ERLANDERS

When the Cariboo fever reached the East, the public there had heard
neither of the Indian massacres in Oregon nor that the Sioux were on
the war-path in Dakota. Promoters who had never set foot west of
Buffalo launched wild-cat mining companies and parcel express devices
and stages by routes that went up sheer walls and crossed unbridged
rivers. To such frauds there could be no certain check; for it took
six months to get word in and out of Cariboo. Eastern papers were full
of advertisements of easy routes to the gold-diggings. Far-off fields
look green. Far-off gold glittered the brighter for the distance.
Cariboo became in popular imagination a land where nuggets grew on the
side of the road and could be picked by the bushel-basket. Besides,
times were so hard in the East that the majority of the youthful
adventurers who were caught by the fever had nothing to lose except
their lives.

{54}

A group of threescore young men from different parts of Canada, from
Kingston, Niagara, and Montreal, having noticed advertisements of an
easy stage-route from St Paul, set out for the gold-diggings in May
1862. Tickets could be purchased in London, England, as well as in
Canada, for when these young Canadians reached St Paul, they found
eighteen young men from England, like themselves, diligently searching
the whereabouts of the stage-route. That was their first inkling that
fraudulent practices were being carried on and that they had been
deceived, that there was, in fact, no stage-route from St Paul to
Cariboo. A few of them turned back, but the majority, by ox-cart and
rickety stagecoach, pushed on to the Red River and went up to a point
near the boundary of modern Manitoba, where lay the first steamboat to
navigate that river, about to start on her maiden trip. On this
steamboat, the little _International_, afterwards famous for running
into sand-banks and mud-bars, the troops of Overlanders took passage,
and stowed themselves away wherever they could, some in the cook's
galley and some among the cordwood piled in the engine-room.

The Sioux were on a rampage in Minnesota {55} and Dakota, but Alexander
Dallas, governor of Rupert's Land for the Hudson's Bay Company, and Mgr
Tache, bishop of St Boniface, were aboard, and their presence afforded
protection. On the way to the vessel some of the Overlanders had
narrowly escaped a massacre. The story is told that as they slowly
made their way in ox-carts