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I am ALWAYS
BEING FAITHFUL

FELICE VALLE was not the first Italian to come to British Columbia, nor was he the most famous by any means. In fact, if he had not had a pocket full of invoices and letters when he died and if someone in the intervening years hadn’t donated the documents to the British Columbia Archives, where they languished until someone else found them by accident and told a researcher about them, and if the researcher hadn’t arranged to have the letters translated from an antiquated Ligurian dialect into English, no one today would know he had ever lived.

And many of the thousands of Italians who came to British Columbia were even less well known. Their names appear on a list at a port of entry and in the corporate records of a railway or a coal mine—if the records have been saved and are accessible to researchers, as many are not—but to the general population they are just faceless Italians who came in large numbers to work, then moved on to different jobs in different places. Some history books do not even contain a listing for Italians in their indexes.

But there they were. And their story is also the story of British Columbia after European contact with the resident Aboriginal culture. Italians crop up in every corner of the province, often at the very beginning of European activity in that area. The documented part of Felice Valle’s story began shortly after British Columbia became a colony of Great Britain and was struggling to become safe, accessible and free of American control.

BUT VALLE’S life began in Liguria, where the steep and rocky terrain clings to the Mediterranean shore in a curve between the French-Italian border and Tuscany. In the centre of the region, where it curves to the south, the city of Genoa, with its near-vertical streets and famous harbour, had been sending sailors and navigators to explore the far reaches of the world’s oceans for centuries. Just south of Genoa, in the province of Chiavari, a string of fishing villages and towns—Nervi, Sori, Rapallo, to name the ones closest to Genoa—cling to the shore on terrain that, according to a modern tourist brochure, “should be better covered by a mule.”

Mules were essential for travel and commerce in all of Liguria, a region so steep that a person could not build a house until he had built a terrace to put it on. The entire countryside was terraced—each house, each tiny field occupying a patch of land wrested from the steep mountainsides and held in place by rock walls. Rough mortar held the rocks together and a network of narrow creuze de mä connected house to house and village to village.

Along one of those pathways in December 1871, a middle-aged woman and a young man hurried northward toward Sori. Maria Valle and her son, Antonio, were coming from Rapallo, where a man named Nicola Cuneo—recently returned from America to visit his family—had given them astounding news.

Cuneo’s home in America was in Barkerville in the mountainous province of British Columbia, a place Maria had never heard of although it was the site of a gold rush even larger than the one in California, which had lured prospectors from all over the world. Her husband, Felice Valle, had left for California fourteen years before and she had not heard from him since. But Cuneo said he had spoken to her husband only weeks before. Her husband had parlayed his familiarity with mules, a Ligurian birthright, into a business transporting goods on the backs of these temperamental animals through the mountainous British Columbia interior between Yale in the Fraser Canyon and Barkerville 640 kilometres to the north. Cuneo gave Maria some money and offered to help her re-establish contact with her husband.

Maria Valle was not the first Chiavarian to suffer at the hands of circumstance. The inhabitants of Chiavari province had been confronting adversity for centuries. In the ninth century, the founders of Sori, Maria’s home village, had chosen a steep-sided river valley in the vain hope that they could hide from Saracen pirates. These Muslim Arabs came by sea from North Africa to massacre, plunder and kidnap villagers for use as galley slaves and harem concubines. For seven hundred years, Sori and other villages south of Genoa all the way to Castiglione della Pescaia in Tuscany lived in fear of these marauders who were undeterred even by the countries and city-states—Austria, France, Venice, Milan—that governed the region at various times.

Danger came from the Mediterranean, but so did sustenance. Chiavarian fishermen sailed long, narrow feluccas with raked masts and lateen sails to capture a living from the sea. By the fifteenth century, Ligurians were known for their sailing prowess all over the civilized world. But they had no navy in which they could serve because the Italian peninsula was only a collection of separate duchies, city-states and kingdoms. Mariners from Liguria and nearby Lunigiana—Cristoforo Colombo and Alessandro Malaspina, to name only the most famous—had to find employment in the service of Spanish kings and queens.

Other European leaders—the French emperor Napoleon, the king of Piedmont-Sardinia—ruled Liguria in the nineteenth century until Italy was united between 1860 and 1870. The economic and political turmoil that followed unification eventually forced millions of Italians to follow the example of emigrants from Liguria, Piedmont and Lombardy to search for work elsewhere in the world.

