f; a few Shuswaps and Siwashes, fat, ill-smelling, insolent, and
plainly highly amused in their beady, watchful, black, ferret eyes at
the mad ways of this white race; a still more ill-smelling Chinaman;
and a taciturn, grizzled, ragged fellow, paying no attention to the fat
squaw, keeping his observations and his thoughts inside his high-boots,
but likely as not to turn out the man who {107} would conduct the squaw
to the bank or the express office at Yale.

If one could get a seat outside with the guards and the driver--one who
knew how to unlock the lore of these sons of the hills--he was lucky;
for he would learn who made his strike there, who was murdered at
another place, how the sneak-thief trailed the tenderfoot somewhere
else--all of it romance, much of it fiction, much of it fact, but no
fiction half so marvellous as the fact.

Bull-teams of twenty yokes, long lines of pack-horses led by a
bell-mare, mule-teams with a tinkling of bells and singing of the
drivers, met the stage and passed with happy salute. At nightfall the
camp-fires of foot travellers could be seen down at the water's edge.
And there was always danger enough to add zest to the journey.
Wherever there are hordes of hungry, adventurous men, there will be
desperadoes. In spite of Begbie's justice, robberies occurred on the
road and not a few murders. The time going in and out varied; but the
journey could be made in five days and was often made in four.

The building of the Cariboo Road had an important influence on the camp
that its builders could not foresee. The unknown El {108} Dorado is
always invested with a fabulous glamour that draws to ruin the reckless
and the unfit. Before the road was built adventurers had arrived in
Cariboo expecting to pick up pails of nuggets at the bottom of a
rainbow. Their disillusionment came; but there was an easy way back to
the world. They did not stay to breed crime and lawlessness in the
camp. 'The walking'--as Begbie expressed it--'was all down hill and
the road was good, especially for thugs.' While there were ten
thousand men in Cariboo in the winter of '62 and perhaps twenty
thousand in the winter of '63, there were less than five thousand in
'71.

This does not mean that the camp had collapsed. It had simply changed
from a poor man's camp to a camp for a capitalist or a company. It
will be remembered that the miners first found the gold in flakes, then
farther up in nuggets, then that