I've had a very special couple of weeks. I was invited to go to Santa Clara California to participate in the Big Read Program....this is essentially a community-wide literacy promotion, similar programs take place throughout the country on an annual basis. The co-ordinating group in Santa Clara is a broad-based collective of represenatives from arts, history and educational organizations and groups, including the Santa Clara Unified School District, Santa Clara University, the Triton Museum of Art (Santa Clara), the Santa Clara Library as well as numerous other groups in the community. Santa Clara is famous for several things, it is the home of Yahoo and Intel and numerous other internet titans, but Santa Clara was also the home of Jack London's Buck, of The Call of the Wild fame....."Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. Judge Miller's place, it was called. It stood back from the road, half hidden among the trees.....and over this great demesne Buck ruled. Here he was born, and here he had lived the four years of his life".
The decision was made to use London's Call of the Wild to promote literacy during the Big Read. I was one of several speakers who were asked to present on some aspect of this story over the course of several weeks. I had the wonderful task of presenting on the topic of the sled dogs of the Klondike Gold Rush....it was a great experience. I hope to write about this in more detail in the next couple of months, but there is a more urgent, but related experience that I want to write about today.
Yesterday (April 9th), 8 local dog teams headed out to Barkerville for one last group run. The conditions were nothing short of spectacular. There is still 6 feet of snow on the groomed trails that climb the mountains behind Barkerville, the sun shone brightly, there was no open water and the scenery was fantastic....it was a very special day. Barkerville, on Williams Creek, was the site of Billy Barker's major gold find and this preserved gold rush town eventually served as the hub of the Cariboo Gold Fields which were developed as a result of the 1858 Cariboo Gold Rush. The stampeders that triggered this gold rush were essentially the same people who were responible for the California Gold Rush of the 1840's, the Fraser River Gold Rush of the 1850's, the Cassiar Gold Rush of the 1870's, the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890's and even the Rush to Nome in the early 1900's....the same group of prospectors (with thousands of re-enforcements) kept moving north in search of more gold.
Yesterday I was running my team along Williams Creek, I couldn't help but think of my recent Santa Clara experiences but particulary about the Klondike Gold Rush. I was definitely in a gold rush frame of mind. There is one significant difference between the Cariboo Gold Rush and the Klondike Gold Rush. It has been stated that without sled dogs there would not have been a Klondike Gold Rush. However, the fact is that sled dogs didn't figure in the Cariboo Gold Rush and this was for a few different reasons.
There is no First Nations history/tradition of using sled dogs in this area, during the winter travel was by snowshoe but generally First Nations people hunkered down for the winter in warm pit houses, living primarily on dried salmon and berries, there were no moose in the area and the caribou were high up on inaccessible mountain tops. The extremely heavy snowfalls in this region would have made dog travel (before the days of snowmobiles and groomers) almost impossible. But the main reason that sled dogs were not a big part of the Cariboo Gold Rush was that unlike most gold rushes, the Colonial government in Victoria actually built a road (the Cariboo Waggon Road) from southern British Columbia all the way to the gold fields which meant that horses (pulling wagons and sleighs) were the preferred means of transportation. Williams Creek is still being actively mined.
You are encouraged to look at http://www.williamscreekgoldfields.ca/ where you can find some wonderful photos of the historic shafts, drifts as well as pictures of the mining activities of Devlins Bench Mining Company. They also have a blog at http://devlinsbenchminingltd.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment