INTRODUCTION.

n setting down a record of the original discoveries of
gold in Cariboo, Alex P. McInnis has done a valuable
work. In these days when the dividends of Cariboo

mines may be estimated in the millions of dollars, we are
likely to forget the names of the great hearted adventurers
who made it all possible.

There were three main phases of gold discovery on the
Pacitic slope during the last century beginning with Cali-
fornia in 1849. The men who found the yellow metal on the’
Horsefly River were Americans who had come north wher
the oviginal stakings at Marshall’s Mill, in California, had
petered out. Indeed the very word “petered’”’, may have
come from the circumstances of the departure of the fam-
ous Peter C. Durlevey from the exhausted placers in Cali-
fornia. All of Sen Francisco rushed to the Fraser River in
1858-59.

Then they rushed back in the early sixties to find the
dazzling millions which awaited on Sun Mountain, Virginia
City, Nevada. But Peter C. Dunlevey remained in British
Columbia and his ashes lie to-day at St. Joseph’s Mission,
Williams Lake, Cariboo. Others were hot on the trail and
other made fortunes during the boom which followed the
first discoveries of gold in Cariboo at Horsefly by Dunlev-
ey and his partners; but to him and his partners the credit
of discovery must go. This little book, written, illustrated
printed and published in the Cariboo, is therefore a perman-
ent record of the birth of the mining industry in North-
western America.

It is fitting that it should be published in time for wide
circulation et heme and tre great fair next vear at San
Francisco. It should be but the first of a series of histor-
ical publications dealing with the deep Cariboo from the
pen of Mr. McInnis.

—George M. Murray, M.L.A.
Enlilsee!, Bc.

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