TheCariboo Gold Rush was agold rush in theColony of British Columbia, which later became theCanadian province ofBritish Columbia. The first gold discovery was made atHills Bar in 1858, followed by more strikes in 1859 on theHorsefly River, and onKeithley Creek andAntler Creek in 1860. The actual rush did not begin until 1861, when these discoveries were widely publicized. By 1865, following the strikes alongWilliams Creek, the rush was in full swing.
Towns grew up, the most famous of these beingBarkerville, now preserved as a heritage site and tourist attraction. Other important towns of the Cariboo gold rush era wereKeithley Creek,Quesnel Forks or simply "the Forks", Antler,Richfield, Quesnellemouthe (which would later be shortened toQuesnel),Horsefly and, around the site of theHudson's Bay Company's fort of the same name,Alexandria.
The Cariboo Gold Rush is the most famous of thegold rushes in British Columbia, so much so that it is sometimes erroneously cited[1] as the reason for the creation of theColony of British Columbia. The Colony's creation had been prompted by an influx ofAmerican prospectors to theFraser Canyon Gold Rush three years earlier in 1858, which had its locus in the area fromLillooet toYale.
Unlike its southern counterpart, the population of the Cariboo Gold Rush was largely British andCanadian, 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 theUnited Kingdom and Canada and there had also been time required for more British and Canadians to get there. Theelectorate of theCariboo 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 theAmerican Civil War, with many who had been around after the Fraser Gold Rush going home to take sides, or to theFort ColvilleGold Rush which was largely manned by men who had been on the Fraser or to other BC rushes such as those atRock Creek andBig Bend.
While some of the population that came for the Cariboo rush stayed on as permanent settlers, taking up land in various parts of theInterior 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 theOmineca andCassiar Gold Rushes, just as the Cariboo itself had been found by miners seeking out in search of new finds from the Fraser rush.
The boom in the Cariboo goldfields was the impetus for the construction of theCariboo Wagon Road by theRoyal Engineers, which bypassed the older routes via theFraser Canyon and theLakes Route (Douglas Road) via Lillooet by using the canyon of theThompson River toAshcroft and from there via the valley of theBonaparte River to join the older route from Lillooet atClinton.
Towns along the Cariboo Road include Clinton,100 Mile House andWilliams 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.
A 1976 young adult novel,Cariboo Runaway, bySandy Frances Duncan, is set in the Cariboo area during the Cariboo Gold Rush.[3][4][5]