ER II

THE PROSPECTOR

By September, when mountain rivers are at their lowest, every bar on
the Fraser from Yale to the forks of the Thompson was occupied. The
Hudson's Bay steamer _Otter_ made regular trips up the Fraser to Fort
Langley; and from the fort an American steamer called the _Enterprise_,
owned by Captain Tom Wright, breasted the waters as far as the swift
current at Yale. At Yale was a city of tents and hungry men. Walter
Moberly tells how, when he ascended the Fraser with Wright in the
autumn of '58, the generous Yankee captain was mobbed by penniless and
destitute men for return passage to the coast. Many a broken
treasure-seeker owed his life to Tom Wright's free passage.
Fortunately, there was always good fishing on the Fraser; but salt was
a dollar twenty-five a pound, butter a dollar twenty-five a pound, and
flour rarer than nuggets. So hard up were some of the {17} miners for
pans to wash their gold, that one desperate fellow went to a log shack
called a grocery store, and after paying a dollar for the privilege of
using a grindstone, bought an empty butter vat at the pound price of
butter--twelve dollars for an empty butter tub! Half a dollar was the
smallest coin used, and clothing was so scarce that when a Chinaman's
pig chewed up Walter Moberly's boots while the surveyor lay asleep in
his shack, Mr Moberly had to foot it twenty-five miles before he could
find another pair of boots. Saloons occupied every second shack at
Yale and Hope; revolvers were in all belts and each man was his own
sheriff; yet there was little lawlessness.

With claims filed on all gold-bearing bars, what were the ten thousand
men to do camped for fifty miles beyond Yale? Those who had no
provisions and could not induce any storekeeper to grubstake them for a
winter's prospecting, quit the country in disgust; and the price of
land dropped in the boom towns of the Fraser as swiftly as it had been
ballooned up. Prospecting during the winter in a country of heavy
snowfall did not seem a sane project. And yet the eternal question
urged the miners on: from what mother lode are {18} these flakes and
nuggets washed down to the sand-bars of the Fraser? Gold had also been
found in cracks in the rock along the river. Whence had it come? The
man farthest upstream in spring would be on the ground first for the
great find that was bound to make some seeker's fortune. So all stayed
who could. Fortunately, the winter of