The Cariboo Trail Part 2

Cariboo Cameron took a hundred and fifty thousand out of his claim in three months. In six months of '63 William's Creek yielded a million and a half dollars, and this was only one of many rich creeks. From '59 to '71 came twenty-five million dollars in gold from the Cariboo country. By '65 hydraulic machinery was coming in and the prospectors were flocking out; but to this day the Cariboo mines have remained a freakish gamble. Mines for which capitalists have paid hundreds of thousands have suddenly ended in barren rock. Diggings from which nuggets worth five hundred dollars have been taken have petered out after a few hundred feet. Even where the gravel merged to whitish gold quartz, the most expert engineer in the camp could not tell when the vein would fault and cease as entirely as if cut off. And the explanation of this is entirely theoretical. The theory is that the place of the gold was the gravel bed of an old stream, an old stream antedating the petrified forests of the South-west, and that, when vast alluvial deposits were carried over a great part of the {49} continent by inland lakes and seas, the gold settled to the bottom and was buried beneath the deposits of countless centuries. Then convulsive changes shook the earth's surface. Mountains heaved up where had been sea bottom and swamp and watery plain. In the upheaval these subterranean creek beds were hoisted and thrown towards the surface. Floods from the eternal snows then grooved out watercourses down the scarred mountainsides. Frost and rain split away loose debris. And man found gold in these prehistoric, perhaps preglacial, creek beds. However this may be, there was no possible scientific way of knowing how the gold-bearing area would run. A fortune might come out of one claim of a hundred feet and its next-door neighbour might not yield an atom of gold. Only the genii of the hidden earth held the secret; and modern science derides the invisible pixies of superst.i.tion, just as these invisible spirits of the earth seem to laugh at man's best efforts to ferret out their secrets.

What became of the lucky prospectors? I have talked with some of them on the lower reaches of the Cariboo Road. They are old and poor to-day, and the memory of their fortune is as a dream. Have they not lived at {50} Hope and Yale and Lytton for fifty years and seen their trail crumble into the canyon, with not a dozen pack-trains a year pa.s.sing to the Upper country? John Rose, who was one of the men to find Cariboo, set out in the spring of '63 to prospect the Bear River country. He set out alone and was never again seen alive. Cariboo Cameron, a 'man from Glengarry,' went back to Glengarry by the Ottawa and established something like a baronial estate; but he lost his money in various investments and died in 1888 in Cariboo a poor man. Billy Deitz, after whom a famous creek was named, died penniless in Victoria; and the Scottish miner who rhymed the songs of Cariboo died unwept and unknown to history.

The romance of the trail is almost incredible to us, who may travel by motor from Ashcroft to Barkerville. In October '62 a Mr Ireland and a party were on the trail when snow began falling so heavily that it was unsafe to proceed. They halted at a negro's cabin. Out of the heavy snowfall came another party struggling like themselves. Then a packer emerged from the storm with word that five women and twenty-six men were s...o...b..und half a mile ahead. Ireland and his party set out to the rescue; but they lost the trail and {51} could only find the cabin again by means of the gunshots that the others kept firing as a signal.

Two dozen people slept that night in the log shack; and when dawn came, four feet of snow lay on the ground and the great evergreens looked like huge sugar-cones. On snowshoes Ireland and three others set out to find the lost men and women on the lower trail. They found them at sundown camped in a ravine beside a rock, with their blankets up to keep off the wind, thawing themselves out before a fire. A high wind was blowing and it was bitterly cold. The lost people had not eaten for three days. Twenty men from the cabin dug a way through the drifts with their snowshoes and brought horses to carry the women back to the coloured man's roof.

But it was not of the perils of the trail that the outside world heard.

