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Short History of Cottonwood House
Introduction
Since the spring of 1862 there has been a stopping
place for prospectors, packers and miners in the Cottonwood valley
east of Quesnel. Initially there were two ranches competing with
each other for the traffic on the pack trail to Van Winkle and by
1865 on the Cariboo Wagon road to Barkerville. The midpoint between
Quesnel and Barkerville was the last good farm land before the gold
fields. It would eventually become the domain of the Boyd family.
The
Quick Map History
This large version of the map gives an overview of
the Cottonwood valley and the centre portion of the Cariboo Wagon
road. Once the stage was running it would take a day to get to Barkerville
and Cottonwood House was the noon stop. For other travellers who
did not have fresh horses waiting every 10 to 15 miles however,
the Cottonwood valley was a one day journey, and by the completion
of the wagon road they had a choice of 4 stopping places.
John Ryder had preempted lots 380 and 379 by 1863
while at the same time Wade, Cox and Moreland had preempted lots
437 and 438 in 1862. By 1865 both properties had changed hands,
Cottonwood house being run by Allen Smith and the partership of
Charles Heath and John Boyd owning the Wade Ranch. Since the wagon
road did not follow the original pack trail Heath and Boyd applied
for lot 443 as hay land and built Coldspring House where Coldpring
creek crossed the wagon road. Meanwhile Bloody Edwards had established
Pine Grove House and Beaver Pass was already a favored stopping
place.
With the decline of the active gold rush after
the Barkerville fire of 1868 there was a general depression in the
entire area during the 1870s. During this time John Boyd first established
himself as sole owner of Coldspring House, married and started his
family, and slowly took over the center stops of the Cariboo road.
Pinegrove house then owned by Hamilton (who went on
to purchase Cottonwood House and try to make it run with a dairy
herd) was purchased by Boyd in 1872. We do not have much documentation
but it is clear that it was shut down as a stopping place and from
then on was used as farm land and for timber in various farming
and mining ventures. This cleared the business environment for both
Coldspring house and Beaver Pass.
Hamilton was not able to make Cottonwood a success
and as so often happened in its history it fell back to the Bank
of BC. It was purchased by a partnership of Josiah Beedy and Jochum
Lindhard. Lindhard it seemed ended up with ownership but shortly
died and his widow sold Cottonwood to John Boyd.
With Cottonwood House and its land in place John Boyd
now owned a bit more than 1000 acres of land which he managed with
great skill both as a farmer and as a merchant. Cottonwood house
was placed under the management of his wife's brother, John Flemming,
and the farm began to fill warehouses in both Stanley and Barkerville.
As time moved along John Boyd became the principal
shareholder in a major mining effort known as the Big Bonanza Mining
company which mined at Wingdam. It was perhaps one of his major
mistakes though it is difficult to trace the money that may have
been spent in the effort. We know three things
- Wingdam has yet to surrender its gold to this day,
every attempt has failed at controlling the seepage of mud and
water
- while he was alive John and his family seemed very
prosperous, his wife left for the coast to have each of her children
at her mother's home, and the children were sent to boarding school
at the coast to complete their education
- when he died, without leaving a will, there was
no cash reserve of any extent.
The family did carry on with its farming over the
next 40 years but always at the edge of difficulty. Janet Boyd died
in 1940 and by the early 1950s Cottonwood was sold.
Historical
overview
The gold rush
From roughly 1861 to 1865 Barkerville and its surrounding
area was the centre of many thousands of men and women seeking their
fortune. Coming into that scene with profitable experience in the
California gold rush of 1848, John Boyd understood that the best
way to make a fortune was to sell supplies to the miners. Like many
merchants, however, he too never ceased to search for gold, but
it was always a secondary consideration. He quickly established
a farming operation that provided him with income even when the
Cariboo Wagon road did not go through his property as the original
pack trail had. Selling to packers, who still continued to use his
services, and more importantly to other roadhouses and merchants,
Boyd's ranch was able to prosper and provide the capital to build
Coldspring House, on the wagon road. Coldspring House and the farming
together then allowed John Boyd to build a nest egg from the continuous
traffic so that as the gold rush slowed down he was able to take
advantage of the situation.
