Talk:British Columbia Gold Rushes

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is part of WikiProject British Columbia, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to British Columbia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.	British Columbia Portal
Stub	This article has been rated as stub-Class on the quality scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as mid-importance on the importance scale.
	If you have rated this article please consider adding assessment comments.

This title is incorrect; it should be "Fraser Canyon Gold Rush" or "Fraser Gold Rush". BC has had several gold rushes - Queen Charlottes (1850), Cariboo (1862-70), Big Bend, Omineca, Wild Horse Creek, Rock Creek, Tulameen and others. I don't know how to revise titles . . . . 20:09, 29 October 2005 User:Skookum1

Hi Skookum, I have been monitoring this article for a while and I am glad that someone who knows something about it can take on the revision. Go for it. I would like to suggest two possible alternatives & you get to pick the one you prefer to do.

1. Rename this article "British Columbia Gold Rushes" and have sections on each of the gold rushes. Eventually, when there is enough material, