Zachary's Gold

To Hazel.
Of course.
Always.

I WAS RAISED IN THE
hill country of New Hampshire, my parents being second generation American farmers and moderately successful as such. My father was able and determined to see that I received an education better than his own, and to that end dispatched me to Chicago at the age of nineteen years to study law.

“Lawyers,” he pronounced more than once, “are the roosters in the henhouse of this world.” There was some truth in this quaint observation, although within the metaphor of a henhouse, I believe that foxes would be the animals more relevant to that profession.

Knowing his hopes for my life as I did, I was rather surprised at his great displeasure two years later when I announced that I had taken employment as a Pinkerton agent. I had assumed that he would quickly see the similarity between the two careers, both being in the field of law and its maintenance, and consider that my scholastic goal had been more or less reached, but this was not the case. His protestations were all the more hurtful to me in that I had been forced to falsify several letters of recommendation to secure the job. At that point in my life, the idea of cheating in order to become an enforcer of the law did not seem paradoxical at all.

The temptation is to state that my father refused to speak to me from that day on, but in fairness, I myself never found opportunity to communicate to him, and he had no idea of my whereabouts after I left school. I liked my family well enough, but as a group we were always too busy to form those poetic bonds that cannot be broken, or at least ignored.

My three years as a Pinkerton man accomplished two things. Firstly, it taught me to use a Colt revolver a third as long as my leg, thereby convincing me that I was a fully redoubtable young bull and a challenge to all comers. Secondly, it showed me that not every occupation that promises challenge and adventure can fulfil that promise. For approximately thirty-four months I was based in various hotels and railway stations, endlessly asking questions and searching, usually in vain, for scoundrels and swindlers. The greatest excitement I experienced was in being lost twice in snowstorms, and the only time I actually used my revolver, I shot out all the windows and most of the door of a small house. I discovered later that my desperado had never actually occupied the place.

I was only a slightly more cynical and experienced young fellow, however, as I headed west for California in the summer of 1863. There was still a challenge available there for a young man, was the surety, and chances for more than a meagre salary and bunions. I had some vague notions of rounding up wild horses or discovering and conquering some lost tribe of very rich Indians, but by the time I reached San Francisco gold and rumours of gold were the only thoughts that I would entertain. In this, I followed much of the population, for while the greatest finds in the region were becoming or had become depleted, the dream remained. New Eldorados were reported from here and there as well—Idaho and Montana were interesting to me, at first.

I decided to winter in San Francisco, though. I had found work on the docks and desired to build up enough capital to endure a short period of careful prospecting with no income to cover expenses, before I became fabulously rich. Each evening as I squirrelled away my resources, I would gaze longingly towards the Montana hills, where my empire was waiting to reveal itself. I amassed quite a collection of maps and pored over them diligently, as if sufficient study would reveal the secrets of the future.

Longshoremen are a rough lot generally, and the people I encountered that winter on the docks were mostly as shameless an amalgam of liars and storytellers as one could hope to find, but mixed with the falsehood and phantasms was a theme I could not ignore—that the relatively instant fortunes of the day were being made not in Montana, but far north of me in the new English colony of British Columbia. British Columbia was where the real gold and the real gold seeker were to be found.

I was reluctant at first to consider the trip, for anyone familiar with the region described it as the Devil's own region to travel. I had hoped to encounter a more hospitable form of wilderness for my journeys, but as the months passed, so did my reservations.

Thus it was that on April 3, 1864, I took passage on the paddlewheel steamship
Commodore
to Fort Victoria, en route to the colony of British Columbia. Because of my connections with the stevedores I was able to work for my fare as a non-skilled crewman, my duty being to clean the decks, to sweep and swab continuously. We were so grossly overladen with passengers, however, that there was scarcely a free patch of deck, bench, or bunk that was not covered either by an itinerant miner or his stack of gear. Therefore, I managed to find time to do a fair amount of posing on the foredeck with my eyes on the horizon and my scraggly bronze moustache fluttering in the wind. I was a tall and skinny creature but fancied myself something of an inspirational portrait piece in that posture.

From Fort Victoria, another steamer—this one so old that it was hardly seaworthy—carried our small horde of humanity across the gulf waters to the mainland and about thirty miles up the Fraser River to Fort Langley, where the next segment of my journey began.