The outside world heard of claims which any man might find and from which gold to the value of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars could be dug and washed in three months. The outside world thought that gold could be picked up amid the rocks of British Columbia. Necessity is the mother of invention. She is also the hard foster-mother of desperation and folly. Times {52} were very hard in Canada. The East was hard up. Farming did not pay. All eyes turned towards Cariboo; and no wonder! Many of the treasure-seekers holding the richest claims had gone to Cariboo owning nothing but the clothes on their backs. A season's adventure in a no-man's-land of bear and deer, above cloud-line and amid wild mountain torrents, had sent them out to the world laden with wealth. Some ran the wild canyons of the Fraser in frail canoes and crazy rafts with their gold strapped to their backs or packed in buckskin sacks and carpet-bags. And some who had won fortune and were bringing it home went to their graves in Fraser Canyon.

[1] See _Pioneers of the Pacific Coast_ in this Series.

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CHAPTER IV

THE OVERLANDERS

When the Cariboo fever reached the East, the public there had heard neither of the Indian ma.s.sacres in Oregon nor that the Sioux were on the war-path in Dakota. Promoters who had never set foot west of Buffalo launched wild-cat mining companies and parcel express devices and stages by routes that went up sheer walls and crossed unbridged rivers. To such frauds there could be no certain check; for it took six months to get word in and out of Cariboo. Eastern papers were full of advertis.e.m.e.nts of easy routes to the gold-diggings. Far-off fields look green. Far-off gold glittered the brighter for the distance.

Cariboo became in popular imagination a land where nuggets grew on the side of the road and could be picked by the bushel-basket. Besides, times were so hard in the East that the majority of the youthful adventurers who were caught by the fever had nothing to lose except their lives.

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A group of threescore young men from different parts of Canada, from Kingston, Niagara, and Montreal, having noticed advertis.e.m.e.nts of an easy stage-route from St Paul, set out for the gold-diggings in May 1862. Tickets could be purchased in London, England, as well as in Canada, for when these young Canadians reached St Paul, they found eighteen young men from England, like themselves, diligently searching the whereabouts of the stage-route. That was their first inkling that fraudulent practices were being carried on and that they had been deceived, that there was, in fact, no stage-route from St Paul to Cariboo. A few of them turned back, but the majority, by ox-cart and rickety stagecoach, pushed on to the Red River and went up to a point near the boundary of modern Manitoba, where lay the first steamboat to navigate that river, about to start on her maiden trip. On this steamboat, the little _International_, afterwards famous for running into sand-banks and mud-bars, the troops of Overlanders took pa.s.sage, and stowed themselves away wherever they could, some in the cook's galley and some among the cordwood piled in the engine-room.

The Sioux were on a rampage in Minnesota {55} and Dakota, but Alexander Dallas, governor of Rupert's Land for the Hudson's Bay Company, and Mgr Tache, bishop of St Boniface, were aboard, and their presence afforded protection. On the way to the vessel some of the Overlanders had narrowly escaped a ma.s.sacre. The story is told that as they slowly made their way in ox-carts up the river-bank, a band of hors.e.m.e.n swept over the horizon, and the travellers found themselves surrounded by Sioux warriors. The old plainsman who acted as guide bethought him of a ruse: he hoisted a flag of the Hudson's Bay Company and waved it in the face of the Sioux without speaking. The painted warriors drew together and conferred. The oxen stood complacently chewing the cud.

Indians never molested British fur-traders. Presently the raiders went off over the horizon as swiftly as they had come, and the gold-seekers drove on, little realizing the fate from which they had been delivered.

There had been heavy rains that spring on the prairie, and trees came jouncing down the muddy flood of the Red River. The little _International_, like a panicky bicycle rider, steered straight for every tree, and hit one with such impact that her smokestack came toppling down. At another place she pushed {56} her nose so deep in the soft mud of the riverbank that it required all the crew and most of the pa.s.sengers to shove her off. But everybody was jubilant. This was the first navigation of the Red River by steam. The Queen's Birthday, the 24th of May, was celebrated on board the vessel pottle-deep to the tune of the bagpipes played by the governor's Scottish piper. But the governor's wife was heard to lament to Bishop Tache that the _International's_ menu consisted only of pork and beans alternated with beans and pork, that the service was on tin plates, and that the dining-room chairs were backless benches.

