Most published accounts, of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush deal largely
with events in the southern "pole" of the rush's activity in the
stretch from Hill's Bar and Yale to Boston Bar and, because of the
Canyon War of the winter of '58, as far north as Lytton..
Lillooet's role as the second, northerly "pole" of that gold rush is
largely forgotten, other than its role as the destination of the
Douglas Road and as the transsshipment point between freight services
on that route and the wagon road from there to Fort Alexandria, and to
some limited degree comments on the "first railway" at the Short
Portage and the horrors and multiethnic workforce on the road-secttions
of the Douglas-Lillooet route. Most accounts of this period shift
rapidly from the heady onslaught of miners and the depraved nature of
life in the boomtowns (particularly Yale and Port Douglas) to the
discovery of gold in the Cariboo and the epic construction of the
official Cariboo Wagon Road via Ashcroft, which rapidly superseded the
older route via Lillooet.
Part of the reason for this is because of the sensational nature of
events in Yale - namely the comic opera known as McGowan's War and,
just before that, the aforementioned Canyon War* - were covered (and
embellished) in detail by not only the Victoria papers but also by
those in California, and various government correspondence exists
concerning them as well as those "officials" who were involved (the
nefarious Mssrs. Whannell and Hicks as well as Col. Moody, Judge
Begbie, Gov. Douglas etc.). Events in what is now Lillooet, on
the other hand, were far removed by difficulties of distance and access
from the activities of the newspaper correspondents (even those who
actually bothered to go to Yale and Hill's Bar instead of just
fabricating material concerning them, as was often the case), and even
Port Douglas, the other main settlement on the mainland at the time,
barely exists in either media or official records. Even the later
importance of the many firms and individuals whose careers were
launched at Port Douglas, or on the Douglas Road (aka the Lillooet
Trail), has not done anything for the profile of either in published
histories of any kind (The best-researched and most thorough account
would seem to be in John Decker's book on Pemberton). Most of the
records of that area are entirely later reminisces from local families,
or brief comments jotted down by travelling journalists and officials
(including Begbie, Bushby and Douglas, but few others).
The hustle and bustle of the "metropolis" of the upper Fraser was
around the same size in population as the Yale-Hill's Bar area but,
unlike the southern end of the rush, were not party to the sensational
events focussed on Yale. This "metropolis" consisted of the
combined boomtowns of Cayoosh Flat, Parsonville, Marysville and Bridge
River and the Upper Fountains. Parsonville was apparently larger
than Cayoosh Flat,.at least briefly, but it was Cayoosh Flat which, in
early 1860, petitioned the governor to rename it Lillooet - by then
Parsonville had effectively vanished, along with nearby Marysville; the
sites of both are in today's East Lillooet, and are estimated to be
just north of the Bridge of the Twenty-Three Camels on the east bank of
the Fraser. Cayoosh Flat, or simply "Cayoosh", comprised that
stretch of today's Main Street from the Mile '0' Cairn northwards, the
famous Golden Mile, and its change of name was in response to many in
the community who found the name unpleasant - perhaps because of the
dominance of Americans in the town, many of whom had made their way to
the Canyon via the area of Washington Territory wracked only recently
by the Cayuse War. The Upper Fountain, which remained a junction
town for wagon trains and travellers for many years, is now the
locality of Fountain although there is nothing at the site of the old
corrals and hostelries (which were at the junction of Fountain Road and
Hwy 99).
At the site of the old "town" of Bridge River, where a toll bridge
connected Cayoosh Flat and the head of the Douglas Road to the trail to
Upper Fountain, there is now almost nothing; the old cabins on the
bench above are abandoned native residences from the 1910s. There
was also Fort Berens, just south of Parsonville, but that effort by the
HBC to open a mercantile outlet in the upper Fraser was abandoned even
before all its construction materials arrived, and was barely anything
more than a land survey and the associated land-stakes. Near to
the boomtowns were various populous "bars" - the working part of the
placer goldfields along the river, for whom the goldfields were for
buying supplies and finding some fun. The best known of these
were French Bar, apparently south of town near today's Jones Ranch
although that name applied for a certain time to the workings below
Upper Fountain, and also much farther upstream at what is now French
Bar Creek; one period account of the lay of the placer diggins held
that there were no appreciable sums of gold upriver from French Bar,
and this would appear to mean the one at Fountain, since the workings
at Mormon Bar, just upstream from the Bridge River on the west side of
the river, and on the river below Cayoosh Flat and adjacent to
Parsonville were known to be rich, and remained so in later
years. The name French Bar, in all cases, came from the presence
of the many French Canadians who worked the river in this area (farther
down the Fraser towards and around Yale there were many French from
Belgium and France, however).
