Читать книгу Beyond Hope - Beverley Boissery - Страница 7

In the mid-nineteenth century one single word had the power to pull men from homes and families: gold. After John Marshall found nuggets in a Californian stream in 1848, tens of thousands crossed continents and oceans in the scramble for wealth. A few years later Edward Hargraves’s discovery of gold near Bathurst prompted a similar rush to the Australian colonies of New South Wales and Victoria.

Stories of lawlessness in the Californian and Australian goldfields became legion. Men shot each other after hearing rumours of a new find and murdered many miners as they tried to convey their gold to safety. Shantytowns sprang up throughout the goldfields and far too many miners lost their earnings through gambling, prostitution, and drinking. Both gold rushes saw extraordinary movements of peoples and produced breathtaking stories of incredible fortunes made overnight.

A London Punch cartoon satirizing the Australian goldfields.

However, by the mid-1850s these goldfields had begun to run dry. Miners abandoned the shantytowns and new prospectors stopped arriving. Merchants who had envisaged making their fortunes through provisioning them went bankrupt, and scores of rotting ships littered the San Francisco Harbor. Thousands with nothing to offer but their experience in the mining of gold drifted from place to place, some in despair, but almost all hungry for the hint of a new chase, as the rush for gold was called.

Deserted ships in San Francisco Harbor, late 1850s.

It can be no wonder, then, that when the first stories of gold surfaced in today’s British Columbia, the government took great care to keep them secret. As early as August 1850 the governor of Vancouver Island, Richard Blanshard, reported to the colonial secretary in London that he had seen “a very rich specimen of gold ore” from the Queen Charlotte Islands, and the Hudson’s Bay Company sent expeditions to investigate. The company provided supplies such as explosives and mining tools for one in 1851, and forty men agreed to work for just their share of the profits. The leader of this expedition claimed British possession of the islands and drove away a party of Americans who had heard rumours of another potential goldfield.

First Nations people from the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Haida regularly traded with the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Queen Charlotte gold differed from that discovered by Marshall and Hargraves. Miners called it a “blowout” because it had to be chipped or blasted from rich veins in rocks. When the Hudson’s Bay men chose the latter method, they found the Haida people averse to seeing their gold being taken away so summarily. The HBC Una’s logbook records that the Haida concealed themselves in bushes “until the report was heard and then made a rush for the gold. A regular scramble between them and our men would take place: the Indians would take our men by their legs and hold them away from the gold.” This particular 1851 venture took a tremendous loss, costing the company £950 and gaining a mere £90 worth of gold. With such a return, the Hudson’s Bay Company soon abandoned Queen Charlotte mining.

But other reports of gold trickled in from the mainland. Native people gave gold dust to the chief trader of Fort Kamloops, Donald McLean, in 1852, and four years later he reported that he had accumulated two bottles half full of Thompson River gold. Samples reached Victoria and in about 1857, “Governor [James] Douglas at the mess table shewed us a few grains of scale gold . . . This was the first gold I saw and probably the first that arrived here.” According to the writer, Dr. John Helmcken: “The Governor attached great importance to it and thought that it meant change and a busy time . . . [with] Victoria rising to a great city.” However, most residents reacted with skepticism and less excitement, thinking the governor was promoting “a sort of advertisement for ‘town lots’.”

They would be shaken from such complacency very rapidly after the Hudson’s Bay Company sent eight hundred ounces of gold to San Francisco for assaying a year later and whispers of northern gold turned into the shout of “Gold on the Frazer.” Miners dreamed again of fortunes. Men everywhere clamoured for information about this new goldfield. This confluence of events produced the flood of people that deluged Fort Victoria in the spring of 1858.

Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken, a Hudson’s Bay Company physician and adviser of Governor James Douglas.

Alfred Waddington, a San Francisco merchant who hurried to establish a branch of his wholesale grocery firm in Victoria, commented that the “proximity of Victoria to San Francisco . . . afforded every facility, and converted the matter into a fifteen dollar trip. Steamers and sailing vessels were put in requisition, and old ships and tubs of every description [became] actively employed in bringing up passengers.”

An artist’s rendering of Victoria, c. 1860.

Alfred Waddington.

Another commentator, R.M. Ballantyne, drew a vivid picture of these ships and their passengers. “A steamer calculated to carry 600 passengers,” he wrote, “is laden with 1,600. There is hardly standing room on the deck. It is almost impossible to clear passage from one part of the vessel to the other. . . . Their object is of the earth, earthly-wealth in its rawest and rudest form — gold, the one thing for which they bear to live, or dare to die.” In their haste to reach the fabulous wealth of the Fraser and Thompson rivers, prospectors stripped stores of provisions. Whether anyone liked it or not, the secret was out and another gold rush on.

In some people’s eyes, the forty-niners of California had achieved bogeyman status. Their exploits and behaviour were legendary, and people of many countries looked upon them as brutal, lawless, vicious, and wild. Armed with guns and bowie knives, they were a law unto themselves, the antithesis to the “peace, order and good government” policy of the British colonial system.

