The town took its name from John Byers, senior partner in the firm of Byers and Little, whose business interests sprawled across the settlement. That was how these places worked. A merchant with capital and nerve could stamp his name on a patch of the goldfield and watch a town assemble itself around his stores almost overnight. Byerstown sat on the road between Cooktown's wharves and the diggings further inland, well placed to skim a living off the river of supplies and the river of miners flowing past in both directions. For a few short years the position was everything.

The machinery of a real settlement arrived fast. A post office opened in April 1876. A Court of Petty Sessions was proclaimed that July, a mining warden installed, a Warden's Court formally established in November to settle the endless disputes over who owned which patch of dirt. The 1877 Australian Handbook recorded Byerstown as a post and savings-bank town, noting in the blunt language of the era that its stores and hotels were largely owned by Chinese merchants, who were, the writer conceded, the dominant party in the place. Behind that grudging line sit real people: traders, gardeners, a doctor, building lives and businesses on a goldfield that rarely welcomed them.

Then the field shifted, as goldfields always do. By 1881 the postal run from Cooktown to Maytown had been rerouted around Byerstown entirely, and mail now had to come back from Maytown to reach it. The following year Pugh's Queensland Almanac delivered the verdict that doomed the town: the old route through Byerstown could only be managed by pack horses, while the newer road carried coaches. Coaches meant commerce, and Byerstown no longer had them. Three hotels still stood, Burr's, the Canton, and the Hang Mei, but the post office was downgraded to a receiving office in January 1883 and shut for good around 1884.

What finished Byerstown was not just the road but the restlessness baked into every gold rush. By 1883 the place was described as nearly deserted, its people drawn off to the Normanby diggings about eight miles away, the next bright rumour of easy colour. The Warden's Court had quietly ceased work around 1879; the Court of Petty Sessions hung on until the end of 1889. Today Byerstown lies within the locality of Palmer in the Shire of Cook, a name on old maps and a scatter of evidence in the bush. It is a clean parable of the Palmer: hundreds of these settlements flared up and went dark, each one a town that existed because, for one brief moment, the gold and the road agreed.