Thomas Robson Pattullo

Brother of Mary (Pattullo) Short, and the uncle for whom Premier T. D. “Duff” Pattullo was named. For seventeen years he was one of the best-known men of the Cariboo gold fields, “a larger-than-life figure,” as Don Bourdon’s study of him puts it; most of what follows is from that study, which quotes the newspapers, the probate file and the family’s papers (source).

The Cariboo. Born at Caledon on 16 December 1837, the second of Halkett and Jane’s children, he moved with the family to Blenheim Township, Oxford County, in 1855. In 1859 he and his brother William left “to seek their fortunes on the Pacific coast,” going first to California, “whence he went to the Fraser River in 1861” (the British Colonist, 1876). By the fall of 1861 he was registering claims and a building lot on Williams Creek, and the Cariboo records hold sixty-five of his claim transactions between 1861 and 1879, in companies from the Heron, Victoria, Pogonip, Woodstock, Starrett, Great Eastern, Murtle, Pattullo Co., Ivanhoe No. 2 and Van Winkle to the Two Brothers, which he was in at his death; much of his work was on Antler, Grouse and Lightning creeks. “His first success was at Heron Creek, in the winter of 1866 and spring of 1867.” He stands with the Heron Company’s men, and with Governor Seymour, in Frederick Dally’s photographs of 1867, taken in the middle of the Grouse Creek War, and he is the man in the black hat and travelling cloak leaning on the Bank of British Columbia in Dally’s view of Barkerville’s main street, taken weeks before the town burned on 16 September 1868. He lived in an apartment in the south wing of the government assay office at Barkerville until it burned in 1875, and was “a bon vivant in New Westminster and Victoria.” He owned half of the Victoria claim on Lightning Creek, and in the early 1870s he was a shareholder of the “Vancouver” claim at Stanley; in his last year he invested in the Quesnelle Quartz Mining Company, which pioneered hardrock mining there. A printed sketch says he helped organize baseball in British Columbia as early as 1864 (source).

A Canadian. He was a reformer and a Canadian among the colonists. With his friend Dr. R. W. W. Carrall, also of Woodstock, one of the three delegates chosen in 1870 to negotiate British Columbia’s terms of union, he escorted Governor Musgrave round the creeks in 1869, and he sat on Barkerville’s committee of sixty for Dominion Day in 1871, the year the colony joined Confederation. The Ottawa Citizen said at his death that he “bore no inconsiderable part in the incorporation of the Pacific Province with the Dominion.” In 1872, as “Tillicum” (friend, in the Chinook Jargon), he wrote a series of articles on British Columbia for his brother George’s Woodstock Sentinel, recalling how Governor Douglas’s officials had looked down on Canadians and colonists (“the officials and lick-spittles generally”), and foreseeing a railway on Dominion soil from Halifax to Bute or Burrard Inlet: “there is no doubt that in time the ‘Columbia’ will be the ‘Britain’ of the Pacific.” He wrote, too, of the many “promising young countrymen whose mortal remains lie in obscure and unmarked graves … away up among the snowy mountains of Cariboo.”

The poor man’s friend. In 1871 he helped collect for the town’s surgeon, who had gone a year unpaid, and he was among those who raised $2,105.50 for the unfortunate Peter McDonald. In the spring of 1872 he went round the district for a miner in the hospital with consumption, and raised $615 to send him home to Canada by Barnard’s express; the Cariboo Sentinel praised him “for his exertions in aid of the sick and needy.”

The Centennial. In 1876 he went east with Cariboo gold for the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, to show “on his own account” in the British Columbia department: specimens, dust, nuggets and bars worth over $13,000, one bar alone of 293.64 ounces, worth $5,426.64 (the British Colonist, 23 July 1876). On the way he came home to Woodstock with some of the gold minted into $20 pieces, and threw a handful on the ground for the children to scramble for; his nephew Duff, then three, remembered sixty-five years later being “among the leaders who grabbed one of these coins” (the Province, 26 June 1941); Robin Fisher’s life of Duff pictures the boy seeing his uncle come to Burnside, his father’s house, “with Cariboo gold in his pockets.” His portrait in the memorial album is embossed “International Exhibition Philad’a May 10th to November 10th 1876,” and on one of his visits home he was photographed with his sister Mary (Woodstock Museum, 1988.21.04). On that trip he made his will, leaving his mother $15,000, his brother Andrew and his sister Mary $2,000 each, and the rest to his other brothers and sisters in equal shares, with Andrew as executor for Ontario and the United States.

Easily got, easily spent. That “was unfortunately the rule in his case,” the Colonist said. His probate file values the estate at $4,999.37½: cash of $2,468.92½ (most of it owed by his partner John Adair), notes, “jewelry” at $500, his share of the Victoria claim at $42.50 and his clothes at $37.12. Against it ran his board at the Colonial Hotel and the Driard House in Victoria, a new wardrobe from a Victoria clothier, an overdraft at the Bank of British Columbia, sixty-three weeks’ room rent at Barkerville, and bar accounts: 303 drinks on one account in 1878, and sixty-two in the week before he died, forty of them on New Year’s Day. When all was paid his mother’s estate received $1,664.06.

Under the snow. He was taken to the hospital at Barkerville on 7 January 1879 and died there the next morning at five minutes to seven, of “a violent inflammation brought on by a severe cold,” with Dr. Grange attending and his brother William beside him. The barber Wellington Delaney Moses shaved him for burial, and wrote of the funeral on the 9th, from Mr. Kelly’s house: “a very large turn out from the Deferent Creeks Ladies and gents.” His family telegraphed asking for his body to be sent home, but he was buried at once in the Cameronton cemetery above Williams Creek. The British Colonist: “He was a very hard-working and persevering man and bid fair at one time to be one of the richest men in the country … always noted as a thoroughly good-hearted and generous man, and one who would always lend a friendly hand to anyone in distress.” His brothers’ Sentinel-Review, which had only a telegram: “Few men were more widely known in the mining centres and among the people generally of the Pacific Slope … none enjoyed a larger share of personal popularity.” The district felt, the Colonist said later, that “in Mr. Pattullo Cariboo loses one of the most widely known and best beloved of her citizens.” His stone reads “Thomas R. Pattullo, a native of Ontario and an early pioneer of British Columbia” (record).

The American poet-scout Captain Jack Crawford, wintering at Barkerville, was at a two-day party when word came that “our good-hearted, jovial friend Tom Pattullo was dying,” and after the funeral wrote “Under the Snow,” eight stanzas on “the dearest, kindest heart in the camp,” who on his deathbed spoke of his favourite song, “Maid of Athens,” and who “was no saint … But Tom was what we call’d a man, ’Mongst men in Cariboo”; it ends “The Lord will not forget the man, / Who’s been the poor man’s friend.” The poem was printed round his portrait on the title page of a memorial album of twenty-seven Dally photographs (BC Archives MS-3100), which William may have put together. Twenty years later Crawford met Duff at Bennett in the spring of 1898, on the way to the Klondike, and told him he looked “just like Uncle Tom except of course that I am not so large.” In June 1941 Duff, as premier, visited his grave. From 1995 to 2003 actors at Barkerville Historic Town played him in the street.

Open questions

• His “Tillicum” articles in the Woodstock Sentinel, 9 February to 29 March 1872, to be read in full.
• Whether he ever married: nothing found says so.