When the paddle wheeler Commodore arrived at Fort Victoria from San Francisco on April 25, 1858, the 450 passengers on board more than doubled the size of the town that had no hotels or other public buildings to accommodate them. This did not really matter, however, as those arriving were eager to seek their fortune up British Columbia’s Fraser River in the biggest gold strike since the California Gold Rush of 1849.

In the next three months an estimated 27,000 gold seekers sailed from San Francisco to Victoria. Another 8,000 travelled overland through the Oregon Territory to seek their fortune. Their first main stop was at the confluence of the Thompson and Fraser rivers. Then, in the 1860s, it was on to the Cariboo district until the dramatic discovery of gold in the Klondike brought worldwide fame to the Yukon in 1898....
 

1. Barkerville grew up around the 50-foot shaft sunk by William Barker whose gold discovery along Williams Creek in 1862 yielded some $600,000 by 1866. The northern terminus of the Cariboo Road, Barkerville was inhabited by 10,000 stampeders by 1863. So much gold was being discovered in the region that some miners hired agents with guns, as this 1865 Barkerville photo demonstrates, to assure safe delivery of gold nuggets to Victoria. [Photo, courtesy National Archives of Canada/C-088917]  2.  Although British Columbia’s Cariboo district was mined into the 20th century, the spectacular discoveries were made in the early 1860s. Claims even then were feverishly reworked, redug, and rediscovered. This Grouse Creek sluicer from near Barkerville was still pocketing gold when Frank McLennan photographed him in 1867. [Photo, courtesy National Archives of Canada/C-021575]

Although reports vary, consensus is that the Fraser discovery was actually made in 1856. Donald McLean, the chief trader of the Hudson Bay Company in Kamloops, reported to James Douglas, the chief factor and acting governor of Vancouver Island, that Indians had brought him gold from the Fraser area. On receiving the letter in February 1857, Douglas asked McLean to “collect a large party of Indians,” and proceed to the gold district, and “make them search and wash for the precious metal....”

Another letter from Douglas that November suggested that McLean send the gold to Fort Langley, near the mouth of the Fraser River, by February 1858, so that it could be sent the next month to England. A California newspaper on April 11, 1858, confirmed this when it reported that “The Princess Royal, a vessel belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company, sailed on the 29th ult. for England with 1,000 ounces of gold dust from the Thompson River Mines.”

Nine days after that story appeared, the Commodore sailed from San Francisco for Victoria, where the prospectors, on realizing they still needed to reach the mainland, did not wait for steamers but built their own small boats, sailed across the Strait of Georgia and up the Fraser River during the low water season to Fort Yale. Even before reaching this isolated outpost, some began panning up to five ounces of gold a day while others moved up river hoping to find the mother lode.

Among the more experienced miners was Peter Dunlevy of Pittsburg who, in May 1858, befriended Tomaah, the son of an Indian chief. Tomaah told Dunlevy and his four companions he could show them a river “where gold lay like beans in a pan.” By the end of the month, these five were panning gold in Little Horsefly Creek, just 12 hours before a second party arrived. The two groups joined forces and started the Cariboo Gold Rush that drew thousands of prospectors over the next decade to numerous creek beds containing gold.

Keithley Creek, discovered in 1860 by veteran prospector Ben McDonald, was named for William Keithley, one of the original party of four. Before the year was out they made a second strike on Antler Creek. After staking their claims, William Keithley and a partner returned to get supplies at a camp that had sprung up at their initial strike. Their attempt to avoid alerting others came to nought when they discovered, on leaving after dark, that “hordes of men were packed and snow-shoed up, ready to follow the pair wherever they had come from.” So wrote Donald Waite in The Cariboo Gold Rush Story (1988).

Other discoveries in 1861 at Williams, Lightning, and Lowhee creeks (250 pounds of gold nuggets were picked up in five weeks at the latter) prompted gold seekers, road contractors, traders, pack train operators, con artists, card sharks and prostitutes the world over, to leave their homes for British Columbia’s interior. In 1862, Governor Douglas, who had earlier persuaded the miners themselves to build a four-foot-wide mule trail to the Fraser strike, commissioned an 18-foot-wide wagon road from Yale to the Cariboo, some 400 miles long. By awarding contracts to a number of road builders that included The British Army Royal Engineers, Douglas reinforced that the territory was British.

Not all, however, reached the Cariboo that way. A party of roughly 200 left Toronto by train in May 1862, bound for St. Paul, Minnesota, then by ox cart or ship to Winnipeg, and by ox cart to the Rockies. Although a good trail to the gold fields existed, there were no good trails from the foothills of the Rockies and beyond. This caused incredible hardships and death before groups straggled into Fort George and Fort Kamloops in mid-September. Another party of 26 from the coal mines of Wales who sailed around Cape Horn to sink shafts at Lightning Creek in the summer of 1863 suffered from scurvy instead of reaping gold.

