"They carved a wagon road up the Fraser Canyon to get to the gold."
As usual with "pop history," Doerksen gets the facts wrong. The "people who walked into the Cariboo with the clothes on their backs and a dream" were not the ones who built the Cariboo Road—either of them (the one from Lillooet being the older of the two).
The "Queen's Highway" from Yale via Cache Creek was built by a combination of the Royal Engineers and white contractors who hired Indigenous and Chinese labourers to do the actual work. Joseph Trutch—despite his famous racism and spite toward both Indigenous and Chinese people—hired them to build the Alexandra Bridge. It replaced an earlier Indigenous pole-and-vine bridge that had spanned the Fraser Canyon near that spot. Trutch hired San Francisco engineer Andrew Smith Hallidie to design it and financed the build himself in exchange for the right to collect bridge tolls for seven years. Because Trutch took over as Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works right after building the bridge, he ended up regulating and overseeing the very toll bridge he privately owned, creating a notable conflict of interest in early colonial politics.
In the case of the other route to the Cariboo, the Lakes Route (a.k.a. the Harrison–Lillooet Trail), parts of it were cut as a rough pack trail in 1858 by work parties of miners who each plunked down $25 as a deposit for the privilege of building designated sections—though many abandoned the work early to rush ahead to Cayoosh (Lillooet) and the Cariboo to stake their claims before anyone else got there. The Royal Engineers ultimately had to rebuild almost all of it into a proper wagon road.
The original Cariboo Road from Cayoosh/Lillooet to Soda Creek and Fort Alexandria actually began at Mile 0 in Parsonville, on the opposite side of the Fraser from where the town of Lillooet was surveyed in 1860 (when it was renamed because Americans disliked the sound of "Cayoosh" due to the recent Cayuse War in the U.S.). That road was built by American contractor Gustavus Blin Wright, of Britisih-Swedish origin, who employed mostly Germans and Scandinavians for his work parties.
Most Cariboo-bound miners could not afford the steep tolls on either route and did what they could to bypass the tollbooths. Most foot traffic from Lillooet to the Cariboo took the "River Trail," which followed the riverbank to Big Bar and then took easier trails across the plateau to the Cariboo—which at first didn't mean Barkerville, but the upper Cariboo River, where Quesnelle Forks was the main centre until Billy Barker struck it rich on Williams Creek in the upper Willow River watershed.
Doerksen misses the point when he says, "plenty of them went broke. Plenty of those camps are ghost towns today, but they went anyway for a chance to build something amazing." That statement says it all about resource-extraction economies: royalties and taxes are consumed by infrastructure spending, most of the wealth is exported to outside bank accounts, and almost none is reinvested in the communities founded in the process, which are left to rot once the resource is depleted or abandoned when world prices shift.
Total recorded gold production from the Cariboo goldfields since the 1860s exceeds 3.87 million ounces. Based on historical and current market prices, the estimated value of this production is roughly $3.4 billion to over $4.9 billion USD, yet almost none of it was reinvested in the towns or communities founded by its extraction—less than 5% to 10% remained directly in the mining towns as permanent local wealth. During the 1860s rush, the Crown did not charge a percentage royalty on gold extracted. Revenue came almost entirely from flat-rate Free Miner's Certificates (licenses), customs duties on imported goods, and road tolls. Because miners routinely smuggled gold across the U.S. border to avoid fees, public coffers captured only a fraction of the $50 million in 19th-century placer gold. Local retention was largely limited to worker wages, basic municipal taxes, and company-built housing; one of the few lasting local reinvestments was cattle ranching, which still anchors the regional economy today. Meanwhile, the road construction debt nearly bankrupted the mainland colony. By 1866, the colony was over $1 million in debt (a massive sum at the time), forcing its union with Vancouver Island and eventually pushing B.C. into Canadian Confederation in 1871 to have Ottawa assume its debts.
Thanks for this fascinating piece, Craig. I wonder if there’s a typo in the quote from Doerkson’s speech — settlers were pursuing gold instead of goal?
