With claims filed on all gold-bearing bars, what were the ten thousand men to do camped for fifty miles beyond Yale? Those who had no provisions and could not induce any storekeeper to grubstake them for a winter's prospecting, quit the country in disgust; and the price of land dropped in the boom towns of the Fraser as swiftly as it had been ballooned up. Prospecting during the winter in a country of heavy snowfall did not seem a sane project. And yet the eternal question urged the miners on: from what mother lode are these flakes and nuggets washed down to the sand-bars of the Fraser? Gold had also been found in cracks in the rock along the river. Whence had it come? The man farthest upstream in spring would be on the ground first for the great find that was bound to make some seeker's fortune. So all stayed who could. Fortunately, the winter of '58-'59 was mild, the autumn late, the snowfall light, and the spring very early. Fate, as usual, favoured the dauntless.
In parties of twos and tens and twenties, and even as many as five hundred, the miners began moving up the river prospecting. Those with horses had literally to cut the way with their axes over windfall, over steep banks, and round precipitous cliffs. Where rivers had to be crossed, the men built rude rafts and poled themselves over, with their pack-horses swimming behind. Those who had oxen killed the oxen and sold the beef. Others breasted the mill-race of the Fraser in canoes and dugouts. Governor Douglas estimated that before April of '59 as many as three hundred boats with five men in each had ascended the Fraser. Sometimes the amazing spectacle was seen of canoes lashed together in the fashion of pontoon bridges, with wagons full of provisions braced across the canoes. These travellers naturally did not attempt Fraser Canyon.
Before Christmas of '59 prospectors had spread into Lillooet and up the river as high as Chilcotin, Soda Creek, Alexandria, Cottonwood Canyon, Quesnel, and Fort George. It was safer to ascend such wild streams than to run with the current, though countless canoes and their occupants were never heard of after leaving Yale. Where the turbid yellow flood began to rise and 'collect'—a boatman's phrase—the men would scramble ashore, and, by means of a long tump-line tied—not to the prow, which would send her sidling—to the middle of the first thwart, would tow their craft slowly up-stream. I have passed up and down Fraser Canyon too often to count the times, and have canoed one wild rapid twice, but never without wondering how those first gold-seekers managed the ascent in that winter of '59.
There was no Cariboo Road then. There was only the narrow footpath of the trapper and the fisherman close down to the water; and when the rocks broke off in sheer precipice, an unsteady bridge of poles and willows spanned the abyss. A 'Jacob's ladder' a hundred feet above a roaring whirlpool without handhold on either side was one thing for the Indian moccasin and quite another thing for the miner's hobnailed boot. The men used to strip at these places and attempt the rock walls barefoot; or else they cached their canoe in a tree, or hid it under moss, lashed what provisions they could to a dog's back, and, with a pack strapped to their own back, proceeded along the bank on foot. The trapper carries his pack with a strap round his forehead. The miner ropes his round under his shoulders. He wants hands and neck free for climbing. Usually the prospectors would appoint a rendezvous. There, provisions would be slung in the trees above the reach of marauding beasts, and the party would disperse at daybreak, each to search in a different direction, blazing trees as he went ahead so that he could find the way back at night to the camp. Distress or a find was to be signalled by a gunshot or by heliograph of sunlight on a pocket mirror; but many a man strayed beyond rescue of signal and never returned to his waiting 'pardners.' Some were caught in snowslides, only to be dug out years later.
Many signs guided the experienced prospector. Streams clear as crystal came, he knew, from upper snows. Those swollen at midday came from near-by snowfields. Streams milky or blue or peacock green came from glaciers—ice grinding over rock.
Heavy mists often added to the dangers. I stood at the level of eight thousand feet in this region once with one of the oldest prospectors of the canyon. He had been a great hunter in his day. A cloud came through a defile of the peaks heavy as a blanket. Though we were on a well-cut bridle-trail, he bade us pause, as one side of the trail had a sheer drop of four thousand feet in places. 'Before there were any trails, how did you make your way here to hunt the mountain goat when this kind of fog caught you?' I asked.
'Threw chips of stone ahead and listened,' he answered, 'and let me tell you that only the greenest kind of tenderfoot ever takes risks on a precipice.'
And nine men out of ten were such green tenderfoots that winter of '58-'59, when five thousand prospectors overran the wild canyons and precipices of the Fraser. Two or three things the prospector always carried with him—matches, a knife, a gun, rice, flour, bacon, and a little mallet-shaped hammer to test the 'float.' What was the 'float'? A sandy chunk of gravel perhaps flaked with yellow specks the size of a pin-head. He wanted to know where that chunk rolled down from. He knocked it open with his mallet. If it had a shiny yellow pebble inside only the size of a pea, the miner would stay on that bank and begin bench diggings into the dry bank. By the spring of '59 dry bench diggings had extended back fifty miles from the river. If the chunk revealed only tiny yellow specks, perhaps mixed with white quartz, the miner would try to find where it rolled from and would ascend the gully, or mountain torrent, or precipice. Queer stories are told of how during that winter almost bankrupt grocers grubstaked prospectors with bacon and flour and received a half-interest in a mine that yielded five or six hundred dollars a day in nuggets.
But for one who found a mine a thousand found nothing. The sensations of the lucky one beggared description. 'Was it luck or was it perseverance?' I asked the man who found one of the richest silver-mines in the Big Bend of the Columbia. 'Both and mostly dogged,' he answered. 'Take our party as a type of prospectors from '59 to '89, the thirty years when the most of the mining country was exploited. We had come up, eleven green kids and one old man, from Washington. We had roughed it in East and West Kootenay and were working south to leave the country dead broke. We had found "float" in plenty, and had followed it up ridges and over divides across three ranges of mountains. Our horses were plumb played out. We had camped on a ridge to let them fatten up enough to beat it out of British Columbia for ever. Well, we found some galena "floats" in a dry gully on the other side of the valley. We had provisions left for only eleven days. Some of the boys said they would go out and shoot enough deer to last us for meat till we could get out of the country. Old Sandy and I thought we would try our luck for just one day. We followed that "float" clear across the valley. We found more up the bed of a raging mountain torrent; but the trouble was that the stream came over a rock sheer as the wall of a house. I was afraid we'd lose the direction if we left the stream bed, but I could see high up the precipice where it widened out in a bench. You couldn't reach it from below, but you could from above, so we blazed the trees below to keep our direction and started up round the hog's back to drop to the bank under. By now it was nightfall, and we hadn't had anything to eat since six that morning. Old Sandy wanted to go back, but I wouldn't let him. He was trembling like an aspen leaf. It is so often just the one pace more that wins or loses the race. We laboured up that slope and reached the bench just at dark. We were so tired we had hauled ourselves up by trees, brushwood branches, anything. I looked over the edge of the rock. It dropped to that shelf we had seen from the gully below. It was too dark to do anything more; we knew the fellows back at the camp on the ridge would be alarmed, but we were too far to signal.'
'How far?' I asked.