taken have petered out
after a few hundred feet. Even where the gravel merged to whitish gold
quartz, the most expert engineer in the camp could not tell when the
vein would fault and cease as entirely as if cut off. And the
explanation of this is entirely theoretical. The theory is that the
place of the gold was the gravel bed of an old stream, an old stream
antedating the petrified forests of the South-west, and that, when vast
alluvial deposits were carried over a great part of the {49} continent
by inland lakes and seas, the gold settled to the bottom and was buried
beneath the deposits of countless centuries. Then convulsive changes
shook the earth's surface. Mountains heaved up where had been sea
bottom and swamp and watery plain. In the upheaval these subterranean
creek beds were hoisted and thrown towards the surface. Floods from
the eternal snows then grooved out watercourses down the scarred
mountainsides. Frost and rain split away loose debris. And man found
gold in these prehistoric, perhaps preglacial, creek beds. However
this may be, there was no possible scientific way of knowing how the
gold-bearing area would run. A fortune might come out of one claim of
a hundred feet and its next-door neighbour might not yield an atom of
gold. Only the genii of the hidden earth held the secret; and modern
science derides the invisible pixies of superstition, just as these
invisible spirits of the earth seem to laugh at man's best efforts to
ferret out their secrets.

What became of the lucky prospectors? I have talked with some of them
on the lower reaches of the Cariboo Road. They are old and poor
to-day, and the memory of their fortune is as a dream. Have they not
lived at {50} Hope and Yale and Lytton for fifty years and seen their
trail crumble into the canyon, with not a dozen pack-trains a year
passing to the Upper country? John Rose, who was one of the men to
find Cariboo, set out in the spring of '63 to prospect the Bear River
country. He set out alone and was never again seen alive. Cariboo
Cameron, a 'man from Glengarry,' went back to Glengarry by the Ottawa
and established something like a baronial estate; but he lost his money
in various investments and died in 1888 in Cariboo a poor man. Billy
Deitz, after whom a famous creek was named, died penniless in Victoria;
and the Scottish miner who rhymed the songs of Cariboo died unwept and
unknown to history.

The romance of the trail is a