Towns grew up, the most famous of these being Barkerville, now preserved as a heritage site and tourist attraction. Other important towns of the Cariboo gold rush era were Keithley Creek, Quesnel Forks or simply "the Forks", Antler, Richfield, Quesnellemouthe (which would later be shortened to Quesnel), Horsefly and, around the site of the Hudson's Bay Company's fort of the same name, Alexandria.
Williams Creek
Richfield
Richfield was the first strike on Williams Creek, and became the seat of government in the region, particularly of the courts.
Differences between the Cariboo and Fraser Canyon Rushes
Unlike its southern counterpart, the population of the Cariboo Gold Rush was largely British and Canadian, among them 4000 were Chinese,[2] although the first wave of the rush was largely American. By the time the Cariboo rush broke out there was more active interest in the Gold Colony (as British Columbia was often referred to) in the United Kingdom and Canada and there had also been time required for more British and Canadians to get there. The electorate of the Cariboo riding were among the most pro-Confederation in the colony, and this was in no small part because of the strong Canadian element in the local populace.
One reason the Cariboo rush attracted fewer Americans than the original Fraser rush may have been the American Civil War, with many who had been around after the Fraser Gold Rush going home to take sides, or to the Fort ColvilleGold Rush which was largely manned by men who had been on the Fraser or to other BC rushes such as those at Rock Creek and Big Bend.
While some of the population that came for the Cariboo rush stayed on as permanent settlers, taking up land in various parts of the Interior in the 1860s and after, that wasn't the general rule for those involved in the Fraser rush. Many veterans of the Cariboo would spread out to explore the rest of the province, in particular triggering the Omineca and Cassiar Gold Rushes, just as the Cariboo itself had been found by miners seeking out in search of new finds from the Fraser rush.
Towns along the Cariboo Road include Clinton, 100 Mile House and Williams Lake, although most had their beginnings before the Cariboo rush began. During the rush, the largest and most important town lay at the road's end at Barkerville, which had grown up around the most profitable and famous of the many Cariboo mining camps.
The Cariboo Wagon Road was an immense infrastructure burden for the colony but needed to be built to enable access and bring governmental authority to the Cariboo goldfields, which was necessary in order to maintain and assert control of the wealth, which might more easily have passed through the Interior to the United States.
The wagon road's most important freight was the Gold Escort, which brought government bullion to Yale for shipment to the colonial treasury. Despite the wealth of the Cariboo goldfields, the expense of colonizing the Cariboo contributed to the Mainland Colony's virtual bankruptcy and its forced union with the Island Colony, and similarly into Confederation.
"Cariboo Road" by Alan Sullivan - published 1946, is a fictional historical novel about a family that travels from San Francisco to seek gold near Williams Creek. The story is set in 1862.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Cariboo_Gold_Rush, and is written by contributors.
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