The Chinese in Lillooet

BC Archives # E-02377  Photo: A.W.A. Phair	BC Archives # E-02379  Photo: A.W.A. Phair	BC Archives #E-02381  Photo: A.W.A. Phair
BC Archives # E-02378  Photo: A.W.A. Phair	Many notable pioneer-era BC Chinese families have roots in the Lillooet and Cariboo goldfields and merchant communities, although this is mostly forgotten today.  Chinese merchants became well-established on The Golden Mile from Lillooet's earliest days, and stayed on to prosper in the years after the Gold Rush, even as the town slipped into relative obscurity.  Many became quite well-off either as a result of their gold workings or because of merchant activities in town, or in one very notable case, ranching, and later on as market gardeners; Chinese enterprises were prominent on the Golden Mile as pictures of that commercial strip often show, as does a perusal of business directories for various years.  Some of the more successful hired the town photographers for formal portraits to be sent back to their families in China (above).  I would be grateful if anyone knowledgeable of Chinese history in BC happening to be visiting this site could help me identify (replace "_at_" in address with @ symbol) the gentlemen whose pictures are shown here, as their identities are unknown in the BC Archives catalogue.  As time permits I will be adding a directory of all known pioneer families to this site, including Chinese merchants and others whose names appear in the historic records of the region, and biographies of the more notable Chinese pioneers will be found with other personal histories of local note on the biographies page..

Lillooet's Chinatown

Like many frontier-era towns in BC's wild Interior, Lillooet had its own Chinatown, dating back (like the town itself) to the Fraser River Gold rush of 1858.  Unofficial census figures for 1862, when Lillooet's initial heyday during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush were over, and most prospectors had headed north for the booming Cariboo Gold Rush around Barkerville, show that the Chinese were the largest part of the non-native community in Lillooet at the time.  Compiled by Port Douglas Magistrate J. Boles-Gaggin for the town of Lillooet show 97 Chinese, 44 US citizens, 33 British subjects and 20 Mexicans; native people in the town of Lillooet at the time numbered roughly 700, but this figure likely does not include native people not living "in town".  During the height of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush (fall of '58 through to '61 or so) all these figures can be expected to be multiplied a few times; during the 1880s and 1890s and through until the 1920s, the Chinese population in Lillooet and along the Cayoosh Creek goldfields and elsewhere in the region boomed, numbering in the several hundreds, perhaps well over one thousand.  Chinatown was in an area most locals now call VLA Flats, after the Veterans' Land Authority which displaced the dwellings and market gardens of the historic old Chinese community, and re-allocated the land to returning war veterans after World War II.  Chinatown also included the back "alley" which runs between Main Street along the BCR tracks.  After World War II, many of the Japanese internee families who decided to stay in Lillooet wound up living in this same area (between Main Street and the tracks), notably the Yada family, who remained in the grocery business locally until recently (?) with a home on the alley behind their Main Street grocery-cum-department store.
BC Archives # A-04281 BC Archives # E-06947
Chinatown was located just behind and below the Golden Mile on the slope and benchland between Main Street and the Fraser, and from there extended along a hilly not-quite-benchland area towards the Old Bridge.  It was in Chinatown that most of Lillooet's adobe houses were mostly located, suggesting that the Mexican packers who brought the technique north with them must have lived among the Chinese and other non-whites among the gold rush populations - it seems probable that the Chinese adopted the Mexican construction techniques, which aren't that different from ordinary clay/mud or brickwork as is common in traditional Chinese peasant construction, but more likely they took over homes built by their original Mexican builders.  Some of the BC Archives pictures below are of the same houses but separate images of them are catalogued under "Adobe Houses" but also under "Lillooet Chinatown".  Not only Chinese and Mexicans chose adobe for building materials, though - the house below at left, shown under construction and completed, was the residence of the Russell family.  I'm not sure of its location - between Chinatown and the Old Bridge I think.
More Adobe Houses
BC Archives # I-29070 BC Archives # H-01008
BC Archives # H-01007 BC Archives # A-03539 The slope on the street in front of the adobe home at left suggests to me that it's on the road down from Main Street to what's now VLA flats; another hint of this is the embankment visible between the house and the tree at left, which would be the steep flank of the railway right-of-way.
BC Archives # B-02464 The BC Archives caption for this photo say simply "Lillooet", and features St. Mary's church in the foreground (where the Lillooet Museum is today) but in reality and despite its poor resolution it gives one of the best views of Chinatown in its peak during the 1890s.  The larger buildings at extreme far left are stores and other commercial buildings lining Main Street or on the allye behind it, many of them Chinese-owned.  Everything to the right of them - nearly everything visible other than St. Mary's - is Chinatown, and as you can see it was a very large Chinatown indeed - probably Lillooet town's largest at the time, with a near-urban density of housing not seen again until after World War II, and really not even since then.

