Beyond Hope. Beverley Boissery

aptly named Hell’s Gate or Great Canyon confronted miners heading up the river in search of rich motherlodes. Bishop Hills, searching for a different treasure, wrote that their progress “seemed like the crawling of a fly on the perpendicular wall” frequently “hanging between life and death.”

      Beyond Yale, the canyons of the river were heartbreakingly precarious, the rapids extremely dangerous, and the cliffs steep. Around the precipices wound ancient native paths. Sometimes, even such narrow trails were nonexistent. Many miners and their horses, cruelly loaded with huge, three-hundred-pound packs, perished in the jaws of the river while attempting to claw their way around these paths. The further up the canyon they progressed, the harder the maintenance of vital supplies became. But despite such perils to life and limb, many succeeded in their trek to the upper Fraser. Their stories lured others — those obsessed with dreams of richer strikes.

      Alexander Caulfield Anderson, explorer, surveyor, and chief factor of HBC Fort Colville, authored a Handbook and Map to the Gold Region — one of many guides written to aid miners in their quest for gold.

      Map showing the preferred route to the upper Fraser before the building of the Cariboo trail.

      As the volume of prospectors and the subsequent toll of lives multiplied, Governor Douglas realized something urgently needed to be done. He decided to bypass the Fraser Canyon and build a road over a track first explored by Alexander Caulfield Anderson of the HBC in 1846. Under Anderson’s supervision, five hundred miners during a five-month period in 1858 carved a mule trail four feet wide along the portages of the Harrison-Lillooet route.

      Astoundingly, labourers from every corner of the globe volunteered to help perform this amazing feat, and in return the government paid for their transportation (which took them partway to the goldfields), equipment, and food. Many praised this first road into the interior of British Columbia as a historical and prodigious achievement, although some experienced HBC men scoffed at its engineering. The road’s construction, imperfect as it was, radically reduced the cost of the trip to the upper Fraser both in dollars and, more importantly, lives.

      Lytton. The small settlement of Lytton had little to commend itself to visitors. Lieutenant Mayne described it as consisting of “an irregular row of some dozen wooden huts, a drinking saloon, an express office, a large court-house — as yet unfinished — and two little buildings near the river.” Mayne and his companions were “pleased to leave the dust and wind of Lytton.” Bishop Hills, uncharacteristically, seemed to have forgotten to pack his rose-coloured glasses: “We left Lytton without regret. It is a cold, windy, unsheltered flat and the people more alien than any place I have ever been.”

      By the end of 1859, the centre of mining had shifted from Hope and Yale to the areas around Lytton and Lillooet. Other places, such as Port Douglas on the shores of Harrison Lake, became busy centres of activity as they provisioned the almost constant stream of men on their way to the goldfields. As most prospectors abandoned the lower Fraser’s bars, Chinese miners, who had abandoned California where hostile legislation made their lives difficult, moved in. With a patience not shown by other miners, they toiled for smaller returns until the diggings ran dry.

      Unlike Lytton, Lillooet received high praise from Mayne: “Lillooet is a very pretty site, on the whole decidedly the best I saw on the Fraser River.” It has “now grown into a somewhat important town, situated as it is, at the north end of the Harrison-Lillooet route, at its junction with the Fraser.”

      Fort Douglas, established after the building of the Douglas road, was not a favoured stop for travellers. George Blair described it as “a nasty, dirty little place with ten or twelve houses or hovels, chiefly gambling-holes.” Bishop Hills, as usual, had a different view to most. Overwhelmed by the magnificence of Harrison Lake, he wrote about “the harbour of Douglas with the town at its extremity . . . [which] consisted . . . of a few wooden buildings with an excellent quay.”

      First Nations village. “This . . . village . . . inhabited by 200 or 300 people [who] . . . like all those to be met with on this route, are peaceable, intelligent, and industrious, often rendering great assistance to the traveller by carrying his baggage over land portages.”

      Victorian goldfield miner’s licence.

      British Columbia licence.

       LEARNING FROM PAST MISTAKES

      In the 1850s the Colonial Office, which supervised all British colonies, proved itself the rarest of all institutions when it became capable of learning. No better example can be given than the way it guided Governor James Douglas’s actions in the first phases of the gold rush.

      The Australian goldfields had taught Britain some bitter lessons. Douglas applied four to British Columbia. He proclaimed Crown ownership of minerals, required ownership of licences for miners, and created gold commissioners. Furthermore, an experience called the Eureka Stockade had to be avoided at all costs. In Ballarat, Victoria, previously law-abiding British subjects had united with perceived Irish and American troublemakers to riot against the gold commissioners’ harsh enforcement of their regulations in 1854. Other problems contributed to the unrest as well, such as weak governance, police desertion, and demands for political change.

      A close comparison of the regulations printed on mining licences from 1853 Victoria and those issued for mining in “the Couteau and Fraser’s River District” of 1858 confirms London’s determination not to repeat the Ballarat problems. Although much of the wording remained the same — for example, that Sunday was to be observed as a day of rest — there were significant differences. Licences were non-transferable in British Columbia and the size of claims increased dramatically. Victorian regulations limited a group of four miners to 576 square feet. That size was more than doubled to 1,600 square feet in British Columbia.

      The Gold Fields Act of 1859 was another example of building on colonial experience. Chief Justice Matthew Begbie claimed to have based it “on the model of the New Zealand mining laws: with some modifications.” Governor Douglas, however, told Sir Henry Barkley, his counterpart in Victoria, that the act had “been framed on the experience of the Australian Colonies, and principally on that of Victoria.” There would be no repeat of the Eureka Stockade. American miner James Bell was just one who commented on “the simplicity, promptness, and honesty with which government business was managed” in British Columbia.

      Douglas and Begbie deserve high praise for the prompt establishment of law and order. Not only were the laws effective, but Begbie himself made stop after stop on his circuit through the colony to meet with miners and explain their rights and changes in the laws. By taking such steps, he ensured that lawlessness was kept to a minimum.