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.