The Quest for Jade and Gold
BC Archives # C-01201
The Chinese miners in the Lillooet country distinguished themselves in their placer workings by their assiduous cleaning of diggings and tailings.  Remains of Chinese placer mining activity are visible today throughout the district as neatly stacked piles of washed rocks.   Starting in 1884, Chinese miners began taking millions in gold out of Cayoosh Creek near to town, in the area between the Fraser River and Cayoosh Canyon.   Word of the strike was spread at first, and quietly, within the Chinese community of the Cariboo and Canyon goldfield towns, with the result being that by the time non-native miners (and government tax assessors) realized what was going on, all available claims between the Fraser and lower Cayoosh Canyon were staked by the Chinese and no one else.  Government officials of the day did not at first realize the scale of the finds and only began to visit the claims on a regular basis in 1887 or so, so the full size of the find is not known.
An estimate by Artie Phair puts the total take of the Cayoosh Creek goldfield in the range of $7 million, an incredible sum in the 1880s!  Chinese staking ended at  point about six miles above Cayoosh Falls (since dammed for private hydro power as part of the development of the Walden North estate, near Seton Beach), and there was much resentment over this by the many non-Chinese prospectors who had been lured back from the Cariboo as news of the Cayoosh Creek finds spread through the province, but denied access to the already-staked area being worked by the Chinese, they wound up exploring the many side-valleys of the Fraser around Lillooet, which turned out to be a good thing for some, and a very good thing for suppliers of goods and services related to prospecting in Lillooet itself.
The Cayoosh, Seton and  Bridge River Valleys had gone virtually unexplored during the gold rush of 1858-62, which focussed on the Fraser, which was abandoned suddenly as gold fever lured the frenzy of the rush north to the Cariboo and Barkerville.   It wasn't until the interest stoked by Cayoosh Creek that much more of the Lillooet Country was even explored, much less prospected.  And this was not without success - several new very profitable mines were found on "ledges" high on the slopes overlooking Seton and Anderson Lakes, notably the Brett Group at McGillivary Falls.  Just above the Chinese claims in the Cayoosh, a chance discovery of a gold-bearing quartz boulder touched off the discovery of the spectacular Golden Cache Mine in Cayoosh Canyon.  Perhaps the greatest consequence of this new era of exploration for the "yellow metal that drives men mad" was the discovery of the Bendor Range goldfields of the Upper Bridge River Country, which had been unknown to white men in the earlier period, and climaxed with the great days of the Bralorne and Pioneer Mines.
Chinese miners had in fact tried to penetrate the upper Bridge River Country in the 1880s, but were driven off by Chief Hunter Jack of the Lakes Lillooet, who laid claim to the whole valley and presided over who could prospect and who could not.  He enforced his jurisdiction to a few hundred Chinese miners who had gathered on Tyaughton and Marshall Creeks by bluffing them with a demonstration of his marksmanship, making no secret of his intent if they were to stay on a creek whose rich placer he considered his own (and which in his mind, as rightful Tyee of the valley, he didn't need paperwork for).
Success in gold-mining aside, the Chinese also gained note by their discovery and export of what government assayers described at first as "large black rocks", which it took several years for customs officials to figure out were actually high-quality nephrite jade, which lays in abundance in the riverbeds of the Fraser and Bridge Rivers.  Unknown tonnes of the semi-precious stone were exported to China before government officials realized it was worth taxing!   Bridge River and Fraser jade is hard to recognize for the uninitiated - the rocks and boulders tend to be a greyish colour at first glance, not interesting-looking at all; it's only by wetting and especially by cutting that the dark black-green of nephritic jade is revealed.  Some immense boulders of jade were movable only by the rivers until invention of a portable diamond-saw by Ron Purvis of Texas Creek, a technology which has since enabled the mining of literal mountainsful of jade from remote settings throughout British Columbia.   The most famous and productive jade mines in the province now are near the Yukon border, in the Cassiar region, and as before China and Japan are the main markets for the stone, often in raw form but increasingly "value-added" as BC-crafted sculpture or jewellery.  Until the discovery of the huge modern-day jade resources of northern BC, Lillooet was the centre of the jade business in BC.  One of the largest local jade mines was high in the headwaters of  Hell Creek, perched on the edge of the Bridge River Canyon, and was noted for the percentage of high-quality "apple-green" stone, a paler, more transulucent and preferable flawless lighter stone found at the cores of certain boulders.  One such boulder sits in the pool-fountain of the Academic Quadrangle at Simon Fraser University.

