The Cariboo Trail: A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British ColumbiaLaut, Agnes C.
History
The Cariboo Trail: A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia
Laut, Agnes C.
British Columbia -- History; Gold mines and mining -- British Columbia
The prices of provisions are as follows: flour thirty-five dollars per
hundred-weight, pork a dollar a pound, beans fifty cents a pound, and
other things in proportion. Every party that starts from the Sound
should have their own supplies to last them three or four months, and
they should bring the largest size chinook canoes, as small ones are
very liable to swamp in the rapids. Each canoe should be provided with
thirty fathoms of strong line for towing over swift water, and every
man well armed. The Indians here can beat anything alive stealing.
They will soon be able to steal a man's food after he has eaten it.
[Illustration: Indians near New Westminster, B.C. From a photograph by
Maynard.]
Within two miles of Yale eighty Indians and thirty white men were
working the gold-bars; and log boarding-houses and saloons sprang up
along the river-bank as if by magic. Naturally, the last comers of '58
were too late to get a place on the gold-bars, and they went back to
the coast in disgust, calling the gold stampede 'the Fraser River
humbug.' Nevertheless, men were washing, sluicing, rocking, and
digging gold as far as Lillooet. Often the day's yield ran as high as
eight hundred dollars a man; and the higher up the treasure-seekers
{14} pushed their way, the coarser grew the gold flakes and grains.
Would the golden lure lead finally to the mother lode of all the yellow
washings? That is the hope that draws the prospector from river to
stream, from stream to dry gully bed, from dry gully to precipice edge,
and often over the edge to death or fortune.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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