The arrival of the steamer at Fort Garry (Winnipeg) was celebrated with great rejoicing. Indians ran along the river-bank firing off rifles in welcome, and opposite the flats where the fort gate opened, on what is now Main Street, the company's men came out and fired a royal salute.

The people bound for Cariboo camped on the flats outside Fort Garry.

Here was a strange world indeed. Two-wheeled ox-carts, made wholly of wood, without iron or bolt, wound up to the fort from St Paul in processions a mile long, with fat squaws and whole Indian families sitting squat inside the crib-like structure of the cart. Men and boys {57} loped ahead and abreast on sinewy ponies, riding bareback or on home-made saddles. Only a few stores stood along what is now Main Street, which ran northward towards the Selkirk Settlement. With the Indians, who were camped everywhere in the woods along the a.s.siniboine, the Overlanders began to barter for carts, oxen, ponies, and dried deer-meat or pemmican. An ox and cart cost from forty to fifty dollars. Ponies sold at twenty-five dollars. Pemmican cost sixteen cents a pound, and a pair of duffel Hudson's Bay blankets cost eight or ten dollars. Instead of blankets, many of the travellers bought the cheaper buffalo robes. These sold as low as a dollar each.

John Black, the Presbyterian 'apostle of the Red River,' preached special sermons on Sunday for the miners. And on a beautiful June afternoon the Overlanders headed towards the setting sun in a procession of almost a hundred ox-carts; and the fort waved them farewell. One wonders whether, as the last ox-cart creaked into the distance, the fur-traders realized that the miner heralded the settler, and that the settler would fence off the hunter's game preserve into farms and cities. A rare glamour lay over the plains {58} that June, not the less rare because hope beckoned the travellers. The unfenced prairie billowed to the horizon a sea of green, diversified by the sky-blue waters of slough and lake, and decked with the hues of gorgeous flowers--the prairie rose, fragrant, tender, elusive, and fragile as the English primrose; the blood-red tiger-lily; the brown windflower with its corn-ta.s.sel; the heavy wax cups of the sedgy water-lily, growing where wild duck flackered unafraid. Game was superabundant. Prairie chickens nestled along the single-file trail.

Deer bounded from the poplar thickets and shy coyotes barked all night in the offing. Night in June on the northern prairie is but the shadowy twilight between two long days. The sun sets between nine and ten, and rises between three and four, and the moonlight is clear enough on cloudless nights for campers to see the time on their watches.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Red River cart. From a photograph.]

The trail followed was the old path of the fur-trader from fort to fort 'the plains across' to the Rockies. From the a.s.siniboine the road ran northerly to Forts Ellice and Carlton and Pitt and Edmonton.[1] Thomas M'Micking {59} of Niagara acted as captain and eight others as lieutenants. A scout preceded the marchers, and at sundown camp was formed in a big triangle with the carts as a stockade, the animals tethered or hobbled inside. Tents were pitched outside with six men doing sentry duty all night. At two in the morning a halloo roused camp. An hour was permitted for harnessing and breaking camp, and then the carts creaked out in line. They halted at six for breakfast and marched again at seven. Dinner was at two, supper at six, and tents were seldom pitched before nine at night. On Sunday the procession rested and some one read divine service. The oxen and ponies foraged for themselves. By limiting camp to five hours, in spite of the slow pace of the oxen, forty to fifty miles a day could be made on a good trail in fair weather. While the scout led the way, the captain and his lieutenants kept the long procession in line; and the travellers for the most part dozed lazily in their carts, dreaming of the fortunes awaiting them in Cariboo. Some nights, when the captain permitted a longer halt than usual and when camp-fires blazed before the tents, men played the violin and sang and danced. Each man was his own cook.

Three or four occupied {60} each tent. In the company was one woman, with two children. She was an Irishwoman; but she bore the name of Shubert, from which we may infer that her husband was not an Irishman.

