Angus McCulloch
Scottish
Angus McCulloch was a Scottish prospector who co-discovered gold with Henry Thibert on Thibert Creek at Dease Lake in 1872, the strike that launched the Cassiar Gold Rush in northern British Columbia. Little else of his life was recorded.
Biography
Angus McCulloch (the name is also spelled McCullough in some records) was a Scottish prospector about whose origins little is known. He partnered with the French-Canadian prospector Henry Thibert on a long overland prospecting journey through the far northwest, and in the summer of 1872 the two men found placer gold on a creek flowing into the north end of Dease Lake, in the Cassiar district of northern British Columbia.
Their strike opened the Cassiar Gold Rush, the great northern excitement of the 1870s. Miners streamed up the Stikine River from Wrangell in 1873 and 1874 to work Thibert Creek, Dease Creek and later McDame Creek, and the district yielded several million dollars in gold before the decade was out.
The discoverers' own fates are murkily recorded. Tradition holds that one of the partners froze to death in the brutal winter that followed the strike, but accounts differ on which man it was, and neither prospector's birth or death dates can be stated with confidence. The creek took Thibert's name, and McCulloch, like many discoverers of the northern goldfields, left almost no other trace in the historical record.