Johnny Chance
Johnny Chance is credited with discovering gold on Granite Creek in British Columbia's Tulameen country on 5 July 1885, reputedly while napping beside the stream. The strike set off the Granite Creek rush and built the boomtown of Granite City.
Biography
Johnny Chance is a semi-legendary figure of the Similkameen and Tulameen country, and almost nothing verifiable is known of his life outside a single famous episode. In the summer of 1885 he was one of a party driving horses toward New Westminster by way of the Tulameen. According to the story told ever since, Chance, regarded as the laziest man in the outfit, stopped to nap beside Granite Creek on a hot 5 July afternoon and, on waking, noticed gold nuggets gleaming in the shallows.
Whether or not the details are embroidered, and accounts of the discovery differ considerably, the strike was real and spectacular. By the end of October 1885, dozens of companies were washing gold from Granite Creek, with some 5,400 ounces worth about $90,000 reported that first season. Within a year roughly 2,000 people lived at Granite City near the creek mouth, briefly one of the largest settlements in British Columbia. The creek and the neighbouring Tulameen gravels later became equally famous for platinum.
Chance himself drifts out of the historical record almost immediately, and his origins, birth and death dates are unknown. Like many single-strike prospectors of the era, he survives chiefly as the name attached to a lucky moment that created, and within a decade abandoned, a gold rush town.