Bustling ghost town is full of life
Historic Barkerville keeps 1860s gold rush alive with actors and displays
It was 1862. The United States was embroiled in a bitter civil war, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery, and Canada was not yet a country, but a British colony essentially run by the Hudson’s Bay Co.
The rich California gold fields had dried up and gold was getting scarce on the sandbars of the Fraser when William (Dutch Bill) Dietz found gold in 1861 in the Cariboo region in the interior of what is now British Columbia. News of Dietz’s find made its way to the ears of Billy Barker, a no-luck prospector who’d arrived from England with big dreams that had so far failed him.
Barker formed his own company and started looking for gold in Williams Creek in 1862 and struck it rich in August. Within a couple of years, Barkerville in the B.C. Interior was the largest city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco.
“It created British Columbia,” says James Douglas, a spokesman for the historic town of Barkerville, which thrives today as a tourist stop with 65,000 visitors a year. This August will mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Cariboo Gold Rush, and Barkerville is celebrating in style, culminating with the Canadian Goldpanning Championships and a two-day celebration Aug. 11 and 12.
While most of the gold towns of the 1860s have long since faded from the map, the namesake of Billy Barker thrives as a tourist attraction that offers visitors a taste of the Wild West that the B.C. Interior was once.
At the beginning of 1858, when gold was found farther downstream in the Fraser River, there were 400 people living in Victoria. By the end of the year, there were thousands, says Douglas.
And that was nothing compared to the influx after Barker struck it rich in 1862.
“It was what prompted the creation of a colonial government because up until that point it was just Hudson’s Bay Co. territory,” Douglas says. “It was the amount of gold that was coming out of this area that really made Britain decide that B.C. was something they wanted to keep.”
At its peak, Barkerville boasted 8,000 residents and a fair number of saloons, dance halls and businesses of ill repute. By the thousands, gold seekers made their way to the Cariboo gold fields west of Quesnel.
Dreams were dashed and bodies broken along the rugged trail leading inland in 1860s British Columbia. The well-groomed modern highway bears no resemblance to the old path, but the heart-stoppings - curves and the towering cliffs of the Fraser Canyon even today offer a glimpse of the rugged journey faced by pioneers. It took an army of engineers three years to blast, plow and pickaxe the route north to Barkerville.
Barkerville today is a bustling ghost town and historic site that brings the 1860s to life with period actors who wander the town by day. There are trials by the notorious Hanging Judge Begbie, a lesson in 1860s schooling and a hurdy gurdy theatre production.
The town boasts one of the largest collections of Chinese migrant archives and historica in Canada, and recreates the bustling Chinatown of 1860s Barkerville, where more than 50 per cent of the population at times was of Chinese heritage.