Untold Tales of Old British Columbia
By Daniel Marshall
Ronsdale, 330 pages, $24.95.
British Columbia has a rich past, and at times it seems that there are still plenty of veins of historical gold just waiting to be mined.
With the three dozen stories in Untold Tales of Old British Columbia, historian Daniel Marshall digs deep, finding those precious nuggets that help us gain a better understanding of our history.
It’s well known that the City of Victoria came to life as a result of the 1858 gold rush on the Fraser River.
The ships from San Francisco unleashed their loads of eager miners on the little community around Fort Victoria, so this became the natural staging area for the gold seekers. Many of the new arrivals weren’t here to work the gold fields; instead, they saw potential riches in providing goods and services to the miners.
After 1858, Victoria never looked back, although admittedly there were more than a few bumps along the way to founding the city in 1862, and a few years later becoming British Columbia’s colonial and then provincial capital.
But what caused the rush? Marshall takes us back to the excitement being felt in San Francisco in early 1858, when the San Francisco Bulletin referred to the “new yellow fever” that was creating a panic to get to the Fraser River as quickly as humanly possible.
Given the transportation options of the day, as quickly as possible was actually not that fast. The options were to travel by water or by land, and neither one was easy.
Marshall notes that many members of the business community in San Francisco worked quickly to provide goods for the miners, including whisky, pork, pans, maps, medicines … just about everything a miner could want.
Thomas Hibben was one of the business people who came north from California, opening a retail store in Victoria selling books and stationery. He remained in business here until his death in 1890.
It’s possible to guess how many business people stayed in Victoria after the gold rush, thanks to references such as city directories, the Canadian census and the digitized British Colonist editions at britishcolonist.ca.
But as Marshall notes, there is no way to know how many miners came through. Common estimates put the number at 30,000 to 35,000, but since it would have been impossible to count them in 1858, there is no chance that we can do a better estimate today.
All we know for sure is that the Fraser River gold rush helped shape modern British Columbia, especially its capital city.
Step back a few years, and consider the Douglas Treaties, known more formally as the Fort Victoria treaties. James Douglas, at the time the chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, signed the treaties in a rush, before receiving the preferred language from his employers.
Why the rush? That’s been one of the mysteries of the early days of the colony of Vancouver Island.
Marshall’s theory is that a treaty signed on northern Vancouver Island by George Blenkinsop, another Hudson’s Bay Company employee, forced Douglas’s hand. He didn’t want the inflated prices paid by Blenkinsop, who was dealing with a work stoppage by Kwakwaka’wakw labourers, to get in the way of a deal in the south.
Those are just two examples of what the reader will find in this book. Marshall has tales from three centuries, with a great variety in his topics. He concludes with a reminder that we must consider truth as we strive for reconciliation.
With Untold Tales of Old British Columbia, Marshall offers a wide variety of nuggets from our past. In some ways, a book such as this can be more appealing than a general history, because stories such as these would undoubtedly be lost in a larger work.
And of course, a book with three dozen stories is a perfect entry point into our shared history. There is something here for just about everyone.
The review, the editor and publisher of the Times Colonist, is the author of Making the News, a history of Victoria.
