Handbook to the new Gold-fields | Page 4

the
foaming Platte, stop to gaze with admiration on the `fantastic ruins'
Nature has `piled' among her mountain fastnesses, while from his bare
and bleeding feet he draws the sharp spines of the hostile cacti. Truth
from travellers is consequently for the most part relative. Abstractedly,
with reference to any country, it must be derived from the combined
accounts and different phases of truth afforded by many."
CHAPTER ONE.

RICHNESS AND EXTENT OF THE GOLD FIELDS.
"Destiny, which has lately riveted our attention on the burning plains of
the extreme East," says the Times of 9th July, "now claims our
solicitude for the auriferous mountains and rushing rivers of the Far
West and the shores of the remote Pacific. What most of us know of
these ultra-occidental regions may be summed up in a very few words.
We have most of us read Washington Irving's charming narrative of
`Astoria,' sympathised with the untimely fate of Captain Thorn and his
crew, and read with breathless interest the wanderings of the pilgrims
to the head waters of the Columbia. After thirty years, the curtain rises
again on the stormy period of the Ashburton Treaty, when the `patriots'
were bent upon `whipping the Britishers' out of every acre of land on
the western side of the Rocky Mountains. And now, for the third time,
we are recalled to the same territory, no longer as the goal of the
adventurous trader or the battle ground of the political agitator, but as a
land of promise--a new El Dorado, to which men are rushing with all
the avidity that the presence of the one, thing which all men, in all
times and in all places, insatiably desire is sure to create."
This El Dorado lies between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific; it is
bounded on the south by the American frontier line, 49 degrees of
latitude, and may be considered to extend to the sources of Fraser River,
in latitude 55 degrees. It is, therefore, about 420 miles long in a straight
line, its average breadth from 250 to 300 miles. Taken from corner to
corner, its greatest length would be, however, 805 miles,--and its
greatest breadth 400 miles, Mr Arrowsmith computes its area of square
miles, including Queen Charlotte's Island, at somewhat more than
200,000 miles. Of its two gold-bearing rivers, one, the Fraser, rises in
the northern boundary, and flowing south, falls into the sea at the
south-western extremity of the territory, opposite the southern end of
Vancouver's Island, and within a few miles of the American boundary;
the other, the Thompson River, which rises in the Rocky Mountains,
and flowing westward, joins the Fraser about 150 miles from the coast.
It is on these two rivers, and chiefly at their confluence, that the gold
discoveries have been made.

Fraser River is about as famous a point as there is today on the earth's
surface--as famous as were the Californian diggings in 1848, or the
Australian gold mines in 1853. It is now the centre of attraction for the
adventurous of all countries. The excitement throughout the Canadas
and Northern States of America is universal. In fact, the whole interior
of North America is quite in a ferment--the entire floating population
being either "on the move," or preparing to start; while traders,
cattle-dealers, contractors, and all the enterprising persons in business
who can manage to leave, are maturing arrangements to join the
general exodus. Persons travelling in the mining regions reckon that, in
three months, 50,000 souls will have left the State of California alone.
The rapidity and extent of this emigration has never been paralleled.
It is now established that the district of British Columbia, holding a
relation to Puget's Sound similar to that of Sacramento Valley to the
Bay of San Francisco, contains rich and extensive gold beds. The
Fraser River mines have already been mentioned in the British
Parliament as not less valuable and important than the gold fields in
Australia, Geologists have anticipated such a discovery; and Governor
Stevens, in his last message to the Legislative Assembly of Washington
Territory, claims that the district south of the international boundary is
equally auriferous.
The special correspondent of the San Francisco Bulletin, a reliable
authority, writes from Fort Langley, twenty-five miles up the Fraser,
under date the 25th May, that he had just come down from Fort Yale,
where he found sixty men and two hundred Indians, with their squaws,
at work on a "bar" of about five hundred yards in length--called "Hills
Bar," one mile below Fort Yale, and fifteen miles from Fort Hope, all
trading posts of the Hudson's Bay Company. "The morning I arrived,
two men (Kerrison and Company) cleaned up five and a-half ounces
from the rocker, the product of half a day's work. Kerrison and
Company the