The following extract was taken from Where the river ran: The story of the Peace by Thelma Irvine. My name is Peace River Smith. I first met Pete Toy in 1862 at Fort St John. Pete and his partner Joe pulled their canoe up on shore late one afternoon. Pete had the broad shoulders of someone who had swung an axe a lot. His hair was black and curly and you could hardly tell what was hair and what was beard. I asked Pete if Black Jack Jones and I could join them. He and Joe agreed. Pete seemed at home in the wilderness and I doubt if we could have made in through the first rapids without him. We had to make a choice. We could go right up the Finlay or to the left up the Parsnip. I knew Cust and Carey's strike had just been a few miles along the Parsnip, so Black Jack and I decided to go that way. Pete decided on the Finlay and before the day was over Pete found a rich bar on the bank of the Finlay and he and Joe were soon taking out a dollar a pan, up to four hundred dollars a day in gold. Black Jack and I didn't know this at the time. We panned along the Parsnip and ended back in Cariboo just as broke as ever. We learned of Pete's luck six years later when we went north again.

Everytime we met someone, we heard about Pete Toy. They all spoke of him with pleasure and about some kindness he'd done for them. He'd built a good solid cabin on the Finlay and used it as a trading post. He'd spend the summer months working his claim then travel to another cabin on the Parsnip for trapping then across country to his winter cabin at Manson Creek, west of the Forks for more trapping. He'd snowshoe or canoe down the Omineca in the spring to his cabin on the Finlay and then go down the Peace to Fort St John with his furs to get goods for his trading post.

Pete came by in the Fall. "Did you know that we're in part of Canada now" he said. "I've just met a man called Hortensky and he said that British Columbia made a deal. They agreed to join the Confereration of Canada if a railway would be built to connect them to the East". This was news to us but it didn't matter. Politicians can't make gold. Black Jack and I spent the Summer on the Peace. We found some gold, just enough to buy what we needed. We split in the Fall. I decided to winter at Hudson's Hope. Black Jack didn't tell me his plans. Next Spring I headed up the Peace and teamed up with Jacques Pardonet. We went through the Ne Parle Pas and up the Finlay. Pete wasn't at his cabin but the door was unlocked as always and everything inside was neat as a pin. We went on the Omineca and camped below Black Canyon in the evening. In the morning I heard Jacques yell "Peace River look at that". He pointed across the river. There was a battered canoe overturned on the bank. It looked like it might have been there all Winter. "That's Pete's canoe he said. There was no doubt in my mind that something terrible had happened. We went up to Germansen. There was no trace along the way of Pete's camp, gear or traps. No one at Germansen had seen Pete all Winter. They hadn't seen Black Jack either. No one knew what really happened.

Captain William Butler of the British army travelled the area after Hortensky surveyed the area in 1874. In his account The Wild Northland he stated how he met Pete Toy. Upon reaching Finlay Forks we decided to forge the Parsnip. Twelve miles from the mouth of McLeod's River we found a neatly constructed white man's dwelling and its owner, one of the better known independant traders on the Peace, Pete Toy. Toy was one of the few miners to remain in the Peace River country after the hopes of finding a rich strike had dwindled. Butler described Toy as a Cornish miner who had come to the Peace River ten years earlier. During that time he had mined, trapped, traded with the Indians, taken an Indian wife and had acquired a reputation as being honest and a superior woodsman.

In 1881 he is at home aged 9
Married Katie L. Hungerschafer on 30 NOV 1893 in Manhattan, New York, United States