The lawyer who pursued golden dreams across the globe, and what he left behind

First came Australia. Then California. Then, finally, the Fraser Canyon. Three gold rushes changed the shape of the western world. And William Kelly saw them all.

A British lawyer with a thirst for gold towns and the idea of striking it rich, Kelly arrived in BC having made a name for himself as an author writing about gold fever across the world. In Yale, he found something a little different—not just a dream of easy riches, and a river that both supplied and obstructed that goal.

Because how do you navigate the Fraser Canyon in a boat? That was the challenge that confronted him and others, and which may have left a unique replica in a Yale home 150-odd years later.

Today, we are excerpting a chapter of Daniel Marshall’s new book, Untold Tales of Old British Columbia.

The following is a chapter of Daniel Marshall’s new book, Untold Tales of Old British Columbia. You can buy the book at local retailers or online here.

A story in a steam-ship hull

Over the years I was fortunate to stay at one of the oldest houses still standing along the Lower Fraser River from the gold rush period: the historic Teague House of Yale.

Built in the 1860s, this extraordinarily well-preserved home had a succession of colourful owners, but primarily the family of William Teague. Like thousands of others, Teague had been swept up by the Fraser River excitement of 1858. Teague mined at Cornish (or Murderer’s) Bar, south of Hope, and soon held a number of early government appointments, from police officer to gold commissioner to government agent.

Many a night I would sit on the old veranda overlooking not only the mighty Fraser River, but also the original Hope to Yale road that my great-great-great-uncle William rebuilt in the 1870s.

As both Teague and my ancestor were ’58ers and from Cornwall, England, it was easy to imagine these two sharing the occasional cup of tea at this very home — a home still filled with Teague’s books and other possessions, even his original top hat!

But there is one fascinating curiosity that has gripped my attention for decades: mounted on a 19th-century plaque, there hangs a sternwheeler steamship hull, the darkened colour of the wood from which it was fashioned hinting at its significant age.

“What is the story of this amazing piece?” I asked my friends Sue and Darwin Baerg of Fraser River Raft Expeditions, the owners of Teague House at the time.

“Oh that!” they said, their eyes sparkling. “It came with the house and the descendants of the Teague family. They say it has always been here.” Beyond that nobody seemed to remember much more about it — but I think now, years later, that I may have uncovered some significant clues!

Yale was the height of steamboat navigation on the Fraser River (steam-boats could go no farther than Yale) but even Yale was initially unreachable in the early months of the gold rush. The strong currents and shallow portions of this immense stream prevented most of the first ships from reaching the epicentre of the third greatest rush of gold seekers in recorded history.

The original steamers, coming quickly from Oregon and the Columbia River (and later San Francisco), could only make it as far as Fort Hope. To get beyond Hope, early gold seekers relied heavily on the expertise of Indigenous peoples who offered canoe transport of both miners and goods to Fort Yale.

The boomtown of neighbouring Whatcom, on Bellingham Bay in Washington Territory, threatened to supplant Victoria as the major control point of the new El Dorado, in large measure due to an American initiative to blaze a trail across the forty-ninth parallel to the adjacent goldfields.

In short order, Coast Salish peoples (particularly the Stó:lō Nation) were employed to cut firewood and act as deckhands. Their vast years of river experience by canoe was invaluable. One in particular, “Captain John,” piloted steamboats, and according to his own reminiscences (given in Chinook and translated in 1898), he amassed some $2,000 from his labours.

Jason Allard, son of Hudson’s Bay Company chief trader Ovid Allard, recalled the first time the Indigenous pilot was taken aboard the American steamer Surprise, anchored off Fort Langley in June 1858. “The pilot was an Indian named Speel-Set. He went aboard the Surprise barefooted and wearing only a blanket. When he returned he came as ‘Captain’ John dressed in a pilot cloth suit, white hat and calf skin boots, the proudest Indian in the country. More over the sum of $160 was paid through Mr. [James] Yale for the pilot’s services — eight twenty dollar gold pieces. The boats thereafter ran to Hope more or less regularly.”

Editor: Captain John was actually a Sq’éwlets named Chief Scult-la-ment. You can read more about him here.

While the participation of Indigenous peoples was key to the early transportation needs of the gold rush, increasing numbers of gold seekers demanded more efficient and greater lines of supply, and there also was a growing concern to conquer the swift currents and treacherous rapids above Hope with new ships built and fortified for the express purpose of reaching Yale.

Enter William Kelly, a transnational gold-seeker who in 1849 had crossed the American Plains to California, then went to Australia in 1852 and subsequently headed to British Columbia in 1858.

An Irish-born lawyer (I have searched in vain for a photograph of him), Kelly published his account of travels to the California goldfields — a book that subsequently inspired the legendary explorer Sir Richard Burton to follow in Kelly’s footsteps. In fact, Burton subsequently nominated Kelly for membership in Britain’s prestigious Royal Geographical Society, and he became a fellow member in the early 1860s. Joining this august group would be beneficial to Kelly a few years later.

