'About twenty-two miles. We threw ourselves down to sleep. It was terribly cold. We were high up and the fall frosts were icy, I tell you! I woke aching at daybreak. Old Sandy was still sleeping. I thought I would let myself down over the ledge and see what was below, for there were no mineral signs where we were. I crawled over the ledge, and by sticking my fingers and toes in the rocks got down to about fifteen feet from the drop to a soft grassy level. I looked, hung for a moment, let go, and "lit" on all fours. Then I looked up! The sun had just come over that east ridge and hit the rocks. I can't talk about it yet! I went mad! I laughed! I cried! I howled! There wasn't an ache left in my bones. I forgot that my knees knocked from weakness and that we had not had a bite for twenty-four hours. I yelled at Old Sandy to wake the dead. He came crawling over the ledge and peeked down. "What's the matter?" says he. "Matter," I yelled. "Wake up, you old son of a gun; we are millionaires!" There, sticking right out of the rock, was the ledge where "float" had been breaking and washing for hundreds of years; so you see, only eleven days from the time we were going to give up, we made our find. That mine paid from the first load of ore sent out by pack-horses.'
Other mines were found in a less spectacular way. The 'float' lost itself in a rounded knoll in the lap of a dozen peaks; and the miners had to decide which of the benches to tunnel. They might have to bring the stream from miles distant to sluice out the gravel; and the largest nuggets might not be found till hundreds of feet had been washed out; but always the 'float,' the pebbles, the specks that shone in the sun, lured them with promise. Even for those who found no mine the search was not without reward. There was the care-free outdoor life. There was the lure of hope edging every sunrise. There was the fresh-washed ozone fragrant with the resinous exudations of the great trees of the forest. There was the healing regeneration to body and soul. Amid the dance-halls and saloons the miner with money becomes a sot. Out in the wilds he becomes a child of nature, simple and clean and elemental as the trees around him or the stars above him.
I think of one prospector whose range was at the headwaters of the Athabaska. In the dance-halls he had married a cheap variety actress. When the money of his first find had been dissipated she refused to live with him, and tried to extort high alimony by claiming their two-year-old son. The penniless prospector knew that he was no equal for law courts and sheriffs and lawyers; so he made him a raft, got a local trader to outfit him, and plunged with his baby boy into the wilderness, where no sheriff could track him. I asked him why he did not use pack-horses. He said dogs could have tracked them, but 'the water didn't leave no smell.' In the heart of the wilderness west of Mounts Brown and Hooker he built him a log cabin with a fireplace. In that cabin he daily hobbled his little son, so that the child could not fall in the fire. He set his traps round the mountains and hunted till the snow cleared. By the time he could go prospecting in spring he had seven hundred dollars' worth of furs to sell; and he kept the child with him in the wilds till his wife danced herself across the boundary. Then he brought the boy down and sent him to school. When the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the Rockies, that man became one of the famous guides. He was the first guide I ever employed in the mountains.
Up-stream, then, headed the prospectors on the Fraser in that autumn of '58. The miner's train of pack-horses is a study in nature. There is always the wise old bell-mare leading the way. There is always the lazy packer that has to be nipped by the horse behind him. There are always the shanky colts who bolt to stampede where the trail widens; but even shanky-legged colts learn to keep in line in the wilds. At every steep ascent the pack-train halts, girths are tightened, and sly old horses blow out their sides to deceive the driver. At first colts try to rub packs off on every passing tree, but a few tumbles heels over head down a bank cure them of that trick.
Always the course in new territory is according to the slope of the ground. River-bank is followed where possible; but where windfall or precipice drives back from the bed of the river over the mountain spurs, the pathfinder takes his bearings from countless signs. Moss is on the north side of tree-trunks. A steep slope compels a zigzag, corkscrew ascent, but the slope of the ground guides the climber as to the way to go; for slope means valley; and in valleys are streams; and in the stream is the 'float,' which is to the prospector the one shining signal to be followed. Timber-line is passed till the forests below look like dank banks of moss. Cloud-line is passed till the clouds lie underneath in grey lakes and pools. A 'fool hen' or mountain grouse comes out and bobbles her head at the passing packtrain. A whistling marmot pops up from the rocks and pierces the stillness. Redwings and waxbills pick crumbs from every camp meal; and occasionally a bald-headed eagle utters a lonely raucous cry from solitary perch of dead branch or high rock.
In the Rocky Mountains. From a photograph.
Naturally enough, the pack-train unconsciously follows the game-trail of deer and goat and cougar and bear across the slope to the watering-places where springs gush out from the rocks. One has only to look close enough to see the little cleft footprint of the deer round these springs. To the miners, penetrating the wilds north of the Fraser, the caribou proved a godsend during that lean first winter. The miners spelled it 'cariboo,' and thus gave the great gold area its name.
The population of Yale that winter consisted of some eight hundred people, housed in tents and log shacks roofed with canvas. Between Yale and Hope remained two thousand miners during the winter. Meals cost a dollar, served on tin plates to diners standing in long rows waiting turn at the counter. The regular menu at all meals was bacon, salmon, bread, and coffee. Of butter there was little; of milk, none. Wherever a sand-bar gave signs of mineral, it was tested with the primitive frying-pan. If the pan showed a deposit, the miner rigged up a rocker—a contraption resembling a cradle with rockers below, about four feet from end to end, two feet across, and two deep. The sides converged to bottom. At the head was a perforated sheet-iron bottom like a housewife's colander. Into this box the gravel was shovelled by one miner. The man's 'pardner' poured in water and rocked the cradle—cradled the sand. The water ran through the perforated bottom to a second floor of quicksilver or copperplate or woolly blanket which caught the gold. On a larger scale, when streams were directed through wooden boxes, the gold was sluiced; on a still larger scale, the process was hydraulic mining, though the same in principle. In fact, in huge free milling works, where hydraulic machinery crushes the gold-bearing quartz and screens it to fineness before catching the gold on delicate sieves, the process is only a complex refinement of the bar-washer cradling his gold.