Cariboo

“ Where was Cariboo? Mr M'Micking, who was acting as captain, tried to find out from the Indians. They made him a drawing showing that if he crossed another watershed he would come on a white man's wide pack-road. That must lead to Cariboo; but the snow lay already a foot deep on this road; and unless the Overlanders hastened they would be snowbound for the winter. On the other hand, if the white men continued to follow the wild river canyon north, it would bring them to Fort George on the main Fraser in ten days. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a bunk against the wall lay a fair-haired man, his eyes shut in sleep, with one powerful arm thrown limp and nerveless upon the outside of his bed. The man who watched him felt a nervous twitching at his throat as his eyes rested upon the big brown hand, contrasting so strongly with the white linen upon which it rested; for Lilla had given her patient of her best, and Ned Corbett was sleeping between the only pair of sheets in Cariboo. ”

“ The oxen and ponies foraged for themselves. By limiting camp to five hours, in spite of the slow pace of the oxen, forty to fifty miles a day could be made on a good trail in fair weather. While the scout led the way, the captain and his lieutenants kept the long procession in line; and the travellers for the most part dozed lazily in their carts, dreaming of the fortunes awaiting them in Cariboo. Some nights, when the captain permitted a longer halt than usual and when camp-fires blazed before the tents, men played the violin and sang and danced. Each man was his own cook. ”

“ Already the gamblers had gone, the whisky trains and other pack trains had started, and the drain upon the stock of full-grown manhood in Victoria was easily noticeable. It was no vain boast which the miners made that the men of Cariboo were the pick of the men of their day. Physically, at any rate, it would have been hard indeed to find a body of men tougher in fibre and more recklessly indifferent to hardships than the pioneers who pushed their way through the Frazer valley to the gold-fields beyond. ”

“ 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 that it was yellow, and dance-hall girls with very little possession of anything on earth but recklessness and slippers; and the recklessness and the slippers danced them into Cariboo, while many a solemn wight went to his death in rockslide or rapids. By the opening of '62 six thousand miners were in Cariboo, and Barkerville had become the central camp. ”

“ One night at Lillooet, Steve said, was rest enough for him; and most of that night he and Phon spent either down by the river or in the saloon, watching the Chinese over their rockers, or listening to the latest accounts from Cariboo. Men could earn good wages placer mining at Lillooet in '62, even as they can now, but all who could afford it were pushing on up stream to golden Cariboo. What was five dollars a day, or ten, or even twenty for the matter of that, when other men were digging out fortunes daily on Williams Creek and Antler Cunningham's, and the Cottonwood? ”

“ You are too proud, and will pay for every little thing; but old Pete, he understood Cariboo ways. To-day you strike it rich and I am stone-broke. Very well. I lend you a handful of dollars and start you again. You don't need to thank me. Any gambler would do as much. By and by I strike it even rockier than you struck it. All right, then you 'ante' up for me. That's Cariboo."
"Is it?" asked Ned, looking into the eager friendly face of this exponent of a new commercial creed. "Is that Cariboo? Well, Lilla, I expect Samaria must be somewhere in Cariboo. But finish your story about Pete." ”

“ I have also letters, private, and writings published, of a New Brunswicker, who has killed the Cariboo fifty times, and had opportunities of seeing the European Reindeer, at the Zoological Gardens in London, long since myself. I can, therefore, form a very fair conjecture at the identity or non-identity of the species. At least I can give some particulars of structure, stature, and pelage of the American Cariboo, which will enable others to judge, who are better posted up than I, in the peculiarities of the Lapland Reindeer. ”

“ How these people ever gained access to the centre of the wilderness before the famous Cariboo Road had {47} been built is a mystery. Some arrived by pack-train, some by canoe, but the majority afoot.
Governor Douglas could not regulate prices here, and they jumped to war level. Flour was three hundred dollars a barrel. Dried apples brought two dollars and fifty cents a pound; and for lack of fruit many miners died from scurvy. Where gold-seekers tramped six hundred miles over a rocky trail, it is not surprising that boots commanded fifty dollars a pair. ”

“ Time has sped all too swiftly at the little mining camp in the Cariboo Valley. There is now only a month left of the two years set by Andy Cameron for his return to his family, and all indications thus far point to a tragic ending for the ambitions and loves of the unfortunate Glengarry farmer. ”

“ When they left Westminster they were five smart, well-fed, civilized human beings; when they struggled up out of the valley of the Frazer towards Cariboo, at Soda Creek, they were five lean, weather-hardened men, their clothes all rags and patches, their skin all wounded and blistered, every "indispensable adjunct of a camp," as made by Mr. Silver, discarded long ago; but every article of camp furniture which was left, carried where it could be got at, ready when it was wanted, and thoroughly adapted to the rough and ready uses of those who took the trouble to "pack it along." ”

“ The trail was plain enough for a blind man to follow, and the walking, after that which they had experienced in the forest and along the banks of the Frazer, was almost a pleasure to them. Unfortunately there were a few drawbacks to the pleasures of travel even in Chilcotin. In Cariboo and up the Frazer the Indians had already learnt that the white man's rifle could kill nearly as far as a man could see, and they respected the white men, or feared them, which did as well. ”

