before we'd waken.'

The next pause was at St Albert, one of Father Lacombe's missions.
What surprised the Overlanders as they advanced was the amazing
fertility of the soil. At Fort Garry, at Pitt, at Edmonton, at St
Albert, at St Ann, they saw great fields of wheat, barley, and
potatoes. Afterwards many who failed in the mines drifted back to the
plains and became farmers. The same thing had happened in California,
and was repeated at a later day in the rush to the Klondike. Great
seams of coal, too, were seen projecting from the banks of the
Saskatchewan. Here some of the men began washing for gold, and,
finding yellow specks the size of pin-heads in the fine sand, a number
of them knocked up cabins for themselves and remained west of Edmonton
{64} to try their luck. Later, when these belated Overlanders decided
to follow on to Cariboo, they suffered terrible hardships.

The Overlanders were to enter the Rockies by the Yellowhead Pass, which
had been discovered long ago by Jasper Hawse, of the Hudson's Bay
Company. This section of their trail is visible to the modern
traveller from the windows of a Grand Trunk Pacific Railway train, just
as the lower sections of the Cariboo Trail in the Fraser Canyon are to
be seen from the trains of the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian
Northern. First came the fur-trader, seeking adventure through these
passes, pursuing the little beaver. The miner came next, fevered to
delirium, lured by the siren of an elusive yellow goddess. The settler
came third, prosaic and plodding, but dauntless too. And then came the
railroad, following the trail which had been beaten hard by the
stumbling feet of pioneers.

[Illustration: In the Yellowhead Pass. From a photograph.]

At St Ann a guide was engaged to lead the long train of pack-horses
through the pass from Jasper House on the east to Yellowhead Lake on
the west. Colin Fraser, son of the famous piper for Sir George Simpson
of the Hudson's Bay Company, danced a Highland fling at the gate of the
fort to speed the {65} departing guests. And to the skirl of the
bagpipes the procession wound away westward bound for the mountains.

Instead of the thirty miles a day which they had made farther east, the
travellers were now glad to cover ten miles a day. Fallen trees lay
across the trail in impassable ramparts and floods filled the gullies.
Scouts went ahead blazing trees to show the way. Bushwhackers
followed, cutting away win