A Trail of Broken Dreams

by Barbara Haworth-Attard

  As promised, dear diary, I will tell you why I know Talbot will be back. It is because Father has given shares in the claim over to Talbot and Mr. Dyer for their kindness in caring for me on the journey. At the mining office I asked the clerk to check the claim registration again, as he had told me Father’s name was not on it. His name was there, right under his partner, Sam Simpson’s! I knew that clerk didn’t look very hard. Then Talbot and I both had the same thought, that Henry and Joe should own a share too. The proper papers will be drawn up in Victoria once Henry and Joe are located.

  Father has given me a small share of my own. He asked if I wanted to return to our old home back east once we got William and Luella back. I thought about it, but told him I liked the country out here, and would be happy to stay. He agreed, and said he had money enough to take up some land here, build a good house and start a business — he says he has had quite enough of mining!

  I thought I might feel desolate when they all left, but I don’t. I am with Father once again, and I know I will see Luella and William soon. It was quite an adventure seeing prairies, mountains, rushing rivers and gold dust. Mama said a woman likes to be settled, not moving about all the time, but I think I’d like to see New York City some day. I hope this wanting new adventures isn’t the start of another bad habit!

  Epilogue

  Harriet and her father spent a peaceful winter in Richfield, along with another hundred people who didn’t head south to Victoria or New Westminster. When spring came, the town was fast becoming deserted in favour of the booming new town of Barkerville. By that time Mr. Palmer had regained his health, and he and Harriet made the journey south to Victoria. In late April Mr. Palmer booked passage on a ship to get William and Luella. It would take him down the west coast, across the Isthmus of Panama by railway (the Panama Canal had yet to be built), then by ship back up the eastern coast of the United States, and overland by train and steamship to Fort Garry. Travelling “across the country” before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed — over twenty years later — was quite involved! While her father was gone, Harriet boarded with a family in Victoria and attended St. Ann’s Academy.

  Spring also brought the miners back to the Cariboo — Talbot and his father, and Joe and Henry Morgan among them. They began to work the Palmer claim on Williams Creek. The claim was a good one, and produced a steady output of gold, enough for all who owned a share. Harriet received her portion, which she put into the bank in Victoria.

  In the early autumn Mr. Palmer returned, and Harriet had a joyful reunion with William and Luella. The family rented a house and stayed in Victoria, Harriet and the children attending school there. Harriet spent many evenings reading from her diary about her overland journey adventures to a wide-eyed Luella and pea-green-with-envy William.

  In the spring of 1864 Mr. Palmer moved the family to the Okanagan Valley in the interior of British Columbia, where he homesteaded 160 acres of land on Okanagan Lake near Trout River. He raised cattle and also built a flour mill. Three years later, Mr. Dyer and Talbot took up land adjoining the Palmers, built a ranch and opened a small trading store. With the hard work of mining proving too difficult for Mr. Dyer, and with the mine’s output declining, he and Talbot left the operation to Joe and Henry.

  In 1869, Talbot and Harriet were married, something their fathers expected even though the couple still sparred at just about every opportunity. Harriet took over the running of the store so Talbot could devote himself to raising cattle on the ranch. They often talked of their overland journey, Talbot jumpping at every opportunity to remind Harriet that she was a Nervous Nellie. The couple had six children: two boys, Alfred and Henry Jr., and four girls, Luella, Catherine, Elizabeth and Beatrice. Harriet ran a loving, welcoming household. As there were no schools nearby, she brought in a governess to teach the children.

  Talbot’s calm, steady ways soon saw him appointed as magistrate for the area. Mr. Dyer, a devoted grandfather, never fully recovered from the overland journey and the hard work in the mine, and passed away in 1875.

  That same year, Joe and Henry Morgan came to stay with William and George Palmer, as the mine was no longer producing. Within a year Joe, acting on a “gut feeling,” asked for and received the hand of the Dyers’ governess. The couple settled nearby, began ranching, and planted an orchard.

  Luella had returned to Victoria in 1865 to attend school at St. Ann’s Academy. Upon completion, she became employed as a governess in Victoria, and met and married a doctor visiting from England. The couple departed for England shortly after they were married, to take up residence there. Luella and Harriet corresponded regularly, but never saw each other again.

  William never married, and took over the family ranch after Mr. Palmer died in 1880. Henry Morgan eventually returned east to London.

  Harriet’s famed stubbornness and determination helped to rebuild the family’s lives when their home, possessions and store were burned in a devastating fire in 1885. A year later, she again had to summon up all her strength when her daughter, Beatrice, drowned. Beatrice was buried in the family plot next to her two grandfathers.

  Despite her busy life with the ranch, the store and raising her children, Harriet could often be found sitting on the shores of the lake, painting or sketching the hills surrounding her. Her eldest son, Alfred, inherited and surpassed Harriet’s skill, and went on to study art in England and France.

  When Harriet turned fifty she took her money from the mine, which she had saved in the bank, and she and Talbot went on her long-desired trip to New York. She recorded her journey there in another diary, though this one was leather-bound and did not contain accounting columns. While in New York she thought often of Old Jackson, but she never saw or heard of him again after he said goodbye in 1862.

