Mig eig Rr re ee Fe

SST ELIT

22 THE CARIBOO TRAIL

yellow specks the size of a pin-head. He
wanted to know where that chunk rolled down
from. He knocked it open with his mallet.
If it had a shiny yellow pebble inside only the
size of a pea, the miner would stay on that
bank and begin bench diggings into the dry
bank. By the spring of ’59 dry bench diggings
had extended back fifty miles from the river.
If the chunk revealed only tiny yellow specks,
perhaps mixed with white quartz, the miner
would try to find where it rolled from and
would ascend the gully, or mountain torrent,
or precipice. Queer stories are told of how
during that winter almost bankrupt grocers
grubstaked prospectors with bacon and flour
and received a half-interest in a mine that
yielded five or six hundred dollars a day in
nuggets. :

But for one who found a mine a thousand
found nothing. The sensations of the lucky
one beggared description. ‘ Was it luck or
was it perseverance ?’ I asked the man who
found one of the richest silver-mines in the
Big Bend of the Columbia. ‘ Both and mostly
dogged,’ he answered. ‘ Take our party as
a type of prospectors from ’59 to ’89, the thirty
years when the most of the mining country
was exploited. We had come up, eleven