Stikine Gold Rush

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The Stikine Gold Rush was a minor but important gold rush in the Stikine Country of northwestern British Columbia, Canada. The rush's discoverer was Alexander "Buck" Choquette, who staked a claim at Choquette Bar in 1861, just downstream from the confluence of the Stikine and Anuk Rivers, at approximately 56°48′N131°46′W / 56.800°N 131.767°W / 56.800; -131.767 . Choquette was the son-in-law of the Tlingit chief Chief Shakes, who presided over the region at the mouth of the river, the site of the former Fort Stikine and today's city of Wrangell, Alaska, and had also explored the Nass and several other rivers. [1]

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Alexander "Buck" Choquette (c. 1830–1898) was a French-Canadian prospector and adventurer who was the discoverer in 1861 of the gold strike which led to the Stikine Gold Rush.

Once news of the find reached the various other goldfields in British Columbia, the lower Stikine in the area of Choquette's find was inundated with prospectors and the river itself busy with steamboat traffic, served by vessels who abandoned the moribund Fraser routes.

Eight hundred miners left Victoria bound for the goldfields but many did not proceed beyond the mouth of the Stikine. Those who reached the goldfield, which was 150 miles up the river, were not more than five hundred. [2]

Legacy

Not much gold was found on the Stikine, but the flurry of activity prompted Governor James Douglas of the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia to declare, in 1862, British ownership over the region in the form of the Stickeen Territories, which extended north from the northern frontier of British Columbia at the Nass and Finlay Rivers to the 62nd Parallel. The Stickeen Territories were a year later merged with British Columbia, except for the portion north of the 60th Parallel, which reverted to the North-Western Territory from which the Territories had been taken upon their creation. Mineral exploration of the region continued in the wake of the rush, with the much larger Cassiar Gold Rush, north of Telegraph Creek, discovered in 1870 by Harry McDame.

See also

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Stikine, meaning "great river" in the Tlingit language, may refer to:

Mount Pereleshin, originally Pereleshin Mountain, 2019 m (6624 ft) prominence: 749 m, is a summit in the Boundary Ranges in the area of the lower Stikine River in northwestern British Columbia, Canada. Located southeast of the junction of the Scud and Stikine Rivers, its original name was officially adopted in Canada in 1924 but changed to its current form in 1954 in accordance with national naming standards. Once considered part of the United States claim in this region, it was first cited in 1906 in the Coast Survey by Baker (p. 494) and was misattributed as being of native origin, with alternate spelling Peerleshin, but the name is that of a Russian Navy Lieutenant Pereleshin who had been sent to the area by Rear-Admiral Andrei Alexandrovich Popov to investigate whether Russian interests in the area had been impacted by gold-mining activity from the recent Stikine Gold Rush of 1861–1862. Pereleshin's entrance to the region was in the company of American professor and geologist William P. Blake, who accompanied Pereleshin's expedition and whose journal is the only record of the journey. The party camped on its sixth night near the Flood Glacier, which Pereleshin reckoned to be at the extreme of Russian territorial claims and from there returned to the coast. Pereleshin Mountain first appears on Blake's 1868 map, published with his "Geographical Notes upon Russian America and the Stickeen River."

References

  1. "Choquette River". BC Geographical Names .
  2. British Columbia Directory, 1863, Territory of Sticken pages No. 1, Vancouver Public Library, British Columbia City Directories 1860-1955.