HIS263Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Fraser Canyon Gold Rush
Document Summary
By mid-century there were signs of canadian interest in the west which was currently in the monopoly of the fur trade. In 1848 vancouver was established as a british colony. Up until then it had been leased out to the hudson bay company. A report maintained that for much of the west the continuation of the trading monopoly of the. Two scientific expeditions one british and one canadian ended the public"s opinion that the vast region was utterly unfit for human habitation. Both reports acknowledged that there was great agricultural potential of the west once opened by a railway. In 1857 the discovery of gold on the mainland along the thompson and fraser (interior b. c. ) rivers brought hundreds of miners, mainly from california, to a gold rush that was quite small by earlier california standards. The discovery of gold irreversibly altered life for the indigenous people of the pacific slope.
