MAGAZINE SEES ‘NEW EL DORADO’
Popular title anticipated California-like gold rush
There was only one newspaper in British Columbia in July 1858. It wasn’t even called British Columbia until a month later — Vancouver Island was then a separate colony from the mainland, which was known as New Caledonia.
When gold was discovered that spring in the Fraser Canyon, American newspapers gave the future B.C. another name: “The New El Dorado.”
How do I know? Because last week I found a July 17, 1858 copy of Harper’s Weekly in an antique store in Olympia, Wash.
Harper’s Weekly was one of the top newsmagazines of its day. Published in New York, it was known for its in-depth articles and illustrations. It was quite popular back east, but few 1858 editions seem to have made it to modern-day B.C. — neither the Legislative Library in Victoria nor the Vancouver Archives have one.
There are two illustrations on the Harper’s Weekly page devoted to “The New El Dorado in North America.” One features a “map of the Pacific coast showing the gold countries,” and a smaller illustration shows “Vancouver’s Island.”
The Vancouver’s Island drawing shows a fort at the head of a body of water, with a sailing ship in front. Presumably this is Fort Victoria, a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost that would become B.C.’s capital.
According to an 1855 census of Vancouver Island, there were only 232 “whites” in Victoria, and 774 on the whole island. There were even fewer white settlers on the mainland, probably about 100. But the population would swell after the 1858 gold rush, when an estimated 30,000 miners flooded into B.C. to try their luck.
The map of the New El Dorado is very America-centric, showing Northern California, Utah, Oregon and Washington, with a tiny little bit up top labelled “Vancouver’s Island” and “British America.”
There are precious few settlements on the map: San Francisco, Vallejo and Sacramento in California, Astoria and Dulles (which is labelled Dallas) in Oregon, Fort Walla Walla in Washington and Fort Langley in British America. Oddly, although Fort Victoria rates an illustration, it isn’t included on the map.
Harper’s Weekly was printed in black and white, but the map and Vancouver’s Island engraving are in colour because somebody hand-tinted them, like an old photograph.
The article accompanying the illustrations shows just how little the outside world knew about B.C. in 1858. There is no mention of B.C.’s First Nations, for example, although there may have been up to 200,000 natives in B.C. before Europeans arrived. Heritage expert Don Luxton also thinks the structures on the left of the Fort Victoria illustration are longhouses built by the Songhees First Nation.
According to the story, the gold had been discovered “on the shores of Frazer’s and Thompson’s rivers.”
“Lying many miles north of the most northerly civilized settlement on the continent, the future El Dorado will more closely resemble the northern goldfields of the Ural Mountains (in Russia) than any that have worked in California and Australia,” the story stated.
“The shores of Frazer’s River are an unknown country; and though the meridian preserves the traveller from the intolerable tropical fevers and ever-growing tropical jungle which are the bane of new countries to the south, these drawbacks to exploration are scarcely more formidable than the severe cold which will impede the exertions of the first settlers on Frazer’s River.
“For at least six months of the year they will find themselves fully occupied in keeping themselves warm and duly supplied with food; and during a great portion of the remainder of the year the spring freshets will so swell the rivers as to render gold-seeking impossible.”
That said, Harper’s Weekly had no doubt there was lots of gold to be had, if only because the mountain range where gold had been found was similar to the one that had yielded so much gold in California.
“On this continent … it might be said that wherever there are high mountains there is gold,” wrote the anonymous scribe.
Unfortunately the Fraser gold rush wasn’t anywhere near as lucrative as the 1849 California gold rush. In 1860, miners left the Fraser en masse for a new gold rush in the Cariboo. The New El Dorado just didn’t pan out.