Then, in March 1858, just when Victoria felt most secure as the capital of a perpetual fur realm, something happened. A few Yankee prospectors had gone down on the Hudson's Bay steamer _Otter_ to San Francisco in February with gold dust and nuggets from New Caledonia to exchange for money at the mint. The Hudson's Bay men had thought nothing of this. Other treasure-seekers had come to New Caledonia before and had gone back to San Francisco disappointed. But, in March, these {8} men returned to Victoria. And with them came a mad rabble of gold-crazy prospectors. A city of tents sprang up overnight round Victoria. The smithy was besieged for picks, for shovels, for iron ladles. Men stood in long lines for their turn at the trading-store. By canoe, by dugout, by pack-horse, and on foot, they planned to ascend the Fraser, and they mobbed the company for passage to Langley by the first steamer out from Victoria. Goods were paid for in cash. Before Finlayson could believe his own eyes, he had two million dollars in his safe, some of it for purchases, some of it on deposit for safe keeping. Though the company gave no guarantee to the depositors and simply sealed each man's leather pouch as it was placed in the safe, no complaint was ever made against it of dishonesty or unfair treatment. Without waiting instructions from England and with poignant memory of Oregon, Governor Douglas at once clapped on a licence of twenty-one shillings a month for mining privileges under the British crown. Thus he obtained a rough registration of the men going to the up-country; but thousands passed Victoria altogether and went in by pack-train from Okanagan or rafted across from Puget Sound. {9} The month of March had not ended when the first band of gold hunters arrived and settled down a mile and a half below Yale. Another boat-load of eight hundred and fifty came in April. In four months sixty-seven vessels, carrying from a hundred to a thousand men each, had come up from San Francisco to Victoria. Crews deserted their ships, clerks deserted the company, trappers turned miners and took to the gold-bars. Before Victoria awoke to what it was all about, twenty thousand people were camped under tents outside the stockade, and the air was full of the wildest rumours of fabulous gold finds. The snowfall had been heavy in '58. In the spring the Fraser rolled to the sea a swollen flood. Against the turbid current worked tipsy rafts towed by wheezy steamers or leaky old sailing craft, and rickety row-boats raced cockle-shell canoes for the gold-bars above. Ashore, the banks of the river were lined with foot passengers toiling under heavy packs, wagons to which clung human forms on every foot of space, and long rows of pack-horses bogged in the flood of the overflowing river. By September ten thousand men were rocking and washing for gold round Yale.