Sunday having intervened, the travellers did not reach Portage la Prairie until the fourth day out. Another week pa.s.sed before they arrived at Fort Ellice. Heavy rains came on now, and James M'Kay, chief trader at Fort Ellice, opened his doors to the gold-seekers.

Harness and carts repaired and more pemmican bought, the travellers crossed the Qu'Appelle river in a Hudson's Bay scow, paying toll of fifty cents a cart. From the Qu'Appelle westward the journey grew more arduous. The weather became oppressively hot and mosquitoes swarmed from the sloughs. At Carlton and at Fort Pitt the fur-traders' 'string band'--husky-dogs in wolfish packs--surrounded the camp of the Overlanders and stole pemmican from under the tent-flaps. From Fort Pitt westward the trail crossed a rough, wooded country, and there were no more scows to take the ox-carts across the rivers. Eleven days of continuous rain had flooded the sloughs into swamps; and in three days as many as eight corduroy bridges had to be built. Two {61} long trees were felled parallel and light poles were laid across the floating trees. Where the trees swerved to the current, some one would swim out and anchor them with ropes till the hundred carts had pa.s.sed safely to the other side.

It was the 21st of July when the travellers came out on the high banks of the North Saskatchewan, flowing broad and swift, opposite Fort Edmonton. There had been floods and all the company's rafts had been carried away. But the ox-carts were poled across by means of a big York boat; and the travellers were welcomed inside the fort.

The arrival of the Overlanders is remembered at Edmonton by some old-timers even to this day. Salvoes of welcome were fired from the fort cannon by a half-breed shooting his musket into the touch-hole of the big gun. Concerts were given, with bagpipes, concertinas, flutes, drums, and fiddles, in honour of the far-travellers. Pemmican-bags were replenished from the company's stores.

Miners often uttered loud complaints against the charges made by the fur-traders for provisions, forgetting what it cost to pack these provisions in by dog-train and canoe. If the Hudson's Bay officials at Fort Garry and {62} Edmonton had withheld their help, the Overlanders would have perished before they reached the Rockies. Though the miner did everything to destroy the fur trade--started fires which ravaged the hunter's forest haunts, put up saloons which demoralized the Indians, built wagon-roads where aforetime wandered only the shy creatures of the wilds--though the miner heralded the doom of the fur trade--yet with an unvarying courtesy, from Fort Garry to the Rockies, the Hudson's Bay men helped the Overlanders.

The majority of the travellers now changed oxen and carts for pack-horses and _travois_, contrivances consisting of two poles, within which the horses were attached, and a rude sledge. A few continued with oxen, and these oxen were to save their lives in the mountains.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Was.h.i.+ng gold on the Saskatchewan. From a photograph.]

The farther the Overlanders now plunged into the wilderness, the more they were pestered by the husky-dogs that roamed in howling hordes round the outskirts of the forts. The story is told of several prospectors of this time, who slept soundly in their tent after a day's exhausting tramp, and awoke to find that their boots, bacon, rope, and clothes had been devoured by the ravenous dogs. They {63} asked the trader's permission to sleep inside the fort.

'Why?' asked the amused trader. 'Why, now, when the huskies have chewed all you own but your instruments? You are locking the stable door after your horse has been stolen.'

'No,' answered the prospectors. 'If those husky-dogs last night could devour all our camp kit without disturbing us, to-night they might swallow us before we'd waken.'

The next pause was at St Albert, one of Father Lacombe's missions.

What surprised the Overlanders as they advanced was the amazing fertility of the soil. At Fort Garry, at Pitt, at Edmonton, at St Albert, at St Ann, they saw great fields of wheat, barley, and potatoes. Afterwards many who failed in the mines drifted back to the plains and became farmers. The same thing had happened in California, and was repeated at a later day in the rush to the Klondike. Great seams of coal, too, were seen projecting from the banks of the Saskatchewan. Here some of the men began was.h.i.+ng for gold, and, finding yellow specks the size of pin-heads in the fine sand, a number of them knocked up cabins for themselves and remained west of Edmonton {64} to try their luck. Later, when these belated Overlanders decided to follow on to Cariboo, they suffered terrible hards.h.i.+ps.

