lmost 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 snowbound 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.

{53}

CHAPTER IV

THE OV