and-food for humans, by wide rivers, steep hills, thick brush, clouds of insects, and by the sheer distance. At least one man was driven to suicide.
Norman Lee, a Chilcotin rancher, tried to drive 200 cattle over the Ashcroft Trail to sell in Dawson City. Although Lee and his colleagues were experienced ranchers and their cattle were used to foraging in the wild, the trail defeated them all. Lee wrote in his diary that mud followed the cattle down slopes like a river of porridge and the country offered them nothing at all to eat. "It was scarcely possible to travel a hundred yards without finding dead or abandoned horses," he recalled.
