1860s Daybooks
Discussion
John Boyd was a trained bookkeeper and an educated man. Brought up in a reasonably wealthy home in Ireland he had a good education for the time and his sense of adventure first took him to the California gold rush. Once in the Cariboo, though he always had some interests and activity in mining, he clearly recognized that the best road to prosperity lay in supplying the miners. Whether or not he had farming experience is unclear but by the time Cottonwood house was purchased in the 1870s it was the center of a bustling farm that produced many of the supplies that the roadhouse and the entire Barkerville area required.
In the yearly samples you will find two pages taken from one of the daybooks. These pages are representative the range of supplies that Coldspring House provided and the surprising amount of business. The sample is presented in a slightly larger than normal table format (as this was the easiest method of converting the digitized version), so you will have to scroll to see the entire page.
The Ledger database provides a search screen "front end" that allows you to perform any number of searches of the database. Teachers can find both lesson plans and explanations in the Learner's Corner.
