each, had come up from San Francisco to
Victoria. Crews deserted their ships, clerks deserted the company,
trappers turned miners and took to the gold-bars. Before Victoria
awoke to what it was all about, twenty thousand people were camped
under tents outside the stockade, and the air was full of the wildest
rumours of fabulous gold finds.
The snowfall had been heavy in '58. In the spring the Fraser rolled to
the sea a swollen flood. Against the turbid current worked tipsy rafts
towed by wheezy steamers or leaky old sailing craft, and rickety
row-boats raced cockle-shell canoes for the gold-bars above. Ashore,
the banks of the river were lined with foot passengers toiling under
heavy packs, wagons to which clung human forms on every foot of space,
and long rows of pack-horses bogged in the flood of the overflowing
river. By September ten thousand men were rocking and washing for gold
round Yale.
As in the late Kootenay and in the still later {10} Klondike stampede,
American cities at the coast benefited most. Victoria was a ten-hour
trip from the mainland. Whatcom and Townsend, on the American side,
advertised the advantages of the Washington route to the Fraser river
gold-mines. A mushroom boom in town lots had sprung up at these points
before Victoria was well awake. By the time speculators reached
Victoria the best lots in that place had already been bought by the
company's men; and some of the substantial fortunes of Victoria date
from this period. Though the river was so high that the richest bars
could not be worked till late in August, five hundred thousand dollars
in gold was taken from the bed of the Fraser during the first six
months of '58. This amount, divided among the ten thousand men who
were on the bars around Yale, would not average as much as they could
have earned as junior clerks with the fur company, or as peanut pedlars
in San Francisco; but not so does the mind of the miner work. Here was
gold to be scooped up for nothing by the first comer; and more vessels
ploughed their way up the Fraser, though Governor Douglas sought to
catch those who came by Puget Sound and evaded licence by charging six
dollars toll each for all {11} canoes on the Fraser and twelve dollars
for each vessel with decks. Later these tolls were disallowed by the
home authorities. The prompt action of Douglas, however, had the
effect of keeping the mining movement in hand. Though the miners were
of the same class as the 'argonauts' of California, they never broke
into the lawlessness that compelled vigilance committees in San
Francisco.
[Illustration: Sir James Douglas. From a portrait by Savannah]
Judge Howay gives the letter of a treasure-seeker who reached the
Fraser in April, the substance of which is as follows:
We're now located thirty miles above the junction of the Fraser and the
Thompson on Fraser River... About a fourth of the canoes that attempt
to come up are lost in the rapids which extend from Fort Yale nearly to
the Forks. A few days ago six men were drowned by their canoe
upsetting. There is more danger going down than coming up. There can
be no doubt about this country being immensely rich in gold. Almost
every bar on the river from Yale up will pay from three dollars to
seven dollars a day to the man at the present stage of water. When the
river gets low, which will be about August, the bars will pay very
well. One hundred and ninety-six dollars was taken out by one man last
winter in a few hours, but the water was then at its lowest stage. The
gold on the bars is all very fine and hard to save in a rocker, but
with quicksilver properly {12} managed, good wages can be made almost
anywhere on the river as long as the bars are actually covered with
water. We have not yet been able to find a place where we can work
anything but rockers. If we could get a sluice to work, we could make
from twelve dollars to sixteen dollars a day each. We only commenced
work yesterday and we are satisfied that when we get fully under way we
can make from five dollars to seven dollars a day each. The prospect
is better as we go up the river on the bars. The gold is not any
coarser, but there is more of it. There are also in that region
diggings of coarser gold on small streams that empty into the main
river. A few men have been there and proved the existence of rich
diggings by bringing specimens back with them. The Indians all along
the river have gold in their possession that they say they dug
themselves, but they will not tell where they get it, nor allow small
parties to go up after it. I have seen pieces in their possession
weighing two pounds. The Indians above are disposed to be troublesome
and went into a camp twenty miles above us and forcibly took provisions
and arms from a party of four men and cut two severely with their
knives. They came to our camp the same day and insisted that we should
trade with them or leave the country. We design to remain here until
we can get a hundred men together, when we will move up above the falls
and do just what we please without regard to the Indians. We are at
present the highest up of any white men on the river, and we must go
higher to be satisfied. {13} I don't apprehend any danger from the
Indians at present, but there will be hell to pay after a while. There
is a pack-trail from Hope, but it cannot be travelled till the snow is
off the mountains.
The prices of provisions are as follows: flour thirty-five dollars per
hundred-weight, pork a dollar a pound, beans fifty cents a pound, and
other things in proportion. Every party that starts from the Sound
should have their own supplies to last them three or four months, and
they should bring the largest size chinook canoes, as small ones are
very liable to swamp in the rapids. Each canoe should be provided with
thirty fathoms of strong line for towing over swift water, and every
man well armed. The Indians here can beat anything alive stealing.
They will soon be able to steal a man's food after he has eaten it.
[Illustration: Indians near New Westminster, B.C. From a photograph by
Maynard.]
Within two miles of Yale eighty Indians and thirty white men were
working the gold-bars; and log boarding-houses and saloons sprang up
along the river-bank as if by magic. Naturally, the last comers of '58
were too late to get a place on the gold-bars, and they went back to
the coast in disgust, calling the gold stampede 'the Fraser River
humbug.' Nevertheless, men were washing, sluicing, rocking, and
digging gold as far as Lillooet. Often the day's yield ran as high as
eight hundred dollars a man; and the higher up the treasure-seekers
{14} pushed their way, the coarser grew the gold flakes and grains.
Would the golden lure lead finally to the mother lode of all the yellow
washings? That is the hope that draws the prospector from river to
stream, from stream to dry gully bed, from dry gully to precipice edge,
and often over the edge to death or fortune.
Exactly fifty-six years from the first rush of '58 in the month of
April, I sat on the banks of the Fraser at Yale and punted across the
rapids in a flat-bottomed boat and swirled in and out among the eddies
of the famous bars. A Siwash family lived there by fishing with clumsy
wicker baskets. Higher up could be seen some Chinamen, but whether
they were fishing or washing we could not tell. Two transcontinental
railroads skirted the canyon, one on each side, and the tents of a
thousand construction workers stood where once were the camps of the
gold-seekers banded together for protection. When we came back across
the river an old, old man met us and sat talking to us on the bank. He
had come to the Fraser in that first rush of '58. He had been one of
the leaders against the murderous bands of Indians. Then, he had
pushed on up the river to Cariboo, travelling, as he told us, by {15}
the Indian trails over 'Jacob's ladders'--wicker and pole swings to
serve as bridges across chasms--wherever the 'float' or sign of mineral
might lead him. Both on the Fraser and in Cariboo he had found his
share of luck and ill luck; and he plainly regretted the passing of
that golden age of danger and adventure. 'But,' he said, pointing his
trembling old hands at the two railways, 'if we prospectors hadn't
blazed the trail of the canyon, you wouldn't have your railroads here
to-day. They only followed the trail we first cut and then built. We
followed the "float" up and they followed us.'
What the trapper was to the fur trade, the prospector was to the mining
era that ushered civilization into the wilds with a blare of
dance-halls and wine and wassail and greed. Ragged, poor, roofless,
grubstaked by 'pardner' or outfitter on a basis of half profit, the
prospector stands as the eternal type of the trail-maker for finance.
[1] The same, of course, may be done to-day, with a like result, at
many places along the Fraser and even on the Saskatchewan.
[2] This was the first Legislative Assembly to meet west of Upper
Canada in what is now the Canadian Dominion. It consisted of seven
members, as follows: J. D. Pemberton, James Yates, E. E. Langford, J.
S. Helmcken, Thomas J. Skinner, John Muir, and J. F. Kennedy.
Langford, however, retired almost immediately after the election and J.
W. M'Kay was elected in his stead. The portraits of five of the
members are preserved in the group which appears as the frontispiece to
this volume. The photograph was probably taken at a later period; at
any rate, two of the members, Muir and Kennedy, are missing.
{16}
CHAPTER II
THE PROSPECTOR
By September, when mountain rivers are at their lowest, every bar on
the Fraser from Yale to the forks of the Thompson was occupied. The
Hudson's Bay steamer _Otter_ made regular trips up the Fraser to Fort
Langley; and from the fort an American steamer called the _Enterprise_,
owned by Captain Tom Wright, breasted the waters as far as the swift
current at Yale. At Yale was a city of tents and hungry men. Walter
Moberly tells how, when he ascended the Fraser with Wright in the
autumn of '58, the generous Yankee captain was mobbed by penniless and
destitute men for return passage to the coast. Many a broken
treasure-seeker owed his life to Tom Wright's free passage.
Fortunately, there was always good fishing on the Fraser; but salt was
a dollar twenty-five a pound, butter a dollar twenty-five a pound, and
flour rarer than nuggets. So hard up were some of the {17} miners for
pans to wash their gold, that one desperate fellow went to a log shack
called a grocery store, and after paying a dollar for the privilege of
using a grindstone, bought an empty butter vat at the pound price of
butter--twelve dollars for an empty butter tub! Half a dollar was the
smallest coin used, and clothing was so scarce that when a Chinaman's
pig chewed up Walter Moberly's boots while the surveyor lay asleep in
his shack, Mr Moberly had to foot it twenty-five miles before he could
find another pair of boots. Saloons occupied every second shack at
Yale and Hope; revolvers were in all belts and each man was his own
sheriff; yet there was little lawlessness.
With claims filed on all gold-bearing bars, what were the ten thousand
men to do camped for fifty miles beyond Yale? Those who had no
provisions and could not induce any storekeeper to grubstake them for a
winter's prospecting, quit the country in disgust; and the price of
land dropped in the boom towns of the Fraser as swiftly as it had been
ballooned up. Prospecting during the winter in a country of heavy
snowfall did not seem a sane project. And yet the eternal question
urged the miners on: from what mother lode are {18} these flakes and
nuggets washed down to the sand-bars of the Fraser? Gold had also been
found in cracks in the rock along the river. Whence had it come? The
man farthest upstream in spring would be on the ground first for the
great find that was bound to make some seeker's fortune. So all stayed
who could. Fortunately, the winter of '58-'59 was mild, the autumn
late, the snowfall light, and the spring very early. Fate, as usual,
favoured the dauntless.
In parties of twos and tens and twenties, and even as many as five
hundred, the miners began moving up the river prospecting. Those with
horses had literally to cut the way with their axes over windfall, over
steep banks, and round precipitous cliffs. Where rivers had to be
crossed, the men built rude rafts and poled themselves over, with their
pack-horses swimming behind. Those who had oxen killed the oxen and
sold the beef. Others breasted the mill-race of the Fraser in canoes
and dugouts. Governor Douglas estimated that before April of '59 as
many as three hundred boats with five men in each had ascended the
Fraser. Sometimes the amazing spectacle was seen of canoes lashed
together in the fashion of pontoon bridges, with wagons full of
provisions {19} braced across the canoes. These travellers naturally
did not attempt Fraser Canyon.
Before Christmas of '59 prospectors had spread into Lillooet and up the
river as high as Chilcotin, Soda Creek, Alexandria, Cottonwood Canyon,
Quesnel, and Fort George. It was safer to ascend such wild streams
than to run with the current, though countless canoes and their
occupants were never heard of after leaving Yale. Where the turbid
yellow flood began to rise and 'collect'--a boatman's phrase--the men
would scramble ashore, and, by means of a long tump-line tied--not to
the prow, which would send her sidling--to the middle of the first
thwart, would tow their craft slowly up-stream. I have passed up and
down Fraser Canyon too often to count the times, and have canoed one
wild rapid twice, but never without wondering how those first
gold-seekers managed the ascent in that winter of '59.
There was no Cariboo Road then. There was only the narrow footpath of
the trapper and the fisherman close down to the water; and when the
rocks broke off in sheer precipice, an unsteady bridge of poles and
willows spanned the abyss. A 'Jacob's ladder' a hundred feet above a
roaring whirlpool without {20} handhold on either side was one thing
for the Indian moccasin and quite another thing for the miner's
hobnailed boot. The men used to strip at these places and attempt the
rock walls barefoot; or else they cached their canoe in a tree, or hid
it under moss, lashed what provisions they could to a dog's back, and,
with a pack strapped to their own back, proceeded along the bank on
foot. The trapper carries his pack with a strap round his forehead.
The miner ropes his round under his shoulders. He wants hands and neck
free for climbing. Usually the prospectors would appoint a rendezvous.
There, provisions would be slung in the trees above the reach of
marauding beasts, and the party would disperse at daybreak, each to
search in a different direction, blazing trees as he went ahead so that
he could find the way back at night to the camp. Distress or a find
was to be signalled by a gunshot or by heliograph of sunlight on a
pocket mirror; but many a man strayed beyond rescue of signal and never
returned to his waiting 'pardners.' Some were caught in snowslides,
only to be dug out years later.
Many signs guided the experienced prospector. Streams clear as crystal
came, he knew, from upper snows. Those swollen at midday {21} came
from near-by snowfields. Streams milky or blue or peacock green came
from glaciers--ice grinding over rock.
Heavy mists often added to the dangers. I stood at the level of eight
thousand feet in this region once with one of the oldest prospectors of
the canyon. He had been a great hunter in his day. A cloud came
through a defile of the peaks heavy as a blanket. Though we were on a
well-cut bridle-trail, he bade us pause, as one side of the trail had a
sheer drop of four thousand feet in places. 'Before there were any
trails, how did you make your way here to hunt the mountain goat when
this kind of fog caught you?' I asked.
'Threw chips of stone ahead and listened,' he answered, 'and let me
tell you that only the greenest kind of tenderfoot ever takes risks on
a precipice.'
And nine men out of ten were such green tenderfoots that winter of
'58-'59, when five thousand prospectors overran the wild canyons and
precipices of the Fraser. Two or three things the prospector always
carried with him--matches, a knife, a gun, rice, flour, bacon, and a
little mallet-shaped hammer to test the 'float.' What was the 'float'?