While in St. Louis, Missouri, Kelly remarked on the allure of gold in California:

Kelly also published on his experiences in Australia — he was a regular commentator in the press — and notably argued for Chinese inclusion in the goldfields. The mania described by Kelly is exactly what occurred less than ten years later in the Fraser River rush. When the Fraser River excitement hit, he — like so many others — was once again swept into the mania that quickly transformed what would become British Columbia, a transformative influence that also shape-shifted other economies of the North Pacific Slope: Washington, Oregon and California.

Kelly, already heading to British Columbia before his second book on Australia was published, forecasted from afar the richness of the new El Dorado of the north in Life in Victoria (1859):

Arriving in British Columbia in 1858, Kelly established himself in a small shack in Yale, hanging his shingle out as a lawyer. He became good friends with David W. Higgins, later the Speaker of the B.C. legislature, who had also caught the gold bug and decamped from San Francisco in the same year.

Higgins described his first encounter with the argonaut of the Californian and Australian rushes. In his book The Mystic Spring (1904) he recorded that he had become homesick for San Francisco, wandering along the foreshore of the town of Yale:

Kelly, veteran of the Californian and Australian rushes, took the young Higgins in hand:

Kelly had quickly perceived that unlike gold rushes in California and Australia, B.C. was hampered by its transportation links to the outside world, and particularly with getting steamers up past Hope. Steamboat technology made the northern goldfields comparatively accessible; a gold seeker in San Francisco could walk down a gangplank, board a ship, travel to Victoria and take another steamer across the Salish Sea (known then as the Strait of Georgia) to enter the mighty Fraser River. Imagine that!

To make that final leg onto the beaches of Yale, one great difficulty had to be surmounted — and Kelly, among others, proposed the solution: specially prepared and powerful shallow-hull steamers that could conquer the rapids and swift currents beyond Hope.

One of the main reasons the Fraser gold rush subsided quickly was the lack of infrastructure: roads, bridges and steamers that could push forward and supply lines of essential goods for an ever-expanding and far-removed field of gold strikes. There is much more to Kelly’s story than I have presented here, but on the question of improved steamboat communication, Kelly ultimately left Yale and British Columbia to make his case to the Royal Geographical Society in 1861–62.

Kelly’s presentation, entitled “British Columbia and the Proposed Route from Pembina to Yale” is found in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society (Session 1861–62). In some ways it is a promotional piece that encouraged emigration while noting B.C.’s disadvantaged position compared to Australia and the United States. Of more particular interest, on May 12, 1862, Kelly exhibited “A Model of a stern-wheel Steamboat, adapted for the navigation of the Fraser River.”

Was this the curious model that hangs in the Teague House — or perhaps a copy of the same such model?

Apparently, the art of making half-hulls is as old as shipbuilding itself and the shipbuilders’ half-hull model was in common use. Half-hull models were originally made as a design tool but also as a marketing and investment display. Often several models were made before the completion of a full-size ship. To my mind, Kelly presented one such copy of a shallow-hulled model at the Royal Geographical Society, and I have a hunch that the curious Teague House antique may well be the other half of Kelly’s exhibit.

What happened to William Kelly after his presentation to the society’s members? Oddly, after having published widely on his expedition to California and his experiences in Australia, Kelly abruptly disappeared. Apparently he had been writing yet another volume of travels — this time to the Fraser River goldfields and British Columbia. This work was neither completed nor published.

Again, what happened to this transnational gold seeker?

If we once again turn to the recollections of his friend David Higgins, a persuasive answer is found:

Higgins himself never found out what became of his companion, but I discovered that apparently Kelly died some ten years after being conned, on March 4, 1872, in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France.

As one of the principal characters in his book The Mystic Spring, Higgins never forgot the well-travelled Irish lawyer. When Higgins returned to Yale many decades later, he was still thinking about him:

Having scoured the Yale waterfront for the last many decades, I believe I know where this giant rock is. I have comfortably perched atop it myself on many occasions where my own daydreams and historical speculations — the kind that have led to this story — were encouraged, perhaps particularly so, because it was the main docking point for all those steamboats to Yale that Kelly had dreamed of; to this day, a great substantial iron ring remains embedded in the rock, where shallow-hulled sternwheelers like Kelly envisaged once securely tied.

How is it that stories like his are forgotten? How is it that we know so little of such a prominent transnational gold seeker and know so little about our foundational experience of a gold rush that, for a moment in time, so caught the attention of the world it was about to potentially eclipse the California experience?

Kelly’s story and the sternwheeler model of Yale are clues to this extraordinary past. But perhaps it is no surprise that British Columbia has lost so much of its early memory. After all, gold rushes have produced some of the most transient populations to have ever wandered the globe — the largely unknown William Kelly among them.

This is an excerpt from Daniel Marshall’s new book, Untold Tales of Old British Columbia. You can buy the book at local retailers or online here.