Chinese gold rush history

The history of Chinese and gold rushes in BC is coming to the Vernon Museum and Archives.

Gold Mountain Dream is a travelling exhibit from the Royal BC Museum and will feature a mixture of provincial and local artifacts.

The exhibit opens Oct. 18 and Kate Kerr, with the RBCM, said the exhibit can be set up anywhere in the province.

“The idea is the local museums add their components to the exhibit so artifacts from their communities that make the exhibit more relevant to each community,” said Kerr.

“The Vernon museum has wonderful showcases filled with artifacts from their collection that represents the story through their community's eyes.”

The focus of the exhibit is on the experience of Chinese during the gold rush.

According to Wikepeida, Chinese arrived with the massive and sudden migration of 30,000 gold-seekers and merchants from San Francisco and the California goldfields with the Fraser Gold Rush of 1858, forming the nucleus of Victoria's Chinatown and leading to the establishment of others at New Westminster, Yale and Lillooet, though most Chinese gold-seekers were not in the newly emerged towns but busy prospecting and working the goldfields.

Estimates indicate that about 1/3 of the non-native population of the Fraser goldfields was Chinese.

As more and more gold fields were found, Chinese spread out all over the colony, and confrontations at Rock Creek and Wild Horse Creek with mostly American miners, but the colonial government intervened on the side of the Chinese (other similar situations were fairly rare, until the railway era).

Chinese miners were notable in many of the gold rushes in the coming decades, including the remote Omineca and Peace River Gold Rushes of the 1860s Cassiar Gold Rush of the 1870s.

While Chinese were driven from the Similkameen Gold Rush in the 1880s, the Cayoosh Gold Rush at Lillooet in that same decade was entirely Chinese. In most goldfield towns there were no distinct Chinatowns, and in many towns and gold camps, Chinese miners and merchants were often the majority so the term "Chinatown" is inapt for them. 

Barkerville had an "official" Chinatown, but Chinese dominated the population in the town's whole area, and many non-Chinese lived in the "official" Chinatown; nearby Richfield was near-entirely Chinese, as were many of the towns in the Cariboo goldfields.