Fraser gold rush collection of ephemera up for auction
In January 1862 somebody in London wrote a letter to James Cooke in the Kootenays.
At the time, few people knew anything about B.C., a four-yearold colony in one of the most remote parts of the British Empire.
So they put all of their geographical knowledge into the address, which is long and detailed: “Fort Shepherd, near the mouth of the Pend Orielle River, in Vicinity of Colville Mines on Columbia River, British Columbia, North America.”
Cooke was the post manager at Fort Shepherd, a small Hudson’s Bay Company trading post just south of today ’s Trail. You’ve probably never heard of it, because it closed in 1870.
It’s hard to say if Cooke received the letter, but by March 1862 it made it to Port Townsend, Wash., where it was postmarked. Eventually it found its way into the collection of Gerald Wellburn, a legendary collector of B.C. stamps and ephemera.
Wellburn died in 1988, and most of his collection was auctioned off for $1 million. But his family held onto his Fraser gold rush collection, including the Cooke letter. Finally, the gold rush collection is being sold as well.
Wellburn put the collection into a 45-page booklet, which Brian Grant Duff of All Nations Stamp and Coin is selling one page at a time through his weekly online auction.
“The front piece might only bring $25, but certainly most things are going to bring $250 and up,” Grant Duff said before the first item was auctioned. “Some will bring thousands.”
In fact, the front piece sold for $700 Nov. 10, a sign that the auction has caught the imagination of collectors. Grant Duff has done well with some Wellburn items in the past. Two years ago he sold a letter by Gastown founder Gassy Jack Deighton for $44,000.
Flipping through the booklet is like taking a crash course in early B.C. history. Wellburn annotated the collection with historical notes that puts them in context. On the Cooke letter page, for example, he writes “gold was first discovered at Fort Colville on the Columbia River in 1855.”
“It’s almost like he was making it to exhibit, so you could show it somewhere, show the history,” Grant Duff said.
The Fort Colville discovery didn’t set off a gold rush. But when gold was discovered on the banks of the Fraser and Thompson rivers in 1858, an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 miners came to B.C. to try their luck.
Alarmed at the prospect of so many Americans flooding into New Caledonia, the mainland region controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the HBC’s James Douglas created the Crown colony of B.C. on Aug. 2, 1858. ( Vancouver Island was a separate colony until they were joined in 1866; Douglas was governor of both.)
There are many recognizable names in the collection, such as HBC official James Murray Yale, whose name inspired the town of Yale in the Fraser Canyon, and then Yaletown in Vancouver.
There are also a couple of letters to Col. Richard Moody, the commander of the Royal Engineers who were dispatched from Britain to survey the colony. Moody would become colonial B.C.’s lieutenantgovernor, and lend his name to Port Moody.
Douglas’ signature pops up in a land-sale document at Fort Hope in March 1861. An accompanying map shows that Peter O’Reilly, the judge and gold commissioner of the area, purchased half of today’s Hope for 34 pounds and 10 shillings.
But most of the material isn’t attached to famous names. Visually the most arresting piece is a “broadsheet” poster for a ship sailing for the B.C. goldfields in August 1858. The poster declared the “Fast- Sailing Barque Orestes” was the “pioneer line to the new gold regions” on “Vancouver’s Island.”
“The great discovery of gold on Frazer’s and Thompson Rivers rivals California in its palmist days,” it stated. “Miners are getting from 8 dollars to 100 dollars per day by surface washing.” It will be auctioned Dec. 1.
Another document details the untimely demise of a miner who was killed by bears near Port Douglas in 1859.
“We found the tracks of three bares (sic), also where they had twice attacked him,” it reads. “The tracks of one of them were covered with blood.”