diggings is an episode to thrill us even today. They
came also overland from Washington and Oregon,
blazing a new trail from what is now Bellingham
(then known as Whatcom), up through the boundary
wastes to Mission, Hope and Lillooet. These gold- i
crazy prospectors were English, Scotch, Irish, Ameri-

cans, Germans, Mexicans, West Indian negroes and

Chinamen, and to this motley crowd belongs the

honour of pioneering the vast hinterland of our Prov-

ince in the great Cariboo gold rush of 1858, blazing

the trail of what was later to be the road over which }
the railway was brought through the Fraser Canyon
to the Pacific Coast.

Amidst this turbulent population, where order was
enforced only by degrees, came the Royal Engineers
under Col. Richard Moody, sent by the Government
at London, England, as a construction unit. They
were our first roadbuilders, running their lines and
grades and hewing out of the wilderness the first
pathway, the famous Yale Road, from New West-
minster to Yale, up the Fraser River and on into the
Cariboo. Came too, the first Judge of the Supreme
Court of Vancouver Island, Mathew Begbie, whose
fearlessness and uprightness of character made him
a powertul factor in law enforcement in a raw, new
country, where every man wanted to be a law unto

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