INTRODUCTION.

Time rolls his ceaseless course. The race of yore,
Who danced our infancy upon their knee,
And told our marvelling boyhood legends store,
Of their strange ventures happ’d by land or sea,
How are they blotted from the things that be!
How few all weak and wither’d of their force,
Wait on the verge of dark eternity,
Like stranded wrecks, the tide returning hoarse,
To sweep them from our sight! Time rolls his ceaseless course.

S THE years pass by and take their toll of the pioneers the
A interest in the story they had to tell deepens. Tis sixty-seven
years since the great gold-rush to the Fraser River; and few, if
any, of that first onrushing tide of gold-seekers yet remain with us.
These men could recall, from personal experience, the conditions in
California, when, after almost ten years of unprecedented production,
the placers, like thoughtless spendthrifts, found their wealth exhausted
and had little left to bestow, at any rate upon the individual miner.
In 1858 the California miners were eager and restless, if not down-
hearted. They were, as one has said, “industrially desperate.”

In the spring of 1858 there went out to the world—that is, to
California, which was the nearest civilized spot that had a mining
population—rumours of the existence of gold in the bars of the Fraser.
It was known that the gold was fine, but this constituted an incentive
rather than a detriment, for, arguing from the analogy of the Sacra-
mento, the Feather, and the San Joaquin, the Californians concluded
that higher up the river rich and extensive placers must exist. Then
began a great exodus. The worm-eaten wharves of San Francisco
fairly trembled under the weight of eager humanity hurrying to reach
the new El Dorado. Steamers and sailing-vessels departed almost
daily, loaded to the guards with miners and with the human flotsam
and jetsam that invariably gathers at the prospect of easily acquired
riches. Beginning in April the rush continued through May, June,
and July. It was at its height in June, when nearly ten thousand adven-
turers are said to have left San Francisco for the Fraser River; during
the first ten days of July six thousand more sailed; it is estimated that
the total number who came by land and water was between twenty-five
and thirty thousand. In the words of the Rev. R. C. Lundin Brown:
“In short, never in the history of the migrations of men has been seen
a ‘rush’ so sudden and so vast.”