Big Bend Gold Rush

The Big Bend Gold Rush was a gold rush on the upper Columbia River in the Colony of British Columbia (now a Canadian province) in the mid-1860s.

The goldfield was located on tributaries of the Columbia in an area known as the Big Bend Country, named for the huge hairpin bend a few hundred miles long in eastern British Columbia formed by the Columbia as it curves around the Selkirk Mountains from the river's source to the southeast in the Rocky Mountain Trench and turns southwards towards the Arrow Lakes and eventually the United States. The main finds were in the middle of the southward leg of the river's journey out of the Big Bend proper, where the towns of Mica Creek and Big Bend marked the northward focus of the rush. The main part of the rush was nearer the Arrow Lakes, on creeks tributary to the Goldstream River and Downie Creek, which lay respectively immediately above and below the infamous Dalles des Morts or "Death Rapids" of the Columbia, which had been the scene of horrendous tragedies twice, in 1817 and 1838. The main town centres of the rush were at La Porte, British Columbia, at the foot of the rapids, and Downie Creek, nearby at that stream's confluence with the Columbia just downstream from La Porte.

The rush was a spin-off of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, the first of the major gold rushes which dominate the colony's history, out from which the huge influx of miners from California on the Fraser fanned out into other regions of the colony in search of gold. Other rushes found in the same years were the Rock Creek, Wild Horse Creek, Cariboo, Omineca, and Stikine Gold Rushes, as well as the Colville and Colorado Gold Rushes which were manned by many who had been on the Fraser and such rushes as Big Bend.

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