Alfred Waddington’s initial impression of Victoria was that it was “a quiet village of about 800 inhabitants. No noise, no bustle, no gamblers, no speculators or interested parties to preach up this or underrate that.” The well-behaved residents lived in seclusion, “as it were, from the whole world.” Their reaction to the invasion of gold-obsessed Californians was therefore predictable. Emerging from church on April 25, 1858, Dr. Helmcken wrote, they “were astonished to find a steamer entering the harbour from San Francisco.” The Commodore disembarked 450 men, all heavily equipped for mining and carrying knives and guns. Waddington observed that the churchgoers “beheld these varied specimens of humanity streaming down in motley crowds from the steamers and sailing vessels . . . in silent amazement, as if contemplating a second eruption of the barbarians!”

On April 25, 1858, the Commodore disembarked 450 eager, fevered pursuers of gold, much to the astonished dismay of Victoria’s residents.

While some Californian prospectors came overland from the south, Victoria bore the brunt of the influx of gold seekers. In fact, so many made their way north that the San Francisco press lamented the lost labourers and the subsequent damage to the Californian economy: “The desire to emigrate is fast increasing. . . . Several hundreds have left in the past fortnight and many more are preparing to leave.”

To this point, the two British colonies on the northern Pacific coast — Vancouver Island and New Caledonia — were largely unknown to the wider world. Only very recently had the British navy transferred the site of its Pacific operations from Valparaiso in the southern Pacific to Esquimalt, and that was only because it needed a base closer to the Russian port of Vladivostok once the Crimean War broke out. The area was chiefly the domain of the various First Nations, although the Hudson’s Bay Company had built a chain of trading posts across the north that connected to southern forts in Kamloops, Langley, and Hope.

And, of course, Fort Victoria. Established in 1842, after the loss of territory in the Oregon Treaty, it was a rough settlement with a bastion on its southwest corner and a series of wooden structures. Its inhabitants were all connected to the HBC and the eight hundred people living there were the usual mix — Scottish officers, Canadiens, Métis, and a few Kanakas (Hawaiians).

Hospital Point, Esquimalt Harbour, Vancouver Island, was “picturesquely rock-bound.” Early arrivals found it “crowded with gracefully peaked canoes and boats of all shapes and sizes”: Kinahan Cornwallis.

The Bastion, Government Street, Victoria, 1858.

The newcomers built a tent city around the fort and shopped for provisions. Prices for everyday basics, such as flour, soared, and the influx of miners transformed Victoria into a busy commercial centre, as described by Waddington: “Shops, stores and wooden shanties of every description were now seen going up and nothing was to be heard but the stroke of the chisel or hammer. In six weeks, 225 buildings, of which nearly 200 were stores . . . had been added to the village of 800 inhabitants.”

Few miners, however, allowed themselves the luxury of observing such effects. They were desperate to reach the goldfields, and the next stage of their trip required some means of transport across the Strait of Georgia to the Fraser River. They left in whatever watercraft they could find — steamers, sailboats, or canoes — and if they couldn’t find anything, they built their own “punty, awkward-looking things, about as good imitations of coffins as anything else.” Consequently, many perished. Today, the journey takes one hundred minutes by public ferry. In 1858, it was a two-day trip, requiring an overnight stop on one of the Gulf Islands, such as Miner’s Bay on Mayne Island.

Bustling Victoria Harbour, August 1858 — “a trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, bids fair, on account of its position with regard to the gold fields . . . speedily to become a large town”: Illustrated London News.

But once the prospectors reached the mainland they discovered their difficulties had only just begun. The Fraser quickly narrowed into a swiftly flowing river and exacted its own death toll. As Governor Douglas reported to London: “with every species of small craft . . . continually employed in pouring their cargoes of human beings into the Fraser river . . . many accidents have happened in the dangerous rapids of that river.” In fact, “a great number of canoes” had been “dashed to pieces and their cargoes swept away by the impetuous stream, while . . . the ill-fated adventurers who accompanied them . . . have been swept into eternity.”

San Francisco. W. Champness, an Englishman on his way to the Cariboo goldfields, observed that it had grown from a village in 1848 to have a population of more than 100,000 in fourteen years, concluding it “is evident that Californians live in a land where gold is prevalent.” This illustration, like others that follow, was published with his story in The Leisure Hour.

Such incidents did nothing to tarnish the lure of gold. In May 1858, 1,262 would-be miners left San Francisco. The total rose to 7,149 in June and to 6,278 in July. By the end of the year, approximately twenty-five thousand prospectors had come via that route to Victoria, and the journey to the Fraser had been made safer with the introduction of stern-wheeled steamers, such as the Enterprise, captained by Tom Wright, generally acknowledged as a “prince of good fellows.”

The SS Enterprise.

