mK) THE CARIBOO TRAIL

found his wealth by going still lower on the
watercourse to a vertical depth of eighty feet.

For seven miles along William’s Creek
worked four thousand men. Cariboo Cameron
took a hundred and fifty thousand out of his
claim in three months. In six months of ’63
William’s Creek yielded a million and a half
dollars, and this was only one of many rich
creeks. From ’59 to ’71 came twenty-five
million dollars in gold from the Cariboo coun-
try. By ’65 hydraulic machinery was coming
in and the prospectors were flocking out; but
to this day the Cariboo mines have remained
afreakish gamble. Mines for which capitalists
have paid hundreds of thousands have sud-
denly ended in barren rock. Diggings from
which nuggets worth five hundred dollars have
been taken have petered out after a few hun-
dred feet. Even where the gravel merged to
whitish gold quartz, the most expert engineer
in the camp could not tell when the vein would
fault and cease as entirely as if cut off. And
the explanation of this is entirely theoretical.
The theory is that the place of the gold was
the gravel bed of an old stream, an old stream
antedating the petrified forests of the South-
west, and that, when vast alluvial deposits
were carried over a great part of the conti-