Barkerville stands on Williams Creek, at the end of the wagon road that ran north from Yale. Gold built it. William Barker’s claim, staked below Richfield Canyon in August 1862, went down deeper than any shaft yet sunk on that stretch of the creek, and it paid.
The Claim Below Richfield Canyon
William Barker is often called a Cornish sailor, but the Dictionary of Canadian Biography records something plainer. He was a canal waterman, baptized 7 June 1817 in March, Cambridgeshire. He joined the California gold rushes, reached British Columbia in 1858, and received a Free Miner’s Certificate in September 1859.
Gold on Williams Creek was already known ground by then. William “Dutch Bill” Dietz had made the first strike there in 1861, above Richfield Canyon at shallow depth, according to the peer-reviewed Geoscience Canada account of the goldfield’s geology. Barker and his seven partners staked lower down the creek instead, on ground other miners had passed over as unlikely to hold gold.
On 17 August 1862, after two unsuccessful seasons, the partners struck rich pay dirt. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography gives the shaft’s depth as 40 feet; Barkerville’s own history page says 52; the peer-reviewed Geoscience Canada range of 10 to 15 metres, roughly 33 to 49 feet, brackets the DCB figure rather than confirming barkerville.ca’s. Either way, it was deeper than anything tried on that stretch of the creek before it.
The Canadian Encyclopedia estimates the claim’s total yield at roughly $650,000 by 1895, at the era’s price of $16 to $21 an ounce. Barker sold his shares in 1864 as the gold-bearing “lead” ran out. He died 11 July 1894 in Victoria’s Old Men’s Home, of jaw cancer, and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave at Ross Bay Cemetery.
The Terminus of the Wagon Road
The Cariboo Wagon Road ran 650 kilometers, about 404 miles, from Yale to Barkerville, and was completed in 1865. When Parks Canada designated Barkerville a National Historic Site on 4 June 1924, it named exactly this pairing as the reason: the settlement as the centre of the Cariboo goldfields, and the terminus of the wagon road from Yale.
Fanny Bendixen’s Saloons
Fanny Bendixen was born around 1820 in France. She married Louis A. Bendixen in California, and the couple opened the St George Hotel on View Street in Victoria in October 1862. In the summer of 1865 she struck out for Barkerville on her own, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
She opened the Parlour saloon in 1866, then the Bella Union in June 1867, advertised in period papers as “fitted up in the most elegant style” and stocking only the “best brands of liquors and cigars.” The Bella Union burned in the September 1868 fire, with her losses estimated at $5,000. She rebuilt at Lightning Creek, running a saloon at Van Winkle with what the record calls “one of the finest reading rooms and picture galleries on the creek.” From there she moved on to Stanley, then returned to Barkerville by the late 1870s, where she became, in the Dictionary’s words, “the only woman to be regularly listed in the business directory.”
In 1889, on his last visit to the Cariboo, judge Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie found Bendixen “in great form; indeed enormous, … though she was always of goodly diameter.” She died 2 May 1899. Her will left her business and two lots to notary Hugh Cochrane; a codicil bequeathing her earrings to a grandniece instead of a friend was later overturned by a court, which found it signed while Bendixen was “almost comatose” and “not competent.”
Chinatown and the Chee Kung Tong Hall
By the mid-1880s, Chinese residents made up about half the population of the Cariboo region, according to Barkerville’s own history page, a figure the Canadian Encyclopedia corroborates independently. Chinese immigrants worked as miners and ran the businesses that made up Barkerville’s Chinatown.
The Chee Kung Tong Building there was built between 1874 and 1877, with a kitchen lean-to added around 1883 to 1885 and a north expansion around 1905. Parks Canada designated it a National Historic Site on 11 April 2008. Barkerville’s own history page describes the hall as the oldest Chee Kung Tong building still standing in Canada and calls the site’s Chinatown collection “the most extensive collection of Chinese buildings, photographs, and artifacts in North America” — an operator’s claim, not an independent one.
The Fire of September 16, 1868
A fire swept through Barkerville on 16 September 1868 and destroyed most of the town; only four buildings survived, according to Parks Canada and the Canadian Register of Historic Places. The exact cause was never officially established. The stories told afterward, from a knocked stovepipe to a dance-hall girl’s ironing, are not documented fact in any source consulted here, and belong to legend rather than record.
Preservation, 1958 to Today
The British Columbia government designated Barkerville a provincial heritage property in 1958, tied to the centennial of the Fraser River gold rush and the founding of the colony. The Cariboo Sentinel published out of Barkerville from 1865 to 1874.
Barkerville’s own history page counts more than 125 heritage buildings on the site today, and its operators bill it as the largest living-history museum in western North America, a claim of theirs rather than an independent measure. The nearby town of Wells, which grew during a 20th-century revival of lode mining, once housed more than 4,000 residents by the same source. On Williams Creek itself, mining technology moved from pans and rocker boxes to hand-dug shafts worked with hoists and Cornish pumps, and, from the late 1800s, to hydraulic mining, per the Geoscience Canada account. The shaft Barker sank below Richfield Canyon in 1862 is where all of it started.
Sources
- Van Kirk, Sylvia. ‘BARKER, WILLIAM.’ Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 1990-. — peer-reviewed — Barker biography, claim location and date, shaft depth (40 ft), sale of shares 1864, death 1894 and burial
- Van Kirk, Sylvia. ‘BENDIXEN, FANNY.’ Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 1990-. — peer-reviewed — Fanny Bendixen biography, saloons, fire losses, Begbie quote, death, will and codicil
- ‘Great Mining Camps of Canada 3: The History and Geology of the Cariboo Goldfield, Barkerville and Wells, BC.’ Geoscience Canada. — peer-reviewed — Dietz’s 1861 discovery, corroboration of Barker strike, shaft-depth range (10-15 m)
- Parks Canada. ‘Barkerville National Historic Site of Canada.’ Directory of Federal Heritage Designations. — primary/official — 1924 national historic site designation, wagon road terminus
- Parks Canada. ‘Chee Kung Tong Building National Historic Site of Canada.’ Directory of Federal Heritage Designations. — primary/official — Chee Kung Tong Building construction dates and 2008 designation
- HistoricPlaces.ca. ‘Barkerville National Historic Site of Canada.’ Canadian Register of Historic Places. — primary/official — Cariboo Wagon Road distance and 1865 completion, 1868 fire and 1958 provincial designation
- Barkerville Historic Town & Park. ‘Our Story.’ — primary/official — 125+ heritage buildings, Chinese population share, Chee Kung Tong operator claims, ‘largest living-history museum’ claim
- ‘Barkerville.’ The Canadian Encyclopedia. — editorial/secondary — Estimated $650,000 claim yield, confirmation of Chinese population share