Pioneer Churches along the Gold Rush Trail: An Explorer’s Guide

By Liz Bryan

A fascinating tour through BC’s historical gold rush trails, focusing on the nineteenth-century churches that were pivotal to the establishment of early settler communities.

Much has been written about the Cariboo gold rush—from the trails and wagon roads to the rowdy mining camps, from tales of great luck to those of disappointment and despair. This book paints a different picture of those pioneer days. It is a guide to the nineteenth-century churches that were built during the gold rush or in the settlement days that followed. Most of these historic structures were handmade of local wood, though they differed greatly in size and style. Some are now abandoned, untenanted but still worthy of inspection. All were built to fill the spiritual need of the European migrants who flooded to the area, to nurture a sense of community that survived even after the gold was gone.

Filled with beautiful colour photography and detailed maps, Pioneer Churches along the Gold Rush Trail highlights the history, geography, architecture, craftsmanship, and social context of dozens of gold rush–era churches, preserving them, in their varying states of decay, for posterity. While acknowledging the destructive forces of colonialism, including Christianity, on Indigenous Peoples, this book also examines the historical role of churches in community building and invites the reader to consider this dichotomy with an open and curious mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heritage House
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781772034028

Liz Bryan

Liz Bryan is a journalist, author, photographer, and co-founder of Western Living magazine. Bryan has written several books, including Pioneer Churches of Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea: An Explorer’s Guide (which was a finalist for the Lieutenant Governor's Historical Writing Competition), River of Dreams: A Journey through Milk River Country, and Stone by Stone: Exploring Ancient Sites on the Canadian Plains.

Book preview

1The Gold Rush Trails

Most miners arrived by boat at Victoria early in 1858 not fully realizing that the gold-bearing rivers and rich mines of the Cariboo were far, far away, in the distant reaches of uncharted wilderness. The Fraser River led the way into the Interior, but while there were a few trails carved out by the Indigenous Peoples of the area, and later fur traders, there were neither established roads nor organized transportation from the Coast to the Interior at the time. The miners and their pack animals just had to literally hoof it. James Douglas, the governor of the newly minted Mainland Colony of British Columbia, saw this as a huge problem not only for the miners but also for future settlement plans. A contingent of Royal Engineers hand-picked for their practical skills had been sent from Britain to assist with surveying and construction, and they were primed to work on the roads first. But where did the best route lie? There were two main trails to choose from.

The Douglas Trail

Douglas decided that to get things done fast, the first road should bypass the horrific Fraser Canyon and take a more expedient route, following an old hbc pack trail along a chain of back-country lakes and rivers from near Hope all the way to the upper Fraser at Lillooet. He would later order steamboats to be built for lake travel along the route.

Work on what was first called the Lakes Trail (later renamed the Douglas Trail in honour of James Douglas) began right away. The Engineers first had to deepen the silty channel between the Fraser and the mouth of the Harrison River so that boats could more easily travel to the head of Harrison Lake, where a new settlement named Port Douglas would be built. Surveying and building of the road would begin at the Harrison Lake wharf.

Five hundred miners planning to overwinter in Victoria were cajoled into joining the work crew. They each deposited twenty-five dollars and were then shipped to Port Douglas, given food and shelter while they worked on the trail, and given the value of their deposit in supplies (from the hbc stores) when the trail reached modern-day Lillooet. The work began in August. The miners worked feverishly toward their head start, a river terrace where Cayoosh Creek enters the Fraser in the land of the St'át'imc Nation. The Indigenous villages along the river here are some of the oldest continuously inhabited places in bc.

Despite the need for sixty-two bridges and wharves at all the portage points, the trail was finished in October. The miners’ camp of Cayoosh, later known as Lillooet, became Mile 0 on the road north along the Fraser.

Port Douglas and other settlements between the lakes mushroomed, and for several years the new trail was the preferred route to mining country. Passengers and supplies went by boat on the lakes and portaged between them, but heavier freight, drawn by teams of oxen, traipsed the entire way along the lakeside trails. The trans-shipment process was slow and inconvenient, though, and this route was later supplanted by the Cariboo Wagon Road from Yale. Steamboat service to Port Douglas was discontinued in the 1890s, though passenger and freight boats ran on both Anderson and Seton lakes until well after the end of the Second World War.

Today, only portions of the Douglas Trail remain, but threaded together by modern roads they make up one of bc’s earliest and most historic trails. Several communities along its way have churches to see—one of them, the Church of the Holy Cross at Skatin, is perhaps the highlight of this book. The route to the church is mostly unpaved, adventurous, and lonely, even in summer. But along this dusty route, the hoofbeats of history are not hard to hear.

Cariboo Wagon Road

In 1862, the Cariboo Wagon Road, the stuff of legends, was blasted through the canyons above Fort Yale, the head of river transportation. A costly and daring (perhaps even reckless) project, the first part—the trickiest—was built by the Royal Engineers. Later work was assigned to private contractors. At first, the road closely followed the Fraser, cutting its way along vertical river cliffs to Mile 0 at Lillooet, but soon it was decided that a better road could be laid from Lytton by following the Thompson River to Cache Creek. Here, the Thompson met the hbc fur-brigade route from Fort Kamloops and turned north along today’s Highway 97. From Yale to Cache Creek, this part of the old trail later became part of the Trans-Canada Highway.

At the height of the gold rush and the days of fast stagecoaches to Barkerville, the Cariboo Road, with its large hostelries and river bridges instead of ferries, was the only way to go. Improved and paved over the years, much of it no longer follows the original route exactly, but it is still an interesting and scenic road with plenty of gold rush history to be found. There are old settlements, roadhouses, pioneer churches, farms, ranches, and Indigenous villages. And at the end of the road is Barkerville, a wonderful reincarnation of the greatest gold rush town of all.

