Five hundred volunteer mine-workers built the road from Harrison Lake to Lillooet in 1858 at the rate of ten miles a day; and when the road was opened in September, packers' charges fell from a dollar to forty-eight cents and finally to eighteen cents a pound. But presently the trend of travel drew away from Harrison Lake to the line of the Fraser. At first there was nothing but a mule-trail hacked out of the rock from Yale to Spuzzum; but miners went voluntarily to work and widened the bridle-path above the shelving waters. From Spuzzum to Lytton the river ledges seemed almost impassable for pack animals; yet a cable ferry was rigged up at Spuzzum and mules were sent over the ledges to draw it up the river. When the water rose so high that the lower ledges were unsafe, the packers ascended the mountains eight hundred feet above the roaring canyon. Where cliffs broke off, they sent the animals across an Indian bridge. The marvel is not that many a poor beast fell headlong eight hundred feet down the precipice. The marvel is that any pack animal could cross such a trail at all. 'A traveller must trust his hands as much as his feet,' wrote Begbie, after his first experience of this trail. [Illustration: Indian graves at Lytton, B.C. From a photograph.] {103} But by 1862 cutting and blasting and bridge-building had begun under the direction of the Royal Engineers; and before 1865 the great road was completed into the heart of the mining country at Barkerville. Henceforth passengers went in by stage-coach drawn by six horses. Road-houses along the way provided relays of fresh horses. Freight went in by bull-team, but pack-horses and mules were still used to carry miners' provisions to the camps in the hills which lay off the main road. It was while the road was still building that an enterprising packer brought twenty-one camels on the trail. They were not a success and caused countless stampedes. Horses and mules took fright at the slightest whiff of them. The camels themselves could stand neither the climate nor the hard rock road. They were turned adrift on the Thompson river, where the last of them died in 1905. There was something highly romantic in the stage-coach travel of this halcyon era. The driver was always a crack whip, a man who called himself an 'old-timer,' though often his years numbered fewer than twenty. Most of the drivers, however, knew the trail from having packed in on shanks's mare and camped under the stars. At the log taverns known {104} as road-houses travellers could sleep for the night and obtain meals.