ke 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.

[Illustration: Indian graves at Lytton, B.C. From a photograph.]

{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