I think it’s worthwhile to consider how being the Superintendent of Indian Affairs positioned Powell to have access to the whole province, with full control of what reserves were allocated and when. All pulp mills on the coast were built on large salmon-bearing rivers with villages beside them. Anybody who argues that “there is no evidence that there was a village site at tiskwat” is ignoring the fact (besides the fact that there is evidence) that there were always villages at those big salmon-bearing rivers. A better question would be “why is there no ‘evidence’ (paper trail) regarding indigenous villages at said river mouth?” It’s suspicious to say the least and not surprising when you think about it. It will be interesting to read the court filing for the lot 450 land claim, as that will contain some interesting information.
It would also be interesting to compare the real estate histories of other pulp mills - Crofton, Port Alberni, Nanaimo, Ocean Falls, Campbell River, port Mellon… Not to mention all the other industries on rivers like Kitimat. All of them are on huge salmon-bearing rivers, where Indigenous communities invariably were (and still are nearby reserves) and are all on stolen land.
The speculation on rivers that could generate power in the early days would have been another gold rush in and of itself. But much quieter as it a lot of it was undoubtedly done illegally.
I wrote about this speculation several years ago when housing prices started to rise here in qathet but I lost the piece and couldn't find my sources again. I'm so glad you did the legwork. In a sense when people complain that houses cost too much here, we can tell them "Blame Powell!"
Craig you have constantly given as Fact, the Israel Powell helped Rithet get Lot 450, yet there are no historical documentation that is factual. Are you able to produce even one historical document backing up your claim?
When you and I sat and had a person to person conversation you insisted at the time Rithet received Lot 450 in 1874, I asked you how did you know? You had no answers, you went by common narratives, Lot 450 did not come into existence until 1878, and Rithet received no land in his 1873 Timber License, just timber.
So can you produce just one document that shows Powell got Rithet Lot 450? It’s not because of the Reserve settlement because that was acknowledged by Ottawa in 1877 when Sproat sent in the Paper Reserve and the land Lot 450 was not part of the destination of Reserves.
So let’s see your historical document backing your claim for Lot 450, or is this just your speculative opinion.
It includes several primary sources for its claims, but I haven't looked into them all.
"While Powell took issue with settler incursion on Indigenous lands in some of his writings, at times he made exceptions to this stance. One notable case is the dispute over a 15,000 acre parcel of land known as Lot 450, situated on traditional Tla'amin, Klahoose, and Homalco territory, and encompassing several traditional villages and seasonal sites. In 1874, land speculator and Victoria politician Robert Paterson Rithet purchased the timber lease to this land under what some authors and academics have called dubious circumstances.59 The Tla’amin expressed their concerns over logging around their villages to Indian Land Commissioner Gilbert Malcolm Sproat. Sproat agreed that the government should cease sales of the Tla’amin territory before official surveys could be made of their reserves. When Sproat brought these complaints forward to Powell, the Superintendent was dismissive of Sproat and the Tla’amin’s concerns, and dissuaded the Commissioner from visiting the Tla’amin to attempt to reach a compromise. Some authors have suggested that Powell’s inaction on the issue is because he and Rithet were personally associated. While no official record linking these two men has been found, both were members of the Masonic order and belonged to the Vancouver and Quadra Lodge no. 2, and were very likely acquainted with one another as members of Victoria’s upper class. Even if his laxity was unrelated to knowing Rithet personally, Lot 450 and the lands of the Tla’amin, Klahoose, and Homalco Nations were highly sought after for their economic potential and probably represented areas of potential industry to Powell, who was strongly in favour of the “civilizing” effects of industry on Indigenous peoples."
Excellent and fascinating work.
"They carved a wagon road up the Fraser Canyon to get to the gold."
As usual with "pop history," Doerksen gets the facts wrong. The "people who walked into the Cariboo with the clothes on their backs and a dream" were not the ones who built the Cariboo Road—either of them (the one from Lillooet being the older of the two).
