were stores . . . had been added to the village of 800 inhabitants.”
Few miners, however, allowed themselves the luxury of observing such effects. They were desperate to reach the goldfields, and the next stage of their trip required some means of transport across the Strait of Georgia to the Fraser River. They left in whatever watercraft they could find — steamers, sailboats, or canoes — and if they couldn’t find anything, they built their own “punty, awkward-looking things, about as good imitations of coffins as anything else.” Consequently, many perished. Today, the journey takes one hundred minutes by public ferry. In 1858, it was a two-day trip, requiring an overnight stop on one of the Gulf Islands, such as Miner’s Bay on Mayne Island.
Bustling Victoria Harbour, August 1858 — “a trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, bids fair, on account of its position with regard to the gold fields . . . speedily to become a large town”: Illustrated London News.
But once the prospectors reached the mainland they discovered their difficulties had only just begun. The Fraser quickly narrowed into a swiftly flowing river and exacted its own death toll. As Governor Douglas reported to London: “with every species of small craft . . . continually employed in pouring their cargoes of human beings into the Fraser river . . . many accidents have happened in the dangerous rapids of that river.” In fact, “a great number of canoes” had been “dashed to pieces and their cargoes swept away by the impetuous stream, while . . . the ill-fated adventurers who accompanied them . . . have been swept into eternity.”
San Francisco. W. Champness, an Englishman on his way to the Cariboo goldfields, observed that it had grown from a village in 1848 to have a population of more than 100,000 in fourteen years, concluding it “is evident that Californians live in a land where gold is prevalent.” This illustration, like others that follow, was published with his story in The Leisure Hour.
Such incidents did nothing to tarnish the lure of gold. In May 1858, 1,262 would-be miners left San Francisco. The total rose to 7,149 in June and to 6,278 in July. By the end of the year, approximately twenty-five thousand prospectors had come via that route to Victoria, and the journey to the Fraser had been made safer with the introduction of stern-wheeled steamers, such as the Enterprise, captained by Tom Wright, generally acknowledged as a “prince of good fellows.”
The SS Enterprise.
Reporter David Higgins, whose observations of the goldfields can be found in The Mystic Spring and Other Tales of Western Life, published in 1904.
In July 1858 a journalist, David Higgins, an eyewitness to the many exciting and tragic events of the period, described his trip to Yale, “then the head of navigation.” The vessel, he wrote, “was crowded with freight and passengers and I was lucky in finding a vacant spot on the hurricane deck upon which to spread my blankets and lie down to unpleasant dreams.” It took a day to reach “Fort Langley, a Hudson Bay Post, where we remained over night. New Westminster had then no existence, a dense forest of fir and cedar occupying the site of the future Royal City.”
Fort Langley’s gates opened each morning at six o’clock when “the massive bolts and bars are unlocked . . . and the English, Scotch, Irish, half-breeds, begin to make their appearance in and around the establishment. At a later hour . . . the door of the salesroom opens . . . and the business of the day begins”: Harper’s Weekly, 1858.
Just below Langley, “some speculative spirits were booming a town which they named Derby, but it was only a name” and did not last. After sailing on from Langley, “the wild scenery of course charmed all, and incidents of travel were novel and exciting to those who had not been accustomed to life outside a large city. All along the river, wherever there occurred a bench or bar, miners were encamped waiting . . . to scoop up the gold by the handful and live at ease forevermore.”
Those miners may have been part of a group that had come overland. T.H. Hill, after noticing colours in the Fraser’s water, had washed a pan of gravel and thus discovered one of the richest river bars in North America. Hill’s Bar would produce more than $2 million in gold (or about US$35 million today). Seeing Hill’s success, other miners staked claims up and down the lower Fraser, scattered around the settlements of Hope and Yale, which turned into bustling communities. David Higgins vividly described them: “All was a bustle and excitement in the new mining town. Every race and colour and both sexes were represented in the population. There were Englishmen, Canadians [i.e. from Upper and Lower Canada], Americans, Australians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese and Negroes — all bent on winning gold from the Fraser sands and all hopeful of a successful season. It was a lottery in which there were few prizes.”
But a lottery, nevertheless, that all the miners thought they had a chance of winning. The lower Fraser’s gold could be mined through “surface” digging. The cheapest method used involved a pan about eighteen inches wide and three or four inches deep with broad sloping sides. Miners stirred and swirled sand and gravel in the pan to separate any gold, which, because it was six times heavier than rock, sank to the bottom. Experienced and fortunate prospectors extracted gold fairly efficiently by this method and many “panned” a site to assess its potential before staking claims. Most miners, however, used the faster rocker or “cradle” if they had the means and skill. Working in twos, one poured water onto the gravel while the other rocked the cradle back and forth. If they were in luck, a series of riffles caught any gold in the bottom of the box while a blanket underneath collected even the finest particles.
Hope. Bishop George Hills believed that no spot could be “more beautifully situated than Hope. The River Fraser flows past it. The site is on the river bank, on either side are noble mountains opposite an island.” A less spiritual observer, writing for Harper’s Weekly, wrote that “temporary frame buildings are going up in all directions. Gambling houses — of which there are five here — are in full blast, day and night; and the number of houses where liquor is sold is about nine out of every ten.”
Fort Yale. Lieutenant Richard Mayne of the Royal Navy thought “there is nothing calling for any notice in Yale.” Residents, however, disagreed. David Higgins feared “to go out after dark. Night assaults and robberies, varied by an occasional cold-blooded murder or a daylight theft, were common occurrences. Crime in every form stalked boldly through the town unchecked and unpunished.”
A lithograph showing the various techniques used in Californian gold mining (clockwise, from top right): conduits, or flumes, bringing water through which gravel is sifted; miners shovelling dirt into a sluice; a windlass bringing underground dirt to the surface; a miner panning in the stream; and, on the left, a seated prospector uses a rocker.
Gold mining technology spread from continent to continent. This illustration shows the gold pan as used by an Australian miner.