A sandy chunk of gravel perhaps flaked with {22} yellow specks the size
of a pin-head. He wanted to know where that chunk rolled down from.
He knocked it open with his mallet. If it had a shiny yellow pebble
inside only the size of a pea, the miner would stay on that bank and
begin bench diggings into the dry bank. By the spring of '59 dry bench
diggings had extended back fifty miles from the river. If the chunk
revealed only tiny yellow specks, perhaps mixed with white quartz, the
miner would try to find where it rolled from and would ascend the
gully, or mountain torrent, or precipice. Queer stories are told of
how during that winter almost bankrupt grocers grubstaked prospectors
with bacon and flour and received a half-interest in a mine that
yielded five or six hundred dollars a day in nuggets.
But for one who found a mine a thousand found nothing. The sensations
of the lucky one beggared description. 'Was it luck or was it
perseverance?' I asked the man who found one of the richest
silver-mines in the Big Bend of the Columbia. 'Both and mostly
dogged,' he answered. 'Take our party as a type of prospectors from
'59 to '89, the thirty years when the most of the mining country was
exploited. We had come up, eleven {23} green kids and one old man,
from Washington. We had roughed it in East and West Kootenay and were
working south to leave the country dead broke. We had found "float" in
plenty, and had followed it up ridges and over divides across three
ranges of mountains. Our horses were plumb played out. We had camped
on a ridge to let them fatten up enough to beat it out of British
Columbia for ever. Well, we found some galena "floats" in a dry gully
on the other side of the valley. We had provisions left for only
eleven days. Some of the boys said they would go out and shoot enough
deer to last us for meat till we could get out of the country. Old
Sandy and I thought we would try our luck for just one day. We
followed that "float" clear across the valley. We found more up the
bed of a raging mountain torrent; but the trouble was that the stream
came over a rock sheer as the wall of a house. I was afraid we'd lose
the direction if we left the stream bed, but I could see high up the
precipice where it widened out in a bench. You couldn't reach it from
below, but you could from above, so we blazed the trees below to keep
our direction and started up round the hog's back to drop to the bank
under. By now it was nightfall, and we hadn't had {24} anything to eat
since six that morning. Old Sandy wanted to go back, but I wouldn't
let him. He was trembling like an aspen leaf. It is so often just the
one pace more that wins or loses the race. We laboured up that slope
and reached the bench just at dark. We were so tired we had hauled
ourselves up by trees, brushwood branches, anything. I looked over the
edge of the rock. It dropped to that shelf we had seen from the gully
below. It was too dark to do anything more; we knew the fellows back
at the camp on the ridge would be alarmed, but we were too far to
signal.'
'How far?' I asked.
'About twenty-two miles. We threw ourselves down to sleep. It was
terribly cold. We were high up and the fall frosts were icy, I tell
you! I woke aching at daybreak. Old Sandy was still sleeping. I
thought I would let myself down over the ledge and see what was below,
for there were no mineral signs where we were. I crawled over the
ledge, and by sticking my fingers and toes in the rocks got down to
about fifteen feet from the drop to a soft grassy level. I looked,
hung for a moment, let go, and "lit" on all fours. Then I looked up!
The sun had just come over that east ridge and hit the rocks. I can't
talk {25} about it yet! I went mad! I laughed! I cried! I howled!
There wasn't an ache left in my bones. I forgot that my knees knocked
from weakness and that we had not had a bite for twenty-four hours. I
yelled at Old Sandy to wake the dead. He came crawling over the ledge
and peeked down. "What's the matter?" says he. "Matter," I yelled.
"Wake up, you old son of a gun; we are millionaires!" There, sticking
right out of the rock, was the ledge where "float" had been breaking
and washing for hundreds of years; so you see, only eleven days from
the time we were going to give up, we made our find. That mine paid
from the first load of ore sent out by pack-horses.'
Other mines were found in a less spectacular way. The 'float' lost
itself in a rounded knoll in the lap of a dozen peaks; and the miners
had to decide which of the benches to tunnel. They might have to bring
the stream from miles distant to sluice out the gravel; and the largest
nuggets might not be found till hundreds of feet had been washed out;
but always the 'float,' the pebbles, the specks that shone in the sun,
lured them with promise. Even for those who found no mine the search
was not without reward. There was {26} the care-free outdoor life.
There was the lure of hope edging every sunrise. There was the
fresh-washed ozone fragrant with the resinous exudations of the great
trees of the forest. There was the healing regeneration to body and
soul. Amid the dance-halls and saloons the miner with money becomes a
sot. Out in the wilds he becomes a child of nature, simple and clean
and elemental as the trees around him or the stars above him.
I think of one prospector whose range was at the headwaters of the
Athabaska. In the dance-halls he had married a cheap variety actress.
When the money of his first find had been dissipated she refused to
live with him, and tried to extort high alimony by claiming their
two-year-old son. The penniless prospector knew that he was no equal
for law courts and sheriffs and lawyers; so he made him a raft, got a
local trader to outfit him, and plunged with his baby boy into the
wilderness, where no sheriff could track him. I asked him why he did
not use pack-horses. He said dogs could have tracked them, but 'the
water didn't leave no smell.' In the heart of the wilderness west of
Mounts Brown and Hooker he built him a log cabin with a fireplace. In
that cabin he daily hobbled his little son, so {27} that the child
could not fall in the fire. He set his traps round the mountains and
hunted till the snow cleared. By the time he could go prospecting in
spring he had seven hundred dollars' worth of furs to sell; and he kept
the child with him in the wilds till his wife danced herself across the
boundary. Then he brought the boy down and sent him to school. When
the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the Rockies, that man became one
of the famous guides. He was the first guide I ever employed in the
mountains.
Up-stream, then, headed the prospectors on the Fraser in that autumn of
'58. The miner's train of pack-horses is a study in nature. There is
always the wise old bell-mare leading the way. There is always the
lazy packer that has to be nipped by the horse behind him. There are
always the shanky colts who bolt to stampede where the trail widens;
but even shanky-legged colts learn to keep in line in the wilds. At
every steep ascent the pack-train halts, girths are tightened, and sly
old horses blow out their sides to deceive the driver. At first colts
try to rub packs off on every passing tree, but a few tumbles heels
over head down a bank cure them of that trick.
Always the course in new territory is {28} according to the slope of
the ground. River-bank is followed where possible; but where windfall
or precipice drives back from the bed of the river over the mountain
spurs, the pathfinder takes his bearings from countless signs. Moss is
on the north side of tree-trunks. A steep slope compels a zigzag,
corkscrew ascent, but the slope of the ground guides the climber as to
the way to go; for slope means valley; and in valleys are streams; and
in the stream is the 'float,' which is to the prospector the one
shining signal to be followed. Timber-line is passed till the forests
below look like dank banks of moss. Cloud-line is passed till the
clouds lie underneath in grey lakes and pools. A 'fool hen' or
mountain grouse comes out and bobbles her head at the passing
packtrain. A whistling marmot pops up from the rocks and pierces the
stillness. Redwings and waxbills pick crumbs from every camp meal; and
occasionally a bald-headed eagle utters a lonely raucous cry from
solitary perch of dead branch or high rock.
[Illustration: In the Rocky Mountains. From a photograph.]
Naturally enough, the pack-train unconsciously follows the game-trail
of deer and goat and cougar and bear across the slope to the
watering-places where springs gush out from the rocks. One has only to
look close enough {29} to see the little cleft footprint of the deer
round these springs. To the miners, penetrating the wilds north of the
Fraser, the caribou proved a godsend during that lean first winter.
The miners spelled it 'cariboo,' and thus gave the great gold area its
name.
The population of Yale that winter consisted of some eight hundred
people, housed in tents and log shacks roofed with canvas. Between
Yale and Hope remained two thousand miners during the winter. Meals
cost a dollar, served on tin plates to diners standing in long rows
waiting turn at the counter. The regular menu at all meals was bacon,
salmon, bread, and coffee. Of butter there was little; of milk, none.
Wherever a sand-bar gave signs of mineral, it was tested with the
primitive frying-pan. If the pan showed a deposit, the miner rigged up
a rocker--a contraption resembling a cradle with rockers below, about
four feet from end to end, two feet across, and two deep. The sides
converged to bottom. At the head was a perforated sheet-iron bottom
like a housewife's colander. Into this box the gravel was shovelled by
one miner. The man's 'pardner' poured in water and rocked the
cradle--cradled the sand. The water ran through the perforated bottom
to a second {30} floor of quicksilver or copperplate or woolly blanket
which caught the gold. On a larger scale, when streams were directed
through wooden boxes, the gold was sluiced; on a still larger scale,
the process was hydraulic mining, though the same in principle. In
fact, in huge free milling works, where hydraulic machinery crushes the
gold-bearing quartz and screens it to fineness before catching the gold
on delicate sieves, the process is only a complex refinement of the
bar-washer cradling his gold.
Fires had not yet cleared the giant hemlock forests, as they have
to-day along the Cariboo Trail, and prospectors found their way through
a chartless sea of windfall--hemlocks criss-crossed the height of a
house with branches interlaced like wire. Cataracts fell over lofty
ledges in wind-blown spray. Spanish moss, grey-green and feathery,
hung from branch to branch of the huge Douglas firs. Sometimes the
trail would lead for miles round the edge of some precipices beyond
which could be glimpsed the eternal snows. Sometimes an avalanche slid
over a slope with the distant appearance of a great white waterfall and
the echo of muffled thunder. Where the mountain was swept as by a
mighty besom, the pack-train kept an anxious eye on the snow {31} amid
the valleys of the upper peaks; for, in an instant, the snowslide might
come over the edge of the upper valley to sweep down the slope,
carrying away forests, rocks, trail, pack-train and all. The story is
told of one slide seen by the guide at the head of a long pack-train.
He had judged it to be ten miles away; but out from the upper valley it
came coiling like a long white snake, and before he could turn, it had
caught him. In a slide death was almost certain, from suffocation if
not from the crush of falling trees and rocks. Miners have been taken
from their cabins dead in the trail of a snowslide that swept the shack
to the bottom of the valley without so much as a hair of their heads
being injured. Though the logs were twisted and warped, the dead
bodies were not even bruised.
When a hushed whisper came through the trees, travellers looked for
some waterfall. At midday, when the thaw was at its full, all the
mountain torrents became vocal with the glee of disimprisoned life
running a race of gladness to the sea. The sun sets early in the
mountains with a gradual hushing of the voice of glad waters and a red
glow as of wine on the encircling peaks. Camp for the night was always
near water for the horses; and every {32} star was etched in replica in
river or lake. Sunrise steals in silence among the mountain peaks.
There is none of that stir of song and vague rustling of animal life
such as are heard at lower levels. Nor does the light gradually rise
above the eastern horizon. The walled peaks cut off the skyline in
mid-heaven. The stars pale. Trees and crags are mirrored in the lake
so clearly that one can barely tell which is real and which is
reflection. Then the water-lines shorten and the rocks emerge from the
belts and wisps of mist; and all the sunset colours of the night before
repeat themselves across the changing scene. As you look, the clouds
lift. The cook shouts 'breakfast!' And it is another day.
Such was the trail and the life of the prospector who beat his way by
pack-train and canoe up the canyons of the Fraser to learn whence came
the wash of gold flake and nugget which he found in the sand-bars below.
{33}
CHAPTER III
CARIBOO
Indian unrest was probably first among the causes which led the miners
to organize themselves into leagues for protection. The Indians of the
Fraser were no more friendly to newcomers now than they had been in the
days of Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser.[1] They now professed
great alarm for their fishing-grounds. Men on the gold-bars were
jostled and hustled, and pegs marking limits were pulled up. A danger
lay in the rows of saloons along the water-front--the well-known danger
of liquor to the Indian. So the miners at Yale formed a vigilance
committee and established self-made laws. The saloons should be
abolished, they decreed. Sale of liquor to any person whomsoever was
forbidden. All liquor, wherever found, was ordered spilled. Any one
selling liquor to an Indian should be seized and whipped thirty-nine
lashes on the {34} bare back. A standing committee of twelve was
appointed to enforce the law till the regular government should be
organized.
It was July '58 when the miners on the river-bars formed their
committee. And they formed it none too soon, for the Indians were on
the war-path in Washington and the unrest had spread to New Caledonia.
Young M'Loughlin, son of the famous John M'Loughlin of Oregon, coming
up the Columbia overland from Okanagan to Kamloops with a hundred and
sixty men, four hundred pack-horses and a drove of oxen, had three men
sniped off by Indians in ambush and many cattle stolen. At Big Canyon
on the Fraser two Frenchmen were found murdered. When word came of
this murder the vigilance committee of Yale formed a rifle company of
forty, which in August started up to the forks at Lytton. At Spuzzum
there was a fight. Indians barred the way; but they were routed and
seven of them killed in a running fire, and Indian villages along the
river were burned. Meanwhile a hundred and sixty volunteers at Yale
formed a company to go up the river under Captain Snyder. The
company's trader at Yale was reluctant to supply arms, for the
company's policy had ever been to conciliate the Indians. {35} But,
when a rabble of two thousand angry miners gathered round the store,
the rifles were handed over on condition that forty of the worst
fire-eaters in the band should remain behind. Snyder then led his men
up the river and joined the first company at Spuzzum. At China Bar
five miners were found hiding in a hole in the bank. With a number of
companions they had been driven down-stream from the Thompson by
Indians and had been sniped all the way for forty miles. Man after man
had fallen, and the five survivors in the bank were all wounded.
When the Indians saw the company of armed men under Snyder, they fled
to the hills. Flags of truce were displayed on both sides and a peace
was patched up till Governor Douglas could come up from the coast.
Not, however, before there occurred an unfortunate incident. At Long
Bar, when an Indian chief came with a flag of truce, two of the white
men snatched it from him and trampled it in the mud. On the instant
the Indians shot both the white men where they stood.
Douglas had been up as far as Yale in June, but was now back in
Victoria, where couriers brought him word of the open fight in August.
