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Chronicles of Canada Volume 23 - The Cariboo Trail: A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia

<h3> CHAPTER VIII </h3> <h4> THE CARIBOO ROAD </h4> When the railway first went through the Fraser Canyon, passengers looking out of the windows anywhere from Yale to Ashcroft were amazed to see something like a Jacob's ladder up and down the mountains, appearing in places to hang almost in mid-air. Between Yale and Lytton it hugged the mountain-side on what looked like a shelf of rock directly above the wildest water of the canyon. Crib-work of huge trees, resembling in the distance the woven pattern of a willow basket, projected out over the ledges like a bird's nest hung from some mountain eyrie. The traveller almost expected to see the thing sway and swing to the wind. Then the train would sweep through a tunnel, or swing round a sharp bend, and far up among the summits might be seen a mule-team, or a string of pack-horses winding round the shoulders of the rock. It seemed impossible that any man-made {100} highway could climb such perpendicular walls and drop down precipitous cliffs and follow a trail apparently secure only for a mountain goat. The first impression was that the thing must be an old Indian war-path, along which no enemy could pursue. But when the train paused at a water tank, and the traveller made inquiry, he was told that this was nothing less than the famous Cariboo Road, one of the wonders of the world. <center> <ANTIMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-100.jpg" ALT="The Cariboo Road. From a photograph." BORDER="2" WIDTH="363" HEIGHT="537"> <H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 363px"> The Cariboo Road. From a photograph. </h4> </center> As long as the discovery of gold was confined to the Fraser river-bars, the important matter of transportation gave the government no difficulty. Hudson's Bay steamers crossed from Victoria to Langley on the Fraser, which was a large fort and well equipped as a base of supplies for the workers in the wilderness. Stern-wheelers, canoes, and miscellaneous craft could, with care, creep up from Langley to Hope and Yale; and the fares charged afforded a good revenue to the Hudson's Bay Company. Even when prospectors struck above Yale, on up to Harrison Lake and across to Lillooet, or from the Okanagan to the Thompson, the difficulties of transportation were soon surmounted. A road was shortly opened from Harrison Lake to Lillooet, built by the miners themselves, under the direction of the Royal {101} Engineers; and, as to the Thompson, there was the well-worn trail of the fur-traders, who had been going overland to Kamloops for fifty years. It was when gold was discovered higher up on the Fraser and in Cariboo, after the colony of British Columbia had taken its place on the political map, that Governor Douglas was put to the task of building a great road. Henceforth, for a few years at least, the miners would be the backbone, if not the whole body, of the new colony. How could the administration be carried on if the government had no road into the mining region? And so the governor of British Columbia entered on the boldest undertaking in roadbuilding ever launched by any community of twenty thousand people. The Cariboo Road became to British Columbia what the Appian Way was to Rome. It was eighteen feet wide and over four hundred and eighty miles long. It was one of the finest roads ever built in the world. Yet it cost the country only two thousand dollars a mile, as against the forty thousand dollars a mile which the two transcontinental railways spent later on their roadbeds along the canyon. It was Sir James Douglas's greatest monument. {102} Five hundred volunteer mine-workers built the road from Harrison Lake to Lillooet in 1858 at the rate of ten miles a day; and when the road was opened in September, packers' charges fell from a dollar to forty-eight cents and finally to eighteen cents a pound. But presently the trend of travel drew away from Harrison Lake to the line of the Fraser. At first there was nothing but a mule-trail hacked out of the rock from Yale to Spuzzum; but miners went voluntarily to work and widened the bridle-path above the shelving waters. From Spuzzum to Lytton the river ledges seemed almost impassable for pack animals; yet a cable ferry was rigged up at Spuzzum and mules were sent over the ledges to draw it up the river. When the water rose so high that the lower ledges were unsafe, the packers ascended the mountains eight hundred feet above the roaring canyon. Where cliffs broke off, they sent the animals across an Indian bridge. The marvel is not that many a poor beast fell headlong eight hundred feet down the precipice. The marvel is that any pack animal could cross such a trail at all. 'A traveller must trust his hands as much as his feet,' wrote Begbie, after his first experience of this trail. <center> <ANTIMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-102.jpg" ALT="Indian graves at Lytton, B.C. From a photograph." BORDER="2" WIDTH="476" HEIGHT="405"> <H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 476px"> Indian graves at Lytton, B.C. From a photograph. </h4> </center> {103} 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 passengers 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 passengers 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 passenger 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 passenger 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 passed 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 passed away for ever the day of the penniless prospector seeking the golden fleece of the hills as his predecessor, the {109} trapper, had sought the pelt of the little beaver. All unwittingly, the miner, as well as the 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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