Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/311

Rh a fine art. Then was the time, too, when it behooved stage-drivers and packers to be handy with a "gun," for "road-agents" were plentiful and vigilant. Many a man with a pack-saddle loaded with gold-dust, or sometimes with whiskey or even "canned goods," "passed in his checks" under some over-shadowing tree or behind some sheltering rock.

Both the distresses and the successes of that epoch are well illustrated by extracts from some of the newspapers of the time. From issues of the Washington Statesman of Walla Walla, we learn that flour was at one time a dollar a pound; beef, thirty to fifty cents a pound; bacon, sixty; beans, thirty; rice, fifty; tea a dollar and a half; tobacco, a dollar and a half; sugar, fifty cents; candles, a dollar. Some of these staples could not be had at all. Physicians, when they got into the mines, would charge twenty dollars a visit. Board was from five to ten dollars a day, frequently more.

But as an offset to the expense and frequent positive suffering, we gather the following item from an issue of the Statesman in December, 1861:

"S. F. Ledyard arrived last evening from the Salmon River mines, and from him it is learned that some six hundred miners would winter there; that some two hundred had gone to the south side of the river, where two streams head that empty into the Salmon, some thirty miles south-east of the present mining camp. Coarse gold is found, and as high as one hundred dollars per day to the man has been taken out. The big mining claim of the old locality belongs to Mr. Weiser of Oregon, from which two thousand six hundred and eighty dollars were taken out on the 20th, with two rockers. On the 21st, three thousand three hundred and sixty dollars were taken out with the same machines."