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 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 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.
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.