This was the spring of '61; and Antler Creek proved only the beginning of the rush to Cariboo. Over the divide in mad stampede rushed the gold-seekers northward and eastward. Ed Stout and Billy Deitz and two others found signs that seemed very poor on a creek which they named William's after Deitz. The gold did not pan a dollar a wash; but in wild haste came the rush to William's Creek. Crossing a creek one party of prospectors was overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, with rock-shattering flashes of lightning. Shivering in the canyon, but afraid to stand under trees {45} or near rocks, with the gravel shelving down all round them, one of the men exclaimed sardonically, 'Well, boys, this _is_ lightning.' The stream became known as Lightning Creek and proved one of the richest in Cariboo. William's Creek was panning poorer and poorer and was being called 'Humbug Creek,' when miners staked near by decided to see what they could find beneath the blue clay. It took forty-eight hours to dig down. The reward was a thousand dollars' worth of wash-gravel. Back surged the miners to William's Creek. They put shafts and tunnels through the clay and sluiced in more water for hydraulic work. Claims on William's Creek produced as high as forty pounds of gold in a day. From another creek, only four hundred feet long, fifty thousand dollars' worth of gold was washed within a space of six weeks. Lightning Creek yielded a hundred thousand dollars in three weeks. In one year gold to the value of two and a half million dollars was shipped from Cariboo.