Chinese Rock Piles "Chinese Rock Piles" are found all over the Lillooet district, but a group of three such piles - pits actually - in Cayoosh Park, on the benchland just above the courthouse and near the Hanging Tree, have been marked and designated heritage sites.  These rock piles (or pits) are the remains of Chinese reworkings of previous placer operations - the Chinese miners would take the discarded tailings and wash the rocks by hand, scrubbing them clean and then panning the residue of sand and silt - often earning more this way than non-Chinese miners had earned in the original workings than produced the tailings.  Chinese mining operations were extremely thorough - along Cayoosh Creek, which Chinese miners worked near-exclusively from 1884 to the mid 1890s, silt and gravel was dug and upturned to the bedrock, often over 30 feet from the surface, and all rocks dug up were thoroughly scrubbed to get all traces of gold dust and gold-rich black sand off them - and to inspect them to see if they were jade or another semi-precious stone such as agate.

Ginseng

Photo by Kat	Ginseng is not part of Chinese history in the Lillooet country, but it's an important part of the modern agricultural economy of the Lillooet area and other dryland regions of the Interior.   Artificially-shaded ginseng fields are now a common sight in the region, as common as alfalfa was for many years and certainly a lot more profitable.  Ginseng farming, though very lucrative and a boon to the struggling local economy, is somewhat controversial as the plant's biology depletes the soil for other crops; interestingly one of the only crops that will rehabilitate ginseng-depleted soils is hemp, which may become a cash crop for the region in the future as a result (the industrial kind, I mean).  The fields shown here are just across the river from town, as can be seen in these aerial images.  The pink-toned scree in the upper left corner of this photo is the same formation where the famous ice caves of Fountain Ridge were discovered.
Photo by Kat	The field at above left is the one closer to the right-hand edge of the second picture.  The benchlands these ginseng crops are being raised on grew alfalfa for years, and during the Japanese internment were tranformed into huge market gardens, like others of the Fraser's hot, fertile but irrigation-hungry benches. The lower picture helps illustrate the location of Chinatown - the small triangle of benchland immediately above the bridge in the centre of the photo, with Main Street's commercial strip,  still "downtown Lillooet today", being just above that.  Cayoosh Creek is the blue-green streamlet entering the frame at lower left and curling around the large sandbar downstream from the bridge.  Discussions of other places visible in this view can be found via the Lillooet Sights & Stories page.