Following the Fraser River upstream, those miners who struggled on and inured the hardships of cold and wet, hunger and privation, were rewarded with the richest diggings of all – in a region that became known as the Cariboo, east of present day Quesnel, roughly 100 km west of Jasper National Park. By July, it was estimated that 30,000 “half-wild Californians” had passed through the sedate, trading outpost of Fort Victoria on their way to the mouth of the Fraser 3,000 having arrived in one day. In the spring of 1858, the easier diggings long since worked out in California, news arrived in San Francisco of discoveries on the Thompson and Fraser Rivers – to the north in British territory.

Ocean travel also brought Peruvians and Chileans, Mexicans, Australians, Europeans, and Chinese. Eastern Seaboard and Midwest who traveled overland and by sea.

The 1849 rush in California brought ‘Forty-Niners’ from the U.S. Many prospectors settled in the province and became leading members of Alberta’s burgeoning communities. Although never achieving the spectacular wealth in gold of its neighbors to the west, Alberta witnessed its own gold rush in the 1860s, and over the subsequent decades many people passed through the province on their way to other mining frenzies that swept across the northwest. Gold! It was dreams of golden wealth and the promise of adventure that drew thousands of young men west to California and British Columbia in the 1800s. We had no very clear knowledge of where Edmonton was, and there was no one there to tell us.” “Having disposed of our holdings on the creeks the five of us packed through the South Kootenai Pass and soon after started for Edmonton, where we heard they were mining placer gold on the Saskatchewan River.

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