According to Judge F.W. Howay's pamphlet promoting the Fraser
goldfields, the maximum number of miners working the entirety of the
Fraser Goldfields at their peak was around 10,500, with the major
concentrations at Yale and Cayoosh (Lillooet). This number
included up to 3,000 Chinese, with the majority of the rest supposedly
American but still with a heady mix of various Europeans and others,
including a smattering of West Indians, Hawaiians and Mexicans.
Actual Britons were so few on the ground that, when needing to convene
a jury for a murder trial in Lillooet, Judge Begbie could not proceed
as there "were not 12 British Subjects to be found" in the swarm of
miners and hangers-on. Tradition, apparently based on a
travelling diarist's description, puts the Gold Rush-era population of
Cayoosh (presumably including Parsonville et al) at 16,000, indicating
either that Howay's figures were grossly underestimated or that another
12,000 people or so were in the area doing something other than mining
- entrepreneurs, swindlers, gamblers, innkeepers, prostitutes, vendors
and merchants, teamsters and labourers etc.
Still, one account mentions that, in response to a comment about how
big the place was, one local quipped that "if you take away all the
Indians, there really isn't all that many", suggesting that the bulk of
this population may have been native; or that, with the usual seasonal
enlargement of the native population during fishing season, it was even
larger. Of these natives, many were not seasonal fishermen from
the Shuswap or Okanagan or other neighbouring Interior tribes, as was
typical and traditional at the fishing grounds; the prostitute
population did not involve Stl'atl'imx women, who would not
participate, but Carriers and Babines who were brought in - presumably
habitues of the fur trade posts in their area farther north..
Another interesting comment from the period is "it's extraordinary how
many French Canadians there are about", and also worth noting that
there were many French Canadians on-site when the first influx of
Americans and others came up the Fraser; these were probably overland
travellers from the Metis population of the prairies and the voyageurs and gens du pays of the country east
from that, or HBC employees gone AWOL from Fort Vancouver and other fur
trade posts elsewhere in the Northwest. This also suggests that
they may have been working the gold in the area in advance of the news of the gold
find reached San Francisco, touching off the rush; if that was the
case, their earnings went unreported to Victoria (as well as the
HBC). It's important to emphasize that there wasn't a gold agent
or other colonial official on the upper Fraser until the town's
chartering in 1860, so the actual extent of earnings in this area is
completely unknown; Howay's statement that the bars of the Upper Fraser
were not rich diggings are only based on reported earnings, and must be
held in doubt given the later returns from the area.
How long the population remained at the supposed peak of 16,000 is
really unknown, but it was reckoned to be the "permanent" bunch - those
who weren't planning on going any farther, at least not right
away. The total number of adventurers said to have poured through
the Douglas Road (the Lillooet Trail) during its heyday is in the range
of 20,000-25,000, but it is known that many of those turned back or,
upon reaching the upper Fraser, turned around and went straight home
again. A few slowly penetrated northwards into the Cariboo and
beyond, or east beyond the Shuswap to the Big Bend area of the
Columbia, laying the foundations for the gold rushes in those areas in
later years. It's also not clear if most of the area's
"permanent" population arrived via the Douglas Road or were among those
unknown numbers who came in overland from Oregon via the war-ridden
route from the settled part of Oregon up the Columbia and Okanagan and
either via Kamloops or overland via the Nicola area. In the case
of both these routes - the Columbia-Okanagan route and the Douglas Road
- it should be understood that these roundabout journeys were taken to
avoid not just the physical difficulties of the gorges of the lower
Fraser between Yale and Lytton, but the bitter and dangerous legacy of
the aftermath of the Fraser Canyon War.