Workers from these northwest regions had been migrating to Switzerland, Belgium, England and France every spring and returning home in the fall since the eighteenth century. In the early years of the nineteenth century they had begun to go farther afield, mostly to South America, where they were in the front ranks of settlement and thus eligible to claim homesteads. Being landowners and speaking a language similar to Spanish had made it relatively easy for them to integrate. By 1858, in addition to the 44,000 Italians working temporarily in industrialized Europe, there were 33,000 Italians in South America.

By that time too, there were 3,600 Italians in the United States, fully one quarter of them from the Ligurian coast. So numerous and widespread were immigrants from the Genoa area in particular that it was said, “In whatever quarter of the world you open an egg a Genoese will spring from it.”

But Maria Valle’s Genoese had disappeared. Her son had been a little boy when his father went abroad, and now he was a man of twenty. Then, all of a sudden, there was news that her husband was alive. Cuneo’s wife had placed silver scudi in Maria’s hands, but Maria had been angry for fourteen years and she didn’t know what she should be feeling now.

Maria’s brother, Giuseppe, was equally ambivalent. It fell to him to write the family’s first letter to Felice, his childhood friend, on January 4, 1872.

We don’t understand why you didn’t send news for thirteen or fourteen years. We had given you up for dead and was consoling your wife and son . . . It’s time for you to return to Italy and I declare my heart to you.

Like most rural people on the Italian peninsula, Giuseppe could neither read nor write, so he had gone to a scribe, most likely a priest, to have his letter written.

Impatient to hear from the truant husband, but unaware of how long it took for a letter to reach British Columbia and for an answer to return to Sori, the family waited only six weeks for a reply. Maria dictated a letter chastising her husband for his silence.

I’m letting you know that I have received the scudi from your boss’s wife from Rapallo. We have already written the last month. I don’t understand why you have forgotten about me and our dear son who wishes to know his father. I never thought you would stay away so long and be so stubborn not to answer the letter. Therefore my dearest husband, I beg you to come home. I beg you to answer immediately to my letter. I have nothing left to say but goodbye together with my son, my brother Giuseppe and all our relatives and friends. Farewell. I declare myself your faithful wife.
Valle, Maria.

When Valle left home in 1858 for California, he would have walked along the creuze de mä that led to Genoa’s ancient port and made his way to the Stazione Marittime, the magnificent two-storey building with imposing wings extending forward on either side that was the embarkation point for northern Italian emigrants boarding ships for the New World. If Valle had looked back as his ship headed out to sea, his last glimpse of Italy would have been the yellow glow of the Lanterna, a lighthouse that has been the symbol of Genoa since the ninth century.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, raw and sparsely populated, was the destination for the adventurous in those days. If Valle’s ship had landed on the eastern seaboard of America, he would have had to go overland to California by foot or wagon because the completion of a transcontinental railroad was still a decade away. By leaving the teeming cities of the east and going west, he would have been in the minority among Italian immigrants, one of the few who refused to live in an Italian ghetto, one of the few who were drawn westward by the promise of free land. It is more likely, however, that Valle, like the majority of gold seekers, sailed directly from Europe across the South Atlantic and around Cape Horn.

California had belonged to Mexico until the United States seized it in 1846. The territory was the wildest part of the Wild West, free of tradition and full of options unavailable to immigrants in the American east. The climate was warm and agreeable—almost Italian. There was no need in California for Italians to bend the knee to employers as they did in Europe or New York. Being in California was like being in South America, where Italians were subservient to no one. In California there was no need to accept the lowest of jobs and the meanest of pay.

California had attracted a trickle of Italians even before the gold rush. The crews on ships loaded with Carrara marble from Tuscany and the Italian crews on English ships loaded with coal were among those who defected to the infant city that became San Francisco. They made their living fishing in the bay or in the deep waters beyond the Golden Gate. The triangular sails of their double-ended feluccas were already a common sight in those waters when the discovery of gold in 1848 brought thousands of prospectors. Within three years there were more than six hundred Italians in San Francisco alone, some of whom had already been searching for gold in South America. There were enough Ligurians among them to justify a consulate of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. And in the mother lode country north and east of San Francisco, they made up one of the largest immigrant groups, most of them coming from the province of Chiavari.

