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2 / No Parallel American Miner-Soldiers at War with the Nlaka’pamux of the Canadian West daniel p. marshall We ware on our march by sunrise. This day we made pease with 4 di¤erent Chiefs and camped within seven miles of the Thompson River. Here we was met by Spintlum. The war chief of all the tribes for some distance up & down Frazer River. . . . Here I proceded at once to hold ourgrandcounsilwhichconsistedof ElevenChiefsandaverylargenumber of other indians that had gathered from above and below. We stated to them that this time we came for pease, but if we had to come againe, that we would not come by hundreds, but by thousands and drive them from the river forever. They ware much supprised and frightened to see so many men with guns & revolvers. For marching along in single file theylookedtobethreetimesthenumbertheirwas. . . .Ifeelwellsatisfied that the Treaty was the best that could be made under the circumstances, and think it will be held sacred by the Indians. —h. m. snyder1 In 1858 the Native lands along the southern section of the Fraser River corridor below the fifty-first parallel were invaded by large companies of foreign miners organized into armies of conquest that had e¤ectively triggered Indian wars in Washington and Oregon and by extension, the Fraser River War of British Columbia. Abraham Lincoln’s future secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, who declared, “A marvellous thing is now going on here. . . [that] will prove one of the most important events on the Globe,” was not the only 31 American to be swept up by the excitement of the Fraser River gold rush.2 Stanton, then federal agent for land claims settlement in California, merely observed the e¤ects of the massive rush north. But those for whom the call of gold was irresistible—more than thirty thousand migrants—were soon to invade the lands along the Fraser and Thompson Rivers in search of the elu32 daniel p. marshall fig. 2.1. Map of “Frazer’s River” and the gold-producing districts of North America. Source: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York, 1858). sive metal that had been the sole mining preserve of the Salishan peoples (Figure 2.1).3 As the mining frontier moved northward from California, through Oregon and Washington, Native discoveries of gold in British Columbia diverted the Euro-American population north of the forty-ninth parallel, precipitating the Fraser River rush: “Never, perhaps, was there so large an immigration in so short a space of time into so small a place.”4 Those who could a¤ord passage, at least twenty-three thousand miners, dashed north to Victoria , Port Townsend, or Bellingham Bay via sailing ships and larger steampowered vessels. At least eight thousand others trod overland from such places as Sacramento, Placerville, or Yreka through northern California and Oregon, along the Columbia and Okanagan Rivers of Washington Territory, and across the forty-ninth parallel to the northern fur trade preserve of New Caledonia, the unconstituted territory of Britain. The “Fraser River Fever” was of such consequence that U.S. president James Buchanan took the unprecedented step of appointing an emissary to the region to represent and protect American interests.5 Contemporary accounts claimed that the flood tide of immigration north carried as many as one hundred thousand people.6 The e¤ects of such a massive outpouring of people from the U.S. Pacific Coast states particularly a¤ected the gold rush metropolis of San Francisco. By 1858, California’s placer mines were largely played out, leaving many old forty-niners without any serious occupation but to frequent San Francisco’s bars, boarding houses, or back alleys.7 Capital- and labor-intensive hydraulic mining had replaced the halcyon days of picks, pans, and shovels and marginalized the average sourdough or made him a wage laborer at best. At the very depths of a city-wide depression, the Golden State’s luster became further tarnished as a huge unemployed class was increasingly desperate for news of a “New Eldorado.”8 These placer miners became the advance guard for theexpansionof theCaliforniaminingfrontierthroughouttheAmericanWest and Pacific Slope regions. As the British Columbia historian Frederick Howay asserted, “The metropolis of the Pacific Coast was San Francisco; and Victoria, the capital and chief port of British Columbia, was only its northern outpost . . .partof thegreathinterland.”9 ThehistorianEarlPomeroyalsostresses the metropolitan-hinterland relationship of the Pacific Slope. “Whatever the neighboring states were,” he claims, “they were in large part because it [California] served as catalyst, banker, and...

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