Cariboo (provincial electoral district)
Cariboo was one of the twelve original electoral districts created when British Columbia became a Canadian province in 1871. Roughly corresponding to the old colonial electoral administrative district of the same name, it was a three-member riding until the 1894 election, when it was reduced through reapportionment and became a two-member riding until the 1916 election, after which it has been a single-member riding. It produced many notable Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs), including George Anthony Boomer Walkem, third and fifth holder of the office of Premier of British Columbia and who was one of the first representatives elected from the riding; John Robson, ninth Premier of British Columbia; and Robert Bonner, a powerful minister in the W.A.C. Bennett cabinet, and later CEO of MacMillan Bloedel and BC Hydro.
When the riding was created, the bulk of its population was in the Cariboo goldfields district around Barkerville, although its boundaries extended to the Yukon boundaries - the original Cariboo riding at its creation included all of the former New Caledonia fur district, north of those parts of it now in the Lillooet Land District which formed the Lillooet riding.1 As mining exploration and other settlement spread northwards from the Cariboo mining areas, the Omineca, Fort George and Peace River (British Columbia electoral district)|ridings were split off by the end of the 19th Century, and the Cariboo riding was reduced to the Cariboo Plateau, south from Quesnel to just south of Williams Lake and 150 Mile House, and including the Barkerville, British Columbia region as well as the remote Chilcotin region, which had no voting (settler) population when the riding was formed other than isolated traders and trappers who may have had time or means to vote. Nearly all of the 785 voters in the first election were in the goldfield towns, Quesnel (then Quesnellemouthe), Williams Lake or towns and ranches south along the Cariboo Road and other routes of the era, and those along the West Fraser from the Chilcotin River, including the Gang Ranch south to just north of Big Bar, an isolated canyon ranching, river-crossing and wagon-trail town in the Fraser Canyon, which was in the Lillooet riding.
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