t band of gold hunters arrived and settled down
a mile and a half below Yale. Another boat-load of eight hundred and
fifty came in April. In four months sixty-seven vessels, carrying from
a hundred to a thousand men each, had come up from San Francisco to
Victoria. Crews deserted their ships, clerks deserted the company,
trappers turned miners and took to the gold-bars. Before Victoria
awoke to what it was all about, twenty thousand people were camped
under tents outside the stockade, and the air was full of the wildest
rumours of fabulous gold finds.

The snowfall had been heavy in '58. In the spring the Fraser rolled to
the sea a swollen flood. Against the turbid current worked tipsy rafts
towed by wheezy steamers or leaky old sailing craft, and rickety
row-boats raced cockle-shell canoes for the gold-bars above. Ashore,
the banks of the river were lined with foot passengers toiling under
heavy packs, wagons to which clung human forms on every foot of space,
and long rows of pack-horses bogged in the flood of the overflowing
river. By September ten thousand men were rocking and washing for gold
round Yale.

As in the late Kootenay and in the still later {10} Klondike stampede,
American cities at the coast benefited most. Victoria was a ten-hour
trip from the mainland. Whatcom and Townsend, on the American side,
advertised the advantages of the Washington route to the Fraser river
gold-mines. A mushroom boom in town lots had sprung up at these points
before Victoria was well awake. By the time speculators reached
Victoria the best lots in that place had already been bought by the
company's men; and some of the substantial fortunes of Victoria date
from this period. Though the river was so high that the richest bars
could not be worked till late in August, five hundred thousand dollars
in gold was taken from the bed of the Fraser during the first six
months of '58. This amount, divided among the ten thousand men who
were on the bars around Yale, would not average as much as they could
have earned as junior clerks with the fur company, or as peanut pedlars
in San Francisco; but not so does the mind of the miner work. Here was
gold to be scooped up for nothing by the first comer; and more vessels
ploughed their way up the Fraser, though Governor Douglas sought to
catch those who came by Puget Sound and evaded licence by charging six
dollars toll each for all {11} canoes on the Fraser and twelve dollars
fo