“ Here lived part of the floating population of Victoria, miners en route to Cariboo, remittance-men sent away from home to go to the dogs out of sight of their affectionate relatives, and a good many other noisy good-fellows who liked to live in their shirt sleeves in the open air. ”

“ Altogether, what with the fool-hens and the grouse (which were too careful of their young to care properly for themselves) and the berries, it was evident to Ned [Pg 189] that no man need starve in the forests of Cariboo in early autumn; but there were broad tracks through the long grass and traces amongst the ruined bushes of another danger to man's life every bit as real and as terrible as the danger of starvation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even now have I laid by skins of the beaver, of the moose, of the cariboo, that I might win favor in the eyes of Thling-Tinneh, that I might marry Zarinska, his daughter. Even now are her snow-shoes bound to her feet, ready to break trail for the dogs of the Wolf. Nor do I speak for myself alone.
As I have done, so has the Bear. He, too, had fain been the father of her children, and many skins has he cured thereto. I speak for all the young men who know not wives. The Wolves are ever hungry. Always do they take the choice meat at the killing. ”

“ Where rain and spring-wash had swept off the gravel to naked rock, little nuggets lay exposed. The men began washing the gravel. The first pan gave an ounce; the second pan gave nuggets to the weight of a quarter of a pound. The excited prospectors forgot time. Dark was falling. They slept under their blankets and awoke at daybreak below twelve inches of snow.
They were out of provisions. Somebody had to go back down to Cariboo Lake for food. Each man staked out a claim. And, while two built a log cabin, the other two set off over the hills for food. ”

“ During most of the year the flesh of the animal is dry and tasteless; but it possesses a layer of fat, two or more inches thick, which is greatly esteemed. This, with the marrow, is pounded together with the dried flesh, and makes the best kind of pemmican—a food of the greatest value to the hunter. The cariboo lives in herds, sometimes only of ten or twenty, but at others consisting of thirty or more individuals. ”

“ But it was not of the perils of the trail that the outside world heard. The outside world heard of claims which any man might find and from which gold to the value of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars could be dug and washed in three months. The outside world thought that gold could be picked up amid the rocks of British Columbia. Necessity is the mother of invention. She is also the hard foster-mother of desperation and folly. Times {52} were very hard in Canada. The East was hard up. Farming did not pay. All eyes turned towards Cariboo ”

“ Indians spearing hundreds in water; migration; havoc by wolves; Caribou-eater Chipewyans) .
“Caribou”: Jenness, 1932: 47, 48, 58, 59 (caribou in Indian economy) ; 51, 58, 75, 406-408, 411, 412, 414, 415 (caribou in Eskimo economy) .
“Cariboo” or “deer”: Munn, 1932: 57 (Artillery Lake) ; 58 (great migration of perhaps 2,000,000 between Artillery and Great Slave lakes; relation to mosquitoes) ; 168 (Baffin Island) ; 191-192 (Eskimo sleeping-bags and clothing of caribou skin, Baffin Island) ; 210, 214 (Eskimos hunting deer, Southampton Island) ; 255 (trade in skins from Melville Peninsula) ”

“ Women and children lined the palisades to scare back high jumpers or strays of the caribou herd. Then scouts and dogs beat up the rear of the fleeing herd, driving the caribou straight for the pound. By a curious provision of nature, the male caribou sheds its antlers just as he leaves the Barren Lands for the wooded interior, where the horns would impede flight through brush, and he only leaves the woods for the bare open when the horns are grown enough to fight the annual battle to protect the herd from the wolf pack ravenous with spring hunger. ”

“ The woodland caribou, the southern representative of the barren ground caribou, inhabits almost the same northern forest of spruce, tamarack, birch, and alder as those sheltering the moose. It ranges from the northern border of the forests in Alaska and Canada south to Maine, northern Minnesota, northern Idaho, and British Columbia. It is far less gregarious than the barren ground caribou, during summer only small parties of cows, calves, and partly grown young keeping together, while the bulls are solitary or in still smaller separate parties. In winter all unite in larger herds. ”

“ When he reached the top, near the place where the caribou had appeared, Ronald had some difficulty in finding the animal’s tracks on the almost bare rock. Presently, however, he came across a half eaten clump of reindeer moss, and the mark of a spreading hoof in a patch of earth in a hollow. Once on the caribou’s trail, he tracked it along the ridge for a little way, noticing, as he went, a hare runway and some lynx tracks. The trail led him down into a gully, and through the aspens and birches that grew there, to the north side of the ridge and into a bog. ”

“ When Caribou, in fleeing from a hunter, catch sight of these “stone men,” they are likely to pause in suspicion of the figures, and to be deflected from their chosen course. This may give the hunter a chance to come within range of the animals. The Kazan 52 River Eskimos are said to use converging lines of such rock piles to direct migrating Caribou to certain river-crossings, where the hunters lie in wait for them. Occasionally a single pile is erected merely to mark the spot where a caribou body is left until the hunter can return with a dogteam to fetch the meat. ”

“ The green tips of this bushy growth were a favoured “browse” of the caribou, who, though no lovers of the heights, would often wander up from their shaggy and austere plains in quest of this aromatic forage. But this lofty mountainside barren had yet another attraction for the caribou. Close at its edge, just where a granite buttress fell away steeply toward the lake, a tiny, almost imperceptible spring, stained 253 with iron and pungent with salt, trickled out from among the roots of a dense, low thicket. ”