into a lake. The whole country side gathered there with carts and
buckets, scraping up the mud and gold from the bottom. Many thousands of
dollars were taken out of the dry river bed before the dam gave way to
the rising waters. And, if there was gold there, what is there even now
in the great main sluice of the vastest natural gold mining concern ever
set going, which has never yet since it began indulged in a "cleanup?"

I have been asked sometimes, when speaking about the Fraser and other
rivers, which are undoubtedly gold traps, why it was that nobody
attempted to turn them. Of course, my questioners were neither engineers
nor geographers. Certainly an inspection of the map of British Columbia
would show the utter impossibility of such a scheme. To dam the Fraser
would be like turning the Amazon. Yet once I do not doubt that it was
dammed, and that all the upper country was a vast lake, until the
waters found the way through the Cascades which it has now cut into a
canyon. Otherwise I cannot account for the vast benches and terraces
which rise along the Thompson. Indeed, the whole of the Dry Belt down to
Lytton has the appearance, to an eye only slightly cognisant of
geological evidence, of an ancient lacustrine valley.

Yet much work of a similar kind to damming this river has been done in
California; and even now there is a company at the great task of turning
the Feather River (which is also undoubtedly gold bearing) through a
tunnel in order to work a large portion of its bed. Whether they will
succeed or not is perhaps doubtful; but if they do, the returns will
probably be large, as they would be if anyone were able to turn aside
the Illinois in Southern Oregon, or the Rogue River, which has been
mining in the Siskiyou Range for untold generations.

I feel certain that all human gold discovering has been a mere nothing;
that our methods are only faint and feeble imitations of Nature, and
that only by circumventing her shall we be able to reach the richer
reward. But by the very vastness of her operations we are precluded
from imitating the sluice robber, who does not work himself, but "cleans
up" the rich boxes of some mining company which has undertaken a scheme
too large for any one man.

OLD AND NEW DAYS IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

The whole of this vast country--this sea of mountains, as it has very
appropriately been called--used practically to belong to the Hudson's
Bay Trading Company, and they ma