The Making of Lost in Barkerville

When my family and I moved to Burnaby in British Columbia, Canada, we decided to use our vacations to tour the province. It was at a time when gas was still cheap, so we would pack our trusted little red Volkswagen Golf and hit the road. 


First on our list were Vancouver Island and the Sunshine coast followed by the Okanagan Valley and the Canadian Rockies, and since my youngest son was a huge dinosaur fan, we also made a sojourn into Alberta to pay a visit to the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller. 


My husband had heard from a client about a ghost town up in the Cariboo called Barkerville and he thought we should consider that as our destination for the upcoming summer vacation. To be honest, I wasn’t terribly keen on going. When I lived in California, I had visited other ghost towns and hadn’t found them all that interesting. The prospect of another road trip through the spectacular BC landscape, however, made me reconsider. 


The road from Yale in BC north to Barkerville pretty much follows the route of the old Cariboo Wagon Road that figures so prominently in gold rush lore. Beginning with the turbulent rushing waters of the Fraser river, which has carved deep canyons and on to the wide plains and mountains of the Chilcotin the vistas, certainly didn’t disappoint.
 

After about two days driving, we finally reached Wells, a small mining and tourist town located about ten kilometres from Barkerville. What I remember most from Wells is how hard it was to find accommodations. Since it was at the height of the tourist season, available choices were very limited. At long last we managed to book a very spartan room which to our two sons’ dismay didn’t even have a television. Fortunately, they were tired from the long drive and went to sleep early. 


We arrived at Barkerville the next morning, right when the park opened. To my great surprise, I enjoyed the visit immensely. The staff, dressed in period costumes from the 1860s, made the experience so much more engaging. We learned about Cariboo Cameron, whose wife died of the typhoid, only for him to store her body in alcohol so it wouldn’t decay when she was transported back to her native Ontario for burial. Also, we heard about Billy Barker, who against everyone’s advice, sank a shaft where Barkerville now stands. At fifty-two feet he struck gold ore, thereby becoming a rich man.


The park board has done a tremendous job at restoring Barkerville back to its former glory. Obviously, this resurrected gold rush town is a bit better manicured and orderly than in its glory days, but you still get a good sense of what life must have been like in a pioneer town.


At one point during our day in Barkerville, I took a much-needed break while my husband and two sons went on a ride on the stagecoach. I sat with a cup of coffee and watched two boys about 13-14 years of age having a great time gold-panning. I began visualizing how these modern-day teenagers might fare in the harsh world of the gold rush era. It was an intriguing thought which kept occupying my mind during our trip home from Barkerville. It was clear to me that the only way I could transplant a group of twenty-first century characters into the 1860s would be through some mode of time travel, which usually is classified as SciFi even though I think there’s a case to be made for it also being categorized as Fantasy. I’ve tried my hand at writing fantasy in some of my earlier works, so the prospect didn’t really daunt me. What, however, did give me pause was the immense amount of research I would have to undertake. Any historical fiction I had written so far had mostly been rooted in the Viking age and Norse mythology. Being Danish, these were subjects I were familiar with, but my knowledge of BC history and the Victorian Age was rudimentary at best. 
     

I pushed the idea aside as something I might tackle in the future, but I had a hard time letting go of it. I caught myself thinking up characters, names and possible plots I might consider, and snippets of dialogue kept popping up in my mind. I picked up books from the library with time travel themes. Finally, I surrendered to the fact that this was a story that had to be written if I was ever going to have a moment’s peace again. 


It was time to begin the research, so I browsed the online library catalogue for anything written about the Cariboo Gold Rush. The next few months was a time of excitement since it’s always satisfying to learn something new, but it was also a time of frustration when certain information I was interested in kept eluding me. I definitely had to put all my librarian skills to use.  


When I do research, I like to read through the material and write down important information in a notebook. The information is grouped into short paragraphs written in a concise manner and within each of these paragraphs I highlight the main subject matter. This notebook I always have in front of me when I write so I can refer to it for information when needed.


During my reading, I came across the story about Charles Morgan Blessing, a Bostonian, who disappeared when he was on his way up to Barkerville in the spring of 1866. His travel companion, since it was safer in those times to travel in groups, was a black barber named Moses who himself was on his way to Barkerville from New Westminster. Moses noticed Blessing sporting an unusual tiepin made of a gold nugget shaped like a man’s profile. 
On the way, the two men met James Barr, who decided to accompany them. At Quesnel, Moses decided to stay for a couple of days in town to make some money offering his barber services to the residents. The other two men continued on without Moses. Blessing and the barber agreed that they would meet up later in Barkerville, but when Moses arrived in town, Blessing wasn’t there. Moses sought out Barry, who told him that Blessing had decided to turn around because of a sore foot. 


Moses, however, began to suspect foul play when one of his customers turned up at his barbershop wearing Blessing’s gold nugget pin. The customer claimed that one of the hurdy-gurdies (dance girls) had given it to him. When Moses went to ask her, she told him she had gotten it from Barry. 


Moses told the judge in Richfield about it and the judge sent a constable to arrest Barry, who at that time had made it to Soda Creek. In August 1867 Matthew Baillie Begbie, a prominent judge during the gold rush years, found Barry guilty of murder and he was subsequently hanged for the crime. I found this story fascinating and decided that I wanted to incorporate a murder in my story’s plot.


The next step was to decide on my main characters. The two teenagers, Zach and Kyle, came fairly easily to me. Zach would be the more sensible and perceptive of the two, whereas Kyle had street smarts, together with a quick temper that would at times land him in trouble, but I kept feeling that there should be a third person, someone entirely different from the boys. I thought of adding a girl their age, but that seemed cliché. The possibility of a woman much older than them did however appeal to me. Someone principled and at the same time enterprising and not easily duped. At first, I thought that this character might be Zach’s aunt, but I reconsidered because the idea of three virtual strangers thrown together due to unusual circumstances appealed to me. This way, they would have to learn about each others’ strengths and then work through their challenges together. It would be an added dimension to the story. Consequently, Eliza Reid, a thirty-six year old single English teacher became my third time-traveler. 


My biggest hurdle was figuring out how to transport Zach, Kyle and Miss Reid back and forth between the twenty-first century and the era of the Cariboo Gold Rush. After several unsatisfactory attempts, I eventually settled on doors as portals between the different worlds. 


During my research, I especially had enjoyed reading about the old Cariboo Road, which ran from what was at that time called Fort Yale and eventually reached all the way to Barkerville. It was an absolute engineering marvel, considering the route it took through some of the most rugged and dangerous terrain in British Columbia. Especially that first part must have been a nail biter when wagons, mule trains and stagecoaches navigated a road that had in places been blasted from the side of a mountain. How terrifying an experience it must have been to have a solid rock wall on one side and dizzying drops down to the Fraser or Thompson rivers on the other. 


I wanted my characters to travel this road and knew then that Fort Yale was where my time warp should be.
The church of St. John the Divine in Yale is one of the oldest landmarks in town and was built in 1863, three years before my story takes place, so it seemed logical to use this church as the place where the jump in time would take place.


The rest of the cast of fictional characters in Lost in Barkerville were relatively easy to come up with and interspersing them with the historical figures I used in the book turned out to be less challenging than I initially had thought.