Description

There are both yearly and larger patterns to the business cycle at the road houses. On the one hand it is important to understand that most of the miners did not spend the winter in the Cariboo. Therefore there is a twice per year influx of customers as they come and go from the gold fields. The level of this movement is a clear indication of just how active the gold fields are in any given year.

On a larger scale there are fluctuations in John Boyd's business because of external events especially when those events are other gold rushes. Both the Omineca and Yukon gold rushes pulled people away from the Cariboo, for example. Interestingly both those rushes were "good" for the town of Quesnel since by that point in time Quesnel was used as a staging area for those rushes (this is particularly true of the Ominica rush).

Using whatever events or patterns you want to investigate you can send students into the ledgers to discover the business volume and how it is affected by the various conditions. At the easiest level you can have students simply "count" customers on a monthly basis and provide a chart of that information over several years. At a more complex level you could have students calculate the total monetary value of each month's business and compare those figures over time.

Another alternative is to take a look and see if certain commodities were in demand (and therefore more subject to price changes) at certain times of the year or in certain years.

The point is that the ledgers can provide a learning tool for students to investigate how changing conditions are reflected in the business carried out at the road houses.