He promptly organized a force of Royal {36} Engineers and marines and
set out for the scene of the disorders. Royal Engineers to the number
of a hundred and fifty-six and their families had come out from England
for the boundary survey; and their presence must have seemed
providential to Douglas, now that the miners were forming vigilance
committees of their own and the Indians were on the war-path. He went
up the river in a small cruiser and reached Hope on the 1st of
September. Salutes were fired as he landed. Douglas knew how to use
all the pomp of regimentals and formality to impress the Indians. He
opened a solemn powwow with the chiefs of the Fraser. As usual, the
white man's fire-water was found to be the chief cause of the trouble.
Without waiting for legislative authority, Douglas issued a royal
proclamation against the sale of liquor and left a mining recorder to
register claims. He also appointed a justice of the peace. Then he
went on to Yale. At Yale he considered the price of provisions too
high, and by arbitrarily reducing the price at the company's stores, he
broke the ring of the petty dealers. This won him the friendship of
the miners. Within a week he had allayed all irritation between white
man and Indian. In a quarrel over a claim a {37} white man had been
murdered on one of the bars. Douglas appointed magistrates to try the
case. The trial was of course illegal, for colonial government had not
been formally inaugurated in New Caledonia or British Columbia, as it
was soon to be known, and Douglas's authority as governor did not
extend beyond Vancouver Island. But so, for that matter, were illegal
all his actions on this journey; yet by an odd inconsistency of fact
against law, they restored peace and order on the river.
[Illustration: A group of Thompson River Indians. From a photograph by
Maynard.]
It was not long, however, before the formal organization of the new
colony took place. Hardly had Douglas returned to Victoria when ships
from England arrived bringing his commission as governor of British
Columbia. Arrived, also, Matthew Baillie Begbie, 'a Judge in our
Colony of British Columbia,' and a detachment of Royal Engineers under
command of Colonel Moody. At Fort Langley, on November 19, 1858, the
colony of British Columbia was proclaimed under the laws of England.
Then, in January, just as Douglas and the officers of his government
had again settled down comfortably at Victoria, came word of more riots
at Yale, led by a notorious desperado {38} and deposed judge of
California named Ned M'Gowan. The possibility of American occupation
had become an obsession at Victoria. There were undoubtedly those
among the American miners who made wild boasts. Douglas gathered up
all his panoply of war and law. Along went Colonel Moody, with a
company of his Royal Engineers, Lieutenant Mayne of the Imperial Navy
with a hundred bluejackets, and Judge Matthew Begbie, to deal out
justice to the offenders. Douglas remembered the cry 'fifty-four forty
or fight,' and he remembered what had happened to his chief,
M'Loughlin, in Oregon when the American settlers there had set up
vigilance committees. He would take no chances. The party carried
along a small cannon. Lieutenant Mayne could not take his cruiser the
_Plumper_ higher than Langley; and there the forces were transferred to
Tom Wright's stern-wheeler, the _Enterprise_. But, when they arrived
at Hope, the whole affair looked like semi-comic vaudeville. Yale,
too, was as quiet as a church prayer-meeting; and Colonel Moody
preached a sermon on Sunday to a congregation of forty in the
court-house--the first church service ever held on the mainland of
British Columbia.
[Illustration: Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie. From a portrait by
Savannah.]
{39}
The trouble had happened in this way. Christmas Day had been
celebrated hilariously. At Yale a miner of Hill's Bar, some miles down
the river, had beaten up a negro. The Yale magistrate had issued a
warrant for the miner's arrest--poor magistrate, he had found little to
do since his appointment in September! The miner, now sobered, fled
back to his bar. The warrant was sent after him to the local peace
officer for execution, but this officer had already issued a warrant
for the arrest of the negro at Yale; so there it stood--each fighter
making complaint against the other and the two magistrates in lordly
contempt of each other! The man who tried to arrest the negro was
insolent and was jailed by the Yale magistrate. Ned M'Gowan, the
Californian down on the bar, then came up to Yale with a posse of
twenty men to arrest the magistrate for arresting the man who had been
sent to arrest the negro. Bursting with rage, the astonished dignitary
at Yale was bundled into a canoe. He was fined fifty dollars for
contempt of court.
It was at this stage of the comedy of errors that Moody, Begbie, and
Mayne came on the scene. At first M'Gowan showed truculence and
assailed Moody; but when he saw the {40} force of engineers and
bluejackets and saw the big gun hoisted ashore, he apologized, paid his
fine for the assault, and invited the officers to a champagne dinner on
Hill's Bar. Both sides to the quarrel cooled down and the riots ended.
The army stayed only to see the miners wash the gold and then put back
to Victoria. The miners had learned that an English judge and a field
force could be put on the ground in a week. September had settled
disorder among the Indians. January settled disorder among the whites.
In the wild remote regions of the up-country there was much 'claim
jumping.' A man lost his claim if he stopped mining for seventy-two
hours, and when the place of registration was far from the find,
'pardners' camped on the spot in dugouts or in lean-tos of logs and
moss along the river-bank. There were fights and there was killing,
and sometimes the river cast up its dead. The marvel is that there
were not more crimes. In every camp is a species of human vulture
living off other men's risk. Whenever a lone man came in from the
hills and paid for his purchase in nuggets, such vultures would trail
him back to his claim and make what they could out of his discovery.
So, by pack-train and canoe, the miners {41} worked up to Alexandria,
to Quesnel, to Fort George. Towards spring, when the prospectors had
succeeded in packing in more provisions, they began striking back east
from the main river, following creeks to their sources, and from their
sources over the watershed to the sources of creeks flowing in an
opposite direction. Late in '59 men reached Quesnel Lake and Cariboo
Lake. Binding saplings together with withes, the prospectors poled
laboriously round these alpine lagoons, and where they found creeks
pouring down from the upper peaks, they followed these creeks up to
their sources. Pockets of gravel in the banks of both lakes yielded as
much as two hundred dollars a day. On Horse Fly Creek up from Quesnel
Lake five men washed out in primitive rockers a hundred ounces of
nuggets in a week. The gold-fever, which had subsided when all the
bars of the Fraser were occupied, mounted again. Great rumours began
to float out from the up-country. Bank facings seemed to indicate that
the richest pay-dirt lay at bed-rock. This kind of mining required
sluicing, and long ditches were constructed to bring the water to the
dry diggings. By the autumn of '59 a thousand miners were at work
round Quesnel Lake. By the spring {42} of '60 Yale and Hope were
almost deserted. Men on the upper diggings were making from sixty to a
hundred dollars a day. Only Chinamen remained on the lower bars.
It was in the autumn of the year '60 that Doc Keithley, John Rose,
Sandy MacDonald, and George Weaver set out from Keithley Creek, which
flows into Cariboo Lake, to explore the cup-like valley amid the great
peaks which seemed to feed this lake. They toiled up the creek five
miles, then followed signs up a dry ravine seven miles farther.
Reaching the divide at last, they came on an open park-like ridge,
bounded north and east by lofty shining peaks. Deer and caribou tracks
were everywhere. It was now that the region became known as Cariboo.
They camped on the ridge, cooked supper, and slept under the stars.
Should they go on, or back? This was far above the benches of
wash-gravel. Going up one of the nameless peaks, they stepped out on a
ledge and viewed the white, silent mountain-world. Marmots stabbed the
lonely solitude with echoing whistle. Wind came up from the valley in
the sibilant sigh of a sea. It was doubtful if even Indians had ever
hunted this ground. The game was so tame, it did not know enough to be
afraid. The men {43} could see another creek shining in the sunrise on
the other side of the ridge. It seemed to go down to a valley benched
by gravel flanks. They began wandering down that creek and testing the
gravel. Before they had gone far their eyes shone like the wet pebbles
in their hands. The gravel was pitted with little yellow stones.
Where rain and spring-wash had swept off the gravel to naked rock,
little nuggets lay exposed. The men began washing the gravel. The
first pan gave an ounce; the second pan gave nuggets to the weight of a
quarter of a pound. The excited prospectors forgot time. Dark was
falling. They slept under their blankets and awoke at daybreak below
twelve inches of snow.
They were out of provisions. Somebody had to go back down to Cariboo
Lake for food. Each man staked out a claim. And, while two built a
log cabin, the other two set off over the hills for food. There was
some sort of a log store down at Cariboo Lake. The one thing these
prospectors were determined on was secrecy till they could get their
claims registered. Bands of nondescript men hung round the
provision-store of Cariboo Lake awaiting a breath to fan their flaming
hopes of fortune. What let the secret out at the store is not {44}
known. Perhaps too great an air of secrecy. Perhaps too strenuous
denials. Perhaps the payment of provisions in nuggets. But when these
two packed back over the hills on snowshoes, they were trailed.
Followers came in with a whoop behind them on Antler Creek. Claims
were staked faster than they could be recorded. The same claims were
staked over and over, the corner of one overlapping another. When the
gold commissioner came hurriedly across the country in March, he found
the MacDonald-Rose party living in a cabin and the rest of the camp
holding down their claims by living in holes which they had dug in the
ground.
This was the spring of '61; and Antler Creek proved only the beginning
of the rush to Cariboo. Over the divide in mad stampede rushed the
gold-seekers northward and eastward. Ed Stout and Billy Deitz and two
others found signs that seemed very poor on a creek which they named
William's after Deitz. The gold did not pan a dollar a wash; but in
wild haste came the rush to William's Creek. Crossing a creek one
party of prospectors was overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, with
rock-shattering flashes of lightning. Shivering in the canyon, but
afraid to stand under trees {45} or near rocks, with the gravel
shelving down all round them, one of the men exclaimed sardonically,
'Well, boys, this _is_ lightning.' The stream became known as
Lightning Creek and proved one of the richest in Cariboo. William's
Creek was panning poorer and poorer and was being called 'Humbug
Creek,' when miners staked near by decided to see what they could find
beneath the blue clay. It took forty-eight hours to dig down. The
reward was a thousand dollars' worth of wash-gravel. Back surged the
miners to William's Creek. They put shafts and tunnels through the
clay and sluiced in more water for hydraulic work. Claims on William's
Creek produced as high as forty pounds of gold in a day. From another
creek, only four hundred feet long, fifty thousand dollars' worth of
gold was washed within a space of six weeks. Lightning Creek yielded a
hundred thousand dollars in three weeks. In one year gold to the value
of two and a half million dollars was shipped from Cariboo.
Millions were not so plentiful in those days, and the reports which
reached the outside world sounded like the _Arabian Nights_ or some
fairy-tale. The whole world took fire. Cariboo was on every man's
lips, as were Transvaal {46} and Klondike half a century later. The
New England States, Canada, the Maritime Provinces, the British
Isles--all were set agog by the reports of the new gold-camps where it
was only necessary to dig to find nuggets. By way of Panama, by way of
San Francisco, by way of Spokane, by way of Victoria, by way of
Winnipeg and Edmonton came the gold-seekers, indifferent alike to
perils of sea and perils of mountain. Men who had never seen a
mountain thought airily that they could climb a watershed in a day's
walk. Men who did not know a canoe from a row-boat essayed to run the
maddest rapids in America. People without provisions started blindly
from Winnipeg across the width of half a continent. In the mad rush
were clerks who had never seen 'float,' English school-teachers whose
only knowledge of gold was that it was yellow, and dance-hall girls
with very little possession of anything on earth but recklessness and
slippers; and the recklessness and the slippers danced them into
Cariboo, while many a solemn wight went to his death in rockslide or
rapids. By the opening of '62 six thousand miners were in Cariboo, and
Barkerville had become the central camp. How these people ever gained
access to the centre of the wilderness before the famous Cariboo Road
had {47} been built is a mystery. Some arrived by pack-train, some by
canoe, but the majority afoot.
Governor Douglas could not regulate prices here, and they jumped to war
level. Flour was three hundred dollars a barrel. Dried apples brought
two dollars and fifty cents a pound; and for lack of fruit many miners
died from scurvy. Where gold-seekers tramped six hundred miles over a
rocky trail, it is not surprising that boots commanded fifty dollars a
pair. Of the disappointed, countless numbers filled unknown graves,
and thousands tramped their way out starving and begging a meal from
the procession of incomers.
The places of the gold deposits were freakish and unaccountable.
Sometimes the best diggings were a mother lode at the head of a creek.
Sometimes they were found fifty feet under clay at the foot of a creek
where the dashing waters swerved round some rocky point into a river.
Old miners now retired at Yale and Hope say that the most ignorant
prospector could guess the place of the gold as well as the geologist.
Billy Barker, after whom Barkerville was named, struck it rich by going
fifty feet below the surface down the canyon. Cariboo Cameron, the
luckiest of all the miners and not originally a prospector, {48} found
his wealth by going still lower on the watercourse to a vertical depth
of eighty feet.
For seven miles along William's Creek worked four thousand men.
Cariboo Cameron took a hundred and fifty thousand out of his claim in
three months. In six months of '63 William's Creek yielded a million
and a half dollars, and this was only one of many rich creeks. From
'59 to '71 came twenty-five million dollars in gold from the Cariboo
country. By '65 hydraulic machinery was coming in and the prospectors
were flocking out; but to this day the Cariboo mines have remained a
freakish gamble. Mines for which capitalists have paid hundreds of
thousands have suddenly ended in barren rock. Diggings from which
nuggets worth five hundred dollars have been taken have petered out
after a few hundred feet. Even where the gravel merged to whitish gold
quartz, the most expert engineer in the camp could not tell when the
vein would fault and cease as entirely as if cut off. And the
explanation of this is entirely theoretical. The theory is that the
place of the gold was the gravel bed of an old stream, an old stream
antedating the petrified forests of the South-west, and that, when vast
alluvial deposits were carried over a great part of the {49} continent
by inland lakes and seas, the gold settled to the bottom and was buried
beneath the deposits of countless centuries. Then convulsive changes
shook the earth's surface. Mountains heaved up where had been sea
bottom and swamp and watery plain. In the upheaval these subterranean
creek beds were hoisted and thrown towards the surface. Floods from
the eternal snows then grooved out watercourses down the scarred
mountainsides. Frost and rain split away loose debris. And man found
gold in these prehistoric, perhaps preglacial, creek beds. However
this may be, there was no possible scientific way of knowing how the
gold-bearing area would run. A fortune might come out of one claim of
a hundred feet and its next-door neighbour might not yield an atom of
gold. Only the genii of the hidden earth held the secret; and modern
science derides the invisible pixies of superstition, just as these
invisible spirits of the earth seem to laugh at man's best efforts to
ferret out their secrets.
