CHAPTER II
THE PROSPECTOR

By September, when mountain rivers are at
their lowest, every bar on the Fraser from Yale
to the forks of the Thompson was occupied.
The Hudson’s Bay steamer Otter made regular
trips up the Fraser to Fort Langley; and
from the fort an American steamer called the
Enterprise, owned by Captain Tom Wright,
breasted the waters as far as the swift current
at Yale. At Yale was a city of tents and
hungry men. Walter Moberly tells how,
when he ascended the Fraser with Wright in
the autumn of ’58, the generous Yankee cap-
tain was mobbed by penniless and destitute
men for return passage to the coast. Many
a broken treasure-seeker owed his life to Tom
Wright’s free passage. Fortunately, there was
always good fishing on the Fraser; but salt
was a dollar twenty-five a pound, butter a
dollar twenty-five a pound, and flour rarer

than nuggets. So hard up were some of the
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