William Pattullo

Brother of Mary (Pattullo) Short, and the “faithful brother” of the poem written on Thomas Robson Pattullo’s death. In 1859 he and Thomas left Blenheim Township, Oxford County, “to seek their fortunes on the Pacific coast” (source). He was on Williams Creek, in the Cariboo, in the 1870s, though he seems to have followed gold in other parts of the province too, and the Barkerville photographer Louis A. Blanc, there from 1867 to 1872, took his portrait.

When Thomas died at Barkerville in January 1879, William was with him: “No loving sister to close his eyes, / But the hand of a faithful brother,” wrote Captain Jack Crawford in “Under the Snow.” The British Colonist’s obituary of Thomas adds: “Another brother, William, is at present on Williams Creek, Cariboo.” Don Bourdon thinks William, who had worked alongside his older brother, was better placed than their mother and sisters to put together Thomas’s memorial album, and may have overseen it. After Thomas’s death he worked on for wages and dividends as a part owner of the Two Brothers Company. Their nephew Duff, visiting the Cariboo as premier in 1941, remembered that “a second uncle, Bill Pattullo, mined in the Cariboo for years and later moved to San Francisco.” Thomas’s will of 1876 left him an equal share of the residue with the other brothers and sisters.

Open questions

• When and where he died, and whether he married. The San Francisco censuses and voters’ registers from 1880 on may find him.