What became of the lucky prospectors? I have talked with some of them
on the lower reaches of the Cariboo Road. They are old and poor
to-day, and the memory of their fortune is as a dream. Have they not
lived at {50} Hope and Yale and Lytton for fifty years and seen their
trail crumble into the canyon, with not a dozen pack-trains a year
passing to the Upper country? John Rose, who was one of the men to
find Cariboo, set out in the spring of '63 to prospect the Bear River
country. He set out alone and was never again seen alive. Cariboo
Cameron, a 'man from Glengarry,' went back to Glengarry by the Ottawa
and established something like a baronial estate; but he lost his money
in various investments and died in 1888 in Cariboo a poor man. Billy
Deitz, after whom a famous creek was named, died penniless in Victoria;
and the Scottish miner who rhymed the songs of Cariboo died unwept and
unknown to history.
The romance of the trail is almost incredible to us, who may travel by
motor from Ashcroft to Barkerville. In October '62 a Mr Ireland and a
party were on the trail when snow began falling so heavily that it was
unsafe to proceed. They halted at a negro's cabin. Out of the heavy
snowfall came another party struggling like themselves. Then a packer
emerged from the storm with word that five women and twenty-six men
were snowbound half a mile ahead. Ireland and his party set out to the
rescue; but they lost the trail and {51} could only find the cabin
again by means of the gunshots that the others kept firing as a signal.
Two dozen people slept that night in the log shack; and when dawn came,
four feet of snow lay on the ground and the great evergreens looked
like huge sugar-cones. On snowshoes Ireland and three others set out
to find the lost men and women on the lower trail. They found them at
sundown camped in a ravine beside a rock, with their blankets up to
keep off the wind, thawing themselves out before a fire. A high wind
was blowing and it was bitterly cold. The lost people had not eaten
for three days. Twenty men from the cabin dug a way through the drifts
with their snowshoes and brought horses to carry the women back to the
coloured man's roof.
But it was not of the perils of the trail that the outside world heard.
The outside world heard of claims which any man might find and from
which gold to the value of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars could
be dug and washed in three months. The outside world thought that gold
could be picked up amid the rocks of British Columbia. Necessity is
the mother of invention. She is also the hard foster-mother of
desperation and folly. Times {52} were very hard in Canada. The East
was hard up. Farming did not pay. All eyes turned towards Cariboo;
and no wonder! Many of the treasure-seekers holding the richest claims
had gone to Cariboo owning nothing but the clothes on their backs. A
season's adventure in a no-man's-land of bear and deer, above
cloud-line and amid wild mountain torrents, had sent them out to the
world laden with wealth. Some ran the wild canyons of the Fraser in
frail canoes and crazy rafts with their gold strapped to their backs or
packed in buckskin sacks and carpet-bags. And some who had won fortune
and were bringing it home went to their graves in Fraser Canyon.
[1] See _Pioneers of the Pacific Coast_ in this Series.
{53}
CHAPTER IV
THE OVERLANDERS
When the Cariboo fever reached the East, the public there had heard
neither of the Indian massacres in Oregon nor that the Sioux were on
the war-path in Dakota. Promoters who had never set foot west of
Buffalo launched wild-cat mining companies and parcel express devices
and stages by routes that went up sheer walls and crossed unbridged
rivers. To such frauds there could be no certain check; for it took
six months to get word in and out of Cariboo. Eastern papers were full
of advertisements of easy routes to the gold-diggings. Far-off fields
look green. Far-off gold glittered the brighter for the distance.
Cariboo became in popular imagination a land where nuggets grew on the
side of the road and could be picked by the bushel-basket. Besides,
times were so hard in the East that the majority of the youthful
adventurers who were caught by the fever had nothing to lose except
their lives.
{54}
A group of threescore young men from different parts of Canada, from
Kingston, Niagara, and Montreal, having noticed advertisements of an
easy stage-route from St Paul, set out for the gold-diggings in May
1862. Tickets could be purchased in London, England, as well as in
Canada, for when these young Canadians reached St Paul, they found
eighteen young men from England, like themselves, diligently searching
the whereabouts of the stage-route. That was their first inkling that
fraudulent practices were being carried on and that they had been
deceived, that there was, in fact, no stage-route from St Paul to
Cariboo. A few of them turned back, but the majority, by ox-cart and
rickety stagecoach, pushed on to the Red River and went up to a point
near the boundary of modern Manitoba, where lay the first steamboat to
navigate that river, about to start on her maiden trip. On this
steamboat, the little _International_, afterwards famous for running
into sand-banks and mud-bars, the troops of Overlanders took passage,
and stowed themselves away wherever they could, some in the cook's
galley and some among the cordwood piled in the engine-room.
The Sioux were on a rampage in Minnesota {55} and Dakota, but Alexander
Dallas, governor of Rupert's Land for the Hudson's Bay Company, and Mgr
Taché, bishop of St Boniface, were aboard, and their presence afforded
protection. On the way to the vessel some of the Overlanders had
narrowly escaped a massacre. The story is told that as they slowly
made their way in ox-carts up the river-bank, a band of horsemen swept
over the horizon, and the travellers found themselves surrounded by
Sioux warriors. The old plainsman who acted as guide bethought him of
a ruse: he hoisted a flag of the Hudson's Bay Company and waved it in
the face of the Sioux without speaking. The painted warriors drew
together and conferred. The oxen stood complacently chewing the cud.
Indians never molested British fur-traders. Presently the raiders went
off over the horizon as swiftly as they had come, and the gold-seekers
drove on, little realizing the fate from which they had been delivered.
There had been heavy rains that spring on the prairie, and trees came
jouncing down the muddy flood of the Red River. The little
_International_, like a panicky bicycle rider, steered straight for
every tree, and hit one with such impact that her smokestack came
toppling down. At another place she pushed {56} her nose so deep in
the soft mud of the riverbank that it required all the crew and most of
the passengers to shove her off. But everybody was jubilant. This was
the first navigation of the Red River by steam. The Queen's Birthday,
the 24th of May, was celebrated on board the vessel pottle-deep to the
tune of the bagpipes played by the governor's Scottish piper. But the
governor's wife was heard to lament to Bishop Taché that the
_International's_ menu consisted only of pork and beans alternated with
beans and pork, that the service was on tin plates, and that the
dining-room chairs were backless benches.
The arrival of the steamer at Fort Garry (Winnipeg) was celebrated with
great rejoicing. Indians ran along the river-bank firing off rifles in
welcome, and opposite the flats where the fort gate opened, on what is
now Main Street, the company's men came out and fired a royal salute.
The people bound for Cariboo camped on the flats outside Fort Garry.
Here was a strange world indeed. Two-wheeled ox-carts, made wholly of
wood, without iron or bolt, wound up to the fort from St Paul in
processions a mile long, with fat squaws and whole Indian families
sitting squat inside the crib-like structure of the cart. Men and boys
{57} loped ahead and abreast on sinewy ponies, riding bareback or on
home-made saddles. Only a few stores stood along what is now Main
Street, which ran northward towards the Selkirk Settlement. With the
Indians, who were camped everywhere in the woods along the Assiniboine,
the Overlanders began to barter for carts, oxen, ponies, and dried
deer-meat or pemmican. An ox and cart cost from forty to fifty
dollars. Ponies sold at twenty-five dollars. Pemmican cost sixteen
cents a pound, and a pair of duffel Hudson's Bay blankets cost eight or
ten dollars. Instead of blankets, many of the travellers bought the
cheaper buffalo robes. These sold as low as a dollar each.
John Black, the Presbyterian 'apostle of the Red River,' preached
special sermons on Sunday for the miners. And on a beautiful June
afternoon the Overlanders headed towards the setting sun in a
procession of almost a hundred ox-carts; and the fort waved them
farewell. One wonders whether, as the last ox-cart creaked into the
distance, the fur-traders realized that the miner heralded the settler,
and that the settler would fence off the hunter's game preserve into
farms and cities. A rare glamour lay over the plains {58} that June,
not the less rare because hope beckoned the travellers. The unfenced
prairie billowed to the horizon a sea of green, diversified by the
sky-blue waters of slough and lake, and decked with the hues of
gorgeous flowers--the prairie rose, fragrant, tender, elusive, and
fragile as the English primrose; the blood-red tiger-lily; the brown
windflower with its corn-tassel; the heavy wax cups of the sedgy
water-lily, growing where wild duck flackered unafraid. Game was
superabundant. Prairie chickens nestled along the single-file trail.
Deer bounded from the poplar thickets and shy coyotes barked all night
in the offing. Night in June on the northern prairie is but the
shadowy twilight between two long days. The sun sets between nine and
ten, and rises between three and four, and the moonlight is clear
enough on cloudless nights for campers to see the time on their watches.
[Illustration: A Red River cart. From a photograph.]
The trail followed was the old path of the fur-trader from fort to fort
'the plains across' to the Rockies. From the Assiniboine the road ran
northerly to Forts Ellice and Carlton and Pitt and Edmonton.[1] Thomas
M'Micking {59} of Niagara acted as captain and eight others as
lieutenants. A scout preceded the marchers, and at sundown camp was
formed in a big triangle with the carts as a stockade, the animals
tethered or hobbled inside. Tents were pitched outside with six men
doing sentry duty all night. At two in the morning a halloo roused
camp. An hour was permitted for harnessing and breaking camp, and then
the carts creaked out in line. They halted at six for breakfast and
marched again at seven. Dinner was at two, supper at six, and tents
were seldom pitched before nine at night. On Sunday the procession
rested and some one read divine service. The oxen and ponies foraged
for themselves. By limiting camp to five hours, in spite of the slow
pace of the oxen, forty to fifty miles a day could be made on a good
trail in fair weather. While the scout led the way, the captain and
his lieutenants kept the long procession in line; and the travellers
for the most part dozed lazily in their carts, dreaming of the fortunes
awaiting them in Cariboo. Some nights, when the captain permitted a
longer halt than usual and when camp-fires blazed before the tents, men
played the violin and sang and danced. Each man was his own cook.
Three or four occupied {60} each tent. In the company was one woman,
with two children. She was an Irishwoman; but she bore the name of
Shubert, from which we may infer that her husband was not an Irishman.
Sunday having intervened, the travellers did not reach Portage la
Prairie until the fourth day out. Another week passed before they
arrived at Fort Ellice. Heavy rains came on now, and James M'Kay,
chief trader at Fort Ellice, opened his doors to the gold-seekers.
Harness and carts repaired and more pemmican bought, the travellers
crossed the Qu'Appelle river in a Hudson's Bay scow, paying toll of
fifty cents a cart. From the Qu'Appelle westward the journey grew more
arduous. The weather became oppressively hot and mosquitoes swarmed
from the sloughs. At Carlton and at Fort Pitt the fur-traders' 'string
band'--husky-dogs in wolfish packs--surrounded the camp of the
Overlanders and stole pemmican from under the tent-flaps. From Fort
Pitt westward the trail crossed a rough, wooded country, and there were
no more scows to take the ox-carts across the rivers. Eleven days of
continuous rain had flooded the sloughs into swamps; and in three days
as many as eight corduroy bridges had to be built. Two {61} long trees
were felled parallel and light poles were laid across the floating
trees. Where the trees swerved to the current, some one would swim out
and anchor them with ropes till the hundred carts had passed safely to
the other side.
It was the 21st of July when the travellers came out on the high banks
of the North Saskatchewan, flowing broad and swift, opposite Fort
Edmonton. There had been floods and all the company's rafts had been
carried away. But the ox-carts were poled across by means of a big
York boat; and the travellers were welcomed inside the fort.
The arrival of the Overlanders is remembered at Edmonton by some
old-timers even to this day. Salvoes of welcome were fired from the
fort cannon by a half-breed shooting his musket into the touch-hole of
the big gun. Concerts were given, with bagpipes, concertinas, flutes,
drums, and fiddles, in honour of the far-travellers. Pemmican-bags
were replenished from the company's stores.
Miners often uttered loud complaints against the charges made by the
fur-traders for provisions, forgetting what it cost to pack these
provisions in by dog-train and canoe. If the Hudson's Bay officials at
Fort Garry and {62} Edmonton had withheld their help, the Overlanders
would have perished before they reached the Rockies. Though the miner
did everything to destroy the fur trade--started fires which ravaged
the hunter's forest haunts, put up saloons which demoralized the
Indians, built wagon-roads where aforetime wandered only the shy
creatures of the wilds--though the miner heralded the doom of the fur
trade--yet with an unvarying courtesy, from Fort Garry to the Rockies,
the Hudson's Bay men helped the Overlanders.
The majority of the travellers now changed oxen and carts for
pack-horses and _travois_, contrivances consisting of two poles, within
which the horses were attached, and a rude sledge. A few continued
with oxen, and these oxen were to save their lives in the mountains.
[Illustration: Washing gold on the Saskatchewan. From a photograph.]
The farther the Overlanders now plunged into the wilderness, the more
they were pestered by the husky-dogs that roamed in howling hordes
round the outskirts of the forts. The story is told of several
prospectors of this time, who slept soundly in their tent after a day's
exhausting tramp, and awoke to find that their boots, bacon, rope, and
clothes had been devoured by the ravenous dogs. They {63} asked the
trader's permission to sleep inside the fort.
'Why?' asked the amused trader. 'Why, now, when the huskies have
chewed all you own but your instruments? You are locking the stable
door after your horse has been stolen.'
