Zachary's Gold Read online

  “All right then. I’ll take pity on you, lad,” he said in an accent that I couldn’t place.

  “What’s that?” said I.

  “Come. Over there,” he grunted, and I dutifully followed him across the road, where he dropped his huge pack (even bigger than my own) onto a wooden box beside a shed.

  “I seen you in there, lad. Half the morning and you comes out all starry-eyed like the minin’ maps was writ in Chinese.” As he spoke, he rummaged deep into his kit, piling shirts and stale bread on the box beside him. At last he withdrew a wrinkled and worn piece of paper, which he clenched in his fist while he repacked his bag and continued. “Yessir, I seen the story enough to know it good, and it’s a sad one for sure. You’re young and anxious and now you’re way out here, and you’re lost, and you don’t have a clue where to start. Am I right?”

  While he addressed me, he wiggled his fingers continually through his great beard, as if he were searching for something lost therein. I bridled at both the man and his approach. The fellow had several times referred to my youth, and twice called me “lad,” and although I could see that he was many years my senior, I resented the implication of his constant reminders. His remarks thus far were likewise quite true, but I was not about to admit as much.

  “I know my way around quite nicely thank you, and—”

  “No you don’t!” He spat the words out without waiting for me to finish what I meant to say.

  “What?”

  “You need my map.”

  “What? No! I don’t need any maps, old man!”

  “Where’s Pinnacle Creek?”

  “What?”

  “Where’s the Welshmen got the new diggins? Is the ground good on the south o’ Cow Mountain?”

  He could show that he knew the area better than I, quite certainly, but that was a small trick.

  “You need my map!” he repeated.

  The affair did not end well. Rather than restraining myself (and to be fair, Barkerville was not a place where men often restrained themselves), I shoved him to the ground as I snatched away his map and tossed it into the trickle of water that perennially flows down Front Street. To the sound of Weskit’s angry squeals, I stalked off in one direction while the map floated away in the other.

  As is usual when a person vents his frustration at the expense of someone else, my feeling of satisfaction was short-lived. Within a minute or two I was once again aware that I had no idea of what to do next. The confrontation with Weskit left me irritated and so self-conscious that when I sat down on the boardwalk to think, I felt everyone’s eyes on me and resumed my aimless promenade, trying to look purposeful and confident. I turned a corner and went all the way down Back Street to Cameronton like this. By this time I was not only angry at Weskit for insulting my intelligence, but angry at myself for half-heartedly wondering if that map just might have been useful.

  The life of a gold seeker was turning out to be more complicated than I had thought. Once more I strolled the length of Barkerville, looking for inspiration. Striking up conversations with strangers in saloons was always a possibility, but it seemed a rather unpromising one. Walking blindly into the hills and starting to dig at some random gully deep in the barrens was equally unpalatable to me, but after a while I began to think it might be unavoidable.

  At that point, I spotted a sign next to a doorway in an alley that could, I thought, hold some promise. It was a painted wood sandwich board sign announcing Taylor Cunningham – Barber. Below this title were advertised Expert Haircuts, shaves, and proper gentleman’s grooming. Tonics and poultices available. At the bottom, evidently added as an afterthought, the sign read Polite conversation and advice. I didn’t know exactly what was meant by this, but it did not seem too unlikely that someone might see a way to make an honest profit from the obvious need of newcomers such as myself. In spite of my vaunted scepticism of strangers, I had little to lose by asking. My only other option was to go back to the creek and see if Miller Weskit’s map had washed up somewhere on the bank.

  The man was alone when I entered, a tall, slim Negro with white hair and full sideburns. He had been sharpening his razors and looked up expectantly when the door opened.

  “Haircut, sir?”

  I was uncertain where to begin, or how to phrase my question.

  “I understand you might be able to advise me regarding possible prospecting areas. I’m new to the area, you see.”

  He nodded his head gravely and with great dignity replied, “To my customers, I am most happy to supply what information I have at my disposal.”

  As I have said, I was feeling a trifle sceptical after my experience with Miller Weskit and felt entitled to ask, “What exactly makes you an authority on such matters, Mr. Cunningham?”

  His air became one not so much offended as disdainful, and his simple reply carried a tone of the most patrician self-respect I have ever heard.

  “I, sir, am a barber,” and he lifted the customer’s cape from his chair.

  When I was seated, he set to clipping and snipping and squinting and waving his scissors without saying a word, so at first I thought he was going to do nothing but cut my hair—a good enough project, but not high on my list of priorities. At last he spoke. “You are new, then, to our fair city, sir?”

  “I am.”

  “And you wish to pursue a career as a gold miner but are unsure of where to begin your search?”

  “I’ve seen a number of good possibilities,” I assured him, “but I saw your advertisement there on the street, and I wondered if you might have any additional snippets of information.”

  “What possibility seems most attractive to you so far, sir?” Glancing at his face in the mirror, I could detect no sign of sarcasm, so I replied, “I think I’d rather just hear what suggestion you would give to a newcomer these days.”

  Once again he went about his work in silence. He was certainly a good barber. I took genuine pleasure in watching the dextrous manoeuvring of his long fingers. As he made a few final deft jabs with his scissors at an occasional out-of-place hair, he gave me his judgment.

