In seven years this Cariboo district, about fifty miles square, yielded gold worth $25,000,000. In one [a]Riches and Starvation] day five men washed $1,200 out of the soil; four men in the same short time got $1,850. An old river bed was found where nuggets could be picked up to the amount of $1,000 per square foot.
The mountain lion and grizzly bear looked on in wonder as mushroom towns sprang up in the silent hunting grounds and the rocks re-echoed with the white man’s oath and pistol. Provisions still had to be carried up from the coast on mule-back, and were often intercepted and devoured by miners travelling the same road. In the winter of 1861, flour in Cariboo cost $72 a barrel, and bacon 75 cents a pound. Next year men came in so much faster than meal that the population was brought to the verge of famine.
The miners were a rough set for the most part, given to furious gambling on the gold-fields and to excesses of every sort when they returned to the comparative civilization of Victoria or San Francisco. Still, the mining towns had their well-filled reading-rooms, their concerts and debates, and the authority of law was uncommonly well respected. “Gold commissioners” were appointed to deal out justice promptly in every camp, and over this whole system presided a judicial genius whose name was a terror to evildoers.
“Old Judge Begbie soon made them understand who was master,” says an old miner. “I saw a fellow named Gilchrist, who had killed two men in California, on trial. He killed a man on Beaver Lake, in the Cariboo country, who was gambling with him. Whilst sitting at the table, a miner came in, threw down his bag of gold, bet an ounce, and won. Gilchrist paid. The man bet again, and won again, flippantly inquiring of the gambler if there was any other game he could play better, as he [a]British Justice] drew in the stake. Gilchrist took offence at the remark, and, lifting his pistol, shot him dead.
“Gilchrist was tried, and the jury brought in a verdict of ‘manslaughter.’ Turning to the prisoner, the judge said: ‘It is not a pleasant duty for me to have to sentence you only to prison for life. Your crime was unmitigated murder. You deserve to be hanged. Had the jury performed their duty, I might now have the painful satisfaction of condemning you to death. And you, gentlemen of the jury, permit me to say that it would give me great pleasure to see you hanged, each and every one of you, for bringing in a murderer guilty only of manslaughter.’ ”
Thirty thousand rough whites could hardly invade an Indian province without some little trouble from the natives, and one or two fights took place; but as a rule the two races got on very well together. The newcomers washing sand along the river beds did not destroy the game on which the old inhabitants depended for their living; true British justice was measured out to red man and to white with equal hand; and the Indians took readily to such work as white employers wanted done. An American historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, has left on record his opinion that “never in the pacification and settlement of any section of America have there been so few disturbances, so few crimes against life and property” as in this British land.
Fifteen years after the first rush Cariboo was utterly deserted by the white miners, though the frugal Chinese continued to sift out the golden dregs left in the district. In those fifteen years many other districts in the “sea of mountains” had been invaded by detachments of gold hunters. Some of these acquired fortunes to [a]“Black Stone” on Vancouver Island] squander, while many came out poorer than they went in, and some never came out at all. Of the three lucky Cariboo pioneers mentioned a little while ago, Dietz died a pauper in 1877, and the body of Rose was found in the woods, starved to death while searching for new gold-fields to conquer.
Even coal-mining has had its romantic episodes in the history of British Columbia. In 1835, some Indians visiting a Hudson’s Bay outpost on Vancouver Island happened into the smithy. They were astonished to find the blacksmith burning coal, and when told it had been brought a six months’ journey from over the sea they burst out laughing. There was any quantity of the same “black stone,” they said, at the north end of that very island. Other deposits were found from time to time, and the Pacific slope farther south has been glad to draw largely on the British territory for its coal supply.
In 1864, British Columbia—the mainland territory, that is—was endowed with a separate Governor and an infant legislature of which only three members out of thirteen were elected by the people. Two years afterwards Vancouver Island and British Columbia were united under the latter name; and in 1871, when the whole colony entered the Canadian Federation, the political swaddling bands were removed, and the Provincial Legislature became an elected body, with full control over the Government.
One other striking episode in the history of our Pacific Province must still be mentioned—an episode that nearly caused a war with the United States.