The effect of sudden wealth on some of the hungry, ragged horde who infested Cariboo was of a sort to discount fiction. One man took out forty thousand dollars in gold nuggets. A lunatic escaped from a madhouse could not have been more foolish. He came to the best saloon of Barkerville. He called in guests from the highways and byways and treated them to champagne which cost thirty dollars and fifty dollars a bottle. When the rabble could drink no more champagne, he ordered every glass filled and placed on the bar. With one magnificent drunken gesture of vainglory he swept the glasses in a clattering crash to the {95} floor. There was still a basket of champagne left. He danced the hurdy-gurdy on that basket till he cut his feet. The champagne was all gone, but he still had some gold nuggets. There was a mirror in the bar-room valued at hundreds of dollars. The miner stood and proudly surveyed his own figure in the glass. Had he not won his dearest desire and conquered all things in conquering fortune? He gathered his last nuggets and hurled them in handfuls at the mirror, shattering it in countless pieces. Then he went out in the night to sleep under the stars, penniless. He settled down to work for the rest of his life in other men's mines. The staid Overlanders, who had risked their lives to reach this wild land of desire, who had come from such church-going hamlets as Whitby, such Scottish-Presbyterian centres as Toronto and Montreal, hardly knew whether they were dreaming or living in a country of crazy pixies who delved in mud and water all day and weltered in champagne all night. The Cariboo poet sang their sentiments in these words: I ken a body made a strike. He looked a little lord. He had a clan o' followers Amang a needy horde. {96} Whane'er he'd enter a saloon, You'd see the barkeep smile-- His lordship's humble servant he Wi'out a thought o' guile! A twalmonth passed an' a' is gane, Baith freends and brandy bottle! An' noo the puir soul's left alane Wi' nocht to weet his throttle! In Barkerville, which became the centre of Cariboo, saloons and dance-halls grew up overnight. Pianos were packed in on mules at a rate of a dollar a pound from Quesnel. Champagne in pint bottles sold at two ounces of gold. Potatoes retailed at ninety dollars a hundredweight. Nails were cheap at a dollar a pound. Milk was retailed frozen at a dollar a pound. Boots still cost fifty dollars. Such luxuries as mirrors and stoves cost as high as seven hundred dollars each. The hurdy-gurdy girls with true German thrift charged ten dollars or more a dance--not the stately waltz, but a wild fling to shake the rafters and tire out the stoutest miners. A newspaper was published in Barkerville. And it was in it that James Anderson of Scotland first issued _Jeames's Letters to Sawney_.