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35-480: The crossing has been important since this part of the border was delineated in 1846, but it would be several more decades before settlements were established on both sides of the border. The level terrain made an ideal crossing for both roadways and railroads. The flat land has been prone to frequent flooding. In the late 1850s, the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush drew numerous prospectors from south of

70-713: A continuing influx of newcomers replaced the disenchanted, with even more men storming the route of the Douglas Road to the upper part of Fraser Canyon around Lillooet ; others got to the upper canyon via the Okanagan Trail and Similkameen Trail , and to the lower Canyon via the Whatcom Trail and the Skagit Trail. All these routes were technically illegal since the Governor required that entry to

105-614: A group of rebellious American miners. Governor Douglas placed restrictions on immigration to the new British colony , including the proviso that entry to the territory must be made via Victoria and not overland, but thousands of men still arrived via the Okanagan and Whatcom Trails . Douglas also sought to limit the importation of weapons, one of the reasons for the Victoria-disembarkation requirement, but his lack of resources for oversight meant that overland routes to

140-587: A new NEXUS lane opened. The NEXUS lane was later extended by 1.3 kilometres (0.81 mi) in 2021–2023 to reduce travel times and increase safety. Officially called "Abbotsford–Huntingdon", the CBSA office is open 24 hours per day. During the goldrush, a pack-trail through the tall timber was known as the Whatcom Road or Whatcom Trail. In 1891, the Bellingham Bay and British Columbia Railroad reached

175-419: A new border station on the east side of Cherry Street in 1914, and rented part of it out as an automotive repair shop. In 1932, as traffic continued to grow, and in response to smuggling during Prohibition , the border station was again upgraded. In 1949, the operating hours at Sumas were expanded to 24 hours. The building was large and ornate, but when it became inadequate in 1988, a fourth Sumas border station

210-737: The Cariboo riding were among the most pro-Confederation in the colony, and this was in no small part because of the strong Canadian element in the local populace. One reason the Cariboo rush attracted fewer Americans than the original Fraser rush may have been the American Civil War , with many who had been around after the Fraser Gold Rush going home to take sides, or to the Fort Colville Gold Rush which

245-776: The Stikine Gold Rush , which led to the creation of the Stikine Territory to the colony's north. The Fort Colville Gold Rush in Washington Territory was also a spin-off of the Fraser Gold Rush, as many miners from the Fraser headed there once news of the strike in US territory reached the mining camps. Many others moved on to a gold rush in Colorado. Cariboo Gold Rush The Cariboo Gold Rush

280-549: The Abbotsford office closed, and the Huntingdon outpost transferred to New Westminster oversight. In 1948, the status was elevated to Port of Huntingdon. Canada built a concrete border station at Huntingdon in the 1930s, and replaced it with a brick facade structure in a style similar to the current facility at Carway, Alberta in the mid-1950s. This structure was replaced by the current twin-wing facility in 1992. In 2012,

315-806: The British Empire's "bulwark in the farthest west" and "found a second England on the shores of the Pacific." Moody arrived in British Columbia in December 1858, commanding the Royal Engineers, Columbia Detachment . Moody had hoped to begin immediately the foundation of a capital city, but upon his arrival at Fort Langley he learned of an outbreak of violence at the settlement of Hill's Bar. This led to an incident popularly known as " Ned McGowan's War ", where Moody successfully quashed

350-603: The Fraser at the peak of the gold rush. This estimate was based on the Yale area and did not include the non-mining "hangers-on" population. (The Fraser River Gold Rush started in 1858) When news of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush reached London, Richard Clement Moody was hand-picked by the Colonial Office , under Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton , to establish British order and to transform British Columbia into

385-559: The apologies of the Americans who had waged war on the natives. Wanting to make the British military and governmental presence more visible, Douglas appointed justices of the peace and also revised the slapdash mining rules which had emerged along the river. Troops to maintain order, however, were still in short supply. Competition and interracial tensions between European Americans and non-white miners erupted on Christmas Eve 1858, with

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420-411: The beating of Isaac Dixon , a freed American black. He was the town barber and in later years was a popular journalist in the Cariboo . Dixon was beaten by two men from Hill's Bar , the other main town in the southern part of the goldfields. The complicated series of events that ensued is known as McGowan's War . Its potential to provoke United States annexation ambitions within the goldfields, prompted

