that it was yellow, and dance-hall girls
with very little possession of anything on earth but recklessness and
slippers; and the recklessness and the slippers danced them into
Cariboo, while many a solemn wight went to his death in rockslide or
rapids. By the opening of '62 six thousand miners were in Cariboo, and
Barkerville had become the central camp. How these people ever gained
access to the centre of the wilderness before the famous Cariboo Road
had {47} been built is a mystery. Some arrived by pack-train, some by
canoe, but the majority afoot.

Governor Douglas could not regulate prices here, and they jumped to war
level. Flour was three hundred dollars a barrel. Dried apples brought
two dollars and fifty cents a pound; and for lack of fruit many miners
died from scurvy. Where gold-seekers tramped six hundred miles over a
rocky trail, it is not surprising that boots commanded fifty dollars a
pair. Of the disappointed, countless numbers filled unknown graves,
and thousands tramped their way out starving and begging a meal from
the procession of incomers.

The places of the gold deposits were freakish and unaccountable.
Sometimes the best diggings were a mother lode at the head of a creek.
Sometimes they were found fifty feet under clay at the foot of a creek
where the dashing waters swerved round some rocky point into a river.
Old miners now retired at Yale and Hope say that the most ignorant
prospector could guess the place of the gold as well as the geologist.
Billy Barker, after whom Barkerville was named, struck it rich by going
fifty feet below the surface down the canyon. Cariboo Cameron, the
luckiest of all the miners and not originally a prospector, {48} found
his wealth by going still lower on the watercourse to a vertical depth
of eighty feet.

For seven miles along William's Creek worked four thousand men.
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