'No,' answered the prospectors. 'If those husky-dogs last night could
devour all our camp kit without disturbing us, to-night they might
swallow us before we'd waken.'
The next pause was at St Albert, one of Father Lacombe's missions.
What surprised the Overlanders as they advanced was the amazing
fertility of the soil. At Fort Garry, at Pitt, at Edmonton, at St
Albert, at St Ann, they saw great fields of wheat, barley, and
potatoes. Afterwards many who failed in the mines drifted back to the
plains and became farmers. The same thing had happened in California,
and was repeated at a later day in the rush to the Klondike. Great
seams of coal, too, were seen projecting from the banks of the
Saskatchewan. Here some of the men began washing for gold, and,
finding yellow specks the size of pin-heads in the fine sand, a number
of them knocked up cabins for themselves and remained west of Edmonton
{64} to try their luck. Later, when these belated Overlanders decided
to follow on to Cariboo, they suffered terrible hardships.
The Overlanders were to enter the Rockies by the Yellowhead Pass, which
had been discovered long ago by Jasper Hawse, of the Hudson's Bay
Company. This section of their trail is visible to the modern
traveller from the windows of a Grand Trunk Pacific Railway train, just
as the lower sections of the Cariboo Trail in the Fraser Canyon are to
be seen from the trains of the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian
Northern. First came the fur-trader, seeking adventure through these
passes, pursuing the little beaver. The miner came next, fevered to
delirium, lured by the siren of an elusive yellow goddess. The settler
came third, prosaic and plodding, but dauntless too. And then came the
railroad, following the trail which had been beaten hard by the
stumbling feet of pioneers.
[Illustration: In the Yellowhead Pass. From a photograph.]
At St Ann a guide was engaged to lead the long train of pack-horses
through the pass from Jasper House on the east to Yellowhead Lake on
the west. Colin Fraser, son of the famous piper for Sir George Simpson
of the Hudson's Bay Company, danced a Highland fling at the gate of the
fort to speed the {65} departing guests. And to the skirl of the
bagpipes the procession wound away westward bound for the mountains.
Instead of the thirty miles a day which they had made farther east, the
travellers were now glad to cover ten miles a day. Fallen trees lay
across the trail in impassable ramparts and floods filled the gullies.
Scouts went ahead blazing trees to show the way. Bushwhackers
followed, cutting away windfall and throwing logs into sloughs. Horses
sank to their withers in seemingly bottomless muskegs,[2] so that packs
had to be cut off and the unlucky bronchos pulled out by all hands
straining on a rope.
Somewhere between the rivers Pembina and M'Leod the travellers were
amazed to see what the wise ones in the party thought a volcano--a
continuous and self-fed fire burning on the crown of a hill. Science
of a later {66} day pronounced this a gas well burning above some
subterranean coal seam.
At length the Overlanders were ascending the banks of the M'Leod, whose
torrential current warned them of rising ground. Three times in one
day windfall and swamp forced the party to ford the stream for passage
on the opposite side. The oxen swam and the ox-carts floated and the
packs came up the bank dripping. For eleven days in August every soul
of the company, including Mrs Shubert's babies, travelled wet to the
skin. At night great log fires were kindled and the Overlanders sat
round trying to dry themselves out. Then the trail lifted to the
foothills. And on the evening of the 15th of August there pierced
through the clouds the snowy, shining, serrated peaks of the Rockies.
[Illustration: Upper M'Leod River. From a photograph.]
A cheer broke from the ragged band. Just beyond the shining mountains
lay--Fortune. What cared these argonauts, who had tramped across the
width of the continent, that the lofty mountains raised a sheer wall
between them and their treasure? Cheer on cheer rang from the
encampment. Men with clothes in tatters pitched caps in air, proud
that they had proved themselves kings of their own fate. It is,
perhaps, well that we have to climb our {67} mountains step by step;
else would many turn back. But there were no faint-hearts in the camp
that night. Even the Irishwoman's two little children came out and
gazed at what they could not understand.
The party now crossed a ravine to the main stream of the Athabaska. It
was necessary to camp here for a week. A huge raft was built of pine
saplings bound together by withes. To the stern of this was attached a
tree, the branch end dipping in the water, as a sweep and rudder to
keep the craft to its course. On this the Overlanders were ferried
across the Athabaska. And so they entered the Yellowhead Pass.
[1] See the map in _The Adventurers of England on Hudson Bay_ in this
Series.
[2] Perhaps the distinction should be made here between the muskeg and
the slough. The slough was simply any depression in the ground filled
with mud and water. The muskeg was permanent wet ground resting on
soft mud, covered over on the top with most deceiving soft green moss
which looked solid, but which quaked to every step and gave to the
slightest weight. Many muskegs west of Edmonton have been formed by
beavers damming the natural drainage of a small river for so many
centuries that the silt and humus washed down from the mountains have
formed a surface of deep black muck.
{68}
CHAPTER V
CROSSING THE MOUNTAINS
Like many lowland dwellers, the Overlanders had thought of a pass as a
door opening through a rock wall. What they found was a forested slope
flanked on both sides by mighty precipices down which poured cataracts
with the sound of the voice of many waters. Huge hemlocks lay
criss-crossed on the slope. Above could be seen the green edge of a
glacier, and still higher the eternal snows of the far peaks. The tang
of ice was in the air; but in the valleys was all the gorgeous bloom of
midsummer--the gaudy painter's brush, the shy harebell, the tasselled
windflower, and a few belated mountain roses. Long-stemmed, slender
cornflowers and bluebells held up their faces to the sun, blue as the
sky above them. Everywhere was an odour as of incense, the fragrance
of the great hemlocks, of grasses frost-touched at night and sunburnt
by day, of the unpolluted earth-mould of a thousand years.
{69}
Where was the trail? None was visible! The captain led the way,
following blazes chipped in the bark of the trees, zigzagging up the
slope from right to left, from left to right, hanging to the horse's
mane to lift weight from the saddle, with a rest for breathing at each
turn as they climbed; and, when the ridge of the foothill was
surmounted, a world of peacock-blue lakes lay below, fringed by
forests. The cataracts looked like wind-blown ribbons of silver.
Instead of dipping down, the trail led to the rolling flank of another
great foothill, and yet another, round sharp saddlebacks connecting the
mountains. Here, ox-carts were dangerous and had to be abandoned. It
was with difficulty that the oxen could be driven along the narrow
ledges.
Jasper House, Whitefish Lake, the ruins of Henry House, they saw from
the height of the pass. One foaming stream they forded eight times in
three hours, driven from side to side by precipice and windfall; and in
places they could advance only by ascending the stream bed. This was
risky work on a fractious pony, and some of the riders preferred wading
to riding. At noon on the 22nd of August the riders crossed a small
stream and set up their tents on the border of a sedgy lake. Then {70}
somebody noticed that the lake emptied west, not east; and a wild
halloo split the welkin. They had crossed the Divide. They were on
the headwaters of the Fraser, where a man could stand astride the
stream; and the Fraser led to the Cariboo gold-diggings. They still
had four hundred miles to travel. Their boots were in shreds and their
clothes in tatters; but what were four hundred miles to men who had
tramped almost three thousand?
But their progress had been so slow that the provisions were running
short. The first snow of the mountains falls in September, and it was
already near the end of August. There was not a moment to lose in
resting. What had been a lure of hope now became a goad of
desperation. So it is with all life's highest emprises. We plunge in
led by hope. We plunge on spurred by fate. When the reward is won,
only God and our own souls know that, even if we would, we could not
have done otherwise than go on.
Those travellers who had insisted on bringing oxen had now to kill them
for meat. Chipmunks were shot for food. So were many worn-out horses.
Hides were used to resole boots and make mitts. Not far from Moose
Lake the last bag of pemmican was eaten. {71} Perhaps it was a good
thing at this time that the band of Overlanders began to spread out and
scatter along the trail; for hungry men in large groups are a tragic
danger to themselves. Those of the advance-party were now some ten
days ahead of their companions in the rear. Mrs MacNaughton, whose
husband was with the rear party, of which we shall hear more anon,
relates the story of a young fellow so ravenous that he fried the
deer-thong he had bought for a tump-line back at one of the company's
forts. Fortunately, somewhere west of Moose Lake, the travellers came
on a band of Shuswap Indians who traded for matches and powder enough
salmon and cranberry cakes to stave off actual famine.
Trees with chipped bark pointed the way down the Fraser. For three
days the party followed the little stream that had come out of the lake
hardly wider than the span of a man's stride. With each mile its
waters swelled and grew wilder. On the third day windfall and
precipice drove the riders back from the river bed into the heavy
hemlock forest, where festoons of Spanish moss overhead almost shut out
the light of the sun and all sense of direction. And when they came
back to the bank of the stream they saw a {72} wild cataract cutting
its way through a dark canyon. There was no mistake. This was the
Fraser, and it was living up to its reputation.
And yet the Overlanders were sorely puzzled. There were no more blazes
on the trees to point the way; and, if this was the Fraser, it seemed
to flow almost due north. Where was Cariboo? Mr M'Micking, who was
acting as captain, tried to find out from the Indians. They made him a
drawing showing that if he crossed another watershed he would come on a
white man's wide pack-road. That must lead to Cariboo; but the snow
lay already a foot deep on this road; and unless the Overlanders
hastened they would be snowbound for the winter. On the other hand, if
the white men continued to follow the wild river canyon north, it would
bring them to Fort George on the main Fraser in ten days. There was no
time to waste on chance travelling. The Overlanders knew that
somewhere south from Moose Lake must lie the headwaters of the
Thompson, which would bring them to Kamloops. Was that what the
Indians meant by their drawings of a white man's road? If that were
true, between Moose Lake and the Thompson must lie the land of their
desire, {73} Cariboo; but to cross another unknown divide in winter
seemed risky. To follow the bend of the Fraser north might be the long
way round, but it was sure.
It was decided to let the party separate. Let those with provisions
still remaining try to push overland to Cariboo. If they failed to
find it, they could build cabins and winter on their pack animals.
Twenty men joined this group. The rest decided to stick to the river.
Behind were straggling a score more of the travellers, who were left to
follow as they could. Mrs Shubert with her children joined the band
going overland to find the Thompson.
The Indians traded canoes for horses and showed the Overlanders how to
put rafts together to run the Fraser. Axes had been worn almost to the
haft. Cutting the huge trees and splitting them into suitable timbers
was slow work. It was September before the rafts were ready to be
launched. There were four. Each had a heavy railing round it like
that of a ferry, with some flat stones on which fires could be lighted
to cook meals without pausing to land. When we recall the experiences
of Mackenzie and Fraser on this river, it seems almost incredible that
these landsmen made {74} the descent on rafts with their few remaining
ponies and oxen tied to the railings; yet so they did. If we imagine
rafts, with horses and oxen tied to the railings, trying to run the
whirlpool below Niagara, we shall have some conception of what this
meant.
The canoes sheered out of the way and the rafts were unmoored. The
Scarborough raft, with men from Whitby and Scarborough, near Toronto,
swirled out to midstream on the afternoon of the 1st of September.
'Poor, poor white men,' sighed the Indians; 'no more see white men';
but the men in the canoes rapped the gunnels with their paddles and
uttered rousing cheers. Then the _Ottawa_ and the _Niagara_ and the
_Huntingdon_ rafts slipped out on the current. All went well for four
days. Sweeps made of trees with the branch ends turned down and long,
slim poles kept the rafts in mid-current. Meals were cooked as the
unwieldy craft glided along the river-bank. Two or three men kept
guard at night, so that the rafts were delayed for only a few hours
during the darkest part of the night. The sun shone hot at midday and
there were hard frosts at night; but the rest in this sort of travel
was wonderfully refreshing after four months of toil across prairie and
{75} mountain. But on the afternoon of the 5th of September the rafts
began to bounce and swirl. The banks raced to the rear, and before the
crews realized it, a noise as of breaking seas filled the air, and the
_Scarborough_ was riding her first rapid. Luckily, the water was deep
and the rocks well submerged. The _Scarborough_ ran the rapid without
mishap and the other rafts followed. On the next day, however, the
waters 'collected' and began running in leaps and throwing back spume.
Some one shouted 'Breakers! head ashore!' and the galloping rafts
bumped on the bank of the river. The banks here were steep for
portaging; and the Scarborough boys, brought up on the lake-front, east
of Toronto, decided, come what might, to run the rapids. They let go
the mooring-rope and went churning into a whirlpool of yeasty spray.
All hands bent their strength to the poles. The raft dipped out of
sight, but was presently seen riding safely and calmly below the rapids.
Those watching the _Scarborough_ from the bank breathed freely again
and plucked up heart; but the worst was yet ahead. The oily calm below
the first rapid dropped into another maelstrom of angry waters. Into
this the _Scarborough_ was drawn by the terrible undertow. For a
moment the watchers on the bank could see nothing but the horns of the
bellowing, frightened oxen tied to the railing. Then the raft was
mounting the waves again. The seaworthiness of a raft is, of course,
well known. It may dip under water, or even split, but it seldom
upsets and never swamps or sinks. Before the other rafts ran the
rapids, two of them were first lightened of their loads. The men
preferred to pack their provisions over the precipices rather than take
the risk of losing them in the rapid. Nor was the packing child's
play. There was a narrow portage-trail along the ledges of the rocks,
and where the slabs of granite had split off Indians had laid rickety
poles across. Over these frail bridges the packers, with great
difficulty, carried the loads of the two rafts. Fortunately most of
them had long since discarded boots for moccasins.
All the rafts came through safely. The canoes were not so fortunate.
When the _Scarborough_ reached a sand-bar at the foot of the rapids,
the men were surprised to find three of their Toronto friends, who had
gone ahead in a canoe, now stranded high and dry. The canoe had sidled
to the waves, swamped, and sunk with everything the Toronto men {77}
owned, including their coats, tents, and boots. For two days they had
been awaiting the coming of the rafts. They were almost dead from
exposure and hunger.
Nine canoes in all were wrecked at this spot. One split on the reef.