455-436: The border and connected with CP. The crossing quickly became a popular smuggling route, especially for Chinese wishing to illegally enter the US, and contraband, such as opium and diamonds. That year, J.F. Flanagan became the inaugural customs officer at Sumas. From 1907, the US rented a building for customs purposes. The road through Huntingdon was relocated in 1913, leaving the customs office poorly positioned. US Customs built

490-402: The border. The police reported that goods were freely entering BC without any means to collect the respective duties. John Musselwhite, the first customs officer, served at Upper Sumas from around 1890. Based about 20 kilometres (12 mi) northeast of the present crossing, he operated from his private dwelling. T. Fraser York, his successor in 1893, assumed this part-time position. In 1912, York

525-613: The canyon of the Thompson River to Ashcroft and from there via the valley of the Bonaparte River to join the older route from Lillooet at Clinton . Towns along the Cariboo Road include Clinton, 100 Mile House and Williams Lake , although most had their beginnings before the Cariboo rush began. During the rush, the largest and most important town lay at the road's end at Barkerville, which had grown up around

560-992: The colony to be made via Victoria, but thousands came overland anyway. Accurate numbers of miners, especially on the upper Fraser, are therefore difficult to reckon. During the gold rush tens of thousands of prospectors from California flooded into the newly declared Colony of British Columbia and disrupted the established balance between the Hudson's Bay Company 's fur traders and indigenous peoples . The influx of prospectors included numerous European Americans and African Americans , Britons , Germans , English Canadians , Maritimers , French Canadians , Scandinavians , Italians , Belgians and French , and other European ethnicities , Hawaiians , Chinese , Mexicans , West Indians , and others. Many of those first-arrived of European and British origin were Californian by culture, and this included Maritimers such as Amor De Cosmos and others. The numbers of "Americans" associated with

595-642: The founding of many towns. Although the area had been mined for a few years, news of the strike spread to San Francisco when the governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island , James Douglas , sent a shipment of ore to that city's mint. People in San Francisco and the California gold fields greeted the news with excitement. Within a month 30,000 men had descended upon Victoria . 4,000 of these Gold Rush pioneers settlers were Chinese. Until that time,

630-478: The gold rush must be understood to be inherently European-ethnic to start with. Anglo-American Southerners (from states such as Missouri and Kentucky), Midwesterners, and New Englanders were well represented. Alfred Waddington, an entrepreneur and pamphleteer of the gold rush later infamous for the disastrous road-building expedition which led to the Chilcotin War of 1864, estimated there were 10,500 miners on

665-866: The goldfields could not be controlled. During the fall of 1858, tensions increased between miners and the Nlaka'pamux , the First Nations people of the Canyon. This led to the Fraser Canyon War . Miners wary of venturing upriver beyond Yale began to use the Lakes Route to Lillooet instead, prompting Douglas to contract for the building of the Douglas Road , the Mainland Colony's first public works project. The governor arrived in Yale to accept

700-409: The governor to send newly appointed Chief Justice Begbie , the colony's chief of police Chartres Brew and a contingent of Royal Engineers and Royal Marines to intervene. They did not need to use force and were able to resolve the matter peacefully. The team also dealt with the corruption of British appointees in the area, which had contributed to the crisis. The Fraser Canyon War did not affect

735-727: The miners had either drifted back to the U.S. or dispersed further into the British Columbia wilderness in search of unstaked riches. Other gold rushes proliferated around the colony, with notable gold rushes at Rock Creek , the Similkameen , Wild Horse Creek and the Big Bend of the Columbia River spinning immediately off the Fraser rush, and gold exploration soon after led to the Omineca Gold Rush and

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770-558: The most profitable and famous of the many Cariboo mining camps. The Cariboo Wagon Road was an immense infrastructure burden for the colony but needed to be built to enable access and bring governmental authority to the Cariboo goldfields, which was necessary in order to maintain and assert control of the wealth, which might more easily have passed through the Interior to the United States. The wagon road's most important freight

805-628: The population of the Cariboo Gold Rush was largely British and Canadian , among them 4000 were Chinese, although the first wave of the rush was largely American. By the time the Cariboo rush broke out there was more active interest in the Gold Colony (as British Columbia was often referred to) in the United Kingdom and Canada and there had also been time required for more British and Canadians to get there. The electorate of