There were no Italians among the people who discovered significant amounts of gold, however. Gold rushes are notoriously short-lived: the free gold that is easy to find doesn’t last long, which leaves the coulees and gravel bars up for grabs to the few miners who can afford the equipment needed for intensive mining. By the time Valle arrived in California seeking his own fortune in gold, Italians were starting businesses, developing farms and opening restaurants. Prospectors still in the grip of gold fever had moved on to other gold rushes farther north.

Gold had been discovered on the Pend d’Oreille River in Washington Territory in 1852 and there had been rumours of gold north of there in New Caledonia. The rumours spoke of a find on the Thompson River, just before it joins the Fraser River at a rendezvous point for First Nations and early explorers called the Forks. Below the Forks, the Fraser descends rapidly between the narrow rock gorges of the Fraser Canyon, then through the wide expanse of the fertile Fraser Valley and onward to the Strait of Georgia and the Pacific Ocean.

New Caledonia was a huge tract of land occupied by thousands of Aboriginal people and administered by a sprinkling of Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) employees. The nearest semblance of civilization was at the former HBC fort of Victoria on the southern tip of the fledgling British colony of Vancouver Island, forty kilometres across the water from where the Fraser River empties into the Strait of Georgia. A clandestine shipment of Thompson River gold from Victoria to the San Francisco mint in February 1858 confirmed the rumours. Within a month, a small party of miners left California for Victoria, followed that spring and summer by thirty thousand more who overwhelmed the little settlement of just five hundred souls.

Although there were respectable businessmen among the thirty thousand coming from California, some of them Italian, they were by and large a disparate and scrofulous lot: itinerant single men, gamblers, drinkers, brawlers, chance takers. The rumour that the jails of California had opened their doors at the first sign of faraway northern gold was believable, given the look of the disreputable bunch that swarmed into Victoria. The citizens of the small settlement—five hundred fur traders, shopkeepers and bureaucrats—struggled to feed, supply and govern the mass of gold-hungry, gun-toting, knife-wielding California invaders whose tents surrounded Victoria while they drank, fought and gambled, bought supplies and tried to get across the water to the mainland and up the river to the goldfields, hampered by the lack of transportation and the absence of any real government on the mainland.

And eventually, Valle would have been there. Sometime between his arrival in San Francisco in 1858 or 1859 and his application for a miner’s licence in Barkerville in 1865, Valle would have come to Victoria, lived rough among the other prospectors heading for the goldfields and made the difficult journey through territory where Aboriginal trails and swiftly moving rivers took the place of wagon roads. Territory where sure-footed pack animals were the only method available to carry the large amounts of freight needed to mine the gold and feed the miners. Territory where a man raised in Liguria, where mules were the main method of transportation, could find a way to make a living even if he didn’t strike it rich.

GOVERNOR JAMES DOUGLAS was the point man for the British Colonial Office, which was a six-month ocean voyage away. Fearing the anarchy that would result once the news of Thompson River gold got out, the governor had managed to keep the discovery quiet for two years while he waited for his bosses in Britain to respond to his concerns.

Just in time, the Colonial Office created the colony of British Columbia and appointed Douglas governor of this colony as well. Douglas, in turn, honoured his boss, the colourful and multi-talented secretary of state for the colonies, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, known to history more for his florid writing style than for his political accomplishments, by changing the name of the Forks to Lytton.

Knowing by then that there was also gold at the lower end of the Fraser Canyon, Governor Douglas had to improvise to maintain law and order until a judge and the military arrived. Americans, even the law-abiding ones, carried guns and it wouldn’t be long before they challenged his authority or, God forbid, the authority of the British Crown. With so many Americans in the country it was only a matter of time before the United States would try to annex the territory.

Douglas stationed a gunboat at the mouth of the Fraser River to collect a five-dollar licence fee from each of the miners who had survived the crossing of the Strait of Georgia in canoes or makeshift vessels and were now intent on making their way upriver by whatever means possible to the gold-bearing gravel bars of the Fraser River, just beyond the town of Yale. Because the river was navigable only as far as Yale, the former HBC fort became a boom town—the largest town west of Chicago and north of San Francisco.

