...some comparable but more famous mines, particularly Barkerville, in the same district. Indeed, most British Columbians have never heard of the Bullion Pit, although it is well known to mining experts.

The first objective of this article is to provide an overview of the Bullion Pit's history and, in doing so, describe case that has not been well documented to date. The second is to explore, in a non-revisionist way, some of the ecological aspects of the case. Since the Bullion Pit has not been worked on a large scale for decades and its recovery has largely been left to natural forces, it offers a sort of laboratory in which to consider an historical process of rapid disturbance followed by slow geological recovery. In the latter respect, the Bullion Pit case is not unique, but its large scale and remoteness combine to make it an interesting case. In researching the Bullion Pit, the authors made several visits to the mine and area and reviewed available government records.

In tracing the history of the Bullion Pit, (1) we are guided by two main questions:

* Why are some significant resource-use cases so much more obscure than others?

* Why is this particular case less well known than others?

We begin with the story of the Bullion Pit, in regional and historical context.

Canada's westernmost province of British Columbia covers a vast area, nearly 950,000 kilometre (2) (366,000 square miles). Most of the population, which has just reached four million, lives, however, in the southwest part of the province; the northern two-thirds contain only about ten percent of its residents. Just below the midpoint of the province, in the Quesnel-Williams Lake area, is the Cariboo region, a region of lakes, forests, and mountains (see Map 1). Highway 97, the province's main north-south artery, connects a string of large and small towns between 100 Mile House and Prince George, of which the largest are Quesnel and Williams Lake, but outside the highway corridor the land is mostly wilderness, with some ranches and a few small villages dotting the landscape.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

First Nations people have lived here for millennia, and Europeans came to the region at the end of the eighteenth century--Alexander Mackenzie's famous trip from "Canada by Land" of 1793 went through part of this country, and soon there were a number of fur trade posts operating throughout the area. The district was pioneered not from the west, from the ocean, but overland, from the east. Although settlement began on Vancouver Island soon after the Oregon Treaty of 1846, it was at first limited to a small colony at Victoria. Surprisingly perhaps, the first major incursion of Europeans on to the mainland was not at Vancouver (which was not founded until the railway reached the coast in 1885), but inland. The lure was not rich land, but gold.

The mountains of western North America have seen a number of gold rushes, beginning with the California rush of 1849, and gradually spreading north up the mountain chain, as prospectors worked the creeks and rivers for alluvial, or placer gold. Gold was found in Washington State in 1855 at Fort Colville, and two years later discoveries were made on the lower Fraser River and its tributaries. In 1858 important discoveries were made in the region around Yale, and by the summer of that year more than twenty thousand people had arrived, mostly by boat from San Francisco. Yale flourished briefly, then shrank to a village, but remained famous for its gold rush history. Hundreds of miners then pushed north up the Fraser valley in search of more gold, and in 1860, important discoveries were made in the Cariboo region, around Quesnel Forks, Keithley Creek, and Antler Creek. In 1869 another important discovery was made on a tributary of the Omineca River. The best known discovery was made in 1862 on Williams Creek, when Billy Barker found gold and founded the community that now bears his name. Barkerville is the most famous not so much because it was the first or the richest gold mining town, but because it lasted long enough as a community to be turned into a tourist attraction that has become synonymous with gold mining in the Cariboo.

The development of the region as a series of mining communities was astonishingly rapid. In 1857 there were no Europeans in the Cariboo except a handful of fur traders; six years later there were tens of thousands. To serve them, and to keep order in the gold...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Northern Review
Effective local institutions for collective action in Arctic communiti..., June 22, 2005

Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.

Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication name or publication date.

About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company analysis or best practices in managing your organization, Goliath can help you meet your business needs.

Our extensive business information databases empower business professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible, authoritative information they need to support their business goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting, company research or defining management best practices - Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.