In fact, it's pretty clear, as both Dan Marshall and Donald Hauka point
out, that the Douglas Road was built explicitly to allow access to the
Upper Fraser goldfields around
the territory of the Nlaka'pamux Indians (the Thompson, known in those
days as the Klackarpun, Couteau or "Knife" Indians) with whom the war
had been raged. The Stl'atl'imx took no part in that war, and
although bitterness remains over the location of the main part of the
town of Lillooet (i.e. the main strip of Cayoosh Flat) on top of the
principal village of the Upper Stl'atl'imx and there were occasional
incidents involving cattle and possessions, the Stl'at'imx were not a
warlike people and were usually friendly to the miners. There's
no mistaking that they made a specific point of not joining in the
Canyon War, and the chiefs proudly flew the white banners or flags
which marked them as "friendly Indians" - a huge banner of white cloth
waved for many years over the location of the Pavilion Rancherie, 20
miles upstream from Lillooet, where the Okanagan-Kamloops Trail met the
Fraser. Doubtless also is that the presence of so many outsiders
helped protect them from their traditional enemies, who had only a few
years before ravaged the settlements of their relations on the Lower
Lillooet River. Ostensibly the Douglas Road was built to prevent
starvation on the Upper Fraser; in reality it was a geopolitical
manoeuvre around the Thompsons, and it wasn't until the completion of
the Cariboo Wagon Road a few years later that the northward route from
Yale via Lytton and Ashcroft was considered safe for travel.
There are no photographs or engravings of Cayoosh or Parsonville in
those times; although some engravings of the Fountains made their way
into the London Illustrated News, and these have sometimes been
misattributed as being Parsonville. The earliest photograph of
Lillooet is from around 1861, and shows not a collection of buildings
but rather the neat lines of tents of the Royal Engineers survey party
which was responsible for laying out the town's original street grid in
the same era that they were resurveying and attempting improvements on
the Douglas Road (the original version of which was very shoddy and
largely considered a fiasco, financial and otherwise). The 1864
engravings and sketches show buildings where the RE tents had been, and
were no doubt laid out according to the property lines and street
boundaries as laid down by the RE's. What remained of Gold
Rush-era Cayoosh Flat there is no being sure of, although some of the
adobe buildings on the east side of town that formed the core of
Chinatown may date from before the Royal Engineers. And contrary
to popular history, the Royal Engineers did not build the suspension bridge at
the mouth of Lillooet Canyon, just north of town, which was not built
until 1912 - long after the RE's had left the province. And that
bridge was only the successor to an older truss-span bridge at the same
location, which in Gold Rush times had been the site of a
friction-cable barge known as Miller's Ferry, after an anglicization of
its German owner's name, John Mueller. In Gold Rush times there
were other ferries operating between Cayoosh and the Parsonville side
of the river - the tolls at the Bridge River crossing being infamously
exorbitant - but it was Miller's ferry that was the safest (and
shortest) and the only one reliable enough for wagons and horses.
Of permanent settlers from the Gold Rush era there are only a handful
of names known; more might be discovered if some earnest researcher
spends some time in the Bancroft Library in San Francisco, but other
than that the names are few and far between. Church records were
non-existent except for those of the Catholic Church, and few of the
Americans were Catholic or had any reason to attend mass or otherwise
enter church records; the first Christian marriage documented in
Lillooet was, in fact, between two Central Americans - interesting in
that the bride must have been among the few non-native women in town at
the time. One name that stands out prominently from this period
is Jonathan Scott, a Kentuckian who introduced tobacco-growing to the
area and did a tidy business making plugs of "chaw", which was much in
demand in the goldfields, being predominantly American as they
were. Another name is that of the father of one of Lillooet's
more famous sons, Frank Gott, whose father Captain Gott must have been
in Lillooet (er, Cayoosh and environs) in 1850, as Frank was estimated
to have been ten years of age at the time the town was named.
There are, however, no actual records concerning non-natives in the
area prior to the Gold Rush so the details of the story of Captain Gott
are unknown (including which army or navy he had been a captain in).
Most of the well-known families whose names and descendants can still
be found in the Lillooet area seem to have arrived in 1860 or just
after - the Joneses, Martleys, Carsons, L'Italiennes, Kanes and others
were also not town residents but ranchers and homesteaders along the
Fraser Canyon near town. At least some of the Chinese merchants
and ranchers who remained in the area for decades must have been
veterrans of the original Gold Rush era, and were so wealthy and
important by the time of the first provincial election in 1871 that,
despite the law that made it illegal for Chinese to vote, they were
duly entered on the rolls as electors and were actively lobbied by the
candidates for the legislature. These would have included Wo
Hing, who owned a restaurant and general store in town but also a hog
ranch in the area of Leon Creek 20 miles up the west side of the
Fraser, and Ah Key, whose wealth built the log flume from Fountain
Creek to the benchlands opposite town. This flume, which was
built for hydraulic mining of the benchlands, cost $60,000 (a small
fortune at the time, when you consider the conversion rate of c.40 to 1
on dollars of the time vs ours today) and wound up being used for some
of Jonathan Scott's tobacoo fields (his main crops were along Cayoosh
Creek, however, opposite the site of today's dormant lumber mill).
