316 Sport and Life. 



The history of British Columbia is brief. Gold made it, and 

 gold unmade it. Its start was precisely the same as California's, 

 and the Klondyke boom, which is to-day luring thousands to untold 

 hardships, is, with certain differences caused by the latter's extreme 

 climatic conditions, but a repetition of what occurred in California 

 in 1848-9, and in British Columbia ten years later. Unlike 

 California, the climate, natural resources, and topography of 

 British Columbia are such as failed to hold out inducements to 

 settlers so long as the " attic of North America," as it was called, 

 retained the isolated position which it only lost by the completion 

 of the Canadian Pacific Railway fourteen years ago. British 

 Columbia's early boom was a short-lived one, for in a country so 

 extremely inaccessible as was the interior, mining claims had to 

 be extraordinarily rich to pay for working.* With wages for the 

 ordinary miner at 6os. per day, and the simplest tools and hardware, 

 such as nails and axes, costing 2^dols. (IGJ.) the pound, all but the 

 cream of the thousands of claims staked out in the wilderness of 

 Cariboo, or Wildhorse, or Cassiar, were quickly abandoned by the 

 disappointed owners. Other gold discoveries in Montana, Idaho, 

 Nevada, which latter, though its later career was that of a typical 

 silver camp, had been started in consequence of auriferous riches, 

 soon lured the " disgruntled diggers " back to regions south of the 

 4gth Par., and British Columbia, after two or three years of feverish 

 life, began rapidly to lapse to the condition of a " peter'd out " 

 mining community. Something that was worth doing the boom 

 had, however, achieved, for not all of the 20,000 miners who had 

 flocked to the northern Eldorado turned their backs in disgust upon 

 this beautiful mountain country. The first arrivals had found, 

 where now stands the city of Victoria, a cluster of log cabins and a 

 storehouse, surrounded by a business-like stockade, the usual 

 make-up of a Hudson's Bay Company fort. Victoria, after the 

 retreat of the great fur-trading company from United States 



* Between May i and June 15, 1858, there sailed from San Francisco for 

 Victoria and the Fraser 10,573 persons. 



