Cariboo Gold Rush
Encyclopedia : C : CA : CAR : Cariboo Gold Rush
The Cariboo Gold Rush is the most famous of the gold rushes in British Columbia and is erroneously sometimes mentioned as the reason for the creation of the Colony of British Columbia. In fact, the colony was created three years earlier in response to an influx of American prospectors seeking gold during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, which had its locus in the area around Yale. Unlike its southern counterpart, the population of the Cariboo gold rush was largely British and Canadian, whereas the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush had been overwhelmingly American, Chinese and European. Some of the population that came for the Cariboo rush also stayed on as permanent settlers; most of the miners in the Fraser Canyon had returned to the US after the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush.
The rush began in 1861 with the discovery of gold at Keithley Creek, east of Quesnel. Unlike the placer diggings of the Fraser, the Cariboo gold field required shaft-digging and other more industrial technologies, although not exactly hard rock mining. Several towns grew up, the most famous of these being Barkerville, now preserved as a heritage site and tourist attraction. Other important towns of the Cariboo gold rush era were Keithley Creek, Quesnel Forks, Antler, Richfield, Quesnellemouthe and Fort Alexandria.
The boom in the Cariboo goldfields was the impetus for the construction of the Cariboo Wagon Road by the Royal Engineers, which bypassed the older routes via the Fraser Canyon and Lakes Route via Lillooet by using the valley of the Thompson River to Ashcroft and from there via the valley of the Bonaparte River to join the older route from Lillooet at Clinton.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.