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54 THE CARIBOO TRAIL

A group of threescore young men from
different parts of Canada, from Kingston,
Niagara, and Montreal, having noticed adver-
tisements of an easy stage-route from St Paul,
set out for the gold-diggings in May 1862.
Tickets could be purchased in London, Eng-
land, as well as in Canada, for when these
young Canadians reached St Paul, they found
eighteen young men from England, like them-
selves, diligently searching the whereabouts
of the stage-route. That was their first
inkling that fraudulent practices were being
catried on and that they had been deceived,
that there was, in fact, no stage-route from St
Paul to Cariboo. A few of them turned back,
but the majority, by ox-cart and rickety stage-
coach, pushed on to the Red River and went
up to a point near the boundary of modern
Manitoba, where lay the first steamboat to
navigate that river, about to start on her
maiden trip. On this steamboat, the little
International, afterwards famous for running
into sand-banks and mud-bars, the troops of
Overlanders took passage, and stowed them-
selves away wherever they could, some in the
cook’s galley and some among the cordwood
piled in the engine-room.

The Sioux were on a rampage in Minnesota