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.
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 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 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 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 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.
