The good

WELLS - Spring has not yet reached the high Cariboo country yet and plows are chewing snow on the road to the Bowron Lakes. In Barkerville, the museum town, snows still almost cover the smaller cabins.

Paul Si. Pierre

PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES

Tourists are thin on the ground and this community's Jack O’Clubs Hotel — more gables than baths and rooms at $20 a night — is almost empty enough to hear echoes.

The two roads over the moun- tains to the other gold communi- ty, Likely, are sealed to traffic and will be for another month or two. As the crow flies, Likeiy is only 60 kilometres from Wells and Barkerville, but how many people can the crows pack around? By car, the way most of us move, it’s 27C kilometres, detouring through both Quesnel and Williams Lake.

What stirs in these oid com- munities at this time of year is not the sap in the poplars but that most exciting, stimulating, intox- icating impulses of mankind. It is called hope.

One hundred and thirty years after the great Cariboo Gold Rush, 22 years after the under- ground Cariboo Gold Quartz workings shut down here in the town Fred Wells created, there still burns the hope that the big- gest gold discoveries are yet to come.

Where better to check than with one of the oldest gold washers in the region, Dougias Ross?

Friday. April 5, 1991 ~ North Shore News - 9

life in Cariboo: ground sluicing and gold

You need enly hear his veice on a telephone, speaking the word Cariboo, to identify him asa ger. une old-timer in this country.

Yoduy's people pronounce the word like the name of the animal, CARiboo. Those who date back to beginnings say CaribOO.

No one knows why this is, any more than anyone knows how the spelling of caribou became altered on the mans, but it just happens tc be so; it is one of the ways to tel the men from the boys.

He lives in a tiny house ona quiet street with a wife called Suzi and two small dogs.

Doug Ross is now 75 or 76 but he has only about 60 of his origi- nal kilos left. His beard is thick but his legs are thin and he walks with cane, slowly.

“lam wearing out,’’ he says. No more gold washing for Doug.

The memories are good. As an immigrant from Scotland, he came here in 1931 and became the school teacher in what was Ieft of old Barkerville. For this he was paid $650 a day, once a year.

“Tom Fry told me ‘Come min- ing with me. I can guarantee you twice that.” He had a claim on Rucheon Creck that hadn’t been worked since the 1860s. He himself was about 70 then.”*

So Doug Ross became a miner, learned to whipsaw logs for planking a log cabin. He and old Tom dug, panned and forever hoped.

“Iq was four years before we finally got enough money to buy a monitor. | remember the date we turned the water on. The flow was reduced from 24 inches to 10 in ihe monitor and there was so much force we couldn't shut it off easily so we ground sluiced for five continuous days.

“He sluiced for 12 hours while {slept and then I sluiced for 12 hours when he slept.

“When we cleaned out the sluice boxes afterward, we had 14 pounds of gold. To be exact, 155 ounces.””

It was a bit like getting $650 a day once a year. The pay day is the one you remember. Doug ate plain food, lived the good outdoor life and washed gold out of Rucheon Creek until 1942 when he went away for a date with Mr. Hitler.

He did a variety of things after the war but none was ever as good as placer mining, so he and his wife came back here and here he

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Like all ihe placer miners, he has been looking for ancient stream beds where the nuggets collected long before the hills we vit today were built. He is sure he has such a deposit on Yuckti Creek, which much resembles the old caims on Rucheon,

Logging provides the few salaries that are paid in this region now, and it is an article of com- mon belief chat the two fast works of man visible from space are the Great Wall ef China and the Bowron clearcut. But Doug Ross

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smoke colunms from £00 chimneys rise straight as blue ropes to the high sky. All the little town is Uhus suspended, a golden sun, living on hope.

Koows thatit's gold that matters. “There is a hell of alot more vold in thts country than was ever

taken out.’” Outdoors, the cold morning air is perfectly still and the wood

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