Aaaaaand Continued...

1858 – The Gold Rush and creation of BC
So now the secret was out and the gold rush began. When the first ship of prospectors arrived in Victoria, it doubled the population of the town. Most of these prospectors were Californians that were reaching the tail end of their own gold rush and were hoping to try their luck further north.

Even before the gold rush had begun in earnest, James Douglas feared that the lawlessness that occurred in California during their gold rush would occur in New Caledonia as well. In 1857, he created a law that required every miner to have a license and imposed a 10% customs duty on imported goods. The fee was low, so that a gold panner could pay it back with a day of work, but it created a controlled access to the area.

The next year, James Douglas really cracked down on policing New Caledonia and imposed a colonial government in the area without permission of the British Crown. Tension was high between the miners and the First Nations, so there was little resistance to the imposed governance from the side of the Europeans. When the British Crown found about Douglas’ rogue governance, they decided to make his authority in the area official by making New Caledonia a British colony. Queen Victoria herself was the one to come up with the name British Columbia for New Caledonia. At the time Americans were colloquially calling their land Columbia, so the moniker British Columbia was a cheeky way of saying they may have lost their American colony, but they had laid claim to this new land. On November 19th, 1885 the proclamation naming British Columbia as a new British colony was read in Fort Langley. However, New Westminster became the capital as it was easier to defend being further from the border and lying on the Fraser River.

As the Gold Fever began to intensify around 1860, a 108 mile wagon road was built from Harrison Lake (Fort Douglas) up to Lillooet by the Royal Engineers and contractors. This road made it easier and cheaper to transport goods and people up the Fraser. Shortly after the construction of the Douglas-Lillooet Wagon Road, the Fraser Canyon gold rush reached its peak in 1861 with 50,000 miners along the Fraser River. These miners were mostly Americans come up from California, with a smaller percentage of European and Chinese immigrants.

At this peak, the British Crown changed British Columbia’s eastern border to go directly North in the Peace River area. This was done in an attempt to keep gold-seekers under the control of the British and more effectively monitor who entered the colony from the North. However, after 1861 gold become more capital intensive as it was buried beneath rock and dirt as you moved further North and the alluvial gold was removed.

The Role of Lillooet

So how does the, now little, town of Lillooet come into this gold rush. At one point Lillooet was the largest town west of Chicago and north of San Fransisco. Lillooet was the furthest north the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush went before gold was found in the Cariboo and sparked the Cariboo gold rush. Not only was Lillooet difficult to get past using the river, it was harder through the mountains to the northeast. When they had built the Cariboo wagon road, the engineers had to blast through rock and create bridges over valleys and rivers.

The Lillooet people were often described as being destitute at the onset of the gold rush and were colloquially known as the “friendly Indians”. They were definitely up for a shock when the gold rush occurred and brought with it a huge influx of people so different from themselves. No one is sure of just how many people were there, but estimates range around 25,000 people arriving in only a few months. In spite of their friendly nature, the Lillooet, like so many First Nations at the time, were pushed back from their waterfront communities. Up to the Main Street area of modern day Lillooet is directly on top of the main village of a former First Nations band.

First Nations and their role

There was a great deal of tension between the First Nations and Europeans during the gold rush and it has continued to this day. Some of the reasons for this animosity on the end of the First Nations came from the rotgut whiskey brought in by the Americans, poor treatment of First Nations women by white men, and miners stealing their caught fish in the river. However, the dependence Europeans had on the First Nations to navigate the wild lands of BC put Europeans in a vulnerable position that they did not seem to appreciate. This one-sided dependence and one-sided exploitation of people and resources caused a great deal of armed conflict during the gold rush. Many people on both sides lost their lives and the tension just increased as a result.

The government went about “Indian law” under the assumption that First Nations would be wiped out by European diseases and thus were doomed to extinction. First Nations in BC, unlike the other parts of Canada, were not allowed even the opportunity to sign treaties and get some immediate compensation for their land and resources. For obvious reasons, this was not pointed out to the First Nations. James Douglas even made the claim that British law was there to protect the rights of the Indians and white men equally.

Tie it back to forestry

The fact that no treaties were signed by the BC First Nations during the time of the gold rush means that they are able to negotiate more easily for the management of their historical lands today. This is especially evident in the growing popularity of community forestry.

Early on James Douglas recognized that gold mining was not a stable basis for an economy as it was too destructive to the environment. The other major natural resources in the area were salmon and trees. Salmon fisheries had already taken off as an industry because you could transport them down the river. Trees were not as easy to sell especially to the American market because of the distance the goods had to travel with no roads and high American tariffs. Furthermore, the raw logs had to be shipped because there were very few sawmills in the area, other than a couple at the mouth of the Fraser that sent their products to the Pacific Rim. So, initially, most of the timber used in BC was shipped from Puget Sound just south of the border.

Forestry really became a viable industry in BC after the creation of the TransCanada Railway. The Railway made it possible to ship the timber around the country and helped to create a bigger market for it. Plus there was a lot of lumber needed in the creation of the railway itself and to create homes for the new people it brought to BC after its construction.