Billy Barker & the Cariboo Rush — 1862, British Columbia

In August 1862, on a stretch of Williams Creek that more experienced men had written off, an English-born ex-sailor named Billy Barker and his small company of shareholders kept sinking their shaft after others quit. At around fifty feet down — below the canyon where conventional wisdom said the gold would stop — they hit pay dirt so rich it became the stuff of legend. The strike turned a played-out gully into the heart of the Cariboo Gold Rush and built the boomtown that bears his name: Barkerville.

For a season or two Barkerville was one of the largest settlements on the Pacific slope north of San Francisco and west of the older cities of the east, a clamorous string of stores, saloons, and miners’ cabins clinging to the mud of the creek. Billy Barker became, briefly, a rich man, his claim reckoned among the great producers of the Cariboo. As so often in these stories, the gold ran out faster than the money habits it created.

Barker spent freely, married, drifted, and prospected on without ever striking it big again. By the end of his life the man whose name graced a famous town was broke, working as a camp cook, his jaw eaten away by cancer. He died in 1894 in a charitable old men’s home in Victoria and was buried in a grave that for many years went unmarked — the founder of Barkerville buried as a pauper hundreds of miles from the creek that made him.

The Cariboo rush played out on the lands of the Dakelh (Carrier) and neighbouring Secwepemc and Tsilhqot’in peoples, who had travelled, traded, and lived in this interior country long before any shaft was sunk. The roads, towns, and diggings of the rush were imposed on their territory without treaty or consent, bringing disease, disruption, and dispossession even as they made fortunes for newcomers. Barkerville is preserved today as a restored heritage town; the deeper history of whose land it stands on is only more recently being told.