We left the train at Ashcroft, British Columbia, and even from the station platform we could see, winding through the sand hills and sage brush, the renowned Cariboo Trail, which outreached four hundred miles to the gold-fields of Barkerville. Up this trail we were to “coach” for twenty glorious days, behind a four-in-hand driven by “Cariboo Billy,” the best whip in all British Columbia. He was ready and waiting for us, a tall, sun-tanned Westerner, with cowboy hat, fringed gauntlets, and knotted scarlet handkerchief at his throat; and the outfit he had consisted of four splendid roadsters hitched to a light, double-seated canopied surrey.
The thermometer registered 104 degrees in the shade, and the the arid hills of the dry belt pulsed under a blistering sun. We two climbed languidly into the back seat. “Cariboo Billy” and the luggage occupied the front. There was a swinging hiss of a long blacksnake whip, and we were away, with two thousand feet of trail to climb before we reached the timber line and the delight of breathing mountain air.
Every twenty miles up the entire trail are road-houses of rare excellence, and at each one the British Columbia Express Company, known in local parlance as the “B.X.,” provided us with a relay of animals. Here, too, we got meals at any and all hours, for as we arrived the first thing seen was the sallow face of the Chinese chef peering from the back door. He always took it for granted we were starving, and would immediately prepare substantials that would satisfy the most exacting appetite.
Where we rested at night, the beds were like mother's arm to us, the linen cool and fresh, and, oh! the mornings, when the day broke in that vast far railroadless country, where the horse is king and you have shaken yourself loose from exacting conventions and forgotten how to spell the word “care”—those glorious mornings when before sun-up “Cariboo Billy” would wake us with, “Hello, pals! Hit the trail in one hour, got to do seventy miles to-day!”
Then the scramble up to a breakfast of picked food from the ranches!—broilers, cream, fresh eggs, or perhaps a venison steak. To see four splendid roadsters at the door, impatient to get away, and “Cariboo Billy” waiting, idly twirling his cowboy hat in one hand, while he rolled a cigarette with the other; to tuck ourselves away in the surrey for a long day's swing into the Northland;—to hear the hearty “Good-bye and good-luck” from the host and hostess; then to hit the trail at a spanking gait, to feel the plunge of the leaders, the tug of the wheelers, and to dash out into the early morning, with “no one to boss, no one to obey”; to feel that we “owned” “Cariboo Billy” and the outfit, and to feel that in all the world not a human being could command our whims or say us nay. That was a holiday kings might envy but never hope to have.
An endless delight was to learn the names of our animals. “Cariboo Billy” knew every shining flank on the trail, and after the first day out he never waited for questions, but at each relay he would remark quietly:
“Leaders, ‘Buck’ and ‘Brandy’; wheelers, ‘Luke’ and ‘John.’” Then our horses became personalities and our holiday comrades for many miles.
One evening, gorgeous with colour, we swung down the heights into Quesnel, on the Fraser River, where the Government telegraph line leaves all haunts of civilization and takes its way through the wilderness to Dawson City.
We had done eighty miles that day, but we felt no fatigue; indeed, I cannot recall feeling wearied or “carriage-stiff” during that entire drive of eight hundred and sixty miles in the wonderful mountain air. I slept like a baby, laughed like a child, and ate like a lumber-jack. Two days later we galloped into historic Barkerville, the nucleus of the Cariboo gold-fields. A little out-of-the-world town it is, four hundred miles from the railroad, with its whole-souled people four hundred times more hospitable to wandering rest-seeking strangers because of it. We stayed three days and said good-bye with faltering voices and misty eyes; for it is unlikely that we shall ever see Barkerville again. A holiday like that comes to a person but once in a life-time.
On the return trip we made a detour of sixty miles westward to Lillooet, on the Upper Fraser River. For miles the trail hangs like a chiffon scarf above the river, which boils through its rock cañon, a thousand feet below. For miles the carriage wheels flew along one foot from the edge of this precipice. We climbed Pavilion Mountain, where the trail wound in six distinct loops above us, we galloped every foot of the way down the opposite side, where the trail dropped in six circles below us. “Cariboo Billy” was a dare-devil driver—we almost ceased breathing in some of his wild dashes from summit to cañon, and, oh! the fascination of his plunge down the mountain, the almost terrifying enjoyment of threatening danger: but he never made a slip. He knew the trails; he knew his horses; and, more than all else, he was sure of himself.
And now, looking backward to that princely holiday, I know that “Cariboo Billy” did much to make that vacation the most royal I have ever experienced. That was seven years[1] ago, but I can feel the thrill of the four-in-hand galloping down to the cañons; the exhilaration of it all is with me to-day, like the haunting scent of sage on the Dry Belt Hills.
[1]
Here, the placid English August and the sea-encircled miles,
There, God's copper-coloured sunshine beating through the lonely aisles,
Where the waterfalls and the forest voice forever their duet,
And call across the cañon on the trail to Lillooet.
—Pauline Johnson, in The Canadian Magazine for June, 1907.