Browse Items (19 total)
Sort by:
Photograph ‘Miners at the head of Auburn Ravine’
Miners arrived at Auburn Ravine in Spring 1848 en route to the Colombo gold fields. On finding gold in the ravine some stayed on and the area became important for placer mining which involves extracting ores from placer deposits by washing or…
‘Recollections of a 49er’
In 1849 Edward McIlhany, aged 20, left West Virginia for the California gold fields. ‘Recollections of a 49er’ is the memoir of the 80 year old Edward. He describes his overland journey to California where he prospected for gold on Feather River and…
Gold nugget
An unworked nugget of gold, .09g. This is reputed to be the piece of gold that launched the gold rush in California. It was found on 24 January 1848 by James Marshall while supervising the construction of a sawmill for Col. John Sutter on the South…
Engraving of a pack train en route to a mining camp
The source is a reproduction of an engraving (by an unknown engraver) of a design by Charles Nahl, a prolific illustrator of the Californian gold rush. At the start of the gold rush Nahl was an artist working in New York. He travelled to San…
Steam engine
The photograph shows a steam engine manufactured in San Francisco in operation at the mill of the Gould and Curry gold mine. Steam engines such as this powered a range of mining equipment including pumps, compressors, hoists and mills. The 1870…
The Bennett Sun
The Bennett Sun is a newspaper in northern British Columbia aimed at the local people of Bennett, now an abandoned town next to Lake Bennett. The paper has a range of news pieces and advertisements. Most notably the source has an editorial news piece…
Photograph of dredge mining in Barkerville, BC
A 1958 photograph of gold dredge mining machinery in a mine in Barkerville, situated in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. Large gold dredge machines like this developed through the first half of the twentieth-century and are machines used for…
Gold pan
A rusted gold sifting pan. Equipment used in sifting gold by hand. Tools such as the gold pan allowed gold prospectors to sift for gold on their own, without the need for a team to operate large machinery. It also allowed prospectors to test the…
Pearl Lochs Map
The map displays the area that would come to be known as Pearl Harbour. It shows that mapmakers may have used local knowledge (in this case place names) to effectively map out the territories which they were interested in exploiting. This is also…
The Miner, colonial newspaper
This source is from The Miner, a daily newspaper in British Columbia. In one of the articles, it is mentioned that a group of missionaries were on their way to the Kootenay district to organise a systematic Chinese mission there. This points towards…