  In 1902 Harriet died of cancer at the age of fifty-three. Talbot died a few months after her, of heart failure. Harriet’s diary of her overland journey remained in the family, a cherished possession that was passed down from daughter to daughter.

  Historical Note

  Gold! In 1858, rumours of a gold discovery on the Fraser River in British Columbia raced around the world, enticing shop clerks, farmers, merchants, teachers, lawyers and doctors to leave home and family to seek their fortune. Thousands of men crowded onto steamboats in San Francisco to make their way north to Fort Victoria. Others spent up to five months on an ocean voyage from Europe and England, either going all the way around the southern tip of South America or taking the quicker route across Panama, and then sailing northward up the west coast to reach British Columbia.

  More fortune seekers travelled overland from eastern Canada by stagecoach and steamship to the Red River Settlement and Fort Garry (present-day Winnipeg.) From there, in 1862, many would-be miners set off on a dangerous and difficult journey by cart, horse and on foot over prairies, rivers and mountains to the Cariboo gold fields. These adventurers were called Overlanders. Like all the travellers heading to the Cariboo, they outfitted themselves with tents, blankets, shovels, axes, picks, small stoves, cooking utensils, soap, needles and thread, boots, flannel shirts, firearms, candles and food: beans, bacon, flour, sugar, coffee.

  The largest party of Overlanders, about one hundred and fifty people who set off from Fort Garry led by Thomas McMicking, included the Schubert family. Catherine Schubert was expecting her fourth child when her husband, Augustus, decided to leave the Red River Settlement to seek gold in the Cariboo. Determined not to be left behind, Catherine Schubert persuaded the Overlanders to let her and her three children join Augustus on the trek, not telling them she was expecting a child.

  They left in early June of 1862 on a journey that was expected to take two months, but almost four months later they were still in the mountains of present-day British Columbia. It was a frightening, tiring journey. They forded rushing rivers, waded through waist-deep swamps, climbed steep mountainsides and cut their way through thick underbrush with axes. Mosquitoes drove people and animals nearly frantic,
and wolves followed them, their howls shredding nerves already frayed by the constant fear of attack by Native people. Though the actual incidence of attacks was sporadic — at least for those travelling the northern route — any word of conflict, even between various tribes, stoked the Overlanders’ fear. Strangely, other than at the various forts and missions, the McMicking Overlanders encountered few Native people until they reached Tête Jaune Cache, where they traded with a party of Shuswap.

  Weary, some with bleeding gums and teeth loose from scurvy, and all with tattered clothes, the McMicking party finally arrived at the head of the Fraser River at Tête Jaune Cache at the end of August. It was decided here that they would split up. The Schuberts opted to take what they thought was the safer route down the Thompson River to Fort Kamloops, while others chose to raft and canoe down the treacherous Fraser River.

  While floating on a raft down the Thompson River, Catherine Schubert was forced to stop at a Native village, and with the help of the women there she gave birth to a baby girl named Rose. The Schuberts continued on their journey downriver for three more weeks to Fort Kamloops and to the Cariboo gold fields, but had little success finding gold. Discouraged, they settled in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.

  The Fraser River party arrived at the mouth of the Quesnel in mid-September. Worn out from their journey and mourning the loss of some of their men on the river descent, all but a few of the Overlanders decided to continue downriver to spend the winter at Victoria or at New Westminster (at that time the capital of the colony of British Columbia). The next spring some returned to try their luck in the gold fields, while others started businesses or farmed or ranched, becoming some of the first white settlers of British Columbia.

  In one of the parties was English artist William George Richardson Hind, who came from Toronto to join the Overlanders. He sketched and painted the trials of the treacherous journey across prairie, river and mountain, providing a rich legacy of Canadian history as valuable as gold. Bad-tempered at times, he was asked to leave one party of travellers and had to join another to continue his westward journey. His overland journey and Cariboo paintings and sketches were not discovered until 1927, when they were found in his brother’s attic in Nova Scotia, providing all Canadians with a rich heritage. Hind’s entire Overlanders of ’62 Sketchbook can be viewed on the National Archives website.

  Getting to the gold fields by any route involved a difficult water or land journey. Not only did the miners have to shoot rapids, but walk through swamps and fight their way through forests, often climbing over huge fallen trees. But the lure of gold and a chance to make a quick fortune was stronger than hardship or fear, and soon thirty thousand men swarmed over the Lower Fraser River, checking each gravel and sand bar for “colour.” If they were successful, they staked their claim and got down to the serious work of mining.

  Gold on the Fraser River was extracted by panning, rocking or sluicing. Panning was slow and not too effective, and was often used mainly for testing. A shovelful of dirt was placed in a pan. The pan was then dipped in water and moved in circles. Using his fingers, the miner threw out large stones and broke up the dirt to let it float out of the pan. The heavier gold remained on the bottom of the pan.

  Rocking was a quicker way to find gold. The miner would build a “cradle,” a wooden box set on rockers with small strips of wood nailed to the cradle’s bottom to form ridges. He shovelled a small amount of dirt into the rocker, and added a bucket of water, while rocking the box. The lighter dirt and stones washed away, but the gold settled against the ridges. With one man to shovel in dirt and a second to rock the cradle, two hundred buckets a day could be checked for gold.

