It was at this stage of the comedy of errors that Moody, Begbie, and Mayne came on the scene. At first M'Gowan showed truculence and assailed Moody; but when he saw the {40} force of engineers and bluejackets and saw the big gun hoisted ashore, he apologized, paid his fine for the assault, and invited the officers to a champagne dinner on Hill's Bar. Both sides to the quarrel cooled down and the riots ended. The army stayed only to see the miners wash the gold and then put back to Victoria. The miners had learned that an English judge and a field force could be put on the ground in a week. September had settled disorder among the Indians. January settled disorder among the whites. In the wild remote regions of the up-country there was much 'claim jumping.' A man lost his claim if he stopped mining for seventy-two hours, and when the place of registration was far from the find, 'pardners' camped on the spot in dugouts or in lean-tos of logs and moss along the river-bank. There were fights and there was killing, and sometimes the river cast up its dead. The marvel is that there were not more crimes. In every camp is a species of human vulture living off other men's risk. Whenever a lone man came in from the hills and paid for his purchase in nuggets, such vultures would trail him back to his claim and make what they could out of his discovery. So, by pack-train and canoe, the miners {41} worked up to Alexandria, to Quesnel, to Fort George. Towards spring, when the prospectors had succeeded in packing in more provisions, they began striking back east from the main river, following creeks to their sources, and from their sources over the watershed to the sources of creeks flowing in an opposite direction. Late in '59 men reached Quesnel Lake and Cariboo Lake. Binding saplings together with withes, the prospectors poled laboriously round these alpine lagoons, and where they found creeks pouring down from the upper peaks, they followed these creeks up to their sources. Pockets of gravel in the banks of both lakes yielded as much as two hundred dollars a day. On Horse Fly Creek up from Quesnel Lake five men washed out in primitive rockers a hundred ounces of nuggets in a week. The gold-fever, which had subsided when all the bars of the Fraser were occupied, mounted again. Great rumours began to float out from the up-country. Bank facings seemed to indicate that the richest pay-dirt lay at bed-rock. This kind of mining required sluicing, and long ditches were constructed to bring the water to the dry diggings. By the autumn of '59 a thousand miners were at work round Quesnel Lake. By the spring {42} of '60 Yale and Hope were almost deserted. Men on the upper diggings were making from sixty to a hundred dollars a day. Only Chinamen remained on the lower bars.