Billy Barker & the Cariboo Rush — 1862, British Columbia

Summary

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.

The Rush

William "Billy" Barker was born in England around 1817, by most accounts in Cambridgeshire, and went to sea young, working as a waterman and sailor. Like thousands of others he was drawn westward by gold — first, by tradition, to the California fields, and then north to the new British colony on the Fraser. When the Fraser River rush of 1858 pushed prospectors deeper into the interior of what would become British Columbia, the search led up into the rugged, cold, heavily forested Cariboo country, where men found that the richest gold lay not in the surface gravels but buried deep beneath the creek beds.

By the early 1860s Williams Creek had already made and broken reputations. Strikes upstream had drawn a crowd, but below a rocky narrows known as the canyon the creek was widely believed to be barren — the gold, miners reasoned, would not have carried past the obstruction. Barker organised a company of shareholders, in the usual Cariboo fashion of pooling labour and dividing the take, and staked ground below the canyon that cannier diggers had passed over. It was a gamble on a hunch against the conventional wisdom of the whole creek.

The work was brutal. Cariboo mining meant timbering a shaft straight down through waterlogged, freezing ground, hauling out muck by hand and bucket, fighting the constant inflow of water with pumps and wheels, all in a remote camp where every nail and sack of flour had been packed in over hundreds of miles of mountain trail. Barker's company dug on as their money and their neighbours' patience ran low. Then, on August 17, 1862, at a depth of fifty-two feet, they broke into gravel laced with gold — within about forty-eight hours pulling out some sixty ounces, and ultimately, over the life of the claim, on the order of 37,500 ounces of gold.

The Diggings

The Barker claim proved one of the great strikes of the Cariboo. Reports of the riches drew a stampede to the lower creek, and a ragged town threw itself up almost overnight along the gully beside the diggings. It took Barker's name: Barkerville. Within a short time it was a crowded, lively boomtown of stores, hotels, saloons, a theatre, and the cabins of hundreds of miners and the people who fed, supplied, and entertained them — for a moment the largest centre of population in the British colonies on the Pacific coast north of the established American cities, a claim repeated ever since with varying degrees of accuracy but real pride.

What made the Cariboo possible was the road. Governor James Douglas, determined to keep the rush British and to bring order to the goldfields, drove the building of the Cariboo Wagon Road, an extraordinary feat of engineering carried hundreds of miles up the Fraser canyon and into the interior, much of it surveyed and begun by the Royal Engineers. The road turned a deadly pack trail into a route for freight wagons and stagecoaches, allowing the deep, capital-hungry mining of the Cariboo to keep going and the towns to be supplied. It also bound the new colony together and helped fix the shape of British Columbia.

Barkerville's population was strikingly mixed. Alongside British, American, and European miners worked a large community of Chinese miners and merchants, who reworked ground others abandoned and built their own stores, associations, and a lasting presence in the town. The diggings were also worked, supplied, and travelled through Dakelh and Secwepemc country, and Indigenous people packed goods, guided newcomers, and traded on the fields — even as the rush brought epidemic disease, particularly the smallpox that swept the interior in 1862, and the steady alienation of their lands. Billy Barker, meanwhile, took a fortune out of his claim, and in January 1863 married a widow, Elizabeth Collyer, who had recently arrived from England, and for a while lived the life of a successful Cariboo man.

The Reckoning

The gold did not last, and neither did the fortune. Like so many who struck it rich in the gullies, Barker had the knack for finding gold and none at all for keeping money. He spent freely in the open-handed style of the camps — his reputed generosity is itself blamed for his ruin — invested in further claims that did not pay, and gradually saw his wealth drain away. His wife Elizabeth died on May 21, 1865, only two years into the marriage, and Barker drifted on alone, prospecting from creek to creek as the Cariboo's best ground was worked out and the crowds thinned. The man whose name was on the town never made another strike to match the first.

Barkerville itself burned almost to the ground in a great fire in September 1868, then was rebuilt — but the boom was already fading as the easy and even the deep gold gave out. The crowds moved on to newer fields elsewhere, and the town shrank into a quiet relic of its loud beginnings. Billy Barker spent his last years poor, working at the humblest jobs the fields still offered, including cooking for mining crews, an old man with a famous name and an empty purse.

He died on July 11, 1894, in Victoria, British Columbia, in a charitable home for the aged and indigent, his final years marked by failing health variously described as Parkinson's disease and cancer of the jaw. He was buried in Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, and his grave went unmarked for many years before later admirers placed a stone. The arc of his life is the oldest one in the gold country: the discoverer who opened a fabulous field, gave his name to a town, took out a fortune, and died a pauper in a charity ward far from the creek that had briefly made him a legend.

What Decided It

What Became of Them

Billy Barker died broke in 1894, but the name he left behind outlasted nearly everyone who got rich in the Cariboo. Barkerville, abandoned to slow decay after the boom, was rescued in the twentieth century: the British Columbia government acquired the site in the 1950s and restored it as a historic town, and today Barkerville Historic Town and Park is one of the largest living-history attractions in western North America, its plank streets and false-fronted buildings drawing visitors to walk where the diggers walked. Barker's own much-restored claim and the story of his strike are part of the telling.

Elizabeth Collyer, the widow Barker married, had died young in 1865, and he ended his life without family at his side in the Victoria home. His unmarked Ross Bay grave was eventually given a headstone by people who thought the founder of a famous town deserved more than anonymity, a small late correction to the indignity of his pauper's burial.

The Cariboo rush remade the interior of British Columbia, but it did so on Dakelh, Secwepemc, and Tsilhqot'in lands taken without treaty, and at terrible cost to their peoples — above all the smallpox epidemic of 1862 that killed a devastating share of the Indigenous population of the colony in the very year of Barker's strike. The Chinese miners who worked alongside and after the Europeans, too, built a community whose contribution was long underweighted in the legend. Barkerville's preserved streets tell the boomtown's story; the fuller history of the land and the people the rush displaced is, slowly, being added to the record.

Lessons

References

• Billy Barker (prospector) Wikipedia
• Cariboo Gold Rush The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Barkerville Historic Town & Park Barkerville Historic Town
• Cariboo Gold Rush Wikipedia