The long decline
The gold rush fever was about run out by 1870 with
mining increasingly done by larger companies with the financial
resources to build Cornish wheels to pull the water out of shafts
dug down to bedrock in search of high grade ore. This concentration
of properties combined with other, smaller gold rushes to the Omineca
country and the Kootneys, meant that the large traffic in individual
prospectors slowly dropped. With the Cariboo Wagon road completed,
freight rates were far more reasonable and trips to and from the
coast could be accomplished in about a week rather than the month
or more it used to take over wet, treacherous trails. Barkerville,
however, was sustained by:
- the larger companies that continued to operate
profitably well beyond 1900
- the men that needed to be hired to work those
mines
- the Chinese who flowed in to work where the Europeans
had confidently declared there was no more gold to be had
- and the stubborn prospectors who would simply
not give up and somehow made enough to keep coming back spring
after spring to the Cariboo mountains that they loved.
Also sustained by this traffic was the network of
enterprises developed by John Boyd over the next two decades. Starting
with the first Cottonwood ranch (originally owned by Wade, Cox and
Moreland) he added Coldspring House as a stopping place on the wagon
road. During the slower times of the 1870s he first acquired Pine
Grove house (another road house 13 miles closer to Barkerville)
and then the gem, Cottonwood house in 1874. At that point he controlled
close to 1000 acres of working land all capable of producing many
of the staples required by the mining companies and merchants. The
Boyd family continued to live at Coldspring House until 1886 when
they moved to Cottonwood House and made it the key stopping place
on the way to Barkerville.
Cottonwood empire
For the next twenty years until his death in 1909
John Boyd and Cottonwood House continued to prosper with a combination
of farm and road house income. He employed two to three full time
workers year round with Angus McPhail as foreman. In season, for
haying, building or mining as many as another six or seven men were
hired and often included several women and children in the garden.
With 10 children he had another small work force but unusually for
the times he always paid his children for the work they did. Almost
from the beginning he employed a tutor for the children and many
of the children were sent to Vancouver or Victoria to complete their
high school education. Janet Boyd whose family lived on the San
Juan Islands in Washington state most often went back home to have
her children and this is perhaps one reason that none of them died
in child birth, quite a common occurrence for the pioneer families.
Without John
After John Boyd's death the family fell into a slow
decline partially due to the fact that John had not left a will.
Not only was it a difficult legal situation with such a large family,
some of them already off and living their own lives, but many of
the properties that he farmed and seemed to own had in fact not
been taken through to the final Crown Grant process. The extensive
family records contain hundreds of documents and letters chronicling
the legal difficulties the family struggled through.
World War I reached out to take three of the boys
to war with only one of them returning. That, along with the difficult
times of the 1920s and 1930s depression, made life a struggle but
the family, now led by Janet and Harry Boyd, survived and adapted.
Because of the development of hard rock mining at Wells and a surge
of prospectors with no other possible work the Depression meant
that there was more activity than in many parts of the country.
Anytime there were travelers on the road Cottonwood House was there
to provide them services.
Cottonwood House was already the community center
and became even more so when it officially became the post office
for the area. It had always functioned as a post office since the
beginning in the 1860s, as had all road houses, but the post office
provided another source of cash income in a difficult time. By the
1930s when the road was improved enough for automobile traffic they
added a gas station. Meanwhile, as it always had, the farm continued
to grow hay, potatoes, turnips and grain and provided the basic
living income for the family. The roadhouse, though not as busy
as one might have wished, still supplied guests with good food and
a nights rest.
World War II and the end
World War II spelled the end of the Boyd family's
tenure at Cottonwood house, much as it also spelled the end of Barkerville
as a viable community. With so many men gone and never enough money
to really modernize to tractors the Boyds found it increasingly
difficult to manage the farming. This was combined, of course, with
the death of Janet Boyd, and the aging of the sons left to work
the farm. Finally in the early 1950s, after many of the other pieces
of property along Lightning Creek and Swift River had been sold,
Cottonwood House itself was sold.
Before the decade was out, however, the historical
significance of the roadhouse was recognized and the province of
British Columbia purchased the site and made it into a provincial
park. It is one of the few surviving, original roadhouses of the
Cariboo Wagon road. The house itself, built probably in 1865 has
survived its own fire threats several times, and it has most often
been fire that consumed the other road houses on the road. Today
it stands as a testament to the pioneer courage and determination
of an entire generation of men and women willing to build from the
wilderness a home where their families could grow up strong and
proud.
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