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33-569: The Hurley River is a major tributary of the Bridge River of west-central British Columbia that was earlier known as the South Fork of that larger river. It was for a while known as "Hamilton's River" after Danny Hamilton, an American who was among the first to settle in the goldfields region of the upper Bridge River . By the 1920s that name was changed to the Hurley River, commemorating one of

66-566: A few miles upstream from the Thompson's confluence with the Fraser River at present-day Lytton . The rush overtook the region around the discovery and was centered on the Fraser Canyon from around Hope and Yale to Pavilion and Fountain , just north of Lillooet . Though the rush was largely over by 1927, miners from the rush spread out and found a sequence of other gold fields throughout

99-599: A group of rebellious American miners. Governor Douglas placed restrictions on immigration to the new British colony , including the proviso that entry to the territory must be made via Victoria and not overland, but thousands of men still arrived via the Okanagan and Whatcom Trails . Douglas also sought to limit the importation of weapons, one of the reasons for the Victoria-disembarkation requirement, but his lack of resources for oversight meant that overland routes to

132-507: A mountainside to the separate drainage basin of Seton Lake , utilizing a system of three dams, four powerhouses and a canal. The powerhouses have a maximum generating capacity of 480 MW and an average annual production of 2670 GWh. Development of the system began in 1927 and was completed in 1960. The waters initially pass through the Lajoie Dam and powerhouse and are then diverted through tunnels and penstocks from Carpenter Reservoir to

165-540: A record for mass movement of mining populations on the North American frontier, even though more men in total were involved in the gold rushes of California and Colorado. By the fall, however, tens of thousands of men who had failed to stake claims or were unable to because of the summer's high water on the river, pronounced the Fraser to be "humbug." Many returned to San Francisco, but a continuing influx of newcomers replaced

198-532: Is Lajoie Dam , which forms Downton Lake . Its confluence with the Fraser occurs at a double gorge formed by the two rivers, which are forced through narrow banks at this point and so reminiscent of a fountain (in another version of the name, the surname of one of Fraser's men was supposedly du Font , giving the location its name of the Lower Fountains (the Upper Fountains being another few miles upstream on

231-681: Is in that area the south flank of the Bridge, what Bridge River water enters the Fraser now is largely the flow of one of the Bridge's tributaries, the Yalakom River . The Yalakom, whose name means 'the ewe of the mountain sheep ' in the Chilcotin language , was in old times known as the North Fork of the Bridge. The South Fork of the Bridge River is many miles upstream, at the community of Gold Bridge , and

264-541: Is today known as the Hurley River (originally Hamilton's River). Several other large feeder streams contribute to the diverted flow of the Bridge, including Gun Creek , Tyaughton Creek , Marshall Creek, and Cadwallader Creek; the last-named is a tributary of the Hurley, about 15 kilometres upstream from its confluence with the Bridge. Bridge River Power Project harnesses the power of the Bridge River, by diverting it through

297-602: The British Columbia Interior and North , most famously that in the Cariboo . The rush is credited with instigating European-Canadian settlement on the mainland of British Columbia. It was the catalyst for the founding of the Colony of British Columbia , the building of early road infrastructure, and the founding of many towns. Although the area had been mined for a few years, news of the strike spread to San Francisco when

330-930: The Lillooet River , to which a steep, switchbacking descent must be made. Railroad Pass gets its name from its consideration as a possible railway route between the Coast and the Interior during the initial surveys for the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1870s, and again during the heyday of railway speculation in British Columbia in the 1890s-1910s. 50°51′00″N 122°51′00″W  /  50.85000°N 122.85000°W  / 50.85000; -122.85000 Bridge River The Bridge River hydroelectric complex , operated by BC Hydro , consists of three successive dams, providing water for four hydro power plants with

363-560: The Bridge River. Upstream from Moha the now-dry riverbed runs through the immense gorge of the Bridge River Canyon, which lies immediately downstream from Terzaghi Dam , the principal dam of the Bridge River Power Project . Terzaghi Dam forms Carpenter Lake , the longest and largest of the power project's reservoirs at about 40 kilometres. Just upstream from Gold Bridge , which is at the upper end of Carpenter Lake,

