It was now the spring of 1860 and fresh prospectors were now coming out again via the Harrison Road. A new mule road was built from Fort Kamloops to pack in supplies. By July, there were 1,000 men on Keithley Creek. Those who were too late to make claims on the Keithley, explored the Cariboo River itself, the south branch of the Quesnel, and its tributaries. There was good color in all of these areas, though none as rich as the Keithley. The average find at Keithley was about three ounces per day. In October, most of the miners headed back to Victoria to sit out the winter. The original four went off to do a little more exploring before winter set in.
They panned a promising creek they named Antler, where they uncovered $1,000 worth of gold in the first day. An early snowfall sent them back to Keithley and before long the word was out. A few days later, 100 men had staked out the Antler. They sat and waited until the March thaw to mine the creek. This was the richest find yet and by summer some 3,000 men had come to Antler Creek.
It looked like the gold was about to peter out again, when a man named Jourdan decided to dig into the blue lead stuff. The mother lode was underneath it! Everyone followed suit. Some claims showed as much as 40 pounds of gold in one day. Almost $2.5 million was taken out of just Antler Creek that year.
But the biggest find of all was yet to come. In the spring of 1861, William "Dutch Bill" Deitz and some friends prospected a new creek, which would become known as Williams Creek. It was another rich find. Another tent city sprang up around it. At first it was called Elwyntown, then later changed to Richfield.
Williams Creek seemed to have been tapped out of the easy pickings and the canyon below the creek didn't have anything in it. Or so they thought. They had mistakenly followed the blue lead along the current stream bed. What they didn't know was that the blue lead was an old stream bed and it didn't follow the present one. So when seven Englishmen led by William "Billy" Barker started poking around in supposedly worthless ground, they found the old stream bed, sixty feet down. A new town called Barkerville sprang up at the site. About $600,000 was taken out the first year. Altogether Williams Creek yielded about $5 million in the first year, and $25 million in the first ten years.