Another was caught in the backwater. Others sank in the whirlpool
below the rapids. Others went under at the first leap into the
cataract. Two of the canoes had foolishly been lashed abreast. They
sidled, shipped a billow, and sank. All the men clung to the gunnels;
but one who was a powerful swimmer struck out for the shore. The
canoes stranded on the shore below and the clinging men saved
themselves. When they looked for their friend who had struck out for
the shore, he was no longer to be seen. These men were all from
Goderich, brought up on the banks of Lake Huron.
A similar fate befell a crew of four men from Toronto. Two of them
undertook to portage provisions along the bank of the canyon, while the
other two, named Carpenter and Alexander, tried to run the canoe down
the rapids. The episode has some interest for students of psychology.
Carpenter walked down the bank of the canyon a short distance to
reconnoitre the different channels of the {78} rapids. He was seen to
take out his notebook and write an entry. He then put the note-book in
the inner pocket of his coat, took off the coat, and slung it in a tree
on the bank. When he came back to the canoe, he seemed preoccupied.
The canoe ripped on a rock in midstream, flattened, and sank.
Carpenter went down insensible as though his head had struck and he had
been stunned. Alexander was washed ashore. He found himself on the
side of the bank opposite the rest of the party. Going below to calmer
waters, he swam across. Carpenter's coat hung on the trees. In the
pocket was the note-book, in which Alexander read the astounding words:
'Arrived at Grand Canyon. Ran the canyon and was drowned.' Carpenter
left a wife and child in Toronto, for whom, evidently, he had written
the message. But if he was of sound mind, desiring to live, and so
certain of death that he was able to write his own fate in the past
tense, why did he attempt the rapids? His friends had no explanation
of the curious incident.
There is another gruesome story of a sand-bar in the very middle of
this raging canyon. It will be remembered that some of the Overlanders
had straggled far to the rear. Some {79} time before spring a party of
them attempted to run this canyon. They were never again seen alive.
Some treasure-seekers who came over the trail in spring stranded on
this sand-bar. They found the bodies of the missing men. All but one
had been torn and partly devoured. It need not be told here that no
wild beast could have stemmed the rapids from either side. Unless
wolves or cougars had accidentally been washed to the sand-bar, and
washed away again, the wild solitude must have witnessed a horror too
terrible to be told; for the body of the man who had apparently died
last was fully clothed and unmolested. As absolutely nothing more is
known of what happened than has been set down here, it seems well that
there is no record of the names of these castaways.
{80}
CHAPTER VI
QUESNEL AND KAMLOOPS
The walls of the river lowered and widened, the current slackened, and
the surviving canoes and rafts were presently gliding peacefully down a
smooth stream. That night the Overlanders slept dead with weariness;
but a fearful depression rested on the company. Gold had begun to
collect its toll, and the price appalled every soul. Who would be the
next? How soon would the unknown river turn west and south? Where was
Fort George? What perils yet lay between the fort and the gold camp?
As the heavy mists lifted at daybreak, the travellers observed that the
river was narrowing again and that the wooded banks had begun to fly
past very swiftly. There was no mistaking the signs. They were
approaching more rapids. But the trick of guiding the craft down
rapids had now been learned; so the flotilla rode the furious waters
unharmed for fifteen miles.
{81}
It was almost dark when canoes and rafts swung round a curve in the
river and saw a flag waving above the little walled fur-post of Fort
George. The tired wanderers were welcomed in by clerks too amazed to
speak, while a howling chorus of husky-dogs set up their serenade. A
young Englishman, who had joined the Overlanders at St Paul, died from
the effects of exposure a few minutes after being carried into the
fort. Next morning the body was rolled in blankets, placed in a canoe,
and buried under a rude wooden cross, with stones piled above the grave
to prevent the ravaging of huskies and wolves.
The chief factor was away, but the young clerks in charge sent Indians
along to pilot the Overlanders through the rapids below Fort George,
known as the most dangerous on the Fraser. These rapids, it will be
recalled, had wrecked Alexander Mackenzie and had almost cost Simon
Fraser his life. But the treasure-seekers did not have to go as far
south as Alexandria, where Mackenzie had turned back. With guides who
knew the waters, they ran the rapids below Fort George safely, and
moored at Quesnel, the entrance to Cariboo, on the 11th of
September--four months after they had left Canada.
{82}
Quesnel was at this time a rude settlement of perhaps a dozen log
shacks--chiefly bunkhouses and provision-stores. North of Yale the
Cariboo Road had not yet been opened, and all provisions had been
brought in from the lower Fraser by pack-horse and dog-train at
enormous cost and risk. Food sold at extortionate prices. A meal cost
two dollars and fifty cents, for beans, bacon, and coffee. Salmon, of
course, was cheap. Fortunately, there was little whisky; so, though
tattered miners were everywhere in the woods, order was maintained
without vigilance committees. On one spectacle the far-travelled
ragged Overlanders feasted their tired eyes. They saw miners
everywhere along the banks of creeks washing gold. But there were more
gold-seekers than claims, and those without claims were full of
complaints and fears for the winter. They declared the country was
over-rated and a humbug. The question was how 'to get out' to
Victoria. Overlanders, who had tramped across the breadth of a
continent, did not relish the prospect, as one Yankee miner described
it, of 'hoofing it five hundred miles farther.' Some of the
disappointed Overlanders floated on down to Alexandria, where they sold
their rafts and took jobs on the {83} government road which was being
constructed along the canyon. This ensured them safety from starvation
for the winter at least.
Other Overlanders followed these first pioneers 'the plains across.'
And we have seen that some of those who had crossed the prairie with
the first party had fallen behind. These stragglers did not reach
Yellowhead Pass till the first week of September. They were entirely
out of food; but they had matches, and each box of fifty bought a huge
salmon from the Shuswaps.
Some of the men pushed ahead, built a raft, and launched it on the
Fraser. The raft ripped on a rock in midstream and stuck there at an
angle of forty-five degrees. Money, tools, food, and clothing
slithered into the tow of the rapids, while the men clung in
desperation to the upper railing of the wreck. One man let go and
dropped into the water. Swimming and drifting and rolling over and
over, he gained the shore, and hurried back to the pass with word of
the accident. Friends, accompanied by Indians, came in canoes to the
rescue, and, by means of ropes, every man was brought off the wrecked
raft alive.
But the party now stood in a more desperate predicament than ever, for
lack of food and {84} clothing. The Shuswaps saved the whites from
starvation. They took the white men to a pool in the Fraser, where
salmon, exhausted from the long run up the river, could be speared or
clubbed by the boat-load. And while some of the men chopped down trees
to build dugout canoes, others speared, cleaned, and dried the salmon.
Night and day they worked, and forgot sleep in their desperate haste.
At length they launched their craft on the Fraser. On the way down the
dangerous canyon they saw the wrecked canoes of those who had gone
before. The tenth day after leaving Yellowhead Pass they reached Fort
George. Their story has been told by Mrs MacNaughton, whose husband
was of the party. They arrived at Fort George mostly barefoot,
coatless, and trousers and shirts in tatters. Their hair and beards
were long and unkempt. It is supposed that they must have lost the
salmon in some of the rapids, or else the supply was insufficient; for
they were so weak from hunger that they had to be carried into the
fort. They arrived at Quesnel a month after the first Overlanders,
when the snow was too deep in the mountains for prospecting or mining.
The majority of this party also took work on the government road.
{85}
Meanwhile, how had fared that band of the Overlanders who had gone over
the hills south from the pass in search of the upper branches of the
Thompson? A Shuswap accompanied them as guide, and for a few days
there was a well-defined game-trail. Then the trail meandered off into
a dense forest of hemlock and windfall, which had to be cut almost
every mile of the way. They did not average six miles a day; but they
finally came to the steep bank of a wild river flowing south which they
judged must be a branch of the Thompson. The mountains were so steep
that it was impossible to proceed farther with horses and oxen; so they
abandoned these in the woods, and cut trees for rafts. For seven days
they ran rapid after rapid. One of the rafts stranded on a rock and
remained for two days before companions came to the rescue. At another
point a canoe was smashed in midstream. The crew struggled to a
slippery rock and hung to the ledge. A man named Strachan attempted to
swim ashore to signal distress to those above. They saw him ride the
waves. Then a roll of angry waters swept over him and he passed out of
sight. His companions clung to the rock till another canoe came
shooting down-stream, when lines {86} were hoisted to the castaways,
and they were hauled ashore.
Where the Clearwater comes into the Thompson they found the
fur-trader's horse-trail and tramped the remaining hundred miles
overland south to Kamloops. On the last lap of their terrible march
all were so exhausted they could scarcely drag themselves forward.
Some would lie down and sleep, then creep on a few miles. About twenty
miles from the mouth of the Thompson they came to a field of potatoes
planted by some rancher of Kamloops. The starving Overlanders could
scarcely credit their eyes. No one occupied the windowless log cabin;
but there was the potato patch--an oasis of food in a desert of
starvation. They paused long enough at the cabin to boil a great
kettleful and to feast ravenously. This gave them strength to tramp on
to Kamloops. We saw that the Irish mother, Mrs Shubert, with her two
children, accompanied this party. The day after reaching Kamloops she
gave birth to a child.
Did the Overlanders find the gold which each man's rainbow hopes had
dreamed? They had followed the rainbow over the ends of earth. Was
the pot of gold at the end of {87} the rainbow? You will find an
occasional Overlander passing the sunset of his days in quiet retreat
at Yale or Hope or Quesnel or Barkerville. He does not wear evidence
of great earthly possessions, though he may refer wistfully to the
golden age of those long-past adventurous days. The leaders who
survived became honoured citizens of British Columbia. Few came back
to the East. They passed their lives in the wild, free, new land that
had given them such harsh experiences.
{88}
CHAPTER VII
LIFE AT THE MINES
Fortunately, in that winter of '62-'63, there was a great deal of work
to be done in the mining country, and men were in high demand. The
ordinary wage was ten dollars a day, and men who could be trusted, and
who were brave enough to pack the gold out to the coast, received
twenty and even as high as fifty dollars a day. There is a letter,
written by Sir Matthew Begbie, describing how the mountain trails were
infested that winter by desperadoes lying in wait for the miners who
came staggering over the trail literally weighted down with gold. The
miners found what the great banks have always found, that the presence
of unused gold is a nuisance and a curse. They had to lug the gold in
leather sacks with them to their work, and back with them to their
shacks, and they always carried firearms ready for use. There was very
little shooting at the mines, but if a bad man 'turned up missing,' no
one {89} asked whether he had 'hoofed' it down the trail, or whether he
hung as a sign of warning from a pole set horizontally at a proper
height between two trees. In a mining camp there is no mercy for the
crook. If the trail could have told tales, there would have been many
a story of dead men washed up on the bars, of sneak-thieves given
thirty-nine lashes and like the scapegoat turned out into the mountain
wilds--a rough-and-ready justice administered without judge or jury.
But a woman was as safe on the trail as in her own home--a thing that
civilization never understands about a wild mining camp. Mrs Cameron,
wife of the famous Cariboo Cameron, lived with her husband on his claim
till she died, and many other women lived in the camps with their
husbands. When the road opened, there was a rush of hurdy-gurdy girls
for dance-halls; but that did not modify the rough chivalry of an
unwritten law. These hurdy-gurdy girls, who tiptoed to the concertina,
the fiddle, and the hand-organ, were German; and if we may believe the
poet of Cariboo, they were something like the Glasgow girls described
by Wolfe as 'cold to everything but a bagpipe--I wrong them--there is
not one that does not melt away {90} at the sound of money.' Sings the
poet of Cariboo:
They danced a' nicht in dresses licht
Fra' late until the early, O!
But O, their hearts were hard as flint,
Which vexed the laddies sairly, O!
The dollar was their only love,
And that they loved fu' dearly, O!
They dinna care a flea for men,
Let them court hooe'er sincerely, O!
Cariboo was what the miners call a 'he-camp.' Not unnaturally, the
'she-camps' heard 'the call from Macedonia.' The bishop of Oxford, the
bishop of London, the lord mayor of London, and a colonial society in
England gathered up some industrious young women as suitable wives for
the British Columbia miners. Alack the day, there was no poet to send
letters to the outside world on this handling of Cupid's bow and arrow!
The comedy was pushed in the most business-like fashion. Threescore
young girls came out under the auspices of the society and the Church,
carefully shepherded by a clergyman and a stern matron. They reached
Victoria in September of '62 and were housed in the barracks. Miners
camped on every inch of ground from which the barracks could be {91}
watched; and when the girls passed to and from their temporary lodging,
their progress was like a royal procession through a silent, gaping,
but most respectful lane of whiskered faces. A man looking anything
but respect would have been knocked down on the spot. We laugh now!
Victoria did not laugh then. It was all taken very seriously. On the
instant, every girl was offered some kind of situation, which she
voluntarily and almost immediately exchanged for matrimony. In all,
some ninety girls came out under these auspices in '62-'63. The
respectable girls fitted in where they belonged. The disreputable also
found their own places. And the mining camp began to take on an
appearance of domesticity and home.
Matthew Begbie, later, like Douglas, given a title for his services to
the Empire, had, as we have seen, first come out under direct
appointment by the crown; and when parliamentary government was
organized in British Columbia his position was confirmed as chief
justice. He had less regard for red tape than most chief justices.
Like Douglas, he first maintained law and order and then looked up to
see if he had any authority for it. No man ever did more for a mining
camp than Sir {92} Matthew Begbie. He stood for the rights of the
poorest miner. In private life he was fond of music, art, and
literature; but in public life he was autocratic as a czar and sternly
righteous as a prophet. He was a vigilance committee in himself
through sheer force of personality. Crime did not flourish where
Begbie went. Chinaman or Indian could be as sure of justice as the
richest miner in Cariboo. From hating and fearing him, the camp came
almost to worship him.
Many are the stories of his circuits. Once a jury persisted in
bringing in a verdict of manslaughter in place of murder.
