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Chronicles of Canada Volume 23 - The Cariboo Trail: A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia

<h3> CHAPTER II </h3> <h4> THE PROSPECTOR </h4> 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. <center> <ANTIMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-028.jpg" ALT="In the Rocky Mountains. From a photograph." BORDER="2" WIDTH="379" HEIGHT="530"> <H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 379px"> In the Rocky Mountains. From a photograph. </h4> </center> 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} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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