  “No one has been opening up new areas of late, of course—too early in the year. Only the best claims and the deeper shafts have been operating over the winter.” He sighed sympathetically. “The best locations are all duly claimed and registered, and from past experience I would say that virtually all the owners will return to take possession of these within the next few weeks. I am afraid that right now even rumours of good new ground are scarce, and I believe you are faced with entering virgin territory and trusting kind Providence.”

  Once again it seemed that any hope I had held for assistance had been quashed, and I was back to the point where I would have to pick a compass bearing and begin to stumble ahead. As I stood up, though, the barber added one more idea.

  “If you are not afraid of rough travel, you might try a bit of prospecting in the Binder Creek area, where it joins Antler Creek farther down, north of Mount Tinsdale—toward the Cariboo River and Babcock Lake. You’ll make decent wages with any luck at all out there, and your chances of finding a windfall are as good as you can hope for anywhere, I believe.”

  He charged fifty cents, making it easily the most expensive haircut of my life, but well worth it for the knowledge gained. It was all I asked. I had not expected anyone to tell me where to go to get rich—only to point me in a decent direction to start looking. From there I was ready to work hard and take my chances.

  My money was fast disappearing. Prices of the simplest goods were atrocious in Barkerville—even a box of candles or a block of cheese took a substantial bite out of a dollar—but I felt a certain satisfaction as I prepared to patronize the store under which I had slept the night before. The general goods store was a single twenty-foot-square room piled from one wall to the other with commodities of every conceivable sort—unsorted and often dirty. The air was thick with a mixture of sharp odours, about half of which were pleasant. At the rear, a squat man w
ith a pointed nose argued in some foreign language with a companion dressed for the street. They seemed close to blows, but then broke into uproarious laughter, after which they argued angrily again.

  I purchased a quantity of food, a large tarpaulin, rope, and other small items, thinking as I paid for them that this trade entitled me to one more night beneath the floor.

  Since I was venturing next day into the wilderness, I decided to sample properly the food and drink of the city that night. I joined a group of five others in the dining room of the Imperial Hotel to feast at a table laden with beef, ham, venison, vegetables, and numerous sorts of fruit pie. After eating more than I had in several days combined, I stumbled next door to the saloon bar and treated myself to an after-dinner tot of rum. The small room was soon crowded with jovial fellows celebrating their day’s good luck. With only the prospect of the cold and dark under the general store ahead, I found it rather difficult to leave. After an hour or two I was deep in a bottle of spirits with a spendthrift Greek or Italian. I never learned his nationality for certain, but he spoke no English. I remember a man playing dance tunes on a fiddle, and I recall winding up behind my general store digs with my foreign friend and the remains of our bottle. He talked to me at great length and I listened sympathetically, although, as I say, not a word was comprehensible to me.

  It occurred to me later that perhaps this was a sort of preface to a time in the near future when I would have a corpse as my only partner in conversation.

  I awoke with the flames of Gomorrah and Gehenna bursting behind my eyes and flowing the length of my body so as to boil my gastric juices. I drank deeply from a rain barrel on the street, sharing it with a horse who surveyed my condition with sombre disapproval. Then I left Barkerville.

  Somehow I forced myself all the way down the valley and through a steep and snowy pass that eventually intersected with the watershed of Antler Creek. Going was hard and slow, but I regarded it only as a fitting penitence for my previous evening’s folly and proceeded with hardly a moment’s rest from morning until evening. By nightfall, I had covered the route to my future claim more than double, I thought. Several known landmarks seemed to have disappeared. The creek seemed to have altered its course, and my distinct impression was that Binder Creek did not exist. The sun had just set in the northeast. My misery was complete.

  The fact of the matter was that I was soon to be a rich man, but even if I had known this for a surety at that point, I doubt whether I could have summoned up any enthusiasm for life.

  I didn’t bother to light a fire, merely burrowed into a clear spot at the base of a large fir tree and collapsed into exhausted sleep.

  WHEN I CRAWLED OUT OF my little nest, the morning frost was already gone and the sun so bright and warm that it seemed the day had been born full grown. With the clear vision of a new day I was able to find with no great difficulty the diminutive trickle that was here called Binder Creek, and I started up its course with a feeling of optimism and rejuvenation.

  There was a sharp bend to the creek bed just up from the junction, then a narrow stretch where the spruce and pine branches from each side nearly touched, before the ravine widened into something that might be called a valley. Here I found that a small group of Chinese had staked claims. I saw three sets of newly cut and pounded markers on both sides of the creek, so I presumed that was how many men were there. One fellow was seated on a stump beside a fire in front of a pair of lean-tos back against the trees, and he waved an arm in greeting as I passed.

  It was the first claim I had come across in several miles, the country this far down Antler being considered more or less a lost cause by the majority of miners—a situation that sat quite nicely with me. I had no desire to be in a hub of activity. Experience told me that the greatest discoveries were given to the solitary adventurer, and I would not be satisfied with only moderate success.