Gold there might be upriver from Yale, but to get to the gold on the Thompson River above Lytton, miners had to find a way around the fearsome rapids and towering rock walls of the Fraser Canyon. Among the miners looking for such a route were several Italians, including some hoping to find enough gold to finance a business in Victoria.

The preferred route to the interior of the colony and the Thompson River gold left the Fraser River long before it reached Yale. The Douglas Route was a combination of water and land travel that followed the Harrison River north into Harrison Lake with a stop halfway up at the boom town of Port Douglas, also claiming to be the largest town west of Chicago and north of San Francisco. From the north end of the lake thousands of miners advanced by foot and mule along the Pemberton Portage and by steamboat across several more lakes to the settlement of Cayoosh Flat at the top of the Fraser Canyon, where its rock walls give way to ponderosa pine forests and then to arid sage-covered hills that fall steeply to the river.

For a brief moment, as the population surged, Cayoosh Flat proclaimed itself to be, like Yale and Port Douglas before it, the largest town in the northwest. In keeping with this fleeting claim to fame, the residents petitioned Governor Douglas in 1860 to change the town’s name to Lillooet, a reflection of its origins as a First Nations gathering place. By then, however, one of the transients who had passed through Lillooet had discovered gold hundreds of kilometres due north on Little Horsefly Creek, a discovery that changed the focus of the gold rush to the Cariboo, that area of British Columbia north of the Fraser Canyon and east of the Fraser River.

One gold-laden creek after another lured men to the Horsefly area until, in 1862, the discovery on Williams Creek of “the richest goldfield in the world” blew the Cariboo wide open. Billy Barker, one of the California miners of 1858, was the man credited with the find, and Barkerville was the town that sprang into existence overnight and quickly usurped Lillooet’s claim in the population record books.

No longer did prospectors have to content themselves with mere gold dust such as gold seekers had found in the Fraser Canyon. The fist-sized nuggets at Barkerville were bigger even than the ones found in California. The discovery of gold was so momentous and the need for quicker access to the interior of the colony and the establishment of law and order so urgent that Governor Douglas ordered the building of a proper wagon road that would cling to the steep sides of the Fraser Canyon and take gold seekers on to Barkerville. But such a road would take time to design and build. Until then, all the traffic went by foot or mule train along the Cariboo Trail, a more westerly route that paralleled the Fraser River as it veered away to the west, taking the prospectors from Lillooet northwest through Dog Creek and Alkali Lake, then northeast to Horsefly Creek.

Among the thousands who passed through Port Douglas, Lytton and Lillooet and onward via the Cariboo Trail to Barkerville was Felice Valle, who had an Italian friend named Francesco Chiara, a rancher at Alkali Lake.

Francesco Chiara was one of four Italians—Ligurians all—who had opted for the possibility of free land rather than gold, the former being a surer thing by far than the latter. With Augustin Boitano, Filippin Simeon and Giuseppe Rosetti, Chiara had followed the example of one Herman Otto Bowe, who was the first to pre-empt land under the regulations established by the colonial government in 1859, by choosing land near Alkali Lake. Chiara, Simeon and Rosetti took acreage along the southern shores of the lake and along the creek that flowed out of it, and Boitano picked a spot a few kilometres to the north at what came to be called Springhouse. The grass was plentiful, the lake teemed with waterfowl; trees crested the surrounding hills—it was a blessed location.

The trail that brought them to Alkali Lake along with the first miners heading for Barkerville has been described as “utterly vile,” with precipitous ascents and descents, fallen logs and miles of deep mud made worse by the constant treading of human and animal feet. The Cariboo Trail was no place for wagons; this was a march through arid terrain with only the eroded gorge of the Fraser far below to the west to remind the men that they were following the northward course of the river as they tramped through the vast grass-covered benchland.

It would have been the grass that attracted the would-be ranchers. If, like some of their compatriots, the four Ligurians had worked the cattle ranches of Piedmont and Tuscany before emigrating and were therefore knowledgeable about cattle, they would have recognized the bunchgrass that grows on the Cariboo benchland. They would have known that the deep roots of the bunchgrass are able to find moisture where shallow-rooted grasses can’t and thus provide good cattle feed. Whatever their level of knowledge, the four Ligurians pre-empted land as early as 1859.