Reporter David Higgins, whose observations of the goldfields can be found in The Mystic Spring and Other Tales of Western Life, published in 1904.

In July 1858 a journalist, David Higgins, an eyewitness to the many exciting and tragic events of the period, described his trip to Yale, “then the head of navigation.” The vessel, he wrote, “was crowded with freight and passengers and I was lucky in finding a vacant spot on the hurricane deck upon which to spread my blankets and lie down to unpleasant dreams.” It took a day to reach “Fort Langley, a Hudson Bay Post, where we remained over night. New Westminster had then no existence, a dense forest of fir and cedar occupying the site of the future Royal City.”

Fort Langley’s gates opened each morning at six o’clock when “the massive bolts and bars are unlocked . . . and the English, Scotch, Irish, half-breeds, begin to make their appearance in and around the establishment. At a later hour . . . the door of the salesroom opens . . . and the business of the day begins”: Harper’s Weekly, 1858.

Just below Langley, “some speculative spirits were booming a town which they named Derby, but it was only a name” and did not last. After sailing on from Langley, “the wild scenery of course charmed all, and incidents of travel were novel and exciting to those who had not been accustomed to life outside a large city. All along the river, wherever there occurred a bench or bar, miners were encamped waiting . . . to scoop up the gold by the handful and live at ease forevermore.”

Those miners may have been part of a group that had come overland. T.H. Hill, after noticing colours in the Fraser’s water, had washed a pan of gravel and thus discovered one of the richest river bars in North America. Hill’s Bar would produce more than $2 million in gold (or about US$35 million today). Seeing Hill’s success, other miners staked claims up and down the lower Fraser, scattered around the settlements of Hope and Yale, which turned into bustling communities. David Higgins vividly described them: “All was a bustle and excitement in the new mining town. Every race and colour and both sexes were represented in the population. There were Englishmen, Canadians [i.e. from Upper and Lower Canada], Americans, Australians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese and Negroes — all bent on winning gold from the Fraser sands and all hopeful of a successful season. It was a lottery in which there were few prizes.”

But a lottery, nevertheless, that all the miners thought they had a chance of winning. The lower Fraser’s gold could be mined through “surface” digging. The cheapest method used involved a pan about eighteen inches wide and three or four inches deep with broad sloping sides. Miners stirred and swirled sand and gravel in the pan to separate any gold, which, because it was six times heavier than rock, sank to the bottom. Experienced and fortunate prospectors extracted gold fairly efficiently by this method and many “panned” a site to assess its potential before staking claims. Most miners, however, used the faster rocker or “cradle” if they had the means and skill. Working in twos, one poured water onto the gravel while the other rocked the cradle back and forth. If they were in luck, a series of riffles caught any gold in the bottom of the box while a blanket underneath collected even the finest particles.

Hope. Bishop George Hills believed that no spot could be “more beautifully situated than Hope. The River Fraser flows past it. The site is on the river bank, on either side are noble mountains opposite an island.” A less spiritual observer, writing for Harper’s Weekly, wrote that “temporary frame buildings are going up in all directions. Gambling houses — of which there are five here — are in full blast, day and night; and the number of houses where liquor is sold is about nine out of every ten.”

Fort Yale. Lieutenant Richard Mayne of the Royal Navy thought “there is nothing calling for any notice in Yale.” Residents, however, disagreed. David Higgins feared “to go out after dark. Night assaults and robberies, varied by an occasional cold-blooded murder or a daylight theft, were common occurrences. Crime in every form stalked boldly through the town unchecked and unpunished.”

A lithograph showing the various techniques used in Californian gold mining (clockwise, from top right): conduits, or flumes, bringing water through which gravel is sifted; miners shovelling dirt into a sluice; a windlass bringing underground dirt to the surface; a miner panning in the stream; and, on the left, a seated prospector uses a rocker.

Gold mining technology spread from continent to continent. This illustration shows the gold pan as used by an Australian miner.

His counterpart in British Columbia as portrayed by Overlander William Hind. W. Champness noted that a “prospecting-pan forms a first-rate dish for beans and bacon” and “is one of the most useful articles one can bring here.”

By June 1858 the roll of the dice seemed heavily weighted against the miners. Constantly challenged by such hazards as hypothermia and exhaustion, they now witnessed an insurmountable obstacle. Once the spring melt began, many bars disappeared beneath the water and hundreds of disillusioned miners gave up their dreams and returned home to California in disgust. Others who had the patience and resources to wait out the season returned in late summer to continue mining, and several began pushing even further up the Fraser in search of a richer motherlode. As they did, the dangers multiplied.

The rocker as shown in the Australian goldfields was a more efficient method of placer gold extraction.

Again, techniques crossed oceans as shown by Bill Phinney, a British Columbian equivalent of the Australian digger.

Mountain roads. “In the river gorges, our track conducted us along the most frightful precipices . . . down whose steep, pine-forested sides we had to lead our horses singly, and [then] with the utmost care”: W. Champness.

The 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.