Rebecca Gibbs, Black Poet and Barkerville Laundress
Published: February 23, 2021
Authors: Bailey Garden
Much of the colonial history of BC has centered the perspectives of white male settlers who came in search of gold and glory. While gold miners tended to work on their own claims, some of the earliest labour organizing in British Columbia was among the coal miners; dangerous conditions, exploitative bosses and long hours prompted these workers to fight back many times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is not that women of the time were non-existent – their involvement is well documented – but it is rare that we hear a woman’s perspective of what they witnessed and felt as community members regarding the miserable working conditions early labourers endured, much less the perspective of a woman of colour. Poetry by Rebecca Gibbs, resident of Barkerville and one of Canada’s first Black female poets, provides us with a window into settler life in the central interior of BC.
Rebecca Gibbs was born in Philadelphia in 1808. By the time that Rebecca was born, slavery was largely absent in the capital city of Philadelphia but lingered in the state of Pennsylvania overall until mid-century. Whether Rebecca or her parents were born into slavery, or why she came to Canada is unknown. Her birth year of 1808 was the same year the US officially abolished the transatlantic slave trade, following the same abolition by Great Britain in 1807.
Sources suggest she was a sister-in-law to Mifflin Gibbs, the first Black person to hold an elected position in British Columbia and the second in Canada overall. It is believed Rebecca was married to one of his brothers, Isaac or Richard Gibbs, but records are not conclusive. We do know that 1868, Rebecca had made her way to what was then the booming town of Barkerville, the largest settlement north of San Francisco and west of Chicago.
Like so many others in the heart of the Cariboo Gold Rush, Rebecca Gibbs worked hard and wore many hats. She opened a laundry in Barkerville and published poems in the local paper, the Cariboo Sentinel.
Dally, Frederick. 1868. “Views in British Columbia.” A. Uno Langmann Family Collection of British Columbia Photographs. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0053437.
Rebecca’s most notable poem, etched on her grave marker, is “The Old Red Shirt” (1869). Her words paint a picture of a man who brings a threadbare shirt to the laundress to repair, leading her to reflect on wealth, work, miners, and their mothers.
Rebecca also published a poem in commemoration of Judge Chartres Brew, a “just and fair” community local who died in May 1870. She was recorded in the Sentinel as a witness in a local court case, but little else is known about her life in Barkerville.
Rebecca Gibbs passed away Nov. 14, 1873 in Victoria, BC at the age of 66 from bronchitis, and was buried in Ross Bay Cemetery. The Victoria Black Peoples Society & the Old Cemeteries Society erected a headstone for her which lists ‘nurse’ among her other occupations of poet and laundress. The engraving reads, “One of many black people who came to British Columbia to escape discrimination before the US Civil War. On the reverse side is the poem, “The Old Red Shirt”.
For the working people of BC, the gold rush established roads, steamship services and thriving settlements throughout the Interior of the province; but it also launched the province into an economy based on the exploitation of natural resources and the sweat and struggle of industrial labour. In the words of Rebecca Gibbs: “Have pity on men who earn your wealth, Grudge not the poor miner his food.”
In the years following her death, miners and other industrial workers around the province began organizing into unions to improve their collective conditions.
Sources:
BC Black History Awareness Society. “BC’s Black Pioneers”. Community Stories virtual exhibit, Digital Museums Canada, 2021.
Karyn Huenemann. ‘On the Death of Judge Brew,” by Rebecca Gibbs. 19 Mar. 2018.
Kilian, Crawford. Go do some great thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1979. pp. 79-80.