Description
Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. Native American Studies. This trailblazing history focuses on a single year, 1858, the year of the Fraser River gold rush—the third great mass migration of gold seekers after the Californian and Australian rushes in search of a new El Dorado. Marshall's history becomes an adventure, prospecting the rich pay streaks of British Columbia's "founding" event and the gold fever that gripped populations all along the Pacific Slope. Marshall unsettles many of our most taken-for-granted assumptions: he shows how foreign miner-militias crossed the 49th parallel, taking the law into their own hands, and conducting extermination campaigns against Indigenous peoples while forcibly claiming the land. Drawing on new evidence, Marshall explores the three principal cultures of the goldfields—those of the fur trade (both Native and the Hudson's Bay Company), Californian, and British world views. The year 1858 was a year of chaos unlike any other in British Columbia and American Pacific Northwest history. It produced not only violence but the formal inauguration of colonialism, Native reserves and, ultimately, the expansion of Canada to the Pacific Slope. Among the haunting legacies of this rush are the cryptic place names that remain—such as American Creek, Texas Bar, Boston Bar, and New York Bar—while the unresolved question of Indigenous sovereignty continues to claim the land.
Author Bio
Daniel Marshall is a fifth-generation British Columbian whose Cornish ancestors arrived in the Pacific province in 1858, the year of the Fraser River gold rush. He has long been a student of history and received his BA and MA from the University of Victoria. Subsequently, he received his doctorate, first-class, from UBC with his dissertation on the Fraser River gold rush, which included a detailed study of the Native-newcomer conflict known as the Fraser River War. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Victoria and lectures in the history of British Columbia and Indigenous-newcomer relations. He has published numerous articles on British Columbia history and is the author of Those Who Fell from the Sky: A History of the Cowichan Peoples (1999, reprinted in 2007), which received a BC2000 Millennium Award. More recently, Marshall was both host and historical consultant for the documentary Canyon War: The Untold Story, televised on the Knowledge Network, APTN, and PBS, which took honours at both the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival and Worldfest 2010 (the Houston International Film Festival).
Author City: VICTORIA, BC CAN