The Cariboo Trail Part 5

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 pa.s.sengers 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.

On the down trip bags were piled on the roof with a couple of frontiersmen armed with rifles to guard them. Many were the devices of a returning miner for concealing the gold which he had won. A fat hurdy-gurdy girl--or sometimes a squaw--would climb to a place in the stage. And when the stage, with a crack of the whip and a prance of the six horses, came rattling across the bridge and rolling into Yale, the fat girl would be the first to deposit her ample person at the bank or the express office, whence gold could safely be sent on down to Victoria. And when she emerged half an hour later she would have thinned perceptibly. Then the rough miner, who had not addressed a word to her on the way down, for fear of a confidence man aboard, would present 'Susy' with a handsome reward in the form of a gaudy dress or a year's provisions.

Start from a road-house was made at dawn, when the clouds still hung heavy on the mountains and the peaks were all reflected in the glacial waters. The pa.s.sengers tumbled dishevelled from log-walled rooms where the beds were bench berths, and ate breakfast in a {105} dining-hall where the seats were hewn logs. The fare consisted of ham fried in slabs, eggs ancient and transformed to leather in lard, slapjacks, known as 'Rocky Mountain dead shot,' in maple syrup that never saw a maple tree and was black as a pot, and potatoes in soggy pyramids. Yet so keen was the mountain air, so stimulating the ozone of the resinous hemlock forests, that the most fastidious traveller felt he had fared sumptuously, and gaily paid the two-fifty for the meal. Perhaps there was time to wash in the common tin basin at the door, where the towel always bore evidence of patronage; perhaps not; anyhow, no matter.

Washing was only a trivial incident of mountain travel in those days.

The pa.s.senger jumped for a place in the coach; the long whip cracked.

The horses sprang forward; and away the stage rattled round curves where a hind wheel would try to go over the edge--only the driver didn't let it; down embankments where any normal wagon would have upset, but this one didn't; up sharp grades where no horses ought to be driven at a trot, but where the six persisted in going at a gallop!

The pa.s.senger didn't mind the jolting that almost dislocated his spine.

He didn't mind the negro who sat on {106} one side of him or the fat squaw who sat on the other. He was thankful not to be held up by highwaymen, or dumped into the wild cataract of waters below. Outside was a changing panorama of mountain and canyon, with a world of forests and lakes. Inside was a drama of human nature to outdo any curtain-raiser he had ever witnessed--a baronet who had lost in the game and was going home penniless, perhaps earning his way by helping with the horses; an outworn actress who had been trying her luck at the dance-halls; a gambler pretending that he was a millionaire; a saloon-keeper with a few thousands in his pockets and a diamond in his shirt the size of a pebble; a tenderfoot rigged out as a veteran, with buckskin coat, a belt full of artillery, fearfully and wonderfully made new high-boots, and a devil-may-care air that deceived no one but himself; a few Shuswaps and Siwashes, fat, ill-smelling, insolent, and plainly highly amused in their beady, watchful, black, ferret eyes at the mad ways of this white race; a still more ill-smelling Chinaman; and a taciturn, grizzled, ragged fellow, paying no attention to the fat squaw, keeping his observations and his thoughts inside his high-boots, but likely as not to turn out the man who {107} would conduct the squaw to the bank or the express office at Yale.

If one could get a seat outside with the guards and the driver--one who knew how to unlock the lore of these sons of the hills--he was lucky; for he would learn who made his strike there, who was murdered at another place, how the sneak-thief trailed the tenderfoot somewhere else--all of it romance, much of it fiction, much of it fact, but no fiction half so marvellous as the fact.

Bull-teams of twenty yokes, long lines of pack-horses led by a bell-mare, mule-teams with a tinkling of bells and singing of the drivers, met the stage and pa.s.sed with happy salute. At nightfall the camp-fires of foot travellers could be seen down at the water's edge.

And there was always danger enough to add zest to the journey.

Wherever there are hordes of hungry, adventurous men, there will be desperadoes. In spite of Begbie's justice, robberies occurred on the road and not a few murders. The time going in and out varied; but the journey could be made in five days and was often made in four.