The "Queen's Highway" from Yale via Cache Creek was built by a combination of the Royal Engineers and white contractors who hired Indigenous and Chinese labourers to do the actual work. Joseph Trutch—despite his famous racism and spite toward both Indigenous and Chinese people—hired them to build the Alexandra Bridge. It replaced an earlier Indigenous pole-and-vine bridge that had spanned the Fraser Canyon near that spot. Trutch hired San Francisco engineer Andrew Smith Hallidie to design it and financed the build himself in exchange for the right to collect bridge tolls for seven years. Because Trutch took over as Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works right after building the bridge, he ended up regulating and overseeing the very toll bridge he privately owned, creating a notable conflict of interest in early colonial politics.
In the case of the other route to the Cariboo, the Lakes Route (a.k.a. the Harrison–Lillooet Trail), parts of it were cut as a rough pack trail in 1858 by work parties of miners who each plunked down $25 as a deposit for the privilege of building designated sections—though many abandoned the work early to rush ahead to Cayoosh (Lillooet) and the Cariboo to stake their claims before anyone else got there. The Royal Engineers ultimately had to rebuild almost all of it into a proper wagon road.
The original Cariboo Road from Cayoosh/Lillooet to Soda Creek and Fort Alexandria actually began at Mile 0 in Parsonville, on the opposite side of the Fraser from where the town of Lillooet was surveyed in 1860 (when it was renamed because Americans disliked the sound of "Cayoosh" due to the recent Cayuse War in the U.S.). That road was built by American contractor Gustavus Blin Wright, of Britisih-Swedish origin, who employed mostly Germans and Scandinavians for his work parties.
Most Cariboo-bound miners could not afford the steep tolls on either route and did what they could to bypass the tollbooths. Most foot traffic from Lillooet to the Cariboo took the "River Trail," which followed the riverbank to Big Bar and then took easier trails across the plateau to the Cariboo—which at first didn't mean Barkerville, but the upper Cariboo River, where Quesnelle Forks was the main centre until Billy Barker struck it rich on Williams Creek in the upper Willow River watershed.
Doerksen misses the point when he says, "plenty of them went broke. Plenty of those camps are ghost towns today, but they went anyway for a chance to build something amazing." That statement says it all about resource-extraction economies: royalties and taxes are consumed by infrastructure spending, most of the wealth is exported to outside bank accounts, and almost none is reinvested in the communities founded in the process, which are left to rot once the resource is depleted or abandoned when world prices shift.
Total recorded gold production from the Cariboo goldfields since the 1860s exceeds 3.87 million ounces. Based on historical and current market prices, the estimated value of this production is roughly $3.4 billion to over $4.9 billion USD, yet almost none of it was reinvested in the towns or communities founded by its extraction—less than 5% to 10% remained directly in the mining towns as permanent local wealth. During the 1860s rush, the Crown did not charge a percentage royalty on gold extracted. Revenue came almost entirely from flat-rate Free Miner's Certificates (licenses), customs duties on imported goods, and road tolls. Because miners routinely smuggled gold across the U.S. border to avoid fees, public coffers captured only a fraction of the $50 million in 19th-century placer gold. Local retention was largely limited to worker wages, basic municipal taxes, and company-built housing; one of the few lasting local reinvestments was cattle ranching, which still anchors the regional economy today. Meanwhile, the road construction debt nearly bankrupted the mainland colony. By 1866, the colony was over $1 million in debt (a massive sum at the time), forcing its union with Vancouver Island and eventually pushing B.C. into Canadian Confederation in 1871 to have Ottawa assume its debts.
Thanks for this fascinating piece, Craig. I wonder if there’s a typo in the quote from Doerkson’s speech — settlers were pursuing gold instead of goal?
