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XVi. Introduction.
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as unfit for circulation. About this time he published a * Narrative
of Edward McGowan, including a Full Account of the Author’s Adven-
tures and Perils, while persecuted by the San Francisco Vigilance
Committee of 1856. Published by the Author, 1857.”

Then the Golden Goddess, waving her wand of Chance and Adven-
ture, summoned him to the bars of the Fraser. Of his life in British
Columbia the letters of Judge Begbie and Mr. Brew enable us to obtain
many glimpses. He has not changed but is a great deal more discreet.
Leaving the colony in March, 1859, under the circumstances stated by
Mr. Brew, Ned is next found in Tucson, Arizona, where he is following
his two callings of printer and lawyer. Thence he drifts back to the
Eastern States, and when he next appears he is an Assistant Sergeant-
at-Arms in the House of Representatives. About 1883 he returned
to the West and took up his residence in San Francisco, where he died,
in 1893, a penniless, garrulous, and, strange to say, pious old man.

In reading the accompanying letters and reports it must be borne
in mind that all numbers and all mileages are merely approximations.
The mining population in 1858-59 is supposed to have been about
ten thousand men, scattered along the river from the vicinity of Sumas
to beyond Canoe Creek. The bars upon which they were working
existed at almost every bend of the Fraser. “For ages the Fraser,
rushing madly along, had torn away the gold-bearing rock, crushed it
in its natural arrastre, and deposited the gold with the accompanying
metallic sand in the eddies in those bends.”

Between Hope and Yale, which was the centre of the mining,
there were probably more than thirty bars named and worked; while
between Yale and Lytton there were more than fifty; and upon them
all the miners were at work with rocker or sluice to wrest from its
hiding-place ‘‘ the yellow root of evil.” Langley was the only town on
the lower river; it may have had a population of a few hundred; in
Hope there were then, perhaps, five hundred people; Yale was the
important spot: its inhabitants probably numbered three thousand ;
Boston Bar, now but a name, was then a real place with hotels, stores,
and gambling-houses; Lytton is said to have numbered about one
thousand inhabitants.

It is now in many instances impossible to identify with certainty
many of the bars so well known and so populous in 1858-59. An
effort has been made to indicate as accurately as possible the situation
of some of those mentioned in the correspondence. It is, of course,
realized that errors will, in all probability, be found in these attempted
identifications. As an instance of the difficulty of accurately fixing
these various bars reference may be made to the reports of Mr. Sanders