“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 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.