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 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. 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 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 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.
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 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.
Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie. From a portrait by Savannah.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.