Big Bend Country

Big Bend Country is a term used in the Canadian province British Columbia to refer to the region around the northernmost bend of the Columbia River, where the river leaves its initial northwestward course along the Rocky Mountain Trench to curve around the northern end of the Selkirk Mountains to head southeast between that range and the Monashee Mountains, which lie to the west. The term is the namesake of the gold rush and associated gold mining district that flourished there in the 19th century. Long known to the indigenous peoples of the region, and in fact raided and at times occupied by the Blackfoot, the Big Bend is traditional territory of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) people, but also claimed by the Ktunaxa. Boat Encampment, near the Big Bend of the Columbia's most northerly point, is the historic site of a long-established fur trading cache and campsite on the annual York Factory Express.

News of gold strikes in the Big Bend Country attracted miners in the fall of 1865, prompting a migration from the Cariboo and other mining districts to the west, via steamboats on Kamloops and Shuswap Lakes, and up the Columbia, also via steamboat, from Washington Territory; a few others came around the Selkirks, down the Columbia from Wild Horse Creek, where there had been another small rush. The mining district was not at the river's bend itself, but nearby on the southward course to the north of today's Revelstoke, along several streams such as Downie Creek, the Goldstream River, French Creek, McCulloch Creek, Carnes Creek, and Gold Creek. The excitement proved to be relatively short-lived and the rush had largely ended by the fall of 1866, with an ongoing exodus through the later 1860s of the few remaining miners began after the easy finds were mined out and the remaining gold was found difficult to extract. By the end of the decade the boom was essentially over.

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