  A few hundred yards farther along, the stream bed dog-legged sharply around a high outcropping of grey slate, and in this bend I found the first of another set of claim stakes. Many miners prefer these cul-de-sacs in the water’s course, reasoning that washed gold will land there in pockets.

  Another fire had been built around the corner, and a man in a long green coat was seated beside it, tin cup in hand and a Winchester .30-.30 resting close to his knee. I could see that he had a full bucket of tea on the boil, so I chimed out cheerfully: “Good morning, sir. Zachary Beddoes is my name. Would your hospitality stretch so far as to share a cup of that fine smelling tea?”

  He spoke not a word, so at first I thought he hadn’t heard me, although he acknowledged my presence by scowling and setting his cup on the ground. He was a sombre fellow—grey of hair, beard, and skin, although I doubt that he was as old as he looked. The Cariboo is not a home for the elderly.

  I tried to put on a cheerful outlook.

  “You have yourself a good-looking claim site here, I must remark,” I began.

  He stood up then, nodded in an upstream direction and said simply, “Come.” It seemed to me that he held his rifle rather purposefully in his left hand as he began to lead.

  I prepared to unshoulder my burden, but he spoke again.

  “Bring your pack,” he said, and I did, annoyed at the man’s bad manners but not yet willing to make an issue of it.

  He took me a stone’s throw distance and stood solemnly beside his upper marking post while I caught up.

  “This is my top stake,” he stated, as if I might not be aware of the fact, then, “Stand on that side of it,” waving his gun barrel in an onward direction. I did so.

  “Now, then, you’ve walked once across my property and I suggest it’s the last time you try it, or I just might have to blow your head off, which is my right and my practice with trespassers.” Speaking thus, he walked away. At that point in my life, I was either quite forgiving or rather easily bullied, for after a moment’s hesitation, I did the same, not even considering a violent response to his rudeness. I never learned his name, but always thought of him as Mr. Greencoat.

  Binder Creek was not large, particularly at that season of the year, but its course stretched and curled for a good number of miles from where I began to follow it, closer to the Spectacle Lakes than Babcock, as the Negro barber had supposed. As I walked upward and away from previously broken ground, I wondered where that fellow had acquired his information and if he ever ventured out to inspect these wild places himself.

  I believe that I may have been less than complimentary in some of my descriptions of the colony of British Columbia, and this is far from fair, for it is a magnificent and beautiful land, even though admittedly an unforgiving one in climate and terrain.

  Since leaving Fort Victoria I had seen a good deal of beautiful and majestic country, but nothing on the entire journey was lovelier or more awe-inspiring than the borders of the alpine meadows at the headwaters of Binder Creek.

  When I view them now in my mind’s eye, I see them green with moss and wild grass, scattered with tiny bright flowers and lichen-coated rocks, but when I first surveyed them on that early May afternoon, they were almost totally white with snow and beautiful enough at that.

  Depositing my pack, I spent most of the remaining daylight hours exploring that high, shallow basin that formed Binder’s source. There was actually less snow up there than lower down, as the trees were more widely spaced and the sun was more able to warm the ground.

  The vistas open to the eye were, as I have said, quite spectacular. High mountains to the far north sparkled with glacial snowpack—the upper levels of the unexplored earth. To the east, no civilization bespotted the wilderness before Fort Athabasca and the Canadian prairies. When I sat on the rocks with my little telescope out, peering at the land valley by valley and speculating on what each might hold, time seemed to hesitate and the world to hold its breath. I do not claim to be a poet, but I maintain that any man of even moderate sensitivity might well find himself so captivated by that landscape that he neglects mundane l
abours to some extent. Partially as a result of this, it might be noted that the majority of the most successful miners are a crude and callous lot.

  My favourite viewpoint was a ridge from which one could look northward and survey a broad, flat valley—largely muskeg and always alive with wild creatures. A silver thread—one of Antler’s countless tributaries—glimmered in the sunshine along the far side of the valley, and coming out of the dense forest were many more streams feeding it. I suspect that a shift of geography had at some stage caused much of the drainage to flow north into this valley rather than into Binder Creek, which had become a largely dormant watercourse, compared to the size of the ravines that held it.

  I was excited when I considered this—that perhaps a large stream had once cleared its path of overburden, washed the gold veins nicely, then disappeared to allow easy access to the itinerant miner. My theory probably had no basis in fact, but neither do many of the established beliefs of prospectors.

  It was mid-afternoon when I looked down from the ridge and first caught sight of the trapper in the distance. At that stage I took him for a prospector, and I paid him little heed. My only impression was that the fellow was a long way afield and walked with the determination of someone who still had a distance to go.

  I wasted too much time that day admiring and exploring the topography of my new home, and I ended up making camp mostly in the dark. Eventually I managed to start a decent fire, cook a grouse I had shot in the morning, and bunk down comfortably enough under some deadfall with my tarpaulin draped above me.

  The next week offered continuous clear, sunny weather—it’s rare that any sort of weather continues more than a half day in those mountains—and I accomplished a good deal.

  I consider myself an orderly and systematic sort of person (although the recounting of certain points of my history may make that difficult to believe), and I approached the work ahead of me in that manner.