Gold Rush to British Columbia (Part 2)
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.
By 1863, most Americans left, on to new strikes at Alder Gulch in Montana, and other places. By that time Barkerville was a full-fledged town with churches, a theater, a library, and hotels. Women and children were there too. But the cost of getting the gold increased to the point that by 1865, population in the entire Cariboo country had decreased to only 5,000. Large corporations bought up what was left since they were the only ones who could afford it. Barkerville itself burned down completely on September 16, 1868. It was rebuilt but on a much smaller scale. By 1871, the last mining companies stopped operations.
Amazingly, in 1923, two old prospectors tried the old diggings. There was still more gold. Two mining companies took a total of $29 million out of the old site. Gold mining was still going on in 1970.
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