- Whatcom Trail
in Washington as an outfitter for those using the Whatcom Trail.
A more westerly route now in use for a major border crossing (at Sumas) was not usable due to the presence of a large shallow lake, now drained and turned into agricultural land. An alternate route to the main Whatcom Trail was the Skagit Trail, which went up the river of that name to its headwaters, from which another "back valley" emerges on the Fraser near Hope, then the HBC fur trading post Fort Hope.
There are no known statistics for the number of goldseekers who travelled the Whatcom Trail during the gold rush, although certainly they may be counted in the thousands. Its existence was in open defiance of the edict from the British Governor on
Vancouver Island that access to the Fraser goldfields "must" be made from Victoria, and then from there via theFraser River "only". In part this measure was intended to prevent the entry of large parties of armed Americans, and also to strip them of any handguns and any goods for trading with the Indians (still aHudson's Bay Company monopoly during the gold rush).The route's ongoing use was demonstration of the early colony's essential inability to prevent unregulated intrusion by US citizens, as was also the case with the
Okanagan Trail . US troops of the Border Commission were stationed near the route's southern US end were put on alert during theMcGowan's War crisis, and were also stationed there during theSan Juan Islands Dispute (thePig War ).Similarly, on the Canadian side, the large tract of land west of Sardis that for many years was Canadian Forces Base Chilliwack was laid aside as a military reserve during the scare over potential
Fenian Raids in the 1870s and 1880s. That allocation, however, was as much a response to localFirst Nations numbers as it was to potential American aggression.There is no border crossing at the Columbia Valley today, only a fence across farmland.
References
* [http://www.nosracines.ca/f/page.aspx?id=3724313 "British Columbia: From thte earliest times to the present, Vol. 2", E.O.S. Scholiefied and F.W. Howay,] , pp. 29-30.
ee also
*
Okanagan Trail
*Fraser Canyon Gold Rush
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