THE ‘ ARGONAUTS’ 9

The month of March had not ended when the
first band of gold hunters arrived and settled
down a mile and a half below Yale. Another
boat-load of eight hundred and fifty came in
April. In four months sixty-seven vessels,
carrying from a hundred to a thousand men
each, had come up from San Francisco to
Victoria. Crews deserted their ships, clerks
deserted the company, trappers turned miners
and took to the gold-bars. Before Victoria
awoke to what it was all about, twenty
thousand people were camped under tents
outside the stockade, and the air was full of
the wildest rumours of fabulous gold finds.

The snowfall had been heavy in’58. Inthe
spring the Fraser rolled to the sea a swollen
flood. Against the turbid current worked
tipsy rafts towed by wheezy steamers or leaky
old sailing craft, and rickety row-boats raced
cockle-shell canoes for the gold-bars above.
Ashore, the banks of the river were lined with
foot passengers toiling under heavy packs,
wagons to which clung human forms on every
foot of space, and long rows of pack-horses
bogged in the flood of the overflowing river.
By September ten thousand men were rocking
and washing for gold round Yale.

As in the late Kootenay and in the still later