*Until recently, the only
decently-written account of both of these
strange (and, in the case of the Canyon War, very ugly) happenstances,
were to be found in the BC Chronicles of the Akriggs, and even then
without much interpretation or objective analysis. In the last
couple
of years two publications have come forward, one in the academic arena
and the other in the popular and historical press, which perhaps for
the first time deal honestly with the nature of the rush and with its
two defining episodes (the two "wars" mentioned, one an elaborate legal
poker game and the other a series of ugly massacres). These two
publications are, on the popular front, Donald J. Hauka's "McGowan's
War", which covers the details not just of those events but also
examines the Canyon War and the political climate in Victoria and
Governor Douglas' machinations in generating and dealing with the gold
rush; it is, in this writer's opinion, the first time in the popular
press that a straightforward account of the corruption of British
"officials" in the goldfields has been dealt with. On the
academic
front, a 2002 Ph.D thesis in Geography from UBC by Dan Marshall, Claiming the Land,
examines the tripartite nature of the social and cultural environments
of the goldfields (British, native, and the predominant "Californian")
and points up the lack of a proper apprecation of these events into the
fabric of Canadian "national" history because of the overwhelmingly
American tone not just of the events, but of the sources. Most of
those sources, as Marshall points out and may also be very true about
materials as yet undiscovered dealing with the Lillooet area, were
gathered up and shipped off to San Francisco by XX Bancroft, one of the
principal 19th Century BC historians, because their contents were
written by the Americans who dominated the goldfields and the early
colony and early province and the events in question were seen to be
part of the history of the American West
rather than the Canadian (as indeed they very much were!). But,
because the events are outside the current boundaries of the United
States, Americans largely ignore these events (even though many of the
inidividuals involved figure prominently in California civic politics
as well as in the Civil War) and, as Marshall points out, despite the
interconnectedness of the Fraser Gold Rush with events in Washington
Territory such as the Yakima and Cayuse Wars, the partition of the
Northwest has created a dual "blindspot" in the national histories of
both countries. Canadian history, of course, is mostly only
interested
in the West when dealing with Louis Riel or with the immigrant
experience on the Prairies, or on the various ethnic crises in BC of
later times, and given that the Fraser Gold Rush in particular has very
little in common with any
other episode in Canadian history, it is given short shrift - even
swept aside to some degree. For one thing, it puts a lie to the
notion
that there were no American-style Indian Wars in Canada, and also
points up the complete ineffectiveness of the early British regime in
the province, which barely survived the first winters of the gold rush;
as both Marshall and Hauka point out, the colony of BC survived not so
much because of the personalities of Begbie, Moody and Douglas but
because of the cooler heads among certain of the American players in
the game.
Typically both academic and popular histories obscure the darker edges
of these events and the nature of the goldfields and their political
and social mayhem and shift rapidly to the Cariboo Gold Rush and the
fashionable and highly touristic obsession with Barkerville.
Canadian
historians in particular seem so uncomfortable with the Fraser Canyon
Gold
Rush that some media histories dealing with BC have baldly declared
that
the Cariboo Gold Rush was responsible for the founding of the Crown
Colony of British Columbia (putting the cart before the horse, or the
mule rather, to say the least, by about 4 years). And part of the
reason for that is that, unlike the Fraser, the Cariboo goldfields were
populated by actual Canadians,
i.e. men from what is now Central Canada, while in the days of the
Fraser Gold Rush, Brits were few and far between and what Canadians at
the time of the colony's founding there were had come in from
California (e.g. Amor de Cosmos, a Nova Scotian who was decidedly
Californian in character and politics), and the same could be said of
many of the Brits (e.g. "Gassy" Jack Deighton, whose career in
connection with the goldfields was as a steamboat captain and bar-owner
and had gained those credentials in California).