By Barry Sale
Haphazard History
On occasion, I have been asked why I don’t write more stories about women during the Gold Rush. The answer is two-fold. First, there were very few women who made the arduous trip to the gold fields during the peak of the rush, and second, most accounts of those women who were present during that time have been lost to history.
The Cariboo Gold Rush really took off on Williams Creek in August of 1861. By the summer of 1862, it was estimated that some 2,000 miners were working the diggings, and there were likely around 20 non-First Nations women in the area. Is very difficult to estimate the number of First Nations women, because it was a common practice in the day for white gold seekers to take up with Indigenous women, occasionally against their wills, to do the cooking and cleaning, to help carry equipment and provisions, to assist in gathering food and hunting, and to share their beds. Many of these women were treated very poorly, virtually little more than slaves, some dying because of poor health and exposure and others becoming addicted to alcohol. When these women were no longer deemed to be useful, or when the miner decided to leave the goldfields, they were simply abandoned to their own devises. No records were ever kept of numbers, names or ancestry of these unfortunates.
By summer of 1864, the population in the goldfields had exploded to more than 5000, about 150 of this number being white or Chinese women. By this time, virtually all the ground had been staked, yet gold seekers kept arriving. Although some continued on, looking for gold to the north, most just gave up and returned to the coast. The towns which grew up to support the diggings provided a semblance of civilization, and businessmen with their wives and families arrived in good numbers. By the summer of 1866, there were in excess of 8,000 inhabitants in the region, including an estimated 3,000 Chinese and more than 300 white and Chinese women.
Many of the Chinese who made their way to the Williams Creek area had been workers on the Cariboo Wagon Road project. They formed a tight-knit community, tightly controlled by Chinese societies, known as Tongs. These Tongs opened brothels which catered to both white and Chinese miners and brought women over from China to staff them. (For a fee, they would also purchase a wife back in the old country to be brought over for any Chinese miner who could afford the price.) Typically, the women employed in the brothels served an indenture for four years, after which they were released from the contract. Many of these women remained in the area marrying a Chinese man or finding work as a laundress, cook or housekeeper.
After the great Barkerville fire of 1868, the population of the area dwindled somewhat, floating around the 5,000 mark, of which about 400 were women. These kinds of numbers continued on until the mid 1880s when the mines petered out and a general population decline ensued.
The white women who came to the gold fields in those early years were strong, resilient and tough. They had to be.
It was a man’s world, and proper, respectable women were expected to be subservient, demure and feminine. However, many of the women who arrived did not quite fit this mold. Some were independent entrepreneurs, often without male partners, who opened businesses such as hotels, boarding houses, saloons, brothels, sewing and millinery shops and eating places. Others were prostitutes, grifters, and scam artists who found creative ways to relieve the miners of their gold.
Gradually, as Barkerville and other towns in the goldfields became established, male shopkeepers, hotel owners, businessmen, and a few miners began relocating their families. These wives were the “respectable” women who would form the “backbone” of the society of the day, and who were considered in those Victorian times to be “a cut above” the common working women and those of the lower classes.
One of the earliest of the women to arrive in Barkerville was Anna Elizabeth (Lizzie) Roddie. She arrived in the fall of 1862 to assist her sister who was married to Richard Cameron, the operator of a stopping house and saloon in Richfield. (Mrs. Cameron had just given birth to the first white child in Barkerville.). Lizzie was a single, attractive young Irishwoman, and within a very short time, several potential suitors were expressing their interest.
The two leading contenders however, were Joseph Carruthers, a successful miner with his own claim on Williams Creek, and Alexander D. (Mac) McInnes, originally from Glasgow, who had been residing in Nanaimo and who had arrived in Barkerville in 1863 and purchased an interest in a successful mining claim. The courtship became serious when Lizzie accepted a marriage proposal from Carruthers, along with “a gift” – a share in his rich claim. Then unexpectedly, Lizzie changed her mind, and on an impulse, married McInnes. The jilted and angry Carruthers sued her for the return of the share in his mine but she refused, The matter was taken to court, where in front of Judge Mathew Begbie, Lizzie denied that “the gift” had anything whatsoever to do with the failed engagement. Begbie, however, disagreed, and ruled that she must return the claim share since he was sure that without the promise of marriage, Carruthers would not have offered her such a gift.
After their marriage, McInnes and Lizzie operated a boarding house in Cameronton, just to the north of Barkerville. They had three children, John (1866), Alexander (1868), and Mary (1869), all of whom were born in the hospital in Marysville, another small community on Williams Creek. In 1870, the family moved to Lightning Creek, where they managed a hotel at Van Winkle. There, second daughter, Anna, was born in 1873. McInnes always wanted a place of his own, away from the rough life of the gold rush towns, and in October of 1873, he purchased two lots immediately above the location of the original Fort Alexandria on the Fraser River. There, he established a stopping house right next to the Cariboo Wagon Road. The remains of several of his outbuildings can still be seen there just to the west of the Fort Alexandria cairn on today’s Highway 97.
The McInnes place did well during the 1870’s. The couple worked well together, with Lizzie running the roadhouse and doing the cooking, while Alex improved the land and buildings and operated the saloon. By 1880, when the Hudson’s Bay Company relinquished its claims on the land in the area, the McInnes stopping house was described as “a two-story log house of seven rooms,” along with “stabling for 40 horses, a granary, a blacksmith shop, a warehouse and chicken house.” By that time as well, McInnes had 140 acres under cultivation, all surrounded by two miles of fencing.
By all accounts, the McInnes place was a popular one with travelers as well as the locals. It was operated like an old country inn. Drinks were served at the tables set up in the main dining room, but as night, the alcohol was securely locked in a cupboard. Despite the hard work and never-ending chores, the family led a happy and simple existence, with a good deal of humor and laughter. Alex, who played the bagpipes, quite enjoyed occasionally walking up and down in front of the roadhouse playing them. It was said that the First Nations people who lived in the village below became quite terrified at the sounds which emerged.
After nearly 20 years of running the roadhouse at Alexandria, Lizzie passed away at the relatively young age of 53 in April of 1892. She was buried in the cemetery at the St. Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake, and her grave can still be seen there today. She was determined, hardworking, and independent person, very representative of the women who came to the Cariboo to carve out a new life for themselves, and, against all odds, succeeded.
For this column, I depended upon the writings of Marie Elliot and Branwen Patenaude.