ublesome
and went into a camp twenty miles above us and forcibly took provisions
and arms from a party of four men and cut two severely with their
knives. They came to our camp the same day and insisted that we should
trade with them or leave the country. We design to remain here until
we can get a hundred men together, when we will move up above the falls
and do just what we please without regard to the Indians. We are at
present the highest up of any white men on the river, and we must go
higher to be satisfied. {13} I don't apprehend any danger from the
Indians at present, but there will be hell to pay after a while. There
is a pack-trail from Hope, but it cannot be travelled till the snow is
off the mountains.

The prices of provisions are as follows: flour thirty-five dollars per
hundred-weight, pork a dollar a pound, beans fifty cents a pound, and
other things in proportion. Every party that starts from the Sound
should have their own supplies to last them three or four months, and
they should bring the largest size chinook canoes, as small ones are
very liable to swamp in the rapids. Each canoe should be provided with
thirty fathoms of strong line for towing over swift water, and every
man well armed. The Indians here can beat anything alive stealing.
They will soon be able to steal a man's food after he has eaten it.

[Illustration: Indians near New Westminster, B.C. From a photograph by
Maynard.]

Within two miles of Yale eighty Indians and thirty white men were
working the gold-bars; and log boarding-houses and saloons sprang up
along the river-bank as if by magic. Naturally, the last comers of '58
were too late to get a place on the gold-bars, and they went back to
the coast in disgust, calling the gold stampede 'the Fraser River
humbug.' Nevertheless, men were washing, sluicing, rocking, and
digging gold as far as Lillooet. Often the day's yield ran as high as
eight hundred dollars a man; and the higher up the treasure-seekers
{14} pushed their way, the coarser grew the gold flakes and grains.
Would the golden lure lead finally to the mother lode of all the yellow
washings? That is the hope that draws the prospector from river to
stream, from stream to dry gully bed, from dry gully to precipice edge,
and often over the edge to death or fortune.

Exactly fifty-six years from the first rush of '58 in the month of
April, I sat on the banks of the Fraser at Yale and punted across the
rapids i