Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/366

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326 FRED LOCKLEY

supplies, and started back for our camp. When some pros- pectors in town learned that we were making $10 a day to the man, they followed me to our camp.

"When I returned father thought that he could strike richer diggings, so he left a man and myself to work with the rockers while he went down to Rock Creek, now the site of Roslyn, B. C. I averaged $8 a day while father was gone. The bedrock was a white clay. We threw the clay out on the tailings. A few years later some Chinamen came to our old abandoned diggings and made $15 to $20 a day apiece from our old clay tailings. The clay had rolled back and forth in our rockers and the gold had stuck to it. When it had weathered and disintegrated the gold was released and the clay washed away in the Chinamen's sluice boxes.

"While father was on his trip he looked over the country, and decided to locate on Asoyoos Lake, at the head of the Okanogan River, across the British Columbia border in Amer- ican territory. He went back to Fort Hope, and, securing riding horses and pack horses, my father and mother, my two sisters and two brothers and myself started for our new home. This was in October, and winter had begun. We traveled day after day through the rain or snow, camping at night, usually in the snow. Timber was scarce where father had selected his ranch, so we hkuled logs down the mountains, split them and built our cabin by standing the split logs on end. We chinked the cracks with moss and mud.

"After looking over the ranch more carefully, father found that it was not as good as he had thought, so he decided to build a boat, go down the Okanogan and Columbia river to Deschutes Falls, now called: Celilo, and bring supplies up the river for the miners. We had practically no tools, and of course no nails. We went into the mountains, whipsawed out the lumber, hauled it down to the water, and father, with the help of us boys, built a boat, fastening it together with trun- nels or wooden pegs. We could have secured nails possibly, but the freight from Fort Hope was $1 a pound, and father decided that the wooden pegs would do equally well. We built