Digital Bob Archive

\"Uncle Dick\" Willoughby, the man for whom Willoughby Avenue was named, may have been born in South Carolina, as the account of his life stated. Another account puts his birthplace in Boone County, Missouri. The date may have been in 1827, but that is one of the many uncertainties about his history. When he made a will in 1901, his age was given as 65. That would have made his birth year around 1836.

It is known that Willoughby was in Missouri when the Gold Rush to California began and he joined it. Apparently he did fairly well at placer mining and in 1854 he returned to Missouri to claim a bride. On March 23 of that year he married Miss Safronia Hornsby at the home of her father, Brinkley Hornsby, near Gunn City in Cass County on the western edge of the state.

About May 1, 1854, the Willoughbys left Missouri on the overland journey to California They returned three years later with a son, James Napoleon Willoughby. Mother and son moved in with her family and Dick Willoughby headed back to the gold fields Whether that was intended to be the end of the marriage is not known, but that is what it proved to be. Mrs. Willoughby reportedly died during the Civil War, by which time Dick was mining somewhere in British Columbia. Who raised the boy is also unknown, but Dick had four brothers and three sisters, and no doubt Safronia Willoughby also had relatives.

Dick Willoughby got back to California just about the time news of gold discoveries on the Fraser River reached there. He took off for the new diggings, did well in the Yale area. then moved on north to the Cariboo. On Lowhee Creek he staked a claim which yielded as much as 120 ounces of gold a day and in a few weeks he and a partner took out $70,000 apiece. Willoughby became an entrepreneur. He bought a saloon, a sawmill and a mule pack train, and financed an express company. Then he went to Victoria and began a winter-long spree that was still talked about thirty years later. By spring he was broke, but, he said,
\"there's always another creek over the hill.\"

Willoughby went back to the Cariboo diggings, found some more gold, then operated a cattle ranch near Chilliwack, B.C., for a few years, The discovery of gold at Dease Lake in what became known as the Cassiar District sent him back to the gold pan. He came north in either 1873 or 1874 and mined on McDame Creek. In 1876 he had a stake of $10,000 and either bought or started a saloon at Wrangell.

When the diggings in the Cassiar began to play out, in 1879, many of the miners moved to Sitka where some gold had been found at Silver Bay. But it was gold in lodes and there wasn't much there for the placer miners. Willoughby also went to Sitka where a census taken in April 1880 listed him as a saloon keeper. In the summer and fall of 1880, when Joe Juneau and Dick Harris were making the gold discovery that resulted in the founding of Juneau, Willoughby was prospecting in Icy Strait and Glacier Bay. He was one of the early arrivals at the new camp on Gastineau Channel and staked a claim on Gold Creek on December 2, 1880.