384 Sport and Life. 



that the canal and reservoir capacity of this mining company amounts to 

 10,000 miners' inches of water delivered from the big nozzles of the largest 

 giants manufactured, and the company claims that there is nothing 

 superior to its system of pipes, canals, and reservoirs on the coast. 



Everything has drifted into big companies in the way of mining in that 

 district now. The Miocene Gravel Mining Company possess claims that 

 -cover four miles of the Horse Fly to the mouth of Beaver Lake Creek. 



The Harper claim on the same creek is owned by a San Francisco 

 syndicate, and is to be worked by a hydraulic elevator. 



Seven miles south-east of the town of Quesnelle Forks is carried on 

 one of the most gigantic placer mining operations ever attempted on 

 the coast. It is at a point where the great Quesnelle Lake empties 

 its overflow waters into the south fork of the Quesnelle. There the 

 Golden River Quesnelle Company, of London, is employing now about 

 400 white men and 100 Chinese in excavating for an immense waste weir 

 that is intended to divert the waters from their natural outlet. When this 

 waste weir and the necessary gates are completed, the construction of the 

 dam to hold back the waters of the great Quesnelle Lake, which is 

 100 miles long and from one to five miles wide, will be commenced. The 

 -overflow waters which it is intended to divert cover a space 3Ooft. wide and 

 are now at the lowest stage of the river flowing, it is said, 8ft. to loft, 

 deep. As the lake rises 6ft. or 8ft., I believe, each season, one can 

 realise what a gigantic piece of work the company has undertaken. 



It is estimated that the dam will cost 228,ooodols., and other work will 

 probably bring the expenditures up to a larger sum before the company 

 completes the work and gets ready to clean up the gold from the bottom 

 of the South Fork River, eight miles of which it controls. It is expected 

 that all of this will be worked out before the lake overflows the dam 

 erected to hold it back. 



But the attack on the auriferous deposits of Horse Fly and Quesnelle 

 Forks represents only one side of the base of " Old Baldy," the supposed 

 source of Caribou's golden wealth. On all the creeks taking their rise in 

 it Keithley, Snowshoe, . Cunningham, Harvey, Willow, William, Grouse, 

 Antler, Goose, Lightning, and other water courses equally familiar to 

 old-timers new efforts on a correspondingly large scale to those named 

 are being instituted. The Caribou Goldfields and Exploration Company, 

 organised in London, with a capital of ^1,000,000, have purchased many 

 of the old claims on the famous William Creek at Barkerville, in the 

 Caribou district, and have expended several hundred thousand dollars in 

 bringing up a bedrock drain tunnel to relieve the deep gravel claims of the 

 water that caused the former owners to give up their enterprises. The old 



