. . .Wright in the autumn of '58, the generous Yankee captain was mobbed by penniless and destitute men for return passage to the coast. Many a broken treasure-seeker owed his life to Tom Wright's free passage. Fortunately, there was always good fishing on the Fraser; but salt was a dollar twenty-five a pound, butter a dollar twenty-five a pound, and flour rarer than nuggets. So hard up were some of the {17} miners for pans to wash their gold, that one desperate fellow went to a log shack called a grocery store, and after paying a dollar for the privilege of using a grindstone, bought an empty butter vat at the pound price of butter—twelve dollars for an empty butter tub! Half a dollar was the smallest coin used, and clothing was so scarce that when a Chinaman's pig chewed up Walter Moberly's boots while the surveyor lay asleep in his shack, Mr Moberly had to foot it twenty-five miles before he could find another pair of boots. Saloons occupied every second shack a. . . Read More