Prior to 1926 Wells went into the Barkerville area on a prospecting trip. He
was attracted to it by the knowledge that immense sums had been won from the creeks
of that region in placer gold. His reasoning followed along the logical lines that since
much of this gold was sharp-edged and contained fragments of quartz, without signs
of having tray ‘elled far, it must originally have been deposited in veins which were once
or still remained in the vieinity of the placer gold.

The theory generally accepted at that time and which is only now being dis-
pelled was that the gold of the Barkerville area had not travelled far, but that the
veins in which it originally had been contained had eroded under elacial and weather
action and that only the barren roots of these veins remained.

Very wide quartz veins striking with the formation seemed to attest the truth
of this theory, since they contained very low gold values despite their impressive widths
and lateral strength. Several efforts had been made to mine them, but without success.
Some of these failures may have been due to the less efficient metallurgical processes of
other years, but in the main they were creditable to the fact that the wide ‘‘strike’’
veins, as they have since been described, were practically barren of gold values where
explored. Where the cross fissure veins were opened ore was found but gold could
not then be recovered from the sulphides.

Wells was invited to look over the property on Cow Mountain where the Low-
hee Creek company was placering in Lowhee Gulch and where Al Sanders and asso6ci-
ates had done a small amount of surface work on some promising lode showings.

On the mountain was a huge boulder of float quartz which was heavily impreg-
nated with sulphides and which, sampled, returned good gold values. It was, even at
that time, in the nature of a local landmark. Geologists expressed the opinion that
it had been left there by a glacier.

Wells left the Cariboo to carry on his prospecting elsewhere, but there was al-
ways with him the continuing memory of that boulder of ore. Was it not reasonable,
he argued, to presume that somew here in that vicinity there might be the vein from
which the boulder came and that when it was found it would prove to be at least as wide
as the narrowest width of the boulder?

Good prospector that he was, Fred Wells could not rest easily until he had
made another reconnaisance trip over that famous gold region and had followed that
up with a detailed study of certain of the most interesting showings.

It is to the everlasting credit of this rugged pioneer that he made discoveries
which skilled engineers and geologists, with only one or two exceptions, had complete-
ly overlooked and that he was not satisfied merely to make these observations and pass
on. He remained to do something about his conclusions. Friends in Vancouver who
had confidence in his judgment backed him financially to the limit of their ability
and the Cariboo Gold Quartz Mining Company was formed to develop ground which
he collected into a compact group on Cow, Island and Barkerville mountains.

Briefly, the secret of Wells’ discovery, made coincidentally with, but without
the assistance of the late Dr. W. L. Uglow, geologist, was that the wide and conspicu-
ous strike veins running with the formation were not the probable sourees of Cariboo’s
placer gold but rather the narrow and numerous cross fissure veins which struck across
the formation and whose existence could seldom be detected on the surface, owing to
erosion of the heavily-sulphided vein matter. He located them by panning on the hill-
sides and then surface stripping. These obscure veins returned assays which were high
enough to remove all doubt in Fred Wells’ mind that he had unlocked the seeret ‘of
the Cariboo’ s lodes,