An enterprising American bought 23 camels from the U.S. Army (they could carry twice the load of a mule) and shipped them to the Cariboo. Their soft hooves were not suitable for sharp rocks, however, and many went lame. They were outfitted with rawhide boots which worked, but the peculiar camel smell stampeded other horse and mule trains. As a result of law suits, the camels were turned loose, and so ended the “Dromedary Express.”

Even though many of both groups squandered their fortunes one way or another, some who went to the Cariboo made fortunes as gold strikers, or as traders. Isaiah Diller, who struck gold on Williams Creek, vowed he would not leave until he had mined his 240-pound weight. Stories claim he left with more than his weight, returned to his mother’s New York farm the day it was being auctioned, bought everything put up for sale, and returned it to his mother.
 

1.  Getting supplies to the Cariboo district was a problem. Oxen-drawn wagons and mules were the main source of transportation. Of all the contrived methods for transporting freight, the most bizarre was by camel. The odour, personality, and soft hooves of the dromedaries proved, however, to be their shortcomings. By 1864 the Dromedary Brigade of 23 was disbanded. [Photo, courtesy British Columbia Archives and Record Services/A-347]  2.  Men without smiles stop for respite on their way through the Chilkoot Pass. Survival, not gold, must have been foremost on their minds during the severe winter of 1897-98. [Photo, courtesy National Archives of Canada/C-16460]

Another successful miner, German-born Edward Stout, was wounded by hostile Indians before discovering Stout Gulch on Williams Creek. He married and settled in Washington State where he died just shy of being 100 in 1924. Henry Beatty of Toronto returned home and invested his find in a shipbuilding venture that made him a millionaire. Bob Stevenson, who arrived with his father as a lad from Glengarry County, Ontario, and who stayed after his dad went home, became a shrewd trader and eventually a mine owner. One of the people he helped was another Glengarry native, John A. Cameron, who made and lost a fortune but is chiefly remembered as the man whose wife died and who, to keep a promise, had her body dug up twice before reinterment in Glengarry. Her remains were dug up a third time when a U.S. newspaper raised the suspicion that Cameron had hidden gold in her coffin. The newspaper was wrong.

Billy Barker, who left England and wife and daughter for the California Gold Rush, struck it rich in the Cariboo and married another English girl at Victoria in 1863. They returned to Barkerville, the town named after him, which became the largest community west of Winnipeg – a title that would be relinquished to Dawson City during the Klondike strike some 35 years later. As in Dawson, hurdy-gurdy girls were transported from California to dance with the miners at one dollar a fling.

An Anglican minister in Lillooet arranged to have English girls brought out to marry the miners, but some wed in Victoria and some who reached the Cariboo turned to prostitution. They were a tough lot according to the Victoria Colonist. “They dress in male attire and swagger through the saloons and mining camps with cigars and huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing, and looking anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended they should be.”

The Cariboo was mined well into the twentieth century, long after the last and greatest gold rush of the period – the Klondike – was but a memory. As early as 1873 some prospectors were searching for gold in the Yukon. It took another 23 years, however, before there was a bonanza discovery. Two men are given credit for the strike: Robert Henderson, a native of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and George Carmack, the son of a Fortyniner.

Carmack, in the Yukon more as a trader than prospector, was married to an Indian and had two close friends, both native: “Skookum” Jim and “Tagish” Charlie. Henderson met and urged Carmack in 1896 to test the Rabbit Creek gravel bed near present-day Dawson City, cautioning the California-born Carmack never to disclose his findings to anyone, especially his Indian friends. He didn’t want Indians registering any gold claims! On August 16, 1896, Carmack discovered one of the world’s richest gold beds at what later would be called Bonanza Creek. He not only disregarded Henderson’s caution but happily shared his findings with anyone he met on his way to register his claims.

Within weeks prospectors from all over the territory converged near present-day Dawson City. News of the strike did not reach the outside world until 11 months later when two steamers arrived at Seattle and San Francisco in mid-July 1897 with tons of gold and a number of celebrating prospectors. This signalled a stampede “heard round the world.”

Lured by both the thought of becoming rich and the adventure of finding gold in the depressed economy of the period, thousands from around the world stormed north to the Klondike. Some became rich, but thousands suffered incredible hardship and death in their quest for the elusive mineral that could be found in abundance in one spot and nowhere in the muck of shafts dug only a few feet away.