These were men used to the small allotments and feudal restrictions of farming in Italy, where peasants worked land and lived in houses owned by a landlord who took, in return, half of what they produced. In the Cariboo grasslands, however, they could choose the land they wanted, work it as well as they knew how, and, as they gradually fulfilled the government’s requirements, gain title to the land and reap all the profits, if there were any to be made.

BUT IT was not bunchgrass that was luring the vast majority of people tramping the Cariboo Trail. Gold was calling them and, in due course, Governor Douglas’s new 640-kilometre Cariboo Wagon Road made it a little easier to get to the goldfields. Planned by Royal Engineers and built by them and various private contractors in three years, the original route came up the Fraser Canyon and through Lillooet and beyond. Roadhouses that would feed, water and shelter travellers and their livestock—Twenty Mile House, Seventy Mile House, One Hundred Mile House—took their names from how far they were from Lillooet even after the engineers changed the route and bypassed the town. The revised route was shorter, had fewer portages and followed the Thompson River from the Forks at Lytton through Spences Bridge, veering away from the old Cariboo Trail and the fledgling ranches at Alkali Lake.

The Cariboo Wagon Road made it possible for the well-heeled, the ones who could afford the hundred-dollar stagecoach fare, to travel from Yale to Barkerville in just four days. The majority of travellers, however, the ones who were walking with sixty- to seventy-pound packs, enduring the bites of blackflies in the spring and early summer and fifteen-foot snowbanks and blizzards in winter, the ones with bloody and blistered feet—these travellers took a month to make the journey.

They were prospectors, saloonkeepers, gamblers; Chinese cooks and miners; farmers and ranchers with food to sell; dance-hall girls, madams and prostitutes with their own merchandise to peddle; honest brokers and parasites; the gullible and the jaded; the dreamers and the double-crossers. And they required supplies—food, drink, clothing, boots, tools—and unexpected luxuries. The supplies came by freight wagon, which could make the journey in two weeks, or by mule train, which took thirty hard days.

Even though the new road could accommodate wheeled vehicles, it had not eliminated the need for packers and mule trains. Their use would continue even into the railroad era as settlers pushed into the rugged interior of British Columbia. They had been used in the Americas since the Spanish and Portuguese had brought them from Europe. They had been used in Europe, including in Liguria, for hundreds of years before that. Being from Liguria, Felice Valle knew how useful mules could be, but running a mule train was a difficult business. Mules were better than horses, it is true, although packers used both. Mules were more robust animals and could carry more; they required less feed and were more sure-footed. But they were also more expensive to buy, more ornery and less likely to survive cold weather. Still, they had proven themselves valuable many times.

Valle had resisted the lure of free land in the grasslands and had followed the gold to Barkerville, where he took out Miner’s Licence Number 227h in October 1865 and found another compatriot in the person of a fellow Chiavarian, Nicola Cuneo, who had been making and selling beer in Barkerville for two years by then. Unlike the thousands of nameless men who scrabbled for gold in the gravel banks of Williams Creek, Cuneo had become successful by providing miners with a way to spend the gold if they found it or drown their sorrows if they didn’t.

An opportunity to make money and drink it away was what Barkerville had to offer in those days. It certainly didn’t offer a beautiful location. A tangle of stumps and branches was all that was left after the sheltering hills on either side of the boom town had been stripped of their trees for lumber. In the spring, with no trees to absorb the water from the melting snow, streams coming off the hillsides turned the main street into a river, making it necessary to build elevated sidewalks, which could be precarious when used by the patrons of the many saloons.

Barkerville residents knew Nicola Cuneo as Nicholas Cunio. Under this name, he made and sold beer for years, changed partners more than once, survived the frequent brawls on his premises and the threatened loss of his licence because of them and rebuilt and added hotel rooms after the fire that demolished most of Barkerville in 1868. Although he gave no details of the contest, it was with obvious pride that he announced in the Cariboo Sentinel that his XXX Ale had won first prize in the entire colony of British Columbia. And, unlike Valle, he went back regularly to his home in Italy, doing so once again in December 1871.

