What the trapper was to the fur trade, the prospector was to the mining era that ushered civilization into the wilds with a blare of dance-halls and wine and wassail and greed. Ragged, poor, roofless, grubstaked by 'pardner' or outfitter on a basis of half profit, the prospector stands as the eternal type of the trail-maker for finance.
[[1]] The same, of course, may be done to-day, with a like result, at many places along the Fraser and even on the Saskatchewan.
[[2]] This was the first Legislative Assembly to meet west of Upper Canada in what is now the Canadian Dominion. It consisted of seven members, as follows: J. D. Pemberton, James Yates, E. E. Langford, J. S. Helmcken, Thomas J. Skinner, John Muir, and J. F. Kennedy. Langford, however, retired almost immediately after the election and J. W. M'Kay was elected in his stead. The portraits of five of the members are preserved in the group which appears as the frontispiece to this volume. The photograph was probably taken at a later period; at any rate, two of the members, Muir and Kennedy, are missing.
CHAPTER II
THE PROSPECTOR
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 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.