In the last installment we left 24-year-old journalist David Williams Higgins—newly arrived in Yale in July 1858—marvelling at the “bustle and excitement” of the new mining town, and the wide range of nationalities represented there. Higgins had arrived in Yale from San Francisco via Victoria, Fort Langley, and Hope, from which last location he and his fellow travellers took passage in a canoe to Yale, arriving after a day’s travel “tired, wet, and blue, with clothes and boots in tatters and appetites that would have been envied by a pack of young coyotes. We slept in our clothes on blankets spread on the sands of the beach that night. In the morning we cooked some bacon and boiled a pot of coffee at a neighbouring camp fire, and I started out to take in the situation.”
When he had had an opportunity to settle in, Higgins commented on the people he saw around him. “A worse set of cut-throats and all-round scoundrels than those who flocked to Yale from all parts of the world never assembled anywhere,” he wrote, with perhaps just a tiny bit of exaggeration. “Decent people feared to go out after dark. Night assaults and robberies, varied by an occasional cold-blooded murder or a daylight theft, were commonplace occurrences. Crime in every form stalked boldly through the town unchecked and unpunished.
“The good element was numerically large; but it was dominated and terrorized by those whose trade it was to bully, beat, rob, and slay. There were many God-fearing men and women, but there were many of the bad sort, too, who never attended church and sneered at those who did. Every other store was a gambling den with liquor attachments. Ruffians of the blackest dye, fugitives from justice, deserters from the United States troops who strutted about in army overcoats which they had stolen when they deserted for the British Columbia gold mines … ex-convicts, pugilists, highwaymen, petty thieves, murderers and painted women, all were jumbled together in that town and were free to follow their sinful purposes so far as any restraint from the officers of the law were concerned.”
In the interest of fairness it must be said that a correspondent for the British Columbia Gazette had written of Yale, in July 1858, that “Its inhabitants are orderly and well-conducted. I saw no drunkenness or lawlessness of any kind—everything was peaceable and quiet.” However, it seems likely that the correspondent was only in Yale long enough to gather sufficient material for a story; Higgins was there for two years, and was probably in a better position to give an accurate picture of day-to-day life as the town expanded.
A correspondent for The Times of London bears out Higgins’s observations. The report is undated, but the writer states that the town and its environs were “so filthy and unsavoury—so exactly like it inhabitants … that we could not pitch our tents in or near it; so we shot across the river, shook the dust of this modern Sodom from off our feet, and camped on a clean sandspit.”
As we have seen, where there were miners intent on winning their fortune there were less scrupulous people bent on winning those fortunes (or as much of them as possible) away from them. Yale was no different. Higgins wrote that “In every saloon a faro-bank or a three-card monte table was in full swing, and the hells were crowded to suffocation… . Gambling of every description was carried out openly, and many were the miners who were inveigled into the dens and stripped of their [gold] dust… . Keno, chuck-a-luck, and all other imaginable games of skill or chance were carried on without check from the authorities, who used to remark that gambling made the camp lively.”
Faro-bank, also known as faro, is a 17th century French gambling card game, while three-card monte, also called “find the lady” or “three-card trick”, dates back to the 15th century. It is a confidence game in which the victim or “mark” bets a sum of money on the assumption that he can find the “money card” among three face-down cards on a table. It is similar to the classic shell game con, in which a shill pretends to conspire with the mark to cheat the dealer, while in fact conspiring with the dealer to cheat the mark, who has no chance of winning. Keno, a lottery-like gambling card game, originated in China. “Hells” is short for “gambling hells” or gambling dens.
“I remember one evil-visaged wretch who presided over the chuck-a-luck table, which is a game played with loaded dice,” wrote Higgins. “It is so simple that a greeny, who is sure that he can win, soon finds to his sorrow that he can only do so when the operator wills.” Higgins goes on to describe the fate of a merchant named Emerson, who was preparing to leave Yale with the $4,000 he had made from selling his stock. Several gamblers set up a rigged faro game, with the result that “Emerson was deprived of all his wealth in one night, and left the camp impoverished and miserable.”
It is worth noting that “officers of the law” were non-existent in British Columbia until late in 1858, when it became obvious that the influx of miners due to the gold rush necessitated some sort of law enforcement, and officers to carry it out. In October 1858, Governor James Douglas organized a police force for the colony, with a chief constable (paid $150 a month; approximately $4,278 in today’s money) and five constables, who each received $100 a month, or approximately $2,852 today. “This is a very high rate of pay,” Douglas wrote, “but no men worth having will serve for less.”
In the next installment we’ll look at a happier side of Yale in its early days.
READ MORE: Part One: Yale goes from deserted Hudson’s Bay Company post to boom town
READ MORE: Part Two: Miners hit pay dirt at Hill’s Bar near Yale
READ MORE: Part Three: Trouble at Hill’s Bar
editorial@accjournal.ca
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter
