CARIBOO 45 or near rocks, with the gravel shelving down all round them, one of the men exclaimed sar- donically, ‘ Well, boys, this is lightning.’ The stream became known as Lightning Creek and proved one of the richest in Cariboo. William’s Creek was panning poorer and poorer and was being called ‘Humbug Creek,’ when miners staked near by decided to see what they could find beneath the blueclay. It took forty-eight hours to dig down. The reward was a thou- sand dollars’ worth of wash-gravel. Back surged the miners to William’s Creek. They put shafts and tunnels through the clay and sluiced in more water for hydraulic work. Claims on William’s Creek produced as high as forty pounds of gold in a day. From an- other creek, only four hundred feet long, fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold was washed within a space of six weeks. Lightning Creek yielded a hundred thousand dollars in three weeks. In one year gold to the value of two and a half million dollars was shipped from Cariboo. , Millions were not so plentiful in those days, and the reports which reached the outside world sounded like the Arabian Nights or some fairy-tale. The whole world took fire. Cariboo was on every man’s lips, as were Transvaal