Founded in 1862, Barkerville was "The Gold Capital of British Columbia". Here Billy Barker dug a Gold Mine Shaft and discovered the mother lode. During the summer months the town comes alive with a guided tours of the town, Chinatown and the cemetery. There are mining demonstrations, street interpreters, stage coach rides, restaurants, gift shops, photo gallery, bakery, live theatre - the Theatre Royal of Barkerville, gold panning at Eldorado Gold, numerous demonstrations and over 125 restored or reconstructed buildings with displays to view.
More details about the town and its attractions can be found at: www.barkerville.ca.
This Earthcache focuses on what lies beneath; the part the tourists don't usually learn much about. Coordinates are "fuzzy" and lead no where important - they just indicate the general location of Barkerville. Logging Requirements at the end. Please read and follow the Logging Requirements.
BC Mining Division records list WILLIAMS CREEK, BLACK JACK, FOREST ROSE, SAN JUAN, FIRST OF MAY, DEVLIN BENCH, HURDY as the major claims in Barkerville area. These claims carry the status of "Past Producer" but that hardly describes the importance of what happened here.
Billy Barker, who already had failed at mining during the California gold rush, staked a number of claims near Williams Creek beginning in 1861 -- without much success. Most of the other gold miners thought Billy was crazy when he broke away from the crowd and started to dig a shaft in what was considered a gold-barren area called Stout's Gulch near Williams creek.
On Aug. 17, 1862, Barker and his seven partners hit a gold vein 52 feet down the shaft and in two days dug out more than 60 ounces of gold worth roughly $1,000. Barker, it was rumored, had dreamed earlier about the significance of the number 52, the same number of the claim he was digging. Other accounts say he struck gold at 40 feet and recovered an ounce of gold for every three pans of dirt. Barker's strike is universally credited with starting a gold rush in the region that lasted almost eight years. More than 125,000 gold seekers traveled the Cariboo wagon road during the rush, many destined for Barkerville and surrounding areas.
Of course Barker was instantly rich, so to honor his achievement the instant town was named after the hard-drinking former canal worker from England. "Barkerville" became the largest community in BC with a population that peaked at about 10,000. Barkerville was the largest community North of San Francisco and West of Chicago at the time.
Barker had luck but little business sense. He loaned most of his money to other miners who either couldn't or wouldn't pay him back. He also was a notorious partier, and drank up most of the proceeds from the claim he sold in 1864 less than two years after his strike. Penniless, but still with a whole town named after him, Barker died of cancer in 1894 in Victoria (age unclear) and was buried in a pauper's grave, which wasn't appropriately marked until 1962.
Unlike many gold towns with a short history, Barkerville area boomed 3 times (1862 - 1872), (1898-1910), and (1932-1942) during periods of higher gold prices. Small scale placer mining continues today in the area as modern day prospectors try to find what Barker and his fellow miners missed.
Earthcaches are a form of Virtual Cache designed to encourage learning about our earth. Logging Requirements (please post to this cache page all three things):
1. Post a Photo to this page of your Team in Barkerville – somewhere that clearly shows you physically visited the town/mining area.
2. Post some information in your log here that you learned about geology or placer gold mining in the town. Good places to look are in the visitor center or by talking to local staff.
3. Find the Sheepskin Mine located at the edge of town and, if you are there in the summer, attend the presentation. Answer this question in your post here: Would (or did) you invest in the Sheepskin Mine? Why or why not?
As with all Earthcaches there is no log book. For this Earthcache there is no secret answers so I don't need email confirmation from you. Just put it all in your online log. Hope you both enjoy and learn something in Barkerville.
A technical explanation of the geology:
Placer gold deposits of the Quesnel Highland region, including the former rich producers of the Barkerville camp, have accounted for a large proportion of British Columbia's alluvial gold production. With the exception of a few producers in the Wingdam area, which are underlain by Upper Triassic sediments correlative with the Nicola Group, almost all the deposits are underlain by the Upper Proterozoic to Lower Paleozoic Snowshoe Group. These predominantly metasedimentary rocks have been metamorphosed to greenschist facies. Placer gold deposits in the region are generally found in relatively young Pleistocene gravels. The morphology and mineral associations of the gold suggests that it was derived locally, the most obvious sources are the numerous auriferous veins in the Downey succession of the Snowshoe Group. Williams Creek was one of the richest placer producing creeks in the Barkerville area. Several properties were located along the creek over a distance of about six kilometres. A rich pay-streak occurred on bedrock in a buried channel and there was at least one interglacial pay-streak. Most of the production was probably by hydraulicking but there was also a considerable amount of drift mining done especially during the early days. "Data from the Cariboo mining district indicate that supergene leaching of gold dispersed within massive sulphides by Tertiary deep weathering followed by Cenozoic erosion is the most likely explanation for the occurrence of coarse gold nuggets in Quaternary sediments" (Exploration in British Columbia 1989, page 147).
The Cariboo is a deeply dissected region with low rounded hills and an irregular pattern of streams, creeks and gulches. The weathering and erosion that gave rise to the dissection of the country evidently originated in early Tertiary time and extended throughout that period. In Pleistocene time a stagnant ice sheet lay over the land, removing much of the weathered mantle at higher elevations but having little effect on the placer deposits in most of the valleys. The bedrock is folded and faulted phyllite, quartzite, argillite, slate and limestone of the lower Paleozoic Cariboo Group. These enclose a host of quartz bodies ranging from stringers, blows and boudins to fairly well defined quartz-vein zones and siliceous replacements in the limestones. All these deposits are auriferous, some of the vein zones and siliceous replacements having been mined extensively. The principal minerals in the auriferous deposits are pyrite, galena, chalcopyrite, sphalerite, cosalite, bismuthinite, arsenopyrite, pyrrhotite, scheelite and free gold. The placers of the Cariboo (Barkerville) district, discovered in 1860, are now largely exhausted after having yielded probably over 2.5 million ounces of gold.
The principal productive creeks were Williams and Lightning, but a number of shorter creeks produced considerable quantities of gold. Several types of auriferous gravels are found in the district, and the gold has had a complex history following its release from the deposits and rocks during extensive oxidation and erosion in Tertiary time. First there was an extensive accumulation of gravels and gold in the valleys during a gradual period of Tertiary uplift. This was followed in Pleistocene time by the development of valley glaciers and stagnant ice sheet, the later protecting the Tertiary gravels from scouring and destruction. Slight uplift after the disappearance of the glaciers rejuvenated the streams forming auriferous gravels.
Thanks to: http://www.minelinks.com/alluvial/deposits15.html for portions of the technical data. Historical info gathered from www.barkerville.ca and other sites.
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