n Bellingham Bay and, tired and sleepy, landed on the beach.

Our cows must have feed, they must be milked, the milk must be marketed.
There was no rest for us during another thirty-six hours. In fact, there
was but little sleep for anybody on that beach at the time. Several
ocean steamers had just dumped three thousand people on the beach, and
there was still a scramble to find a place to build a house or stretch
a tent, or even to spread a blanket, for there were great numbers
already there, landed by previous steamers. The staking of lots on the
tide flats at night, when the tide was out, seemed to be a staple
industry.

A few days after my arrival four steamers came with an aggregate of more
than two thousand passengers. Many of these, however, did not leave the
steamer; they took passage either to their port of departure--San
Francisco or Victoria--or to points on the Sound. The ebb tide had set
in, and although many steamers came later and landed passengers, their
return lists soon became large and the population began to diminish.

Taking my little dory that we had with us on the scow, I rowed to the
largest steamer lying at anchor. So many small boats surrounded the
steamer that I could not get within a hundred feet of it. All sorts of
craft filled the intervening space, from the smallest Indian canoe to
large barges, the owner of each craft striving to secure customers.

The great difficulty was to find a trail to the gold fields. This pass
and that pass was tried without success. I saw sixty men with heavy
packs on their backs start out in one company. Every one of these had to
come back after floundering in the mountains for weeks. The Indians,
among whom the spirit of war still smouldered, headed off some of the
parties. The snows kept back others; and finally the British, watching
their own interests, blocked the way through their land. As a result the
boom burst, and people resought their old homes.

It is doubtful if another stampede of such dimensions as that to the
Fraser in 1858 ever occurred where the suffering was so great, the
prizes so few, and the loss of life proportionately so great. Probably
not one in ten that made the effort reached the mines, and of those who
did the usual percentage drew the blanks inevitable in such stampedes.
And yet the mines were immensely rich; many millions of dollars of gold
came from the find in the lapse of years, and gold is still coming,
though now more than