The great drawbacks to the mining in this district are, the nature of the country, the mountains and dense forest forming great obstacles to proper investigation, and rendering the transport of provisions and other necessaries exceedingly costly; the long and severe winter, which prevents the working of the mines from October until June; and the great geological disturbances which have taken place, although they doubtless are one cause of its exceeding richness, render the following of the “leads” very difficult and uncertain. The two former disadvantages will be removed ere long by the clearing of the country, the formation of roads, and the employment of steam power to drain the shafts. The difficulties encountered in tracing the course of the gold are more serious; but more accurate knowledge of the geological formation will give greater certainty to the search. At present the changes which have taken place in the face of the country continually upset the most acute calculations. The drift gold carried down the streams settled on the solid “bed rock,” or in the blue clay immediately above it, and has been covered by the gravel accumulated in after times. Now, if the streams ran in exactly the same channels as they did when the gold came down, the matter would be simple enough. But great changes have taken place since then. At one point an enormous slide has occurred, covering in the channel, and forcing the stream to find a new course. At another, some convulsion appears to have upheaved a portion of the old bed high and dry. In the first case the “lead” is found to run into the mountain side; in the other it scales the hill. But these eccentricities are only discovered by experiment, and many a miner works for weeks to sink his shaft of thirty or forty feet, to find nothing at the end of his labour. His neighbour above or below may perhaps be making £1,000 a day, but the creek ran not through his claim in these past ages when it washed down the auriferous _débris_. More fortunate men, however, who, in mining phrase, “hit a streak,” often make large fortunes in Cariboo in an incredibly short space of time. The extraordinary yield of the Cariboo mines may be inferred from the fact that in 1861 the whole of the colonies of British Columbia and Vancouver Island were almost entirely supported by the gold obtained from Antler Creek alone; and from that time to the present year, or for four years in succession, William’s Creek has also alone sustained more than 16,000 people, some of whom have left the country with large fortunes. And yet William’s Creek is a mere narrow ravine, worked for little more than two miles of its length, and that in the roughest manner. The miners are destitute of steam power, and many requisites for efficient mining; and all that has been done hitherto has been mere scratching in the dark.