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396-774: The British Empire's "bulwark in the farthest west" and "found a second England on the shores of the Pacific." Moody arrived in British Columbia in December 1858, commanding the Royal Engineers, Columbia Detachment . Moody had hoped to begin immediately the foundation of a capital city, but upon his arrival at Fort Langley he learned of an outbreak of violence at the settlement of Hill's Bar. This led to an incident popularly known as " Ned McGowan's War ", where Moody successfully quashed

429-601: The Fraser River just south of Lillooet as a result. The salmon fishery of the Bridge River was near-entirely destroyed by this diversion. It is along Cadwallader Creek that the major mines of the Bridge River goldfields are located at Bralorne and Pioneer Mine . Other mining towns and camps built around mines in the Bridge River goldfields were Minto City , Wayside, Congress, Lajoie, Haylmore and Brexton (aka Fish Lake). Around Bralorne other localities such as Ogden grew up along road right-of-ways and slips of land between

462-582: The Fraser at the peak of the gold rush. This estimate was based on the Yale area and did not include the non-mining "hangers-on" population. (The Fraser River Gold Rush started in 1858) When news of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush reached London, Richard Clement Moody was hand-picked by the Colonial Office , under Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton , to establish British order and to transform British Columbia into

495-541: The Fraser, today's community of Fountain The river came to be called the Bridge River due to the location of a bridge across the Fraser at this point, originally a pole-structure built by the native St'at'imc people but replaced at the time of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in 1858 by a white-run tollbridge. Because of the diversion of the river to Seton Lake by Terzaghi Dam and tunnels through Mission Mountain , which

528-549: The apologies of the Americans who had waged war on the natives. Wanting to make the British military and governmental presence more visible, Douglas appointed justices of the peace and also revised the slapdash mining rules which had emerged along the river. Troops to maintain order, however, were still in short supply. Competition and interracial tensions between European Americans and non-white miners erupted on Christmas Eve 1858, with

561-885: The area has changed since it was first proposed for a park in the 1930s, due to the efforts of the prospecting and mining community in the goldfield towns. The protectionist vs. resource extraction battle over that area has raged since that time, and names used in debates for the area have included the Charlie Cunningham Wilderness, the Spruce Lake-Eldorado Study Area , the Spruce Lake-Eldorado Management Planning Unit (SLRMP), Southern Chilcotin Mountains Provincial Park, and South Chilcotin Provincial Park. In 2007

594-733: The banks of the river for the thirty kilometres between the community of Moha, at the confluence of the Yalakom and the Bridge. Gun Creek and Tyaughton Creek jointly drain the south flank of the protected wilderness area known as the Spruce Lake Protected Area , popularly known as the South Chilcotin although the area is not actually in the Chilcotin, which lies north of it, but in the Chilcotin Ranges . The official designation for

627-411: The beating of Isaac Dixon , a freed American black. He was the town barber and in later years was a popular journalist in the Cariboo . Dixon was beaten by two men from Hill's Bar , the other main town in the southern part of the goldfields. The complicated series of events that ensued is known as McGowan's War . Its potential to provoke United States annexation ambitions within the goldfields, prompted

660-754: The disenchanted, with even more men storming the route of the Douglas Road to the upper part of Fraser Canyon around Lillooet ; others got to the upper canyon via the Okanagan Trail and Similkameen Trail , and to the lower Canyon via the Whatcom Trail and the Skagit Trail. All these routes were technically illegal since the Governor required that entry to the colony to be made via Victoria, but thousands came overland anyway. Accurate numbers of miners, especially on

693-471: The gold rush must be understood to be inherently European-ethnic to start with. Anglo-American Southerners (from states such as Missouri and Kentucky), Midwesterners, and New Englanders were well represented. Alfred Waddington, an entrepreneur and pamphleteer of the gold rush later infamous for the disastrous road-building expedition which led to the Chilcotin War of 1864, estimated there were 10,500 miners on

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726-826: The goldfields could not be controlled. During the fall of 1858, tensions increased between miners and the Nlaka'pamux , the First Nations people of the Canyon. This led to the Fraser Canyon War . Miners wary of venturing upriver beyond Yale began to use the Lakes Route to Lillooet instead, prompting Douglas to contract for the building of the Douglas Road , the Mainland Colony's first public works project. The governor arrived in Yale to accept

