e fights and there was killing,
and sometimes the river cast up its dead. The marvel is that there
were not more crimes. In every camp is a species of human vulture
living off other men's risk. Whenever a lone man came in from the
hills and paid for his purchase in nuggets, such vultures would trail
him back to his claim and make what they could out of his discovery.

So, by pack-train and canoe, the miners {41} worked up to Alexandria,
to Quesnel, to Fort George. Towards spring, when the prospectors had
succeeded in packing in more provisions, they began striking back east
from the main river, following creeks to their sources, and from their
sources over the watershed to the sources of creeks flowing in an
opposite direction. Late in '59 men reached Quesnel Lake and Cariboo
Lake. Binding saplings together with withes, the prospectors poled
laboriously round these alpine lagoons, and where they found creeks
pouring down from the upper peaks, they followed these creeks up to
their sources. Pockets of gravel in the banks of both lakes yielded as
much as two hundred dollars a day. On Horse Fly Creek up from Quesnel
Lake five men washed out in primitive rockers a hundred ounces of
nuggets in a week. The gold-fever, which had subsided when all the
bars of the Fraser were occupied, mounted again. Great rumours began
to float out from the up-country. Bank facings seemed to indicate that
the richest pay-dirt lay at bed-rock. This kind of mining required
sluicing, and long ditches were constructed to bring the water to the
dry diggings. By the autumn of '59 a thousand miners were at work
round Quesnel Lake. By the spring {42} of '60 Yale and Hope were
almost deserted. Men on the upper diggings were making from sixty to a
hundred dollars a day. Only Chinamen remained on the lower bars.

It was in the autumn of the year '60 that Doc Keithley, John Rose,
Sandy MacDonald, and George Weaver set out from Keithley Creek, which
flows into Cariboo Lake, to explore the cup-like valley amid the great
peaks which seemed to feed this lake. They toiled up the creek five
miles, then followed signs up a dry ravine seven miles farther.
Reaching the divide at last, they came on an open park-like ridge,
bounded north and east by lofty shining peaks. Deer and caribou tracks
were everywhere. It was now that the region became known as Cariboo.
They camped on the ridge, cooked supper, and slept under the stars.
Should they go on,