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How Uncounted Millions Of Gold Were Missed
L.A. Times June 27, 1897 |
Even the wild rush to California in ’49 hardly equaled that to
Caribou ten years later.
Surely there has never been such a frenzied scramble for gold as
that which filled the harbor of Victoria, Vancouver Island, with a
navy of antiquated, leaky craft, laden to the scuppers with a
horde of dauntless adventurers, burning to reach the precious
placers of the Upper Frazer. These upper reaches are wild enough
even today; forty years ago they were in the heart of untrodden
wilderness. Civilization had not penetrated further than the guns
of the British cruisers could reach. Even the log forts of the
Hudson Bay Company were not found in the remoter parts of that
region so aptly described years afterward by Lord Dufferin as a
“Sea of Mountains”.
Gold was known to exist; inland tribes bartered with it with
others for powder and lead, or blankets, and it eventually made
its way to Victoria; but where it was found, or in what
quantities, no white man knew; unless indeed it was the head
factors of the company, and it was part of their duty to withhold
such matters from the world, so that they might keep the great
northwest a breeding ground for the fur bearing animals for all
time. But one day a certain Jim Barker found his way upstream, dug
gold dust from the bars by the spadeful, and then a dozen Hudson
Bay Companies could not keep back the adventurers. The rush had
begun.
There were no roads, or even trails, save those made by the
grizzly and the blacktail, the Frazer and Thompson were cruel
streams, ice cold and full of terrible rapids and eddies. But when
did danger deter the gold seeker? The army of red-shirted, big
booted, daredevils pressed on until Caribou and its rich placers
had been reached. Hundreds died on the way; disease and privation
played sad havoc with the survivors; but the rewards were in a few
cases beyond the dreams of avarice, and the dogged fellows
continued to work like heroes all through the short northern
summer, with rocker and long tom. Ravishing the rich bars of the
wealth they had accumulated during the lapse of eons. Wages were
$25 a day, paid in gold dust. It was barely a living pittance.
Everything had to be carried over four hundred miles of rough
trail on men’s shoulders, as the country produced nothing, after
the game had been driven away, except gold dust-but of that there
was great store. Potatoes cost $60 a bushel, flour $10 a pound;
and a pair of gum boots sold for $50; drinks were paid for in
pinches of the precious dust- and some of the bar-keepers had
thumbs broader than ever Miller possessed. A few men made
fortunes, many managed to pay expenses, but majority went dead
broke.
Then the awful winter was upon them. The mercury disappeared in
the bulb; the rivers froze almost to the bottom in the still
reaches deep snow covered the land, and buried the shanties and
tents of the pioneers. Men sickened and died like sheep with
murrain. One historian met 4,000 miners returning on the
Bakerville trail, destitute, bare-footed, and despairing. When the
ice thawed in the spring, the canon of the Frazer was a
chapel-house, strewn with the bodies of the red-shirted
gold-seekers who had met their fate in its waters.
A few of the most hardy struggled through the great bond of the
Columbia River, and, sailing down its broad bosom, eventually
found their way back to Oregon. They wintered near the Arrow
Lakes, and with indomitable resolution continued prospecting
during the succeeding summer. Traces of their operations are
occasionally found, but though they were in a country far richer,
than Caribou, they knew it not. Placers there were none, and the
mysteries of true fissure veins and smelting ores were beyond
their ken. They required gold in its native purity- something they
could wash out with a pan or rocker and exchange for necessaries
without further trouble. It was not there, so they passed on.
Yet, there were superior men among them. One pioneer, at least,
must have found rich float on Red Mountain, on the very site of
what is now the Le Rol Mine, and evidently followed it up to the
outcrop of gossan, or “Iron Hat”, that lay exposed for hundreds of
feet. In a half-hearted way, as if he doubted the wisdom of
wasting precious energy on a quartz lead, he drove a shallow trail
shaft, but, after going down a few feet, became discouraged and
moved away- back to the dance halls and rum of the coast. Probably
his bones now bleach on some alkali desert, far to the south of
the futile shaft he sunk on Red Mountain. A few more shots, and he
would have reached ore that would have placed all that wealth can
buy within is reach.