759-509: The governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island , James Douglas , sent a shipment of ore to that city's mint. People in San Francisco and the California gold fields greeted the news with excitement. Within a month 30,000 men had descended upon Victoria . 4,000 of these Gold Rush pioneers settlers were Chinese. Until that time, the village had had a population of only about 500. This was

792-409: The governor to send newly appointed Chief Justice Begbie , the colony's chief of police Chartres Brew and a contingent of Royal Engineers and Royal Marines to intervene. They did not need to use force and were able to resolve the matter peacefully. The team also dealt with the corruption of British appointees in the area, which had contributed to the crisis. The Fraser Canyon War did not affect

825-599: The main pioneers of the Lillooet Country , Dan Hurley. The Hurley begins near Mount Thiassi and flows through a marshy upper valley eastwards before turning north just west of the famous gold-mining town of Bralorne . From that point the river goes over semi-hidden Hurley Falls into the Hurley Canyon, which makes up ten of the last twelve miles of the river before its confluence with the Bridge River near Gold Bridge , just below Lajoie Dam . An operating placer mine at

858-518: The mineral claims which dominate the northwestern flank of the Bendor Range in this area, providing services not approved of by company towns, including "sporting houses" , some of which were also in Gold Bridge until forced to move to Minto as Gold Bridge became larger. Other gold-mining activity is found throughout the river's basin. During the 19th Century, large hydraulic mining operations lined

891-634: The miners had either drifted back to the U.S. or dispersed further into the British Columbia wilderness in search of unstaked riches. Other gold rushes proliferated around the colony, with notable gold rushes at Rock Creek , the Similkameen , Wild Horse Creek and the Big Bend of the Columbia River spinning immediately off the Fraser rush, and gold exploration soon after led to the Omineca Gold Rush and

924-590: The name was changed again to the Spruce Lake Protected Area, reflective of the government's downgrading of the area from park to mixed-use in certain areas. Fraser Canyon Gold Rush The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush , (also Fraser Gold Rush and Fraser River Gold Rush ) began in 1858 after gold was discovered on the Thompson River in British Columbia at its confluence with the Nicoamen River

957-471: The outlet of the canyon goes by the name South Fork, alluding to the river's older name. The Hurley has given its name to a famous B.C. backroad between Gold Bridge and Pemberton - the Hurley Main. A "main" is a logging main, that is to say a major trunk road for a network of logging roads. The route of the Hurley Main uses a defile known as Railroad Pass near the head of that river to emerge high above

990-613: The total rated power of total 492 megawatts. Its name in the Lillooet language is Xwisten (pronounced Hwist'n), sometimes spelled Nxwisten or Nxo-isten). Dubbed Riviere du Font by Simon Fraser's exploring party in 1808, it was for a while known by the English version of that name, Fountain River , and some old maps show it as Shaw's River, after the name of one of Fraser's men. The Bridge River Ocean , an ancient ocean, takes its name from

1023-471: The two powerhouses on Seton Lake Reservoir. Due to the force of the rivers at the Bridge's original confluence into the Fraser, the area has been for millennia the most important inland salmon-fishing site on the Fraser. The flow of the Bridge River, however, was near-completely diverted into Seton Lake with the completion of the Bridge River Power Project in 1961, with the water now entering

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1056-874: The upper Fraser, are therefore difficult to reckon. During the gold rush tens of thousands of prospectors from California flooded into the newly declared Colony of British Columbia and disrupted the established balance between the Hudson's Bay Company 's fur traders and indigenous peoples . The influx of prospectors included numerous European Americans and African Americans , Britons , Germans , English Canadians , Maritimers , French Canadians , Scandinavians , Italians , Belgians and French , and other European ethnicities , Hawaiians , Chinese , Mexicans , West Indians , and others. Many of those first-arrived of European and British origin were Californian by culture, and this included Maritimers such as Amor De Cosmos and others. The numbers of "Americans" associated with

1089-478: The upper reaches of the goldfields, in the area of Lillooet, and the short-lived popularity of the Douglas Road caused the town to be designated "the largest town north of San Francisco and west of Chicago ", with an estimated population of 16,000. This title was also briefly held by Port Douglas , Yale, and later on by Barkerville . By 1860, however, the gold-bearing sandbars of the Fraser were depleted. Many of

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