228 Sport and Life. 



like a giant wall Soooft. high. A couple of wandering trappers 

 heard of it, and through them the news spread, and eventually 

 populated this remote creek, which at first was known as 

 Studhorse and then as Wildhorse Creek, with the usual seething 

 mass of excited miners. From the nearest settlement, the 

 already mentioned Walla Walla, 500 miles of impenetrable 

 forests separated them. All necessaries of life kept at famine 

 prices, flour selling at from 4^. to los. the pound, and 

 even the simplest mining tools being practically unobtainable 

 during the first season. Only very rich claims could under such 

 circumstances pay, wages being, of course, extraordinarily high 

 I5dol. a day for the ordinary miner. For a season or two hundreds 

 of miners sunk shafts, built flumes to carry water, and blasted into 

 the banks and bed of the creek, only a minority, however, making 

 sufficiently rich strikes to pay them. Then other distant camps to 

 the north and to the south (Big Bend and Helena) came to the fore, 

 fascinating tales of their superior richness causing the ever restless 

 miners to stampede thither with the same speed that had marked 

 their advent. Not long afterwards Wildhorse was a deserted 

 camp, untidy heaps of tailings, scores of tunnels and laboriously 

 constructed water ditches, and hundreds of prospect holes sunk at 

 likely looking spots on the banks of the creek, with some scores 

 of deserted log shacks telling the pathetic tale of a forsaken 

 mining camp. 



What the " old camp," as in later years it was familiarly called, 

 must have been like in its heyday in the early sixties, no one who 

 has knocked about Western placer mines need be told. For one 

 season it had been a very live camp, for it was remoter from 

 civilisation than any other in North America, and the pistol 

 flourishing cut-throats of Californiaaand Montana mining camps 

 flocked hither in full expectation that here at least they would be 

 safe from unpleasant interviews with that terror to their class, 

 Judge Begbie, to whom more than to any other man is due the 

 province's fair reputation. Among the lawless parasites that infest 

 every camp, British Columbia was anything but popular. In 



