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Barkerville gives kids of all ages a lively lesson in history
By TOM DOUGLAS
SPECIAL TO THE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
BARKERVILLE, B.C. -- If history had been taught this way in school, I wouldn't have had to waste an entire summer cramming for a makeup exam.
Billed as British Columbia's largest "live" museum, Barkerville Historic Town is a collection of more than 125 original and reconstructed buildings nestled in the sub-alpine forests of the province's interior.
At the visitor center you can view an audio/visual presentation about the gold-rush fever that hit the area following Billy Barker's discovery of the precious metal in nearby Williams Creek in 1862.
But once you go outside, you are instantly transported back in time. Directly in front of you is a town of the mid-1800s, complete with ramshackle wooden buildings, board sidewalks and strolling townspeople in period costumes.
These Barkerville "inhabitants" stay in character from 8 a.m., when everything starts to come alive, until dusk when, like in the musical "Brigadoon," the town closes down and disappears into the mountain mist.
Stop Miss Florence Wilson as she sashays along the boardwalk in front of the Goldfield Bakery, and this reincarnation of the B.C. mainland's first librarian will fill you in on the latest town gossip in a clipped British accent that's as frosty as the early morning air.
Walk along the earthen main street, which turns into a quagmire on rainy days, and you'll hear a bewhiskered Mr. Pattullo, a local philanthropic businessman, trying to wheedle a donation for the needy from Peter Chance, a gambler from Tennessee who has just fleeced the local yokels.
Keep walking eastward past Cameron & Ames Blacksmith Shop, where your senses are assailed by the clang of hammer on molten iron and the heady aroma of a charcoal forge, and you'll come to the Theatre Royale. Here, the entire family can take in a rollicking frontier-style vaudeville show, complete with dancing girls and mandolin-playing minstrels.
As you buy your show tickets at Barnard's Express, you'll be jostled by eager passengers who have arrived for the afternoon performance aboard the BX Express Stagecoach, which offers rides up and down Barkerville's main street.
But the real magic moment for our family occurred when we got to the Cornish Waterwheel, a wooden replica 15 feet in diameter that stands on the bank of Williams Creek, which meanders along the northern edge of the town. We'd been waiting all morning for the waterwheel show, and we'd soon find out that the wait was well worthwhile.
In an age where a child's attention span is measured by the clicks of a TV remote, can you imagine a dozen youngsters sitting on a wooden plank for half an hour or more enthralled by a dissertation on gold mining in the 1860s? They laughed, they oohed, they aahed and they fell silent when Ripley Douglas, the mine foreman resembling a gunfighter who'd hung up his shootin' irons to seek his fortune, told of the hardships of trying to strike it rich in the northern wilderness.
What makes the whole show so entertaining is that Ripley and the mine owner, a Scotsman by the name of William McKenzie, go through a whimsical patter where they treat the spectators as potential investors in their mine. Ripley, who seems about as bright as the guttering candles they used to take down into the mines, keeps slipping up and revealing, much to the delight of the onlookers, that the mine is really worthless.
The long-suffering mine owner keeps telling Ripley to shut up, even when the hapless foreman picks up a rock from the ground and begins to sputter that it seems there really is gold on the property after all. When the message sinks in, McKenzie realizes he almost sold off a valuable claim for peanuts -- and he unceremoniously tells the spectators to get off his land before he has them thrown off -- thus signaling the end of the show.
We attended the Waterwheel show two days running. Even though the characters had changed -- the foreman this time went by the name of Daniel Grimsby and the owner was Nigel Cruickshank -- the youngsters, including our own, were just as delighted with the antics the second day.
In fact, the only disappointed visitor we saw during our entire stay was a German tourist who stopped Ripley Douglas on the boardwalk and asked him where his guns were. Ripley explained that, unlike town sites in the American Wild West, there were no guns in Barkerville. The tourist wandered away shaking his head, having expected to see shootouts in the street.
To make our visit to Barkerville complete, we had a family portrait taken, in rented period costumes, at the Louis A. Blanc Photographic Gallery, and we and took a guided tour through Chinatown. Then we dined at the Wake Up Jake Cafe and wandered through the local cemetery, the last resting place of such characters as Cariboo Cameron, Scotch Jennie and Captain Travaillot.
After learning how to pan for gold at the Eldorado Gold Panning & Souvenir Arcade, we stayed right in town at the Kelly House Bed & Breakfast where the family room -- one queen-size and two single beds -- went for $95 Canadian (about $50 U.S.). While we had to share a bathroom down the hall -- "retaining the true atmosphere of the 1800s" as their brochure coyly states -- the full breakfast served on fine china in the morning made up for it.
After two nights "roughing it" without television or video games, our youngsters were happy to head back to Quesnel, a lively, modern city 53 west of Barkerville and right back in the middle of civilization, with McDonald's Happy Meals and the modern conveniences of a Ramada Inn.
But we older folk still find ourselves thinking about the pristine stillness and crisp mountain air that greeted us the first morning when we stepped onto the boardwalk at Barkerville. And we wonder whether humans have really advanced all that far in terms of peace of mind in the past 140 years.
Tom Douglas is a free-lance writer based in Beaverton, Ontario, near Toronto. He can be contacted at douglas@quicklinks.on.ca
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