A dozen routes to the discovery were possible. The easiest but costliest was by sea from San Francisco, Seattle, or Victoria to St. Michael, Alaska, on the Bering Sea, where steamboats could travel 1,700 miles up the Yukon River to Dawson City. The winter freeze-up, however, stranded all but 43 of the 1,800 people who travelled that route in the summer of 1897, and it was July 1898 before those who persevered reached Dawson.
 

1.  At the top of the Chilkoot, the Canadian Customhouse and the North West Mounted Police rigidly controlled border crossings and kept law and order. [Photo, courtesy National Archives of Canada/C-1277]  2.  In the land of the midnight sun, one could “rock for gold” all day long and easily lose track of time. There was so much gold at Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River, that it was difficult for a “rocker” to stop looking for gold for fear someone else might discover what he neglected to find. [Photo, courtesy National Archives of Canada/PA-16223]

Another 3,500 took the all-American route from Valdez, Alaska, to avoid Canadian customs, but many could not cross the 20-mile-wide glacier they encountered beyond that port city. Only a few reached the Klondike taking this route. Two other all-American routes proved equal failures. Two Canadian routes, one through British Columbia and another from Edmonton, were equally devastating. Frostbite that caused gangrene, snowblindness, scurvy, starvation, even suicide were the result. There was no easy access to the gold fields!

Most of those who eventually made it did so through two passes, the White and Chilkoot. The White, a 45-mile narrow, winding route of gumbo, boulders, crevices, rivers, and hills, became the burial ground for more than 3,000 overworked, ill-treated, and ill-fed pack horses driven by some 5,000 people attempting the route. “The horses died like mosquitoes in the first frost and from Skagway to Bennett, they rotted in heaps,” wrote novelist Jack London.

Many who reached Skagway, at the head of Alaska’s Lynn Canal, became victims of another kind – victims of the Soapy Smith gang that cheated, robbed, and even murdered at will, since Smith controlled the town, which NWMP Superintendent Samuel B. Steele described in his memoirs as “little better than a hell on earth.”

On the Chilkoot Pass, people themselves became the beasts of burden as animals couldn’t make the final four-mile climb from Sheep Camp to the summit. Everything had to be carried, and everything meant at least a year’s supply of goods, a rule rigidly enforced by Steele and his North West Mounted Police stationed at the summits of both the White and Chilkoot passes. For those who couldn’t afford to pay Indian packers to carry their supplies, it meant making 30 to 40 trips to the summit and beyond to Lake Bennett. Those who made it then worked feverishly building boats of every description to take them the remaining 500 miles to the gold fields.

Spring breakup occurred in late May and “the whole freakish flotilla of 7,124 boats loaded with thirty million pounds of solid food was in motion,” wrote Berton in his 1957 bestseller, Klondike. On reaching Miles Canyon, however, 150 boats were destroyed and five people drowned in the first few days when they attempted the five-mile run of the Squaw and White Horse Rapids.

A handful of Mounties with Steele in command arrived. As he did in connection with the supplies required, Steele dictated rules. A corporal with riverboat experience was put in command to assess the suitability of each boat, provide experienced men to sail them when necessary, and ordered women and children to walk beyond the rapids five miles distant. A penalty of $100 was also imposed for anyone breaking these orders, and while some resented his dictum, few boats or lives were lost among the estimated 30,000 people who traversed the route that same summer.

As a result of this influx, Dawson became a city overnight. Unlike Skagway, there was little crime, even though the city was wide open six days a week, 24 hours a day. Only at Saturday midnight did the saloons and dance halls close until 2 a.m. Monday, another regulation imposed by Steele who turned a blind eye to prostitution and drinking but banned guns and imposed stiff penalties on card sharks and con men of any kind. Sentences for breaking the rules imposed by the NWMP were steep, the most severe being a sentence to the woodpile – which could mean months of hard labour sawing wood to heat the government buildings in Dawson.

Dawson remained the biggest city west of Winnipeg until the discovery of gold in Nome, Alaska, in mid-summer 1899. Within a week, 8,000 miners left and the Klondike rush was over. Gold continued to be mined by a few major companies with sophisticated equipment for another half century but Dawson’s main interest and industry became tourism when Parks Canada rebuilt a number of the old buildings. To this day thousands visit the historic site each summer. Of course, in 1998 Dawson will experience still another stampede – people wanting to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the most famous gold discovery of all time....

The Cariboo and Klondike gold stampedes of the nineteenth century gave impetus to vast and rich mineral discoveries in Canada throughout the twentieth century. Such eurekas have continued to make Canada the centre for global mineral exploration and have ensured Canada’s position as the mining capital of the world.

Mel James