Fred Gwatkins

Fred Gwatkins is remembered for a single decisive act: in 1887 he and his partner George Sheenan staked the Stemwinder, the first mining claim in the hills west of the Okanagan River, and in doing so founded the Fairview gold camp near present-day Oliver, British Columbia.

The Stemwinder became Fairview's first operating mine in 1888, and the discovery drew a wave of prospectors who staked the surrounding slopes. Within five years the camp had grown into a boomtown of hotels, stamp mills and roughly a dozen mines, and at its peak in the 1890s Fairview's boosters claimed several thousand residents, making it briefly one of the liveliest settlements in the southern Interior. The Stemwinder remained the camp's most important mine until it closed in 1904, after which Fairview declined rapidly into a ghost town.

Almost nothing else is reliably recorded about Gwatkins himself; his origins, later life, and birth and death dates are absent from accessible histories of the camp, and even the spelling of his name varies (Gwatkin appears in some accounts). Like many discoverers of small interior camps, he survives in the record only through the claim he staked and the town it created.