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Barkerville
With
the California and Klondike gold rush, the Barkerville
gold rush was one of the great frenzied events in North
American history. The 1849 gold rush in California had
drawn people from every corner of the world to what was
portrayed as and easy way of getting rich. As with all
gold rushes, a few became very rich, many got by, and
the vast majority found little or no gold. Once the
mines had been claimed and worked out, the boom towns
died down, and the fever of the rush subsided. In most,
there was still that dedicate core of prospectors who
wandered off up new river valleys, into unexplored
mountain ranges, along unsettled coastlines and into the
unknown.
The 1850's saw a moderate gold rush along
the Fraser River with Americans, the British, Chinese
and many other people working the gravel bars and banks
or the Fraser for a few specks of gold. Governor Douglas
initiate the building or a road system into the area and
in 1858 British Columbia became a Crown Colony.
By 1861 rumours about
gold discoveries, along the Williams River in the
interior of British territory along the Northern
Pacific, had begun to leak out to many of the minors
working the Fraser River and other area of the Pacific
Northwest. One of the prospectors who migrated towards
the area was Billy Barker. He had worked the California
fields and the Fraser river and come up relatively empty
handed. He travelled inland and on a small plot in
Stouts Gulch on the Williams River, he sank a mining
shaft straight down which was about 50 feet deep. He
struck a rich vein and started the gold rush.
Barker was to die poor but while mining
he pulled out over $500,000 worth of gold which was a
large fortune at that time. The word Gold once again
spread out across North America and the majority of
those who flooded into the area were Americans from the
U.S.. Barkerville quickly grew to 10,000 people, many of
who made a tidy living by catering and selling to the
miners. This
influx of Americans forced Governor Douglas in Victoria
to take the mainland colony under his protection and he
ordered the establishment of law and order through the
area by British troops and constables. In 1866 the two
colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia were
united to save costs and simplify administration with
Victoria being designated as the capital.
By 1868 the gold rush was beginning to
die down and a fire in that year destroyed most of the
city. The next day the people of the town began the
rebuilding process but many began to leave looking for
new sources of gold and a new area to explore.
Baskerville shrank and by the turn of the century only a
few hundred people claimed occupancy in Barkerville.
The Barkerville gold
rush was an important event in the consolidation of
British Columbia as a single Crown colony and then as a
province in Canada. |