'Prisoner,' thundered Begbie, 'it is not a pleasant duty to me to
sentence you _only_ to prison for life. You deserve to be hanged. Had
the jury performed their duty, I might have the painful satisfaction of
condemning you to death. You, gentlemen of the jury, permit me to say
that it would give me great pleasure to sentence you to be hanged each
and every one of you, for bringing in a murderer guilty only of
manslaughter.'
On another occasion, when an American had 'accidentally' shot an
Indian, the coroner rendered a verdict 'worried to death by a dog.'
Begbie ordered another inquest. This {93} time the coroner returned a
finding that the Indian 'had been killed by falling over a cliff.'
Begbie on his own authority ordered the American seized and taken down
to Victoria. On his way down the prisoner escaped from the constable.
This type of hair-trigger gunmen at once fled the country when Begbie
came.
Mr Alexander, one of the Overlanders of '62, tells how 'Begbie's
decisions may not have been good law, but they were first-class
justice.' His 'doctrine was that if a man were killed, some one had to
be hanged for it; and the effect was salutary.' A man had been
sandbagged in a Victoria saloon and thrown out to die. His companion
in the saloon was arrested and tried. The circumstantial evidence was
strong, and the judge so charged the jury. But the jury acquitted the
prisoner. Dead silence fell in the court-room. The prisoner's counsel
arose and requested the discharge of the man. Begbie whirled:
'Prisoner at the bar, the jury have said you are not guilty. You can
go, and I devoutly hope the next man you sandbag will be one of the
jury.' On another occasion a man was found stabbed on the Cariboo
Road. The man with whom the dead miner had been quarrelling was {94}
arrested, tried, and, in spite of strong evidence against him,
acquitted. Begbie adjourned the court with the pious wish that the
murderer should go out and cut the throats of the jury.
But, in spite of his harsh manner towards the wrong-doer, 'the old
man,' as the miners affectionately called him, kept law and order. In
the early days gold commissioners not only settled all mining disputes,
but acted as judge and jury. Against any decision of the gold
commissioners Begbie was the sole appeal, and in all the long years of
his administration no decision of his was ever challenged.
The effect of sudden wealth on some of the hungry, ragged horde who
infested Cariboo was of a sort to discount fiction. One man took out
forty thousand dollars in gold nuggets. A lunatic escaped from a
madhouse could not have been more foolish. He came to the best saloon
of Barkerville. He called in guests from the highways and byways and
treated them to champagne which cost thirty dollars and fifty dollars a
bottle. When the rabble could drink no more champagne, he ordered
every glass filled and placed on the bar. With one magnificent drunken
gesture of vainglory he swept the glasses in a clattering crash to the
{95} floor. There was still a basket of champagne left. He danced the
hurdy-gurdy on that basket till he cut his feet. The champagne was all
gone, but he still had some gold nuggets. There was a mirror in the
bar-room valued at hundreds of dollars. The miner stood and proudly
surveyed his own figure in the glass. Had he not won his dearest
desire and conquered all things in conquering fortune? He gathered his
last nuggets and hurled them in handfuls at the mirror, shattering it
in countless pieces. Then he went out in the night to sleep under the
stars, penniless. He settled down to work for the rest of his life in
other men's mines.
The staid Overlanders, who had risked their lives to reach this wild
land of desire, who had come from such church-going hamlets as Whitby,
such Scottish-Presbyterian centres as Toronto and Montreal, hardly knew
whether they were dreaming or living in a country of crazy pixies who
delved in mud and water all day and weltered in champagne all night.
The Cariboo poet sang their sentiments in these words:
I ken a body made a strike.
He looked a little lord.
He had a clan o' followers
Amang a needy horde.
{96}
Whane'er he'd enter a saloon,
You'd see the barkeep smile--
His lordship's humble servant he
Wi'out a thought o' guile!
A twalmonth passed an' a' is gane,
Baith freends and brandy bottle!
An' noo the puir soul's left alane
Wi' nocht to weet his throttle!
In Barkerville, which became the centre of Cariboo, saloons and
dance-halls grew up overnight. Pianos were packed in on mules at a
rate of a dollar a pound from Quesnel. Champagne in pint bottles sold
at two ounces of gold. Potatoes retailed at ninety dollars a
hundredweight. Nails were cheap at a dollar a pound. Milk was
retailed frozen at a dollar a pound. Boots still cost fifty dollars.
Such luxuries as mirrors and stoves cost as high as seven hundred
dollars each. The hurdy-gurdy girls with true German thrift charged
ten dollars or more a dance--not the stately waltz, but a wild fling to
shake the rafters and tire out the stoutest miners.
A newspaper was published in Barkerville. And it was in it that James
Anderson of Scotland first issued _Jeames's Letters to Sawney_.
Your letter cam' by the express,
Eight shillin's carriage, naethin' less!
{97}
You maybe like to ken what pay
Miners get here for ilka day?
Jus' twa poond sterling', sure as death--
It should be four, between us baith--
For gin ye coont the cost o' livin',
There's naethin' left to gang an' come on.
Sawney, had ye yer taters here
And neeps and carrots--dinna speer
What price; though I might tell ye weel,
Ye'd ainly think me a leein' chiel.
The first twa years I spent out here
Werena sae ill ava';
But hoo I've lived syne; my freend,
There's little need to blaw.
Like fitba' knockit back and fore,
That's lang in reachin' goal,
Or feather blown by ilka wind
That whistles 'tween each pole--
E'en sae my mining life has been
For mony a weary day.
Later, when the dance-hall became the theatre of Barkerville, James
Anderson used to sing his rhymes to the stentorious shouting and loud
stamping of the shirt-sleeved audience.
He thinks his pile is made,
An' he's goin' hame this fall,
To join his dear auld mither,
His faither, freends, and all.
His heart e'en jumps wi' joy
At the thocht o' bein' there,
An' mony a happy minute
He's biggin' castles in the air!
{98}
But hopes that promised high
In the springtime o' the year,
Like leaves o' autumn fa'
When the frost o' winter's near.
Sae his biggin' tumbles doon,
Wi' ilka blast o' care,
Till there's no stane astandin'
O' his castles in the air.
{99}
CHAPTER VIII
THE CARIBOO ROAD
When the railway first went through the Fraser Canyon, passengers
looking out of the windows anywhere from Yale to Ashcroft were amazed
to see something like a Jacob's ladder up and down the mountains,
appearing in places to hang almost in mid-air. Between Yale and Lytton
it hugged the mountain-side on what looked like a shelf of rock
directly above the wildest water of the canyon. Crib-work of huge
trees, resembling in the distance the woven pattern of a willow basket,
projected out over the ledges like a bird's nest hung from some
mountain eyrie. The traveller almost expected to see the thing sway
and swing to the wind. Then the train would sweep through a tunnel, or
swing round a sharp bend, and far up among the summits might be seen a
mule-team, or a string of pack-horses winding round the shoulders of
the rock. It seemed impossible that any man-made {100} highway could
climb such perpendicular walls and drop down precipitous cliffs and
follow a trail apparently secure only for a mountain goat. The first
impression was that the thing must be an old Indian war-path, along
which no enemy could pursue. But when the train paused at a water
tank, and the traveller made inquiry, he was told that this was nothing
less than the famous Cariboo Road, one of the wonders of the world.
[Illustration: The Cariboo Road. From a photograph.]
As long as the discovery of gold was confined to the Fraser river-bars,
the important matter of transportation gave the government no
difficulty. Hudson's Bay steamers crossed from Victoria to Langley on
the Fraser, which was a large fort and well equipped as a base of
supplies for the workers in the wilderness. Stern-wheelers, canoes,
and miscellaneous craft could, with care, creep up from Langley to Hope
and Yale; and the fares charged afforded a good revenue to the Hudson's
Bay Company. Even when prospectors struck above Yale, on up to
Harrison Lake and across to Lillooet, or from the Okanagan to the
Thompson, the difficulties of transportation were soon surmounted. A
road was shortly opened from Harrison Lake to Lillooet, built by the
miners themselves, under the direction of the Royal {101} Engineers;
and, as to the Thompson, there was the well-worn trail of the
fur-traders, who had been going overland to Kamloops for fifty years.
It was when gold was discovered higher up on the Fraser and in Cariboo,
after the colony of British Columbia had taken its place on the
political map, that Governor Douglas was put to the task of building a
great road. Henceforth, for a few years at least, the miners would be
the backbone, if not the whole body, of the new colony. How could the
administration be carried on if the government had no road into the
mining region?
And so the governor of British Columbia entered on the boldest
undertaking in roadbuilding ever launched by any community of twenty
thousand people. The Cariboo Road became to British Columbia what the
Appian Way was to Rome. It was eighteen feet wide and over four
hundred and eighty miles long. It was one of the finest roads ever
built in the world. Yet it cost the country only two thousand dollars
a mile, as against the forty thousand dollars a mile which the two
transcontinental railways spent later on their roadbeds along the
canyon. It was Sir James Douglas's greatest monument.
{102}
Five hundred volunteer mine-workers built the road from Harrison Lake
to Lillooet in 1858 at the rate of ten miles a day; and when the road
was opened in September, packers' charges fell from a dollar to
forty-eight cents and finally to eighteen cents a pound. But presently
the trend of travel drew away from Harrison Lake to the line of the
Fraser. At first there was nothing but a mule-trail hacked out of the
rock from Yale to Spuzzum; but miners went voluntarily to work and
widened the bridle-path above the shelving waters. From Spuzzum to
Lytton the river ledges seemed almost impassable for pack animals; yet
a cable ferry was rigged up at Spuzzum and mules were sent over the
ledges to draw it up the river. When the water rose so high that the
lower ledges were unsafe, the packers ascended the mountains eight
hundred feet above the roaring canyon. Where cliffs broke off, they
sent the animals across an Indian bridge. The marvel is not that many
a poor beast fell headlong eight hundred feet down the precipice. The
marvel is that any pack animal could cross such a trail at all. 'A
traveller must trust his hands as much as his feet,' wrote Begbie,
after his first experience of this trail.
[Illustration: Indian graves at Lytton, B.C. From a photograph.]
{103}
But by 1862 cutting and blasting and bridge-building had begun under
the direction of the Royal Engineers; and before 1865 the great road
was completed into the heart of the mining country at Barkerville.
Henceforth passengers went in by stage-coach drawn by six horses.
Road-houses along the way provided relays of fresh horses. Freight
went in by bull-team, but pack-horses and mules were still used to
carry miners' provisions to the camps in the hills which lay off the
main road. It was while the road was still building that an
enterprising packer brought twenty-one camels on the trail. They were
not a success and caused countless stampedes. Horses and mules took
fright at the slightest whiff of them. The camels themselves could
stand neither the climate nor the hard rock road. They were turned
adrift on the Thompson river, where the last of them died in 1905.
There was something highly romantic in the stage-coach travel of this
halcyon era. The driver was always a crack whip, a man who called
himself an 'old-timer,' though often his years numbered fewer than
twenty. Most of the drivers, however, knew the trail from having
packed in on shanks's mare and camped under the stars. At the log
taverns known {104} as road-houses travellers could sleep for the night
and obtain meals.
On the down trip bags were piled on the roof with a couple of
frontiersmen armed with rifles to guard them. Many were the devices of
a returning miner for concealing the gold which he had won. A fat
hurdy-gurdy girl--or sometimes a squaw--would climb to a place in the
stage. And when the stage, with a crack of the whip and a prance of
the six horses, came rattling across the bridge and rolling into Yale,
the fat girl would be the first to deposit her ample person at the bank
or the express office, whence gold could safely be sent on down to
Victoria. And when she emerged half an hour later she would have
thinned perceptibly. Then the rough miner, who had not addressed a
word to her on the way down, for fear of a confidence man aboard, would
present 'Susy' with a handsome reward in the form of a gaudy dress or a
year's provisions.
Start from a road-house was made at dawn, when the clouds still hung
heavy on the mountains and the peaks were all reflected in the glacial
waters. The passengers tumbled dishevelled from log-walled rooms where
the beds were bench berths, and ate breakfast in a {105} dining-hall
where the seats were hewn logs. The fare consisted of ham fried in
slabs, eggs ancient and transformed to leather in lard, slapjacks,
known as 'Rocky Mountain dead shot,' in maple syrup that never saw a
maple tree and was black as a pot, and potatoes in soggy pyramids. Yet
so keen was the mountain air, so stimulating the ozone of the resinous
hemlock forests, that the most fastidious traveller felt he had fared
sumptuously, and gaily paid the two-fifty for the meal. Perhaps there
was time to wash in the common tin basin at the door, where the towel
always bore evidence of patronage; perhaps not; anyhow, no matter.
Washing was only a trivial incident of mountain travel in those days.
The passenger jumped for a place in the coach; the long whip cracked.
The horses sprang forward; and away the stage rattled round curves
where a hind wheel would try to go over the edge--only the driver
didn't let it; down embankments where any normal wagon would have
upset, but this one didn't; up sharp grades where no horses ought to be
driven at a trot, but where the six persisted in going at a gallop!
The passenger didn't mind the jolting that almost dislocated his spine.
He didn't mind the negro who sat on {106} one side of him or the fat
squaw who sat on the other. He was thankful not to be held up by
highwaymen, or dumped into the wild cataract of waters below. Outside
was a changing panorama of mountain and canyon, with a world of forests
and lakes. Inside was a drama of human nature to outdo any
curtain-raiser he had ever witnessed--a baronet who had lost in the
game and was going home penniless, perhaps earning his way by helping
with the horses; an outworn actress who had been trying her luck at the
dance-halls; a gambler pretending that he was a millionaire; a
saloon-keeper with a few thousands in his pockets and a diamond in his
shirt the size of a pebble; a tenderfoot rigged out as a veteran, with
buckskin coat, a belt full of artillery, fearfully and wonderfully made
new high-boots, and a devil-may-care air that deceived no one but
himself; a few Shuswaps and Siwashes, fat, ill-smelling, insolent, and
plainly highly amused in their beady, watchful, black, ferret eyes at
the mad ways of this white race; a still more ill-smelling Chinaman;
and a taciturn, grizzled, ragged fellow, paying no attention to the fat
squaw, keeping his observations and his thoughts inside his high-boots,
but likely as not to turn out the man who {107} would conduct the squaw
to the bank or the express office at Yale.
