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