The building of the Cariboo Road had an important influence on the camp that its builders could not foresee. The unknown El {108} Dorado is always invested with a fabulous glamour that draws to ruin the reckless and the unfit. Before the road was built adventurers had arrived in Cariboo expecting to pick up pails of nuggets at the bottom of a rainbow. Their disillusionment came; but there was an easy way back to the world. They did not stay to breed crime and lawlessness in the camp. 'The walking'--as Begbie expressed it--'was all down hill and the road was good, especially for thugs.' While there were ten thousand men in Cariboo in the winter of '62 and perhaps twenty thousand in the winter of '63, there were less than five thousand in '71.

This does not mean that the camp had collapsed. It had simply changed from a poor man's camp to a camp for a capitalist or a company. It will be remembered that the miners first found the gold in flakes, then farther up in nuggets, then that the nuggets had to be pursued to pay-dirt beneath gravel and clay. This meant shafts, tunnels, hydraulic machinery, stamp-mills. Later, when the pay-dirt showed signs of merging into quartz, there pa.s.sed away for ever the day of the penniless prospector seeking the golden fleece of the hills as his predecessor, the trapper, had sought the pelt of the little beaver.

All unwittingly, the miner, as well as the {109} trapper, was an instrument in the hands of destiny, an instrument for shaping empire; for it was the inrush of miners which gave birth to the colony of British Columbia. Federation with the Canadian Dominion followed in 1871; the railway and the settler came; and the man with the pick and his eyes on the 'float' gave place to the man with the plough.

{110}

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The episode of Cariboo is so recent that the bibliography on it is not very complete. _British Columbia_, by Judge Howay and E. O. S.

Scholefield, provincial librarian, is the last and most accurate word on the history of that province, though one could wish that the authors had given more human-doc.u.ment records in the biographical section. In a very few years there will be no old-timers of the trail left; and, after all, it is the human doc.u.ment that gives colour and life to history. It was my privilege to know some of the Overlanders intimately. One of the companies who rafted down the Fraser came from the county where I was born; and though they preceded my day, their terrible experiences were a household word. With others I have poled the Fraser on those very tempestuous waters that took such toll of life in '62. Others have been my hosts. I have gone up and down the Arrow Lakes in a steamer as a guest of the man who came through the worst experiences of the Overlanders. Chance conversations are shifty guides on dates and place-names. For these, regarding the Overlanders, I have relied on Mrs MacNaughton's _Cariboo_.

{111}

Gosnell's _British Columbia Year Book_ and Hubert Howe Bancroft's _British Columbia_ are very full on this era. Walter Moberly's pamphlets on the building of the trail and Mr Alexander's casual addresses are excellent. Old files of the Kamloops _Sentinel_ and the Victoria _Colonist_ are full of scattered data. Anderson's _Hand Book of 1858_, Begbie's Report to the London Geographical Society, 1861; Begg's _British Columbia_; _Fraser's Journal_; Mayne's _British Columbia_, 1862; Milton and Cheadle's _North West Pa.s.sage_, 1865; Palliser's _Report_, 1859; Waddington's _Fraser River Mines_--all afford sidelights on this adventurous era. On the prospector's daily life there is no book. That must be learned from him on the trail; and on many camp trips in the Rockies, with prospectors for guides, I have picked up such facts as I could.

THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA

THIRTY-TWO VOLUMES ILl.u.s.tRATED

Edited by GEORGE M. WRONG and H. H. LANGTON

THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA

PART I

THE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS

1. THE DAWN OF CANADIAN HISTORY By Stephen Leac.o.c.k.

2. THE MARINER OF ST MALO By Stephen Leac.o.c.k.

PART II

THE RISE OF NEW FRANCE

3. THE FOUNDER OF NEW FRANCE By Charles W. Colby.

4. THE JESUIT MISSIONS By Thomas Guthrie Marquis.

5. THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA By William Bennett Munro.

6. THE GREAT INTENDANT By Thomas Chapais.

7. THE FIGHTING GOVERNOR By Charles W. Colby.

PART III

THE ENGLISH INVASION

8. THE GREAT FORTRESS By William Wood.

9. THE ACADIAN EXILES By Arthur G. Doughty.

10. THE Pa.s.sING OF NEW FRANCE By William Wood.

11. THE WINNING OF CANADA By William Wood.

PART IV

THE BEGINNINGS OF BRITISH CANADA

12. THE FATHER OF BRITISH CANADA By William Wood.