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For
one brief historical moment in 1858, the
most important spot in British Columbia
was a gravel bed in the Fraser River
about two kilometres south or Yale. It
was only 45 metres long when the river
was low (and invisible when the water
rose). It was called Hill's Bar. Around
it sprang a raucous improvised town of
the same name.
The spot's potential had been discovered
in early April by a small band of
amateur prospectors who were former San
Francisco firefighters. Soon a party of
first nations men and women appeared to
protest the intrusion. As a result, the
two races shared the bar, albeit so
uneasily that James (not yet Sir James)
Douglas, the governor, had to appoint a
justice of the peace to preserve order.
After only two months, the strange
spontaneous community of Hill's Bar was
home to about 400 people, all of whom
appeared to be making money. When
Douglas arrived he met the eponymous
Edward Hill who proudly showed him the
results of six hours' work that morning
"very nearly six ounces of clean float
gold, worth $100 in money, giving a
return of $50 a day for each man
employed" in retrieving it.
Like Hill, most miners on the Fraser
were Americans:25,000 of them over the
course of the year. They stood for the
collective desire to break free of
government authority, while Douglas, and
the administrators soon sent out from
England, represented the need to impose
order (far too much of it, in the
American view). The total of Americans
included not only the American-born but
also Britons and Europeans who had
become americanized in the California
rush of 1849.
In the summer of 1858 as the river began
to rise, large numbers of disaffected or
disillusioned miners were pulling out,
heading downriver towards their homes.
So there were only about 9,000 men left
working the bars when the water levels
began to drop at the end of the summer
and newcomers started arriving. They
built sluices - long wooden aqueducts
that directed water flow down riffled
troughs filled with gravel from the
river, letting hydraulic power do much
of the shoveling, so to speak. Sluices
that didn't draw on the energy of
quick-flowing streams were powered by
undercut waterwheels that acted as
pumps.
Being
so rich, Hill's Bar was the scene of
various unpleasant incidents and crimes,
most of which were usually laid at the
feet of American citizens. Gambling was
one factor in the atmosphere of
violence, especially as many and perhaps
most of the miners were armed with
Samuel Colt's "revolving pistols."
Even
the tax collector far down at Fort
Langley complained gunshots rang out
through the night. But a different level
of lawlessness could be traced to
professional criminals who viewed the
rush as an opportunity to fleece. Their
leader was Edward (Ned) McGowan
(1813-1893), a classic sociopath:
charming, bright, articulate,
persuasive, and immoral.
McGowan had arrived in the colony not
long before, following an astonishing
career on the other side of the border,
where he had once practiced law. At
another stage, he was the superintendent
of police in Philadelphia, but left the
position after being implicated in a
blank robbery.
Scandal and the promise of easy pickings
naturally took him to the California
gold rush. Such was the unsettled state
of public life in San Francisco that he
became a judge. While on the bench, he
was named as an accessory to murder. |