Valle heard that Cuneo was going back to Italy in a letter from Ernesto Sopranis, an Italian who worked in the Last Chance Saloon in Lightning Creek near Barkerville. Sopranis had been a drayman in Victoria before deciding to come to the Cariboo, and now he regretted his decision. He hated his boss and he hated winter more.

It’s the cold of the devil. I don’t know how I will make it to the end of this long tedious winter . . . Nothing else has disgusted me like the Cariboo [and] nothing could induce me to stay another winter here. My friend Nicola Cuneo rented his house for $300 a month and he left for Italy again. Lucky him and poor us.

Sopranis asked Valle to pay fifty dollars on his account in Victoria, where Valle spent the winter, and to send his greetings to other Italian friends who lived in various parts of the province, but his main concern was for Valle himself.

I understand that winter is very bad in all of British Columbia. I hope your mules will be secure and I hope that nothing bad will happen to them! My poor friend. That’s all you need after you worked so hard.

By the time he received Sopranis’s letter, Valle had been in the packing business for some time. He had survived reversals of fortune and made friends throughout the province, but he had not communicated with his family. The long years of silence were about to end, however. In the same month that he received Sopranis’s letter, Valle received one from Cuneo telling him he planned to see Valle’s wife and son and give them money.

Valle and his mule train had established a regular pattern of buying goods in Victoria and selling them in Barkerville and points in between. Other packers brought supplies to a single merchant like Cuneo, but Valle supplied several. Yet he and Cuneo had a close connection. Cuneo may have been his padrone, although the term did not gain relevance until later in the nineteenth century when the increased number of immigrants demanded a fellow countryman who would stand between them and the customs and demands of the new country.

Or Cuneo may have been nothing more than a paesano or friend from home to Valle, his success in Barkerville making him the man to turn to when Valle needed work or a loan. In any case, having warned Valle that he was going to contact his family, Cuneo went back to Italy and told Maria where her husband was. His location having been revealed, Valle was apparently willing to respond, but as a man who could inscribe only a wobbly “X” beside someone else’s rendition of his name, he too needed someone to write his letters for him. The content of Valle’s letters is a mystery only partially revealed by how his family responded to them, but he carried their letters with him for the rest of his life. And for the rest of his life, April to November, he made the journey from Victoria to Barkerville, the first part by sternwheeler to Yale, the second by mule train. A month to get there, a month to return, a few days at either end to deliver goods and buy new ones.

THE SHALLOW-DRAFT sternwheeler clears the Fraser River sandbars and lands at Yale, pushes its bow onto the shore, then nestles alongside the riverbank close to Front Street. Valle delivers Germantown socks, good quality Duck pants and women’s cotton hose to the Yale branch of A. Casamayou and Co.; buys nails, camp kettles, bacon and cutlery at the Oppenheimer Brothers’ branch store; assembles his mules and horses and prepares for the trip overland to Barkerville.

Each morning on the trail he loads the animals the way the Mexicans did in California, placing the inverted V of the leather aparejo on a mule’s flat back, confident that the stuffing of willow branches and hay is thick enough to prevent sores, mindful that a mule’s hind legs can deliver a fatal kick. He packs two hundred kilograms on each mule and one hundred on each horse, then leads the bell mare to the head of the pack, knowing the rest of the animals will follow her. At the end of each long day he repeats the process in reverse and sleeps on the ground or on the floor of a roadhouse full of rowdy packers and miners.

The wagon road that clings to the Fraser Canyon walls holds no fear for a man used to the creuze de mä of Liguria. He stops at Boston Bar to buy four horses, at Spences Bridge to buy twenty-four sets of pack shoes and have a kettle repaired, at Thirteen Mile House to pay a fifteen-dollar toll for twenty-two animals to cross a bridge, at Soda Creek Mile to have wheat ground and to buy twine.

But these are mere errands compared with his primary purpose, which is to transport goods to Barkerville. From A. Casamayou and Co., soap, rifle powder, tobacco, butter, sugar, tea, rum, brandy, absinthe, candles, macaroni, Worcestershire Sauce, a cask of claret. From Cohen and Hoffman, ten cases of boots. From John Dickson, Importer, a thirty-one-inch box stove and assorted pipes and joints. From E. Grancini, Italian importer and dealer in hardware and crockery, two washboards, three dozen cloth pins, four French saucepans, six door locks and eighteen axe handles.