If one could get a seat outside with the guards and the driver--one who
knew how to unlock the lore of these sons of the hills--he was lucky;
for he would learn who made his strike there, who was murdered at
another place, how the sneak-thief trailed the tenderfoot somewhere
else--all of it romance, much of it fiction, much of it fact, but no
fiction half so marvellous as the fact.
Bull-teams of twenty yokes, long lines of pack-horses led by a
bell-mare, mule-teams with a tinkling of bells and singing of the
drivers, met the stage and passed with happy salute. At nightfall the
camp-fires of foot travellers could be seen down at the water's edge.
And there was always danger enough to add zest to the journey.
Wherever there are hordes of hungry, adventurous men, there will be
desperadoes. In spite of Begbie's justice, robberies occurred on the
road and not a few murders. The time going in and out varied; but the
journey could be made in five days and was often made in four.
The building of the Cariboo Road had an important influence on the camp
that its builders could not foresee. The unknown El {108} Dorado is
always invested with a fabulous glamour that draws to ruin the reckless
and the unfit. Before the road was built adventurers had arrived in
Cariboo expecting to pick up pails of nuggets at the bottom of a
rainbow. Their disillusionment came; but there was an easy way back to
the world. They did not stay to breed crime and lawlessness in the
camp. 'The walking'--as Begbie expressed it--'was all down hill and
the road was good, especially for thugs.' While there were ten
thousand men in Cariboo in the winter of '62 and perhaps twenty
thousand in the winter of '63, there were less than five thousand in
'71.
This does not mean that the camp had collapsed. It had simply changed
from a poor man's camp to a camp for a capitalist or a company. It
will be remembered that the miners first found the gold in flakes, then
farther up in nuggets, then that the nuggets had to be pursued to
pay-dirt beneath gravel and clay. This meant shafts, tunnels,
hydraulic machinery, stamp-mills. Later, when the pay-dirt showed
signs of merging into quartz, there passed away for ever the day of the
penniless prospector seeking the golden fleece of the hills as his
predecessor, the trapper, had sought the pelt of the little beaver.
All unwittingly, the miner, as well as the {109} trapper, was an
instrument in the hands of destiny, an instrument for shaping empire;
for it was the inrush of miners which gave birth to the colony of
British Columbia. Federation with the Canadian Dominion followed in
1871; the railway and the settler came; and the man with the pick and
his eyes on the 'float' gave place to the man with the plough.
{110}
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The episode of Cariboo is so recent that the bibliography on it is not
very complete. _British Columbia_, by Judge Howay and E. O. S.
Scholefield, provincial librarian, is the last and most accurate word
on the history of that province, though one could wish that the authors
had given more human-document records in the biographical section. In
a very few years there will be no old-timers of the trail left; and,
after all, it is the human document that gives colour and life to
history. It was my privilege to know some of the Overlanders
intimately. One of the companies who rafted down the Fraser came from
the county where I was born; and though they preceded my day, their
terrible experiences were a household word. With others I have poled
the Fraser on those very tempestuous waters that took such toll of life
in '62. Others have been my hosts. I have gone up and down the Arrow
Lakes in a steamer as a guest of the man who came through the worst
experiences of the Overlanders. Chance conversations are shifty guides
on dates and place-names. For these, regarding the Overlanders, I have
relied on Mrs MacNaughton's _Cariboo_.
{111}
Gosnell's _British Columbia Year Book_ and Hubert Howe Bancroft's
_British Columbia_ are very full on this era. Walter Moberly's
pamphlets on the building of the trail and Mr Alexander's casual
addresses are excellent. Old files of the Kamloops _Sentinel_ and the
Victoria _Colonist_ are full of scattered data. Anderson's _Hand Book
of 1858_, Begbie's Report to the London Geographical Society, 1861;
Begg's _British Columbia_; _Fraser's Journal_; Mayne's _British
Columbia_, 1862; Milton and Cheadle's _North West Passage_, 1865;
Palliser's _Report_, 1859; Waddington's _Fraser River Mines_--all
afford sidelights on this adventurous era. On the prospector's daily
life there is no book. That must be learned from him on the trail; and
on many camp trips in the Rockies, with prospectors for guides, I have
picked up such facts as I could.
{113}
INDEX
Alexander, Mr, his tragic experience on the Fraser, 77-8; quoted, 93,
111.
Anderson, James, the Scottish miner poet, 50, 90, 95-8.
Antler Creek, 44.
Barker, Billy, 47.
Barkerville, 46; life in, 94-8; the Cariboo Road terminus, 103.
Begbie, Sir Matthew Baillie, chief justice of British Columbia, 37, 38,
39, 88; his popularity with the miners, 91-4, 102, 108, 111.
Big Canyon, 34.
Black, John, Presbyterian 'apostle of the Red River,' 57.
British Columbia, proclaimed a crown colony, 37; and the building of
the Cariboo Road, 100-1; and the miners, 109. See Cariboo, Fraser
river, Vancouver.
Cameron, Cariboo, 47-8, 50.
Cameron, Mrs, 89.
Cariboo, prospecting in, 41-5; the mad rush for, 45-6, 51-2, 53-4; the
mines a freakish gamble, 47-8; changes in, 107-9. See Barkerville and
Overlanders.
Cariboo Road, 19; the building of the, 82, 99-103; its effect on the
mines, 107-9; stagecoach travel on, 103-7.
Cariboo Trail, perils of the, 50-51; evolution of, 64. See Cariboo
Road.
China Bar, 35.
Cridge, Rev. Edward, 6.
Dallas, Alexander, governor of Rupert's Land, 55.
Deitz, Billy, 44, 50.
Douglas, Sir James, governor of Vancouver Island, 5, 8, 10; quells
disturbances on the Fraser, 35-7, 37-8; governor of British Columbia,
37, 38; builds the Cariboo Road, 101.
Edmonton, the Overlanders at, 61.
Finlayson, Roderick, chief trader at Victoria, 1-3, 5, 6, 8
Fort George, the Overlanders at, 81, 84.
Fort Langley, British Columbia proclaimed at, 37, 100.
Fraser, Colin, and the Overlanders, 64-5.
Fraser, Simon, explorer, 81.
Fraser Canyon 14, 19, 64
Fraser river, the quest for gold on, 8-9, 10, 11-22, 27-32, 51-2;
disturbances among the Indians, 33-5; and the whites, 37-40; the
Overlanders on, 70, 71-2. See Gold-fields, Miners.
Gold, prospecting for, 17-18, 20-21, 27-8; the lure of the 'float,'
21-2, 23-5, 25-6, 28; mining for, 29-30. See Gold-fields, Miners.
Gold-fields, the price of commodities in, 13, 16-17, 29, 47, 96, 105;
'claim jumping,' 40; unused gold a curse, 88-9, 104; hurdy-gurdy girls,
89-90, 96, 104.
Hope, 29, 36, 38, 42.
Horse Fly Creek, 41.
Howay, Judge, quoted, 11, 110.
Hudson's Bay Company, and the quest for gold, 1-4; and Vancouver
Island, 5-6; and the diggings on the Fraser, 16, 100; and the Indians,
34-5; and the Overlanders, 55, 57, 60, 61-3.
Indians of the Fraser, and the quest for gold, 12-13; their hostility,
33-6; and the Overlanders, 81. See Shuswaps.
Ireland, Mr, his rescue party, 50-1.
Kamloops, 86-7.
Keithley, Doc, 42-4.
Langley, 37, 100.
Lightning Creek, 45.
Long Bar, 35.
MacDonald, Sandy, 42-4.
M'Gowan, Ned, his affair on the Fraser, 37-40.
M'Kay, James, chief trader at Fort Ellice, 60.
Mackenzie, Alexander, explorer, 81.
Maclean, chief factor at Kamloops, 4.
M'Loughlin, John, 34.
M'Micking, Thomas, captain of the Overlanders, 58-9, 69, 72.
MacNaughton, Mrs, quoted, 71, 84, 110.
Mayne, Lieutenant, and the Yale riots, 38, 39, 111.
Miners, in the wilds, 26; disappointed gold-seekers, 13, 16; some lucky
prospectors, 22-5, 47-51; the miner and his boy, 26-7; their
packhorses, 27, 103; form vigilance committees, 33-5; their
rough-and-ready justice, 89; their chivalry, 89, 91; the effect of
sudden wealth on, 94-6; a device for concealing gold, 104, 106-7; an
instrument for shaping empire, 109. See Fraser river, Gold,
Gold-fields.
Moberly, Walter, his experiences on the Fraser, 16, 17, 111.
Moody, Colonel, and the Yale riots, 37-9.
Muskeg and slough, the difference between, 65 n.
Overlanders, the, at St Paul, 54; their meeting with the Sioux
warriors, 55; on the Red River steamer, 54, 55-6; and the Hudson's Bay
Company, 55, 57, 60, 61-3; at Winnipeg, 56-7; on the trail to Edmonton,
57-61; and the husky-dogs, 60, 62-3; reach Yellowhead Pass, 62, 63-7;
cross the Divide and reach the Fraser, 68-72; the party separate, 71,
73; on the Fraser, 73-81, 83-4; a question for psychologists, 77-8; a
gruesome story, 78-9; reach Quesnel, 81, 84; Kamloops, 85-7.
Prospecting for gold on the Fraser, 17-22, 25-6, 27-9, 30-32, 40; some
lucky prospectors and their fate, 47-51; theory regarding gold
deposits, 48-9.
Psychology, a question of, 77-8.
Queen Charlotte Islands, discovery of gold in, 3.
Quesnel, 81-3, 84.
Quesnel Lake, 41.
Red River, the first steamer on, 54-6; Red River carts, 56-7.
Rose, John, 42-4, 50.
Saskatchewan, the quest for gold on the, 63-4.
Shubert, Mrs, with the Overlanders, 60, 66, 67, 73, 86.
Shuswaps, the, and the Overlanders, 71, 72, 73, 74, 83, 84.
Sioux, the, 54-5.
Snyder, Captain, leads attack on the Indians, 34-5.
Spuzzum, a fight with Indians at, 34-5.
Stout, Ed, 44.
Taché, Mgr, bishop of St Boniface, 55, 56.
Vancouver Island, the first Council and Legislative Assembly of, 5 and
note. See Victoria.
Victoria, and the quest for gold, 1, 5, 6-7; and the rush for the
Fraser, 7-8, 9, 10; and the matrimonial scheme, 90-91. See Vancouver
Island.
Weaver, George, 42-4.
William's Creek, 44, 45, 48.
Winnipeg, 56-7.
Work, John, chief factor at Victoria, 6.
Wright, Captain Tom, a Yankee skipper on the Fraser, 16, 38.
Yale, 9, 13, 16, 29, 33, 34, 36, 37-40, 42.
Yellowhead Pass, 64, 67, 68.
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA
THIRTY-TWO VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED
Edited by GEORGE M. WRONG and H. H. LANGTON
THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA
PART I
THE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS
1. THE DAWN OF CANADIAN HISTORY
By Stephen Leacock.
2. THE MARINER OF ST MALO
By Stephen Leacock.
PART II
THE RISE OF NEW FRANCE
3. THE FOUNDER OF NEW FRANCE
By Charles W. Colby.
4. THE JESUIT MISSIONS
By Thomas Guthrie Marquis.
5. THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA
By William Bennett Munro.
6. THE GREAT INTENDANT
By Thomas Chapais.
7. THE FIGHTING GOVERNOR
By Charles W. Colby.
PART III
THE ENGLISH INVASION
8. THE GREAT FORTRESS
By William Wood.
9. THE ACADIAN EXILES
By Arthur G. Doughty.
10. THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE
By William Wood.
11. THE WINNING OF CANADA
By William Wood.
PART IV
THE BEGINNINGS OF BRITISH CANADA
12. THE FATHER OF BRITISH CANADA
By William Wood.
13. THE UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS
By W. Stewart Wallace.
14. THE WAR WITH THE UNITED STATES
By William Wood.
PART V
THE RED MAN IN CANADA
15. THE WAR CHIEF OF THE OTTAWAS
By Thomas Guthrie Marquis.
16. THE WAR CHIEF OF THE SIX NATIONS
By Louis Aubrey Wood.
17. TECUMSEH: THE LAST GREAT LEADER OF HIS PEOPLE
By Ethel T. Raymond.
PART VI
PIONEERS OF THE NORTH AND WEST
18. THE 'ADVENTURERS OF ENGLAND' ON HUDSON BAY
By Agnes C. Laut.
19. PATHFINDERS OF THE GREAT PLAINS
By Lawrence J. Burpee.
20. ADVENTURERS OF THE FAR NORTH
By Stephen Leacock.
21. THE RED RIVER COLONY
By Louis Aubrey Wood.
22. PIONEERS OF THE PACIFIC COAST
By Agnes C. Laut.
23. THE CARIBOO TRAIL
By Agnes C. Laut.
PART VII
THE STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL FREEDOM
24. THE FAMILY COMPACT
By W. Stewart Wallace.
25. THE 'PATRIOTES' OF '37
By Alfred D. DeCelles.
26. THE TRIBUNE OF NOVA SCOTIA
By William Lawson Grant.
27. THE WINNING OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT
By Archibald MacMechan.
PART VIII
THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY
28. THE FATHERS OF CONFEDERATION
By A. H. U. Colquhoun.
29. THE DAY OF SIR JOHN MACDONALD
By Sir Joseph Pope.
30. THE DAY OF SIR WILFRID LAURIER
By Oscar D. Skelton.
PART IX
NATIONAL HIGHWAYS
31. ALL AFLOAT
By William Wood.
32. THE RAILWAY BUILDERS
By Oscar D. Skelton.
TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY
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