The BC Gold Rush (jan 1, 1858 – jan 1, 1865)

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The BC Gold Rush was a vast movement of migrant workers, frontiersmen and Western Canadian settlers that moved into British Columbia to make an attempt at getting rich with gold found in the area. At first, the rumours of the gold were kept quite, due to a couple of factors. The first one was that the HBC was very concerned that it was not real gold that was being found, but fool’s gold; and this they did not want to trade their goods for gold. (Belshaw, p. 520) The second reason was that if it was real, the HBC wanted to hold control over who was able to mine it and possibly use it as a trading advantage. (Belshaw, p. 520) The rush, called the Fraser River gold rush, started in 1858, after James Douglas sent the gold to be tested in a San Francisco mint. (Belshaw p.520) This was called a rush because in April of 1858, 455 people were in Victoria. And by the end of 1858, over 30,000 people were in the area of Victoria. (Watson, On The Edge Of Empire, slide 37-38) The amount of people that ended up in BC was astounding. No other event in Canadian history moved so many people so fast; but the effects it would have on years to come would be even worse than they had been many years before. It changed the political landscape, the environmental landscape, the Indigenous landscape, and the economic landscape. Miners created mining posts, stripping hillsides of trees and shrubs, salmon spawning rivers were filled with silt and sand, rocks were piled and pulled from the ground; the whole environmental landscape of BC was changed. (Belshaw, p. 520-521) Not only that, but British Parliament decided it needed to create the Colony of British Columbia in the area, meaning they wanted to both secure the people currently living there and also begin expanding from it. (Watson, On The Edge Of Empire, slide 40) The BC Colony had an amazing economy, due to the Gold Rush, and also due to the amount of people they had living there. But once the gold rush concluded, their economy began to falter. (Watson, On The Edge Of Empire, slide 43) With that said, I believe that this event had an absolutely massive affect on Canada as a whole. It opened up much more of the Western part of the continent to even more migrants and settlers, and also gave the British another colony in North America. I believe that it was an important factor to BC joining the Confederation in 1871, as they were a British colony, but also wanted to be directly related to the Confederation to have control over their economy, and general populous well-being.

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