Valle carried the invoices and receipts along with the letters in his pockets, a portable record of his business and personal life. The prices in Barkerville weren’t nearly as high as they had been at the peak of the gold rush in 1863, when few supplies were getting through. By 1871, there were supplies galore and fewer customers to buy them. The multitudes of miners had disappeared; the ones who remained worked for mining companies that could afford the expensive equipment necessary to mine the hidden gold.

But there was enough work and enough profit for Valle to continue his yearly round. Even though he was back in contact with Maria and Antonio, they continued to think he was in California not British Columbia, a place that had just become a province of Canada but that still meant nothing to them. For them, Valle had gone to America, which could have meant either Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, New York or California.

AS LONG as Italian men have been leaving home to find work, there have been men who abandoned their families permanently. The expectations and rules of Italian marriage were difficult and complicated enough when the men were at home. It was even more complicated when the majority of the men were absent for most of the year in Europe or for several years overseas. Italian society expected the wife to preserve her family’s way of life at home and remain faithful to her marriage while it allowed the absent husband to “conserve his bachelor freedom.” Not only did Italian society deem it understandable for the husband to associate with other women while he was away, society accepted the fact that some men would abandon their families and start new ones in North America. Wife desertion among emigrant Italians was still as common after World War I when “emigration [was] taking the place of a divorce court.” Even after World War II, a high percentage of married Italian immigrants did not go back to Italy for their wives and children; the Italian government of the time considered this a private matter and one best ignored.

With the shortage of available women in gold-rush-era British Columbia, it was unlikely that Valle had another wife, but he had certainly abandoned his family. In her letters to her husband, Maria struggled to strike a balance between affection and outrage. “I am always being faithful. You cannot imagine the anger I carry because I never receive news from you.” She flattered her husband and chided him. She demanded that he either come home immediately or send for his son. She sent him a photo of Antonio and asked her husband to send one of himself. She thanked him for a long-awaited letter, then complained because she had to go to Rapallo to pick it up. And always she signed her letters with superlatives, as any good Italian would do, calling him carissimo, signing herself “your most affectionate wife.”

In the fall of 1872, Valle told his family he would be coming home. That his intention was only to visit and then return to British Columbia is apparent in the fact that he borrowed a thousand dollars to buy mules that he left to pasture for the winter with his other animals in the care of a Mexican packer named José Maria Rodrigos, near Lytton. But Valle did not go to Italy that winter after all. And when the snow did not melt as soon as usual the next spring, ten of his mules and one of his horses starved to death. Rodrigos had tried to get them to the other side of the Thompson River, where there was more grass, but the animals had been too weak to swim across. As for Valle’s remaining livestock, Rodrigos had arranged to transport them across the river for a fee of five dollars. That it had been a bad year for everyone, that Rodrigos himself had lost nine or ten mules, that the Alkali Lake Ranch had lost many animals and even the legendary packer Cataline had lost half of his sixty-mule train was little consolation. When Valle made the final payment on his mule-buying loan a month later, he still needed more animals for the 1873 packing season.

Mules were always in short supply in British Columbia, even in the good years. Sterile offspring of male donkeys and female horses, mules were bred in California, where it was warm. The harsh British Columbia winters and the fact that horses were cheaper to buy discouraged the breeding of mules in the province. In 1860, mules brought up from Washington Territory sold for $150 a head. A year later, the price for a mule in Victoria was at least $225. The farther north the gold rush went and the farther from the international border, the more a mule cost. This made it necessary for packers to augment their trains with horses.

Despite losing half his animals in the spring, Valle must have had a good season in the summer of 1873. When he returned as usual to Victoria in November of that year, he went shopping at the store of John Quagliotti, importer of boots and shoes, clothing, gentlemen’s furnishings and Yankee notions. Valle bought work clothes—mining boots, wool socks, an Oregon grey undershirt—as well as wardrobe items inappropriate for the trail: white flannel trousers, cassimere pants and a fine wool overshirt and overcoat.