I think it’s worthwhile to consider how being the Superintendent of Indian Affairs positioned Powell to have access to the whole province, with full control of what reserves were allocated and when. All pulp mills on the coast were built on large salmon-bearing rivers with villages beside them. Anybody who argues that “there is no evidence that there was a village site at tiskwat” is ignoring the fact (besides the fact that there is evidence) that there were always villages at those big salmon-bearing rivers. A better question would be “why is there no ‘evidence’ (paper trail) regarding indigenous villages at said river mouth?” It’s suspicious to say the least and not surprising when you think about it. It will be interesting to read the court filing for the lot 450 land claim, as that will contain some interesting information.
It would also be interesting to compare the real estate histories of other pulp mills - Crofton, Port Alberni, Nanaimo, Ocean Falls, Campbell River, port Mellon… Not to mention all the other industries on rivers like Kitimat. All of them are on huge salmon-bearing rivers, where Indigenous communities invariably were (and still are nearby reserves) and are all on stolen land.
The speculation on rivers that could generate power in the early days would have been another gold rush in and of itself. But much quieter as it a lot of it was undoubtedly done illegally.
I wrote about this speculation several years ago when housing prices started to rise here in qathet but I lost the piece and couldn't find my sources again. I'm so glad you did the legwork. In a sense when people complain that houses cost too much here, we can tell them "Blame Powell!"
Craig you have constantly given as Fact, the Israel Powell helped Rithet get Lot 450, yet there are no historical documentation that is factual. Are you able to produce even one historical document backing up your claim?
When you and I sat and had a person to person conversation you insisted at the time Rithet received Lot 450 in 1874, I asked you how did you know? You had no answers, you went by common narratives, Lot 450 did not come into existence until 1878, and Rithet received no land in his 1873 Timber License, just timber.
So can you produce just one document that shows Powell got Rithet Lot 450? It’s not because of the Reserve settlement because that was acknowledged by Ottawa in 1877 when Sproat sent in the Paper Reserve and the land Lot 450 was not part of the destination of Reserves.
So let’s see your historical document backing your claim for Lot 450, or is this just your speculative opinion.
Hi Rob, I got the information from the report "Israel Wood Powell’s Legacy" prepared for Tla'amin Nation. I've included the relevant quote but you can read the whole thing here: https://www.tlaaminnation.com/report-legacy-of-israel-wood-powell/
It includes several primary sources for its claims, but I haven't looked into them all.
"While Powell took issue with settler incursion on Indigenous lands in some of his writings, at times he made exceptions to this stance. One notable case is the dispute over a 15,000 acre parcel of land known as Lot 450, situated on traditional Tla'amin, Klahoose, and Homalco territory, and encompassing several traditional villages and seasonal sites. In 1874, land speculator and Victoria politician Robert Paterson Rithet purchased the timber lease to this land under what some authors and academics have called dubious circumstances.59 The Tla’amin expressed their concerns over logging around their villages to Indian Land Commissioner Gilbert Malcolm Sproat. Sproat agreed that the government should cease sales of the Tla’amin territory before official surveys could be made of their reserves. When Sproat brought these complaints forward to Powell, the Superintendent was dismissive of Sproat and the Tla’amin’s concerns, and dissuaded the Commissioner from visiting the Tla’amin to attempt to reach a compromise. Some authors have suggested that Powell’s inaction on the issue is because he and Rithet were personally associated. While no official record linking these two men has been found, both were members of the Masonic order and belonged to the Vancouver and Quadra Lodge no. 2, and were very likely acquainted with one another as members of Victoria’s upper class. Even if his laxity was unrelated to knowing Rithet personally, Lot 450 and the lands of the Tla’amin, Klahoose, and Homalco Nations were highly sought after for their economic potential and probably represented areas of potential industry to Powell, who was strongly in favour of the “civilizing” effects of industry on Indigenous peoples."
Well that explains much, that Report has multiple false narratives in which you are repeating.
The 1874 reference is entirely false as Lot 450 simply did not exist.
The rest about Rithet and Powell is pure 100 speculations with no factual documentation.