anders feasted their tired eyes. They saw miners
everywhere along the banks of creeks washing gold. But there were more
gold-seekers than claims, and those without claims were full of
complaints and fears for the winter. They declared the country was
over-rated and a humbug. The question was how 'to get out' to
Victoria. Overlanders, who had tramped across the breadth of a
continent, did not relish the prospect, as one Yankee miner described
it, of 'hoofing it five hundred miles farther.' Some of the
disappointed Overlanders floated on down to Alexandria, where they sold
their rafts and took jobs on the {83} government road which was being
constructed along the canyon. This ensured them safety from starvation
for the winter at least.

Other Overlanders followed these first pioneers 'the plains across.'
And we have seen that some of those who had crossed the prairie with
the first party had fallen behind. These stragglers did not reach
Yellowhead Pass till the first week of September. They were entirely
out of food; but they had matches, and each box of fifty bought a huge
salmon from the Shuswaps.

Some of the men pushed ahead, built a raft, and launched it on the
Fraser. The raft ripped on a rock in midstream and stuck there at an
angle of forty-five degrees. Money, tools, food, and clothing
slithered into the tow of the rapids, while the men clung in
desperation to the upper railing of the wreck. One man let go and
dropped into the water. Swimming and drifting and rolling over and
over, he gained the shore, and hurried back to the pass with word of
the accident. Friends, accompanied by Indians, came in canoes to the
rescue, and, by means of ropes, every man was brought off the wrecked
raft alive.

But the party now stood in a more desperate predicament than ever, for
lack of food and {84} clothing. The Shuswaps saved the whites from
starvation. They took the white men to a pool in the Fraser, where
salmon, exhausted from the long run up the river, could be speared or
clubbed by the boat-load. And while some of the men chopped down trees
to build dugout canoes, others speared, cleaned, and dried the salmon.
Night and day they worked, and forgot sleep in their desperate haste.
At length they launched their craft on the Fraser. On the way down the
dangerous canyon they saw the wrecked canoes of those who had gone
before. The tenth day after leaving Yellowhead Pass they reached Fort
George. Their s