230 Sport and Life. 



District. Most of them were living round the old camp, where 

 some scores of Chinamen, who had wandered into Kootenay after 

 the exodus of the white miners, were now digging-over the old 

 ground, and washing the old tailings for a second and third time, 

 with the tireless diligence of their race. 



This community of eleven white men was a somewhat unique 

 little settlement, and a more isolated one it would be difficult to 

 imagine. As a relic of the days when the population of this 

 infinitely remote gulch in the heart of the Rocky Mountains had 

 been counted by hundreds, the camp still held its old franchise of 

 returning two members to the provincial House of Parliament, 

 which in 1882 consisted of twenty-four or twenty-five members. 

 So evenly matched had been the " ins " and the " outs " in. 

 provincial politics that neither party had dared to disfranchise 

 Wildhorse. The place also boasted of a gold commissioner, who 

 acted as his own constable, returning officer, and registrar, a 

 postmaster, who made up and received four mails in the year, and 

 who was one of the two storekeepers in Kootenay, and a Roman 

 Catholic missionary, who was at the head of the primitive little 

 Indian school and mission that had been started many years before 

 by the famous Father De Smet. The two white women in the camp 

 had come in during the boom fifteen or twenty years before, and 

 had never been out of the camp since then, and as they were the 

 wives of the two rival storekeepers they had not even the chance 

 of enjoying each other's company. If I add that seven of these 

 eleven old timers were Irishmen, to which nationality also the two- 

 women belonged, it will be acknowledged that there was present 

 the element fora good deal of political fun. To the two legislators 

 their parliamentary duties were better than a gold mine, for their 

 travelling allowance of 10 cents a mile of the very roundabout 

 route to Victoria amounted to more than did the sessional 

 allowance of 80, which was attached to the office of M.P.P. 

 (Member of the Provincial Parliament). It was none too much, 

 for a journey to the capital was in those days a formidable 

 undertaking, that occupied several weeks, and which meant a 



