Francis Jones Barnard (18 February 1829 – 10 July 1889), often known as Frank Barnard Sr., was a prominent British Columbia businessman and Member of Parliament in Canada from 1879 to 1887.
Most famously, Barnard was the founder of the B.X. Express freighting company ("Barnard's Express"), which was the main cartage and passenger services company on the Cariboo Road. His son, Sir Francis Stillman Barnard, later became the Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia.
Life
Though born in Quebec City, Barnard was a descendant of another Francis Barnard who settled in Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1642 and was one of that city's selectmen. The family business in Québec City was in hardware, but when his father died when he was twelve it fell upon him to support his mother and siblings.
In 1853 he married Ellen Stillman of Quebec City and in 1855 moved to Toronto, Canada West and started his own business. Unsuccessful in Toronto, he left his wife and young children there and emigrated to British Columbia in the spring of 1859 via the Panama Railway and San Francisco in 3rd class steerage. He arrived in Victoria at one of the peaks of gold rush frenzy in the early colony, and arrived in Yale with only a $5 gold piece in his pocket. He survived his first season there by chopping cordwood and delivering it on his back, and in staking and working a gold claim, and then selling it. He was appointed as the constable of Yale that summer. He was assigned to escort two prisoners to New Westminster and recaptured one at Hope after the prisoner had attempted to murder him with his own revolver after overpowering him.
In 1860 he became purser of the steam vessel Yale, which had been built by the businessmen of Yale to be the first steamer capable of reaching the Yale wharf, as all earlier vessels had only been able to voyage as far as Hope. In a joint contract with a Captain Powers , he also won a government contract to build the trail from Yale to Boston Bar. Doing well, between the roadbuilding and his job with the steamer, he sent to Ontario to bring out his wife and two small children. They arrived in Victoria in December, arriving on the mainland via the steamer Yale on its next-to-last voyage, as it was blown up just below Hope in a boiler accident on its next voyage. Though most others were killed, Barnard had been sitting at the dining table and was thrown out of the vessel by the explosion, and was rescued by local First Nations people. Shortly after he was awarded a contract to grade and "stamp" (the pre-asphalt equivalent of paving) Douglas Street, one of the principal streets of Yale.
It was his next enterprise, begun in the fall of 1860, that would grow to become the B.X. Express one of the most important companies in the early history of the Colony, and which would remain in business for decades. He began by carrying mail and newspapers, on foot, all the way from Yale to the goldfield towns of the Cariboo, a 760-mile roundtrip journey, charging $2 per letter and selling newspapers in the goldfields for $1 a copy. In 1861 and 1862 he also carried packages between Yale and New Westminster, a distance of 200 miles, and in 1862 established a one-horse pony express, with himself as sole rider, serving the Cariboo from Yale, where he met with services from New Westminster and Yale provided by Dietz & Nelson (one of the partners in which was the later Lieutenant-Governor Hugh Nelson and couriered reliably from there to Barkerville. On his return journeys, he became entrusted with shipments of gold dust, and managed to reliably and safely convey earnings from the goldfields to Yale despite the ever-present risk of robbery, in addition to the difficulties posed by distance, climate, and the difficult canyon and plateau trails.