White trousers. A soft wool overcoat. Such clothing would befit a man wishing to appear successful when returning to his home country. Such a man might finally have decided to honour his promise to his family. But still Valle did not go back to Sori. It was left to Cuneo, who was again in Rapallo, to tell Valle’s family that he was unable to come home. Maria wrote in March 1874:

Meanwhile I have heard that you are well. I heard that you cannot come yet because of your businesses but that you would be very pleased if your son would come [to you] . . . He would be happy to come but please send the money soon because our son does not want to wait too much longer. I lost the chance to send him with Nicola Cuneo because I didn’t have the money . . . When our son will come to you he would be able to read and write and he would keep the books of the store.

Then, as if she was resigned to never seeing him again, she ended her letter even more effusively than usual.

Goodbye, goodbye, my dear consort. Goodbye with all my heart together with your dear son and everybody in the house and all my sisters. They say hello and the two sons of your brother they send a dear embrace with all the heart.
Valle, Maria

The letter reached Valle sometime before May 5, the day he dropped dead among his mules at Alkali Lake at the age of fifty. His friend Francesco Chiara found Maria’s latest letter in her husband’s pocket along with his other letters and papers. Chiara reported Valle’s death to the registrar of vital statistics three weeks later; the official cause was heart failure. Missing from the papers was the photo of Antonio. Missing from the official documents is any mention of where Valle was buried.

CHIARA AND the other ranchers on the Cariboo benchland had been riding the booming Barkerville market for beef on the hoof since the gold rush peaked in 1863 and they could get $150 for each animal. The price had inspired one Cariboo ranch to buy cattle in northern California and drive them through central Oregon and Washington and into British territory at Osoyoos, which was situated in the Okanagan Valley—the first break in the string of mountain ranges that started at the coast that was wide enough for a herd of cattle to pass through.

From Osoyoos, the herd advanced northward through the valley on the old HBC fur brigade trail that had connected Osoyoos to Sicamous since 1824. At Sicamous they turned westward to travel along Kamloops Lake to Savona’s Ferry, at the point where the Thompson River leaves the lake. The owner of the ferry, a Ligurian named Francesco Savona, took gold seekers coming from eastern Canada across the Thompson River so that they could be on their way to the goldfields by way of the Cariboo Wagon Road.

But even as the gold rush was winding down, even as the price of cattle plummeted to fifteen dollars a head, the ranchers of the Cariboo benchland remained optimistic that new markets would open up for them. Rumours had fed their optimism, rumours that said that British Columbia would soon join the Canadian confederation on the promise of a transcontinental railway. One of the possible routes for the railway would go right through the Cariboo and on to Bute Inlet on the central coast and would take their cattle to distant markets. The ranchers of the benchland, including Chiara and Boitano, continued to buy cattle and pre-empt land and cling to the hope that a transcontinental railroad would be their salvation.

The Bute Inlet choice would have pleased businessmen in Victoria too, for the railway would have crossed to Seymour Narrows on the central Vancouver Island coast and then travelled down the Island to Victoria. The ranchers of the Cariboo and the businessmen of Victoria waited much longer than anyone could have dreamed. Governments fell, protesters threatened, secessionists offered themselves and their province to the United States, but still the railway did not come. And when finally the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) Company came into being in 1880 and construction began on the British Columbia section, the choice of terminus took the Cariboo ranchers and Victoria businessmen out of the running. The transcontinental railway would go through the Fraser Canyon and end at Port Moody on Burrard Inlet.

THERE ARE ranches still near the benchland community of Alkali Lake, and it is not much different now than it was in 1874 when Valle died there among his mules. The Alkali Lake Ranch and the First Nations village of Esk’et are the only signs of human habitation. Trees still crest the distant hills. Waterfowl still shelter on the shores of the lake and feed in its waters. Square-hewn-log buildings still line the road that leads into the ranch. Only the dusty pickup trucks and the sprinkling system for the gardens that surround the elegant ranchhouse, which could easily have been built by a homesick Italian, speak of the present.

Traces of Felice Valle are nowhere to be found—not at the ranch or at the cemetery full of white crosses in Esk’et that dates back to the nineteenth century. None of the markers have names on them and there is no written record of the people buried beneath them. In the band archives, where a full-time archivist assists the Esketemc or People of the White Ground to assemble evidence in support of their land claims, there is information about the four Italian ranchers, but no mention of Felice Valle or his grave.