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By the opening of '62 six thousand miners were in Cariboo, and Barkerville had become the central camp. How these people ever gained access to the centre of the wilderness before the famous Cariboo Road had been built is a mystery. Some arrived by pack-train, some by canoe, but the majority afoot. Governor Douglas could not regulate prices here, and they jumped to war level.
Milk was retailed frozen at a dollar a pound. Boots still cost fifty dollars. Such luxuries as mirrors and stoves cost as high as seven hundred dollars each. The hurdy-gurdy girls with true German thrift charged ten dollars or more a dance not the stately waltz, but a wild fling to shake the rafters and tire out the stoutest miners. A newspaper was published in Barkerville.
About this time he found that the nomads were catching all the fish. He made up his mind to become a nomad and be a wanderer on the face of the Cariboo district. He could not love. He resigned his position in Ashcroft and migrated up the Cariboo road. He invaded Lillooet, Clinton, 150 Mile House, Soda Creek, Quesnel, Barkerville and Fort George. To secure a wife he became an itinerant.
Sometimes they were found fifty feet under clay at the foot of a creek where the dashing waters swerved round some rocky point into a river. Old miners now retired at Yale and Hope say that the most ignorant prospector could guess the place of the gold as well as the geologist. Billy Barker, after whom Barkerville was named, struck it rich by going fifty feet below the surface down the canyon.
'A traveller must trust his hands as much as his feet, wrote Begbie, after his first experience of this trail. But by 1862 cutting and blasting and bridge-building had begun under the direction of the Royal Engineers; and before 1865 the great road was completed into the heart of the mining country at Barkerville. Henceforth passengers went in by stage-coach drawn by six horses.
The day after reaching Kamloops she gave birth to a child. Did the Overlanders find the gold which each man's rainbow hopes had dreamed? They had followed the rainbow over the ends of earth. Was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? You will find an occasional Overlander passing the sunset of his days in quiet retreat at Yale or Hope or Quesnel or Barkerville.
But while he sat stock still, the voices continued: "There, it's stopped. I knew it was an animal. The stage won't be along for an hour yet." "They are white men, but the gold does not belong to them," Leloo told himself. "It belongs to the white men on the stage, or up in the Barkerville gold ledges. These white men here are 'bad medicine. They shall not find that stage."
The effect of sudden wealth on some of the hungry, ragged horde who infested Cariboo was of a sort to discount fiction. One man took out forty thousand dollars in gold nuggets. A lunatic escaped from a madhouse could not have been more foolish. He came to the best saloon of Barkerville.
The Cariboo poet sang their sentiments in these words: In Barkerville, which became the centre of Cariboo, saloons and dance-halls grew up overnight. Pianos were packed in on mules at a rate of a dollar a pound from Quesnel. Champagne in pint bottles sold at two ounces of gold. Potatoes retailed at ninety dollars a hundredweight. Nails were cheap at a dollar a pound.
Billy Deitz, after whom a famous creek was named, died penniless in Victoria; and the Scottish miner who rhymed the songs of Cariboo died unwept and unknown to history. The romance of the trail is almost incredible to us, who may travel by motor from Ashcroft to Barkerville. In October '62 a Mr Ireland and a party were on the trail when snow began falling so heavily that it was unsafe to proceed.
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