Alfred Waddington
British (born England)
1801 – 1872
Alfred Waddington was an English merchant and promoter of the Fraser River Gold Rush who wrote the colony's first non-government book and championed a road from Bute Inlet to the Cariboo, a scheme that ended in the Chilcotin War of 1864.
Biography
Alfred Penderell Waddington was born on 2 October 1801 in Brompton, London, England, and was educated partly in Germany at the University of Göttingen. After years in European commerce he joined the California Gold Rush economy as a San Francisco merchant in 1850, then moved to Victoria in 1858 when the Fraser River Gold Rush began.
Waddington became one of the rush's great boosters. His pamphlet The Fraser Mines Vindicated (1858), defending the goldfields against skeptics, was the first book published in the Colony of Vancouver Island that did not come from a government press. He served in the colonial House of Assembly and threw himself into transportation schemes, convinced that a route from the head of Bute Inlet to the Cariboo goldfields would be shorter than the Fraser Canyon road.
Work on his Bute Inlet road ended in tragedy in April 1864, when Tsilhqot'in warriors, angered by intrusions into their territory and abuses by road crews, killed fourteen of Waddington's workmen, igniting the conflict known as the Chilcotin War. The road was never completed, and the venture ruined him financially. Undeterred, Waddington spent his final years lobbying for a transcontinental railway to tidewater via Bute Inlet, and he died of smallpox in Ottawa on 26 February 1872 while promoting the scheme. Mount Waddington, the highest peak entirely within British Columbia, is named for him.