(YALE) When you go to the Yale Historic Site, be ready for an in-tents experience. They don’t just display history at this incredibly rich and historic place at the mouth of the Fraser Canyon, they give you a hands-on experience. My colleague David Pettigrew and I are being toured around the site’s Tent City by Site Manager Deb Zervini. Here you really get a feel (as well as the smell and taste) of what it was like to live in this once-bustling boomtown during the Fraser River Gold Rush in 1858. We’re in the General Store tent, chock-full of the goods that gold-seekers from that time period would have needed on their claims: canned goods, barrels of flour, pork, gold pans, picks and shovels – you name it. Next door in the saloon tent they even have the kind of piano that would have been played in one of the 40-plus saloons and gaming dens on old Front Street at the height of the rush, when anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 people were crammed into the narrow confines between the mountains and the river.
David and I are content-gathering tour that will take us all the way to Barkerville and back. It’s for a Heritage Tourism Alliance of B.C. project called “Time Travel B.C.” The project will provide visitors to B.C. with virtual access to heritage attractions throughout the province via “TimeTravelbc.com.” The content is web-based and (cool) will also be delivered to users via smartphones, including the iPhone as well as Blackberry and Android phones. We’re gathering material for a Story Tour that basically follows the Cariboo Waggon Road and its feeder routes all the way from Hope to Barkerville.
Today we’ve started at Yale and we’re filming at the tent city, where if you have a mind to you can don period costume, take on a character and live like a miner (or Judge Begbie, or a First Nations character or a dozen other choices) for a day. We also go inside the main museum for a short while to take some footage of the Peace Piano, which is a fascinating musical instrument from the gold rush era. “I could day here all day!” says David. Well, that would be nice, but we have three more stops on the itinerary. Next up, Alexandra Bridge Provincial Park…
