Section II, 1919 [37] Trans. R.S.C. 



The Overland Journey of the Argonauts of 1862 



By Judge F. W. How ay, LL.B., F.R.S.C. 

 (Read May Meeting, 1919) 



The earliest recorded emigration across the prairies to the region 

 west of the Rocky Mountains occurred in 1841, and according to 

 Sir George Simpson, who met them near Edmonton, consisted of 

 twenty-three families. Thirteen years later another party, known as 

 the Sinclair party, numbering sixty-five persons — men, women, and 

 children — followed in their tracks to the Columbia. In this paper an 

 attempt will be made to trace and describe the journey in 1862 of the 

 third immigrant party across the continent through British North 

 America; but the first of such immigrants whose object was to reach 

 a home in British territory. For this purpose liberty has been kindly 

 granted by Mrs. Caroline L. McMicking, of Victoria, to use the 

 original diaries of her late husband, Mr. Robert B. McMicking, and 

 his brother, Thomas R. McMicking. These little books contain 

 the day by day account of the incidents of the whole journey from 

 Queenston, Canada West to Quesnel, British Columbia. 



The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway follows, in a general way, the 

 route taken by this party from Winnipeg to Fort George, and covers 

 the distance in three days. We, who travel in luxury at this speed, 

 find it difficult to visualize the slow and steady "grind" of twenty 

 or twenty-five miles a day, the innumerable delays, the constant 

 crossing and re-crossing of rivers and creeks — ferrying, fording, or 

 bridging — the footsoreness, the uncertainties, the wearisomeness, 

 the disappointments and dangers, and the dwarfing sense of man's 

 insignificance that the surrounding vastness impressed upon these 

 pioneers in their four months' crawl across the prairies and the Rocky 

 Mountains. All things are ready-made for the pioneer de luxe of 

 to-day; the pioneer of 1862 had to make them for himself. 



In 1861 Cariboo had yielded about $2,700,000. Tales of easily- 

 gotten wealth rolled from West to East, and as they rolled they not 

 only increased, but all the asperities vanished leaving with the hearer 

 only a clear vision of gold to be picked up in Cariboo "by the bucket- 

 ful," as one old-timer used to phrase it. But El Dorado was far 

 distant from Canada West. To reach it by the usual route meant 

 a journey to New York, thence by water to Aspinwall, across the 

 isthmus to Panama, by ship to San Francisco, and on to Victoria, 

 thence by river steamer to Yale, and by stage four hundred miles to 



