The Cariboo & Fraser gold

British Columbia was made by gold. In 1858 news of a strike on the Thompson River near its meeting with the Fraser at Lytton reached San Francisco, after Governor James Douglas sent a shipment of ore to the mint there, and within a month some 30,000 men had poured into Victoria, a village of about 500. Around 4,000 of them were Chinese, and the rest came from nearly everywhere, Americans from California above all. It was a record for a mass movement of miners on the North American frontier. They worked the bars of the Fraser Canyon from Hope and Yale up past Lillooet, and by autumn many who had found the high water too much were calling the Fraser a humbug, but more kept coming. Alarmed at the influx, Britain founded the Colony of British Columbia that same year and sent Richard Clement Moody and the Royal Engineers to hold it.

It was not a peaceful rush. Tension between the miners and the Nlaka'pamux, the people of the canyon, broke into the Fraser Canyon War in the autumn of 1858, and the Christmas Eve beating of Isaac Dixon, a Black barber, by two men from Hill's Bar grew into McGowan's War, settled without force by Chief Justice Begbie with Royal Engineers and Marines.

By 1860 the Fraser's gravel bars were worked out, and the miners pushed north. Strikes on the Horsefly River, Keithley Creek and Antler Creek led to the Cariboo rush, which began in earnest in 1861 and was in full swing by 1865 after the finds on Williams Creek. Its crowd was largely British and Canadian, with some 4,000 Chinese. Towns sprang up at Quesnel Forks, Antler, Richfield and Quesnellemouthe, now Quesnel, but the greatest was Barkerville, on Williams Creek at the end of the road. To reach the goldfields and keep their wealth from slipping south, the Royal Engineers built the Cariboo Wagon Road, and its most important freight was the Gold Escort carrying bullion down to Yale. The cost of it all helped push the bankrupt mainland colony into union with Vancouver Island and then into Confederation. Barkerville, rebuilt after its great fire, is preserved today as a heritage town.

The gold is still there to find. In British Columbia you need no free miner certificate to hand pan, but only a pan and a hand shovel are allowed, with no sluice boxes, dredges or metal detectors. The province keeps recreational panning reserves, including one at the junction of the Quesnel and Fraser rivers and others at Hope, Yale and Lytton. Panning on a claim or private land needs the holder's permission, and it is forbidden in parks and on provincial heritage sites.