'58-'59 was mild, the autumn
late, the snowfall light, and the spring very early. Fate, as usual,
favoured the dauntless.

In parties of twos and tens and twenties, and even as many as five
hundred, the miners began moving up the river prospecting. Those with
horses had literally to cut the way with their axes over windfall, over
steep banks, and round precipitous cliffs. Where rivers had to be
crossed, the men built rude rafts and poled themselves over, with their
pack-horses swimming behind. Those who had oxen killed the oxen and
sold the beef. Others breasted the mill-race of the Fraser in canoes
and dugouts. Governor Douglas estimated that before April of '59 as
many as three hundred boats with five men in each had ascended the
Fraser. Sometimes the amazing spectacle was seen of canoes lashed
together in the fashion of pontoon bridges, with wagons full of
provisions {19} braced across the canoes. These travellers naturally
did not attempt Fraser Canyon.

Before Christmas of '59 prospectors had spread into Lillooet and up the
river as high as Chilcotin, Soda Creek, Alexandria, Cottonwood Canyon,
Quesnel, and Fort George. It was safer to ascend such wild streams
than to run with the current, though countless canoes and their
occupants were never heard of after leaving Yale. Where the turbid
yellow flood began to rise and 'collect'--a boatman's phrase--the men
would scramble ashore, and, by means of a long tump-line tied--not to
the prow, which would send her sidling--to the middle of the first
thwart, would tow their craft slowly up-stream. I have passed up and
down Fraser Canyon too often to count the times, and have canoed one
wild rapid twice, but never without wondering how those first
gold-seekers managed the ascent in that winter of '59.

There was no Cariboo Road then. There was only the narrow footpath of
the trapper and the fisherman close down to the water; and when the
rocks broke off in sheer precipice, an unsteady bridge of poles and
willows spanned the abyss. A 'Jacob's ladder' a hundred feet above a
roaring whirlpool without {20} handhold on either side was one thing
for the Indian moccasin and quite another thing for the miner's
hobnailed boot. The men used to strip at these places and attempt the
rock walls barefoot; or else they cached their canoe in a tree, or hid
it under moss, lashed what provisions they could to a dog's back, and,
with a pack strapped to their own back, proceeded