History of British Columbia - Colonial British Columbia (1858-1871)

Colonial British Columbia (1858-1871)

In 1858, gold was found along the banks of the Thompson River just east of what is now Lytton, British Columbia, triggering the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush. When word got out to San Francisco about gold in British territory, Victoria was transformed overnight into a tent city as prospectors, speculators, land agents, and outfitters flooded in from around the world, mostly via San Francisco. The Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Langley burgeoned economically as the staging point for many of the prospectors heading by boat to the Canyon.

At the time, the region was still not under formal colonial authority. Douglas, fearing challenges to the claim of British sovereignty in the region in the face of an influx of some 20,000 Americans, stationed a gunboat at the mouth of the Fraser in order to obtain license fees from those seeking to head upstream. The British colonial office responded to the new situation by establishing the mainland as a crown colony on August 2, 1858, naming it the Colony of British Columbia.

On 19 November 1858, a government for the colony was established with Fort Langley, on the southern reaches of the Fraser, as its provisional capital. New Westminster was chosen as its first official capital, however, for reasons of military security. New Westminster, at a defensible location on the north bank of the Fraser River, possessed, according to Lieutenant-Governor Richard Moody, "great facilities for communication by water, as well as by future great trunk railways into the interior". Governor Douglas proclaimed "Queensborough" (as the site was initially called by Moody) the new capital on February 14, 1859. "Queensborough", however, did not appeal to London and it was Queen Victoria who proposed New Westminster, after Westminster, that part of the British capital of London where the Parliament Buildings were situated. New Westminster became the first city incorporated on the mainland in 1860. Douglas was named joint governor of the three colonies (the Colony of the Queen Charlotte Islands had been in existence since 1853 and was merged with the Mainland Colony under Douglas' regime, in 1863).

A second major gold rush in the Cariboo region of the colony occurred in 1861-64, in the midst of a smaller ones, notably in the Omenica, Big Bend and on the Stikine. The influx of gold miners into B.C.'s economy led to the creation of basic infrastructure in B.C., most notably, the creation of the Cariboo Wagon Road which linked the Lower Mainland to the rich gold fields of Barkerville. However, the enormous costs of the road, and its predecessor the Douglas Road and services such as the Gold Escort, left B.C. in debt by the mid-1860s. In 1866, because of the massive debt leftover from the gold rush, the mainland and Vancouver Island became one colony named British Columbia, with its capital in Victoria.