The Overlanders were to enter the Rockies by the Yellowhead Pa.s.s, which had been discovered long ago by Jasper Hawse, of the Hudson's Bay Company. This section of their trail is visible to the modern traveller from the windows of a Grand Trunk Pacific Railway train, just as the lower sections of the Cariboo Trail in the Fraser Canyon are to be seen from the trains of the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian Northern. First came the fur-trader, seeking adventure through these pa.s.ses, pursuing the little beaver. The miner came next, fevered to delirium, lured by the siren of an elusive yellow G.o.ddess. The settler came third, prosaic and plodding, but dauntless too. And then came the railroad, following the trail which had been beaten hard by the stumbling feet of pioneers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Yellowhead Pa.s.s. From a photograph.]

At St Ann a guide was engaged to lead the long train of pack-horses through the pa.s.s from Jasper House on the east to Yellowhead Lake on the west. Colin Fraser, son of the famous piper for Sir George Simpson of the Hudson's Bay Company, danced a Highland fling at the gate of the fort to speed the {65} departing guests. And to the skirl of the bagpipes the procession wound away westward bound for the mountains.

Instead of the thirty miles a day which they had made farther east, the travellers were now glad to cover ten miles a day. Fallen trees lay across the trail in impa.s.sable ramparts and floods filled the gullies.

Scouts went ahead blazing trees to show the way. Bushwhackers followed, cutting away windfall and throwing logs into sloughs. Horses sank to their withers in seemingly bottomless muskegs,[2] so that packs had to be cut off and the unlucky bronchos pulled out by all hands straining on a rope.

Somewhere between the rivers Pembina and M'Leod the travellers were amazed to see what the wise ones in the party thought a volcano--a continuous and self-fed fire burning on the crown of a hill. Science of a later {66} day p.r.o.nounced this a gas well burning above some subterranean coal seam.

At length the Overlanders were ascending the banks of the M'Leod, whose torrential current warned them of rising ground. Three times in one day windfall and swamp forced the party to ford the stream for pa.s.sage on the opposite side. The oxen swam and the ox-carts floated and the packs came up the bank dripping. For eleven days in August every soul of the company, including Mrs Shubert's babies, travelled wet to the skin. At night great log fires were kindled and the Overlanders sat round trying to dry themselves out. Then the trail lifted to the foothills. And on the evening of the 15th of August there pierced through the clouds the snowy, s.h.i.+ning, serrated peaks of the Rockies.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Upper M'Leod River. From a photograph.]

A cheer broke from the ragged band. Just beyond the s.h.i.+ning mountains lay--Fortune. What cared these argonauts, who had tramped across the width of the continent, that the lofty mountains raised a sheer wall between them and their treasure? Cheer on cheer rang from the encampment. Men with clothes in tatters pitched caps in air, proud that they had proved themselves kings of their own fate. It is, perhaps, well that we have to climb our {67} mountains step by step; else would many turn back. But there were no faint-hearts in the camp that night. Even the Irishwoman's two little children came out and gazed at what they could not understand.

The party now crossed a ravine to the main stream of the Athabaska. It was necessary to camp here for a week. A huge raft was built of pine saplings bound together by withes. To the stern of this was attached a tree, the branch end dipping in the water, as a sweep and rudder to keep the craft to its course. On this the Overlanders were ferried across the Athabaska. And so they entered the Yellowhead Pa.s.s.

[1] See the map in _The Adventurers of England on Hudson Bay_ in this Series.

[2] Perhaps the distinction should be made here between the muskeg and the slough. The slough was simply any depression in the ground filled with mud and water. The muskeg was permanent wet ground resting on soft mud, covered over on the top with most deceiving soft green moss which looked solid, but which quaked to every step and gave to the slightest weight. Many muskegs west of Edmonton have been formed by beavers damming the natural drainage of a small river for so many centuries that the silt and humus washed down from the mountains have formed a surface of deep black muck.

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