108 Mile House

William James Roper
Born in Dorsetshire, England in 1841 and educated at Sherbourne College, James Roper arrived in Victoria in 1862 via Panama and San Francisco. He was drawn to the Interior by gold and spent time mining and working as a freighter. On his first trip north, he was reminded of the rolling hills of his home county. He pre-empted land at that site thinking that he might settle there, and built a roadhouse to cater to the travelers. He was not particularly successful at running the 108 Mile roadhouse and sold it to Charles Beak so that he could return to freighting.

Charles Beak
Born and raised in England, Beak traveled to California in the 1850s where he became associated with a vigilante group in the area of the goldfields he mined, along the Sacramento River. He first came to B.C. accompanying a herd of 300 cattle, selling meat along the way. His next trip to B.C. he brought a large flock of sheep as far as Barkerville where he opened a butcher shop selling mutton and candles made from mutton tallow. In 1866 competition increased to the point that he was no longer able to make a profit, and he moved back to the U.S. The following winter he married Marie Johnson, a sixteen-year-old from Glencoe, Oregon. In the spring of 1868 he brought her to the Cariboo, and bought the 108 Mile Ranch. Along with running the roadhouse, Beak and his wife also worked alongside the other ranchers in the area to increase the cattle population of the region; this was so successful that the Beaks were able to start several dairies as well as another retail butcher shop in Barkerville. Again Beak's foray into the meat market was unsuccessful, and most of his stock was killed by bears. By 1878, Beak decided that the Cariboo was not suitable for the type of ranching he hoped to pursue, and he and his wife sold the roadhouse and moved to a site on the Upper Nicola River where he was one of the founding ranchers at the Douglas Lake Ranch.

William Walker
Like many of the other roadhouse proprietors, Walker was an early entrepreneur in the Cariboo. Before purchasing the 108 Mile Ranch from the Beaks in the 1870s, he and his wife Emily had had interests in several properties since the early 1860s.