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30-653: This pass was historically important in the founding of British Columbia during the Fraser River Gold Rush when it was a key link in what was known as the Lakes Route or Douglas Road . In that context it was also known as the Pemberton Portage or Long Portage ( Seton Portage , at the lower end of Anderson Lake, was the Short Portage). The wagon road constructed in those times continued in use locally despite

60-682: A continuing influx of newcomers replaced 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

90-484: A cosmopolitan mix of British , Americans , Chinese , Mexicans , Scandinavians , Kanakas (Hawaiians), Germans and others signed up for the job. Controversy erupted at the end of construction over whether prices at the Port Douglas end of the trail or the more expensive rates at Lillooet would be used to reckon the reimbursement as promised. The Governor settled finally on the cheaper Port Douglas prices. But

120-599: 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

150-784: The Canadian National Railway conglomerate. 50°28′11″N 122°38′37″W  /  50.46972°N 122.64361°W  / 50.46972; -122.64361 This article related to a mountain, mountain range, or peak in British Columbia , Canada is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about a location in the Cariboo Regional District , Canada is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Fraser River Gold Rush The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush , (also Fraser Gold Rush and Fraser River Gold Rush ) began in 1858 after gold

180-713: The Lillooet Trail , Harrison Trail or Lakes Route , was a goldrush -era transportation route from the British Columbia Coast to the Interior (NB another route known as the Lillooet Trail was the Lillooet Cattle Trail , which used some of the same route but was built 25 years later). Over 30,000 men are reckoned to have travelled the route in, although by the end of the 1860s it was virtually abandoned due to

210-797: The Stikine Gold Rush , which led to the creation of the Stikine Territory to the colony's north. The Fort Colville Gold Rush in Washington Territory was also a spin-off of the Fraser Gold Rush, as many miners from the Fraser headed there once news of the strike in US territory reached the mining camps. Many others moved on to a gold rush in Colorado. Douglas Road The Douglas Road , a.k.a.

240-454: The 1890s, although small-steamer traffic on Anderson and Seton Lakes continued for decades after, ending on Seton Lake only in the 1950s. Starting at Port Douglas (now abandoned), a trail led to 25 Mile House (abandoned and lost). From there a route by boat and road went to Port Pemberton. A trail then went into Pemberton and made a wide turn to Port Anderson. From there, another water to road route went straight to Lillooet, where it joined

270-716: 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

300-582: 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

330-558: The Short Portage (today known as Seton Portage ). There packers and ultimately a short mule-drawn "railway" shuttled men and freight to the head of Seton Lake , where another collection of steamers carried them to the foot of that lake and a final five-mile wagon road to the boomtowns of Cayoosh Flat, Parsonville and Marysville (today's Lillooet ). In response to the Cariboo Gold Rush , a toll road from there to Fort Alexandria

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360-572: The Upper Fraser had mounted in the wake of the Fraser Canyon War of the winter of 1859, and miners were wary of travelling through the territory of the Nlaka'pamux (Thompson Indians), even though the war was over. Thousands had travelled the route already, in nightmarish conditions including heavy rain and even heavier infestations of mosquitos , when Governor Sir James Douglas decided to formalize

390-549: 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

420-460: 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

450-988: The colony to be made via Victoria, but thousands came overland anyway. Accurate numbers of miners, especially on 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

480-584: The construction of the Cariboo Wagon Road , which bypassed the region. Originally traversed by Hudson's Bay Company employees in 1828 and charted by HBC explorer Alexander Caulfield Anderson in 1846, the route was heavily travelled by prospectors seeking to avoid the dangers of the Fraser Canyon to access the gold-bearing bars of the Fraser around today's Lillooet . Pressure for an alternative route to

510-465: The construction work was of very poor condition, such that when the Royal Engineers resurveyed the route a year later it was unusable, and further public funds were dedicated to fixing and improving it, adding bridges and taking down steep hills. Despite their efforts the route was little-used by 1861 or so, although it remained in use by locals and the occasional traveller for years afterwards. Regular steamer service to and from Port Douglas ended in

540-625: The founding of many towns. Although the area had been mined for a few years, news of the strike spread to San Francisco when 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,

570-471: 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

600-720: 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

630-409: 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

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660-693: 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

690-569: The old Cariboo Road. The route begins at Port Douglas, British Columbia , at the head of Harrison Lake and the head of river navigation from the Strait of Georgia . From there a land portion of the route follows the lower Lillooet River to Port Lillooet at the south end of Lillooet Lake , where steamers and canoes carried travellers to Port Pemberton, at the mouth of the Birkenhead River near present-day Mount Currie . The next land portion of

720-533: The route with the construction of a wagon road over the land portions in order to avert starvation among the thousands already on the upper Fraser . As one of the first acts of the newly incorporated Colony of British Columbia , the Governor commissioned the building of the road in an unusual road-development scheme whereby men willing to work on the road would invest twenty-five dollars each, which would be paid back in goods upon reaching Cayoosh ( Lillooet ). In 1858 five hundred men, in two teams of two hundred fifty,

750-560: The route's general abandonment and isolation after the building of the Cariboo Road farther to the east via the Fraser Canyon , and its road grade remains essentially the same today as the route of the unnumbered route from Mount Currie , on BC Highway 99 to D'Arcy / Nequatque , at the head of Anderson Lake . Also using the valley is the route of the railway, originally constructed as the Pacific Great Eastern but today part of

780-550: The route, known as the Long Portage or the Pemberton Portage , follows the lower Birkenhead River then diverges from it to Birken Lake (a.k.a. Summit Lake or Gates Lake ) and then via the Gates River to present-day D'Arcy at the head of Anderson Lake , then known as Port Anderson. From there a motley variety of watercraft, including the "Lady of The Lake", a small steamer and the ubiquitous native canoe , ferried travellers to

810-478: 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

840-511: The village had had a population of only about 500. This was 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

870-617: Was discovered on the Thompson River in British Columbia at its confluence with the Nicoamen River 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

900-486: Was largely over by 1927, miners from the rush spread out and found a sequence of other gold fields throughout 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

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