For more than a generation Red Mountain lay undisturbed. Wild
animals alone wandered over the lofty mass of diorite. The grizzly
and mountain lion owned it by turns; blacktail skulked in the
forests at its base; big horn skipped over its crest; the white
goat of the north chewed the scanty lichens on its scarred side.
But the treasure that lay in its bowels rested secure under the
protecting “Iron Hat”. Yet through all those long years, a man was
growing up in the distant east that had been selected by fate as
the inheritor of the hidden treasure in the great Red Mountain.
Born in Suffolk County, New York state, E.S. Topping was by turns
sailor, miner, hunter, prospector, Indian fighter and scout.
Topping saw western life in all its aspects, until finally he
drifted to west Kootenay. Soon although alien, he found himself
Recorder and Constable- in fact “the government” of that lonely
region. Prospectors were then beginning to stray into southern
British Columbia from Idaho and Montana, and such human driftwood
formed the bulk of Topping’s subjects. They were a little rough,
of course, but “bad men” were scarce, and the few that did wander
into west Kootenay invariably showed the most profound respect for
the old Indian fighter, and took the first opportunity to remove
themselves from his jurisdiction. It is a leaven of just such men
as he that made life possible in the mining regions of the west;
without them rapine and murder would have stalked unchecked from
the Missouri to the coast.
Topping had now found a quiet anchorage after hi adventurous
youth, and seemed likely to pass his later days as many another
mountain man has done, in an uneventful though not by any means
monotonous fashion. When a man is fond of the wilderness and finds
himself beside waters teeming with fish, and prairies alive with
fowl, and where venison may always be had for the pressing of a
trigger, he is likely to be too contented to make any very
strenuous efforts to change his lot.
But that was six years ago. Read, and let me tell you how Topping
fares today.
One evening in the fall of 1890 he was startled by a violent
rapping on the split cedar door of his cabin. He lifted the latch,
and Joe Bourgois and his “Pard” Morris stumbled into the little
shanty, and dumped the bags of ore samples they had been laden
with on the rough floor. Deadbeat and half frozen, they were yet
full of enthusiasm over a wonderful body of sulphide ore, which
their trail shots had disclosed in the bottom of an old trail
shaft high on the flanks of Red Mountain. They had staked out five
claims, they said, and would give one to Topping if he would pay
the recorders fees on the lot. This, he agreed to do, and in due
course became the owner of what seemed the poorest prospect. It is
now the famous Le Rol mine. One of the locations is the War Eagle,
and another the Center Star, Each a valuable property, but
inferior to the Le Rol. From that day Trail Creek, Topping’s
abode, began to be famous.
Events move fast in the West, Topping was almost alone at Trail in
1890; today there are hotels, stores, a smelter, a railroad
station, and steamboat wharfs, while perched on the shoulder of
the mountain near the Le Rol has sprung up the bustling town of
Rossland, numbering already 10,000 inhabitants and increasing in
population at the rate of 5,000 a year.
Topping of course sold out long ago. He need worry himself no more
about ways and means, but can buy all Winchesters, boats and pack
animals he may desire, and still have an ample income left- and
what more can a frontiersman and old Indian fighter ask? The
veteran is a great favorite with his fellow citizens.
And the nameless wanderer who sunk the shallow pit in the iron hat
back in the fifties? What grudge had the blind goddess against
him? A shot or two more and he would have been rich and famous.
But the big air compressors do not pant and groan in his service;
a thousand feet below the sunlight, men are tolling, but not for
him, the dump sparkles with fifty dollar ore, but the proceeds
will not be credited to his account. What writ is writ, and in the
Book of Destiny there is no turning back to correct errors- but if
the bare, bleached bones on the alkali desert could again be
clothed in flesh and revisit Red Mountain, they would weep to see
how near the pioneer of ’50 came to finding his El Dorado
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