An old map posted outside the historic

bc

Express Company office in Ashcroft shows the main trails to the goldfields.

Early miners passing through the rough-and-tumble gold settlements along the historic trails had little interest in churches—their eyes were on earthly treasure. But Christian missionaries—some of whom had been in the country years before with the fur trade—followed behind them, bringing their beliefs and ceremonies to First Nations villages, settlers’ homes and ranches, the first little towns, and even the outdoors, under the heavenly blue of a bc sky. Later, small chapels and some fine churches were built, many of them on First Nations reserves. Most of the latter have graveyards that at first glance seem far too large—until one remembers the great epidemics of smallpox and influenza, diseases brought in by the newcomers that struck down so many Indigenous communities. The churches and graveyards along the trails are part of gold rush history too.

2Fraser Valley Churches

Miners en route from the Coast to the Cariboo had to travel up the Fraser Valley, either on foot or by boat, and Fort Langley was their first stop for supplies: all the trails, such as they were, led here, and steamboats arrived regularly from Victoria. The landing stage for Fort Langley was a short distance downriver from the fort itself—near the site of an earlier fort, built in 1827. It was here that the first townsite in the Valley was established, named for Lord Derby, then prime minister of Great Britain. St. John the Divine, built here in 1859, was the first Christian church on the Mainland. Others soon followed: several in New Westminster (in 1860, 1863, and 1865) and in Port Douglas and Hope (in 1861).

Many of the early churches in southern bc were funded by Anglican and Methodist missions, but the Catholic Oblates were the first: their missionaries arrived in New Caledonia as early as the 1840s and travelled to most of the hbc posts throughout the north. In 1860, they built two churches in New Westminster—St. Peter’s and St. Charles (neither of which survived the great fire of 1898)—and in 1863, led by Father Durieu, they completed St. Mary’s, the first Catholic chapel in the central Fraser Valley, as part of their large mission complex in the riverside town known today simply as Mission. Little of the complex remains: the large school on the premises was pulled down in 1965, but the graveyard and small shrine are still a most sacred destination.

As agricultural settlement increased, so too did the number of churches throughout the valley, but this book will focus on those on or near the gold rush trails or in the early settlements that grew up during the gold rush years. All the churches in the Fraser Valley can be accessed by short detours off the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 1) heading east from Vancouver.

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral (1860) (1868) (1902)

514 Carnarvon Street,

New Westminster

604-521-2511

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral was born in the rubble of a huge logging camp on a steep, thickly forested slope beside the Fraser River. All that was here in 1859 was a great mess of fallen trees and muddy trails and a handful of log shacks, but Colonel Richard Moody, commander of the Royal Engineers, had plans for a great city, the new capital of the colony, with crescent-shaped streets, squares, parks, and promenades—a little bit of jolly old England. And right in the centre, he allotted space for a grand Anglican church, one destined to become a magnificent cathedral.

The base of the tower is of stone, a remnant of the earlier church burnt in the New Westminster fire. Above it, the brick bell loft still holds one of the original bells.

Holy Trinity Church was built by the Engineers in 1860. George Hills, the colony’s first Anglican bishop, tracked its progress: he inspected the site in February, laid the cornerstone (a block of granite under the massive timber sills) in May, and returned for its consecration in early December. The building was made entirely of local wood. People remarked on its solid fir uprights and rafters, with Gothic arches between the aisles and fronting the chancel. Its pews were made of fir, nicely trimmed with redwood. A year or so later, a tower was added to house a peal of eight bronze bells given by Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts, an ardent Church of England supporter and well-known philanthropist.

The main body of the church with its angled apse and Gothic windows is faced with stucco.

Inside, looking towards the altar, one can see the intricate construction system of Gothic arches supported on columns of black stone.

In 1865, when New Westminster was just starting to look a bit like a city, the church burned to the ground. It was replaced by another, designed by a Victoria architect named H.O. Tiedemann. Work on the new Holy Trinity began in 1867 and finished in 1868. It was built of durable Salt Spring Island sandstone and was designated a cathedral in 1892. But this church too fell victim to flames, in New Westminster’s great fire of 1898, though this time much of the structure was saved. Building on the basic bones of its earlier stone walls and foundations, an architect named George Grant created a fine Gothic Revival church with a semicircular apse and a tall square tower of brick and stone with crenellated battlements that were reminiscent of an English castle.

The interior, based on that of St. Paul’s Church in Kensington, England, replicates the stone pillars, high vaulted ceiling, and Gothic arches of the previous church. Walls in the nave are white, but the shell of the apse is painted a soft green, offsetting the brilliance of the stained glass windows, the work of local master craftsmen Henry Bloomfield and Son. Organ pipes, set on both sides of the chancel, add their gleam to the visual feast.

Relics saved from the old church include the brass lectern, given by Governor James Douglas in 1875, the altar cross and credence table, and the embroidered banner on the carved wood pulpit, all gifts from London’s Westminster Abbey. Only one of the eight church bells survived the fire. Named Wisdom, it still hangs in the tower.

The cathedral’s story is tightly bound into the volumes of New Westminster’s own history. The first capital city of the new Colony of bc, and named by Queen Victoria in 1859, it owed everything to the Royal Engineers. Colonel Moody selected its location and drew up an ambitious city layout, and his troops cleared the site, surveyed its roads, and designed and even built most of its buildings. Moody established troop headquarters just upstream of the city and had a residence built for himself, his wife Mary, and their four children. Because the Engineers were known as Sappers, the military base became known as Sapperton.

The stone font, carved with Tudor roses, sits beside the organ pipes. Note the beautiful wall patterns; the brass lectern on the pulpit was given to the church by James Douglas in 1875. The embroidered banner and the altar cross came from Westminster Cathedral in London,

uk

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