and eastward. Ed Stout and Billy Deitz and two
others found signs that seemed very poor on a creek which they named
William's after Deitz. The gold did not pan a dollar a wash; but in
wild haste came the rush to William's Creek. Crossing a creek one
party of prospectors was overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, with
rock-shattering flashes of lightning. Shivering in the canyon, but
afraid to stand under trees {45} or near rocks, with the gravel
shelving down all round them, one of the men exclaimed sardonically,
'Well, boys, this _is_ lightning.' The stream became known as
Lightning Creek and proved one of the richest in Cariboo. William's
Creek was panning poorer and poorer and was being called 'Humbug
Creek,' when miners staked near by decided to see what they could find
beneath the blue clay. It took forty-eight hours to dig down. The
reward was a thousand dollars' worth of wash-gravel. Back surged the
miners to William's Creek. They put shafts and tunnels through the
clay and sluiced in more water for hydraulic work. Claims on William's
Creek produced as high as forty pounds of gold in a day. From another
creek, only four hundred feet long, fifty thousand dollars' worth of
gold was washed within a space of six weeks. Lightning Creek yielded a
hundred thousand dollars in three weeks. In one year gold to the value
of two and a half million dollars was shipped from Cariboo.

Millions were not so plentiful in those days, and the reports which
reached the outside world sounded like the _Arabian Nights_ or some
fairy-tale. The whole world took fire. Cariboo was on every man's
lips, as were Transvaal {46} and Klondike half a century later. The
New England States, Canada, the Maritime Provinces, the British
Isles--all were set agog by the reports of the new gold-camps where it
was only necessary to dig to find nuggets. By way of Panama, by way of
San Francisco, by way of Spokane, by way of Victoria, by way of
Winnipeg and Edmonton came the gold-seekers, indifferent alike to
perils of sea and perils of mountain. Men who had never seen a
mountain thought airily that they could climb a watershed in a day's
walk. Men who did not know a canoe from a row-boat essayed to run the
maddest rapids in America. People without provisions started blindly
from Winnipeg across the width of half a continent. In the mad rush
were clerks who had never seen 'float,' English school-teachers whose
only knowledge of gold was