Well, Pete, the Cornish miner, built his hut and took out his gold; but that did not satisfy him. What miner ever yet was satisfied? Pete went in for fifty things; he traded with the Indians, he trapped, he took an Indian wife; yet, through all, he maintained a character for being as honest and as straightforward a miner as ever found “a colour” from Mexico to Cariboo.
My little friend Jacques expected to meet his old brother miner Pete at his hut; but, as we came within five miles of it, a beaver swam across the river. We all fired at him, and when the smoke had vanished, I heard Jacques mutter, “Pete’s not hereabouts, or that fellow wouldn’t be there.” He was right, for, when we reached the hut an hour later, we found a notice on the door, saying that Pete and two friends had departed for the Ominica just six days earlier, being totally out of all food, and having only their guns to rely upon. Now this fact of Pete’s absence rendered necessary new arrangements, for here the two courses I have already alluded to lay open—either to turn south, along the Parsnip; or north and west, along the Findlay and Ominica.
The current of the Parsnip is regular; that of the Ominica is wild and rapid. But the Parsnip was already rising, and at its spring level it is almost an impossibility to ascend it, owing to its great depth; while the Ominica, though difficult and dangerous in its cañons, is nevertheless possible of ascent, even in its worst stage of water.
I talked the matter over with Jacques, as we sat camped on the gold-bar opposite Pete Toy’s house. Fortunately we had ample supplies of meat; but some luxuries, such as tea and sugar, were getting dangerously low, and flour was almost exhausted. I decided upon trying the Ominica.
About noon, on the 10th of May, we set out for the Ominica, with high hopes of finding the river still low enough to allow us to ascend it.
Ten miles above Toy’s hut the Ominica enters the Peace River from the south-west. We reached its mouth on the morning of the 11th, and found it high and rapid. There was hard work in store for us, and the difficulties of passing the Great Cañon loomed ominously big. We pushed on, however, and that night reached a spot where the river issued from a large gap in a high wall of dark rock. Above, on the summit of this rock, pine-trees projected over the river. We were at the door of the Ominica cañon. The warm weather of last week had done its work, and the water rushed from the gate of the cañon in a wild and impetuous torrent. We looked a moment at the grim gate which we had to storm on the morrow, and then put in to the north shore, where, under broad and lofty pines, we made our beds for the night.
The Findlay River, as it is called, after the fur-trader, who first ascended it, has many large tributaries. It is something like a huge right hand spread out over the country, of which the middle finger would be the main river, and the thumb the Ominica. There is the North Fork, which closely hugs the main Rocky Mountain range. There is the Findlay itself, a magnificent river, flowing from a vast labyrinth of mountains, and being unchanged in size or apparent volume, 120 miles above the Forks we had lately left. At that distance it issues from a cañon similar to that at whose mouth we are now camped; and there is the second South Fork, a river something smaller than the Ominica, from whose mouth it is distant about a hundred miles.
Of these rivers nothing is known. These few items are the result of chance information picked up from the solitary miner who penetrated to this cañon’s mouth, and from the reports which a wandering band of Sickanies give of the vast unknown interior of the region of the Stickeen. And yet it is all British territory. It abounds with game; its scenery is as wild as mountain peak and gloomy cañon can make it; it is free from fever or malaria. In it Nature has locked up some of her richest treasures—treasures which are open to any strong, stout heart who will venture to grasp them.
I know not how it is, but sometimes it seems to me that this England of ours is living on a bygone reputation; the sinew is there without the soul!
It is so easy to be a traveller in an easy chair—to lay out a map and run one’s finger over it and say, “This river is the true source of the Hunky-dorum, and that lake finds its outlet in the Rumtifoozle;” and it is equally easy, particularly after our comfortable dinner at the club, to stroll over to the meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Sticklebacks in Tahitian Seas, and to prove to the fashionable audience there assembled, that a stickleback was the original progenitor of the human race.