  Sluicing required a steady supply of creek water. The sluice-box was a long wooden trough, again built with ridges or “riffles” on the bottom to catch the heavier gold. Dirt and gravel was shovelled in, and as creek water flowed down the length of the sluice, it washed away the dirt and stones, leaving the gold caught on the riffles. Many miners formed companies of six to twenty people to make it faster to extract the gold.

  Along with the miners flocking to the gold fields were others who wanted to make their fortunes not from finding gold, but from the gold-seekers themselves. They opened tent boarding houses, stores, eating houses, saloons and gambling houses. Opportunists eager to part the miner from his fortune — pickpockets, thieves and gamblers — also flocked to the gold fields.

  Alarmed by the sudden arrival of thousands of gold-seekers, James Douglas, the governor of Vancouver Island, extended his authority to cover the Fraser River area as a British holding. The British Parliament quickly formed a new colony that included the Fraser River and its tributaries from the Rocky Mountains west to the Pacific coast, south to the international boundary and north to the Peace River. It was named British Columbia by Queen Victoria. James Douglas was appointed governor of the new colony. One of his first acts was to require that everyone seeking gold purchase a mining licence for five dollars. Customs officers enforced the licences, and later on, gold commissioners set up offices to issue the mining licences. Money from the sale of licences went to help pay for the development of the new colony of British Columbia.

  As the Fraser River’s gravel bars were stripped of gold, miners travelled almost 650 kilometres further into the interior of British Columbia. Here in the Cariboo, a region east of the Fraser River and south of the Quesnel River, dozens of small tributaries flowed into the Fraser. Accidents, many of them fatal, were plentiful as men and pack mules journeyed to the Cariboo. They toppled over steep cliffs or drowned in the fast-flowing Fraser River. Many men turned back, but others, like Billy Barker and John Cameron, persevered and were rewarded with rich claims. As in any gold rush, some miners made nothing at all, while others pulled in $40.00 to $300.00 a day from their claims.

  On the many creeks, men banded together in companies and began to sink deep shafts into the bedrock and tunnel into the sides of the hills to find the elusive gold. The area was stripped of trees as wood was needed to shore up crumbling shaft walls against cave-ins, for cabins and shelters, for fuel, for windlasses (used to raise buckets of rock and dirt from the shafts), for sluices, and for the huge Cornish wheels (large water-driven wooden wheels used to pump water out of the shafts so miners could dig deeper).

  As before, traders and business people followed the miners, and camps sprang up along the creeks seemingly overnight. Antler, Richfield and Barkerville were thriving places with stores, restaurants, boarding houses and churches. And because the miners needed entertainment, there were many saloons. Here the men played cards, ate meals and danced — often with each other, as few women lived in the settlements. But as the miners went on to other areas, one by one the settlements were abandoned and today those that remain are ghost towns.

  Recognizing the need for a road into the Cariboo over which to pack supplies, Governor Douglas ordered the Royal Engineers to begin the Cariboo Wagon Road. It stretched 650 kilometres from Yale in the south to Barkerville in the north. The final section was completed in 1865 and helped to open up the interior of British Columbia.

  To keep law and order in the area, Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie arrived from England. Judge Begbie had graduated in law from Cambridge University, and was a man well travelled and fond of adventure. He made the journey to the Cariboo to administer the law, and while there he mapped the area and recorded the weather and types of flora. He was regarded as a fair judge, not discriminating by race. Judge Begbie’s nickname, “the hanging judge,” came about after his death, and is considered part myth. His reputation of acting swiftly — and at times, harshly — along with the presence of a detachment of soldiers and police officers, helped to keep the miners under control. But the Cariboo was a large area of wilderness, and despite the presence of the law, there were still some cases of miners being robbed of their gold, or even murdered for it.

  By 1864, one hundred companies had staked out more than three thousand claims along the Cariboo�
�s creeks. While most of the gold was extracted by 1870, some claims were still being worked in the early 1900s. It is estimated that 30 million dollars’ worth of gold was taken from the area. But more important than gold, a new province called British Columbia had been born.

  Historical fiction is a mixture of fact and imagination. The overland journey and the Cariboo gold rush are fact. So are these people: Thomas McMicking, the Schubert family (Augustus, Catherine, and their three children, Gus Jr., Mary Jane and James), William George Richardson Hind, James Sellar, James Carpenter, Alexander Fortune, William Fortune, Eustache Pattison, James Wattie, William Wattie, Charles Rochette, Rev. Corbett, James Kelso, W. W. Morrow, Felix Munroe, Robert Warren, Alexander Robertson, J. Douglas, Dr. Edward Stevenson and Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie. The remaining characters in Harriet’s story are from the author’s imagination.

  Images and Documents

  Image 1: Fort Garry in 1860, including the ferry across the Red River (at lower right).

  Image 2: Thomas McMicking was selected by the other Overlanders to be the party’s leader. He drowned four years after reaching British Columbia, trying to save his son William from drowning.