30 THE CARIBOO TRAIL

floor of quicksilver or copperplate or woolly
blanket which caught the gold. On a larger
scale, when streams were directed through
wooden boxes, the gold was sluiced; on a still
larger scale, the process was hydraulic mining,
though the samein principle. Infact, in huge
free milling works, where hydraulic machinery
crushes the gold-bearing quartz and screens it
to fineness before catching the gold on delicate
sieves, the process is only a complex refinement
of the bar-washer cradling his gold.

Fires had not yet cleared the giant hemlock
forests, as they have to-day along the Cariboo
Trail, and prospectors found their way through
a chartless sea of windfall—hemlocks criss-
crossed the height of a house with branches
interlaced like wire. Cataracts fell over lofty
ledges in wind-blown spray. Spanish moss,
grey-green and feathery, hung from branch to
branch of the huge Douglas firs. Sometimes
the trail would lead for miles round the edge
of some precipices beyond which could be
glimpsed the eternal snows. Sometimes an
avalanche slid over a slope with the distant
appearance of a great white waterfall and the
echo of muffled thunder. Where the moun-
tain was swept as by a mighty besom, the
pack-train kept an anxious eye on the snow