The Trail of 1858: British Columbia's Gold Rush Past
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by Mark Forsythe and Greg Dickson
Harbour Publishing, Madeira Park, B.C., 2007
224 pp., illus., $26.95 paperback
It was a typically dreary West Coast November day. It was cold. It rained. The exact date was November 19, 1858. On that fateful day 150 years ago, Governor James Douglas travelled to the then-remote outpost of Fort Langley to hastily proclaim the new province of British Columbia.
B.C. was the product of fear — fear that the region would be overwhelmed by the gold-lusting miners flooding into the Fraser River Valley; fear that the United States would gobble up the territory as it fulfilled its “manifest destiny.”
In The Trail of 1858: British Columbia’s Gold Rush Past, Mark Forsythe and Greg Dickson take us back to a time when fortune seemingly beckoned from every river and stream — a time of gold fever, hangin’ judges, and a convergence of cultures that would one day meld into the modern, multicultural, and cosmopolitan province we know today.
As the good citizens of B.C. celebrate this fall, they should also read The Trail of 1858, and then hoist a glass to the many colourful characters that came before them, lured by dreams of striking the motherlode.
— Mark Collin Reid (Read bio)
Mark Collin Reid is the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's History.