I disembarked in the early afternoon, optimistic and only mildly nauseated from the ship's motion, so I determined to shoulder my pack and make some distance towards Fort Hope. By nightfall I had covered twenty miles along a most pleasant road, and as I lay rolled in my blanket by a cheery fire, I felt sure that the stories of the road's treachery and danger had been grossly exaggerated.

The next day, in bright spring sunshine, I walked the forty miles to Fort Hope, camping just north of the settlement in ease and good spirits. I remember this quite well, for it was the last I saw of ease and good spirits for some time.

The ten or twelve miles to Fort Yale introduced me to the realities of the odyssey I had undertaken. A fine, cold rain fell steadily and seemed to double the weight of my pack. I spent much of my time cursing the foul capriciousness of road surveyors. When a straight path through the forest was quite obviously available, they chose to make it meander like a prairie stream, and when a really formidable obstacle presented itself, they forced the traveller directly up its face, rather than divert him around it.

It was also at this time that I first glimpsed the river's malicious rage. The flat grey maelstrom twisted along the base of the slate cliff looking as deceptively slow as a coiling serpent until it struck some exposed rock and spat up sheets of rabid foam. (To this day I recall seeing, at a spot twenty miles or so above Fort Yale, a pair of fallen trees fully thirty feet in length being borne swiftly down the swirling waterway. I watched them hurtle to the edge of a great whirlpool, whereupon they flipped up on their ends like twigs and were swallowed in a single gulp.)

It was nightfall when I straggled into Fort Yale, and I immediately took the chance to emulate the Christ child by seeking refuge in a stable. I remained there the following day, it being a Sunday. Like most of the travellers, I was grateful for a Sabbath rest, even though my own expedition had scarcely begun. A trader with four pack mules was due to leave Monday morning—a French Canadian whose name I now forget. Along with a half-dozen other apprehensive adventurers, I chose to accompany him. We would give him the safety found in numbers, and he, for his part, could supply us from his stocks with certain items we would otherwise have had to carry on our backs. It was a fortuitous arrangement and kept those unpleasant weeks of sojourning from being totally impossible for me. The journey was more than a week and a half of cold, aching bones and misery that I shall not describe at length.

One vivid picture remains in my mind, though, from the celebrated Royal Engineers' road through the wicked lower regions of the Fraser Canyon. I remember being forced to venture out onto what the Frenchman called “cat's paths”—hanging slings of boards suspended from ropes above and shored up by random logs underneath. Dangling there against the sheer slate face, I found the view of watery death far below me was too much to endure and too near to ignore, and I was forced to creep along with my eyes tightly shut, one hand holding a mule's packstrap. It was an undignified posture, but, as I say, a memorable one.

I could easily spend a great deal of time describing our travel north through river canyons, over mountain ridges, swamps, and deserts. It was an eventful journey. I recall vividly the night we expelled an Englishman named Alexander from our company for cheating at cards, barely refraining from hanging the scoundrel. I remember equally, at another point, how disgusted I was to witness the lengthy funeral the papist Frenchman gave his favourite packhorse when it broke a leg and had to be shot.

It is a country that breeds memorable images and strange stories, although the strangest and most memorable still awaited me, weeks later, and farther north.

After travelling for about ten days, we reached the outpost of Soda Creek, some sixty or seventy miles down the Fraser from Quesnelle Mouth. That stretch of the river is safely navigable, and, as luck would have it, we were able to gain passage on the sternwheeler next day.

The operators of that vessel proved to be as wild a lot as any dock workers in San Francisco, and I arrived at the beginning of the last leg of my expedition quite drunk. Indeed, in my attempt to disembark I almost drowned in about three feet of water before I could extricate myself from beneath my river-soaked pack. By sleeping in a shed owned by the shipping company, I was able to keep the frost off my blanket, but I awoke very cold and ill-disposed to the world next day.

I set out alone and travelled nearly twenty miles—as far as Cottonwood House—where I ate good beefsteak and potatoes, then retired immediately to the stables where, warmed by hay and horse breath, I slept a full twelve hours.

In the morning I was much invigorated. Checking my accounts, I found I still had several days of rough grub and thirty-five American dollars, while being within thirty-odd miles of my destination. After having covered roughly four hundred, it seemed such a short distance that I expected to reach the goldfields that day, but that majestic and malevolent country had more than one surprise in store for newcomers.