840-627: The rest of the province, in particular triggering the Omineca and Cassiar Gold Rushes , just as the Cariboo itself had been found by miners seeking out in search of new finds from the Fraser rush. The boom in the Cariboo goldfields was the impetus for the construction of the Cariboo Wagon Road by the Royal Engineers , which bypassed the older routes via the Fraser Canyon and the Lakes Route (Douglas Road) via Lillooet by using

875-468: The rush was in full swing. Towns grew up, the most famous of these being Barkerville , now preserved as a heritage site and tourist attraction. Other important towns of the Cariboo gold rush era were Keithley Creek , Quesnel Forks or simply "the Forks", Antler, Richfield , Quesnellemouthe (which would later be shortened to Quesnel ), Horsefly and, around the site of the Hudson's Bay Company's fort of

910-467: The same name, Alexandria . The Cariboo Gold Rush is the most famous of the gold rushes in British Columbia , so much so that it is sometimes erroneously cited as the reason for the creation of the Colony of British Columbia . The Colony's creation had been prompted by an influx of American prospectors to the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush three years earlier in 1858, which had its locus in the area from Lillooet to Yale . Unlike its southern counterpart,

945-484: The upper reaches of the goldfields, in the area of Lillooet, and the short-lived popularity of the Douglas Road caused the town to be designated "the largest town north of San Francisco and west of Chicago ", with an estimated population of 16,000. This title was also briefly held by Port Douglas , Yale, and later on by Barkerville . By 1860, however, the gold-bearing sandbars of the Fraser were depleted. Many of

980-518: The village had had a population of only about 500. This was a record for mass movement of mining populations on the North American frontier, even though more men in total were involved in the gold rushes of California and Colorado. By the fall, however, tens of thousands of men who had failed to stake claims or were unable to because of the summer's high water on the river, pronounced the Fraser to be "humbug." Many returned to San Francisco, but

1015-550: Was a gold rush in the Colony of British Columbia , which later became the Canadian province of British Columbia . The first gold discovery was made at Hills Bar in 1858, followed by more strikes in 1859 on the Horsefly River , and on Keithley Creek and Antler Creek in 1860. The actual rush did not begin until 1861, when these discoveries were widely publicized. By 1865, following the strikes along Williams Creek ,

1050-579: Was discovered on the Thompson River in British Columbia at its confluence with the Nicoamen River a few miles upstream from the Thompson's confluence with the Fraser River at present-day Lytton . The rush overtook the region around the discovery and was centered on the Fraser Canyon from around Hope and Yale to Pavilion and Fountain , just north of Lillooet . Though the rush

1085-469: Was largely manned by men who had been on the Fraser or to other BC rushes such as those at Rock Creek and Big Bend . While some of the population that came for the Cariboo rush stayed on as permanent settlers, taking up land in various parts of the Interior in the 1860s and after, that wasn't the general rule for those involved in the Fraser rush. Many veterans of the Cariboo would spread out to explore

Sumas–Huntingdon Border Crossing - Misplaced Pages Continue

1120-497: Was largely over by 1927, miners from the rush spread out and found a sequence of other gold fields throughout the British Columbia Interior and North , most famously that in the Cariboo . The rush is credited with instigating European-Canadian settlement on the mainland of British Columbia. It was the catalyst for the founding of the Colony of British Columbia , the building of early road infrastructure, and

1155-478: Was planned. Rather than demolishing the historic building, the 714-ton brick building was moved intact to 131 Harrison Street, where it stands today. Construction on the current US border station was completed in February 1990. The crossing remains open 24 hours per day. Fraser Canyon Gold Rush The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush , (also Fraser Gold Rush and Fraser River Gold Rush ) began in 1858 after gold

1190-527: Was the Gold Escort, which brought government bullion to Yale for shipment to the colonial treasury. Despite the wealth of the Cariboo goldfields, the expense of colonizing the Cariboo contributed to the Mainland Colony's virtual bankruptcy and its forced union with the Island Colony, and similarly into Confederation. A 1976 young adult novel, Cariboo Runaway , by Sandy Frances Duncan , is set in

1225-548: Was transferred to the Port of Abbotsford, established that year. The Port of New Westminster administered Upper Sumas until the latter closed in 1918. Canada established a border station at Huntingdon in 1896, also administered by New Westminster. In 1912, Huntingdon closed as an office but became an outpost for Abbotsford, which itself was housed in a room of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) station. In 1932,

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