New Perspectives on the Gold Rush
Edited by Kathryn Bridge
Royal British Columbia Museum, 190 pp., $24.95
As the title suggests, this book does not attempt to repeat the story of British Columbia’s gold rushes, and that is a good thing; that ground has been mined many, many times before.
Instead, it offers a fresh look at the impact of the 1858 rush as well as the ones that followed, adding much to what is already known.
The 1858 gold rush helped create British Columbia as we know it today. As a direct result, Victoria grew from a small community clustered around a Hudson’s Bay Company fort to a small city. First Nations were blindly pushed out of the way, a hint at the treatment that was to come. The mainland became a colony, taking the name British Columbia for the first time.
The precious gold deposits had been discovered along the Fraser River, and that became the destination for many of the people who arrived here starting in April 1858. Not all went to the gold fields; many smart people saw that there was money to be made in Victoria, providing goods and services to the people heading to the Interior.
New Perspectives on the Gold Rush was published to accompany the new Royal British Columbia Museum exhibit, Gold Rush! El Dorado in British Columbia.
As editor Kathryn Bridge notes, this book benefits from recent digitization work, which has made old documents available to more people. That has made possible more in-depth research than had been done before.
The book looks at, among other things, how people from different classes, cultures and races worked together — or at cross-purposes — during the gold rush years.
The first of the 10 essays might seem unusual, since it deals with the gold-seekers in Colombia, South America, long before the gold rushes took place in British Columbia. It works, however, since it describes how the indigenous people of Colombia used gold long before the Spanish arrived.
New Perspectives also includes essays on the tangled, and somewhat confusing, relations with blacks, Chinese and First Nations peoples. Governor James Douglas appears almost enlightened, compared to most other leaders of the day, but his policies were erased soon after he retired.
Marie Elliott has contributed an essay on women in the gold rush, and it makes for a valuable chapter. Women are often hard to find in historical records, and the contributions they made could be easily, and unfairly, discounted.
Another essay deals with the artists and photographers who recorded the gold rush areas when the rushes were on. Their work means we have a much better sense of what happened, and where.
This book is more than just a guide to the museum exhibit, since it can stand alone, and claim a rightful spot in any collection of works on the gold rush period. By taking a new approach, rather than retelling the old, familiar stories, it will encourage a fresh look at our past, and will have an impact on the way the history of the gold rush is considered in the future. It really does offer new perspectives.
The book is richly illustrated, with many of the images drawn from the El Dorado exhibit. And that raises a key question: Should the book be read before a visit, or after?
The correct answer is likely both. Exploring the exhibit will provide a basis for reading the book, and the book will give you a better sense of the exhibit when you see it a second time.
The reviewer is the editor-in-chief of the Times Colonist.
