Adam Beam
Canadian
Adam Beam was a Canadian prospector who found coarse gold in October 1859 on a stream in British Columbia's Boundary Country, sparking the Rock Creek Gold Rush of 1860 that drew thousands of miners to the new town of Rock Creek.
Biography
Adam Beam (his surname also appears as Beame in colonial records) was a Canadian prospector about whose origins little is recorded. In October 1859, while travelling westward to prospect the Similkameen River near present-day Princeton, he camped on the banks of a stream then called York Creek, about 36 kilometres west of modern Greenwood, and panned gravel that showed coarse flakes of gold.
Beam recorded the first claim on the renamed Rock Creek in 1860 and reportedly took out $977 in his first six weeks of work, a striking sum for the day. News of the find set off the Rock Creek Gold Rush, which at its height drew an estimated 5,000 men, most of them Americans and Chinese miners arriving overland from Colville, Oregon and California. The influx on the boundary alarmed Governor James Douglas, who visited the camp in person in 1860 to assert British authority and appointed officials to license the miners.
The Rock Creek excitement faded within a couple of years as the shallow ground was worked out and miners left for the Cariboo. Beam himself disappears from the record after the rush, and his birth and death dates are unknown; his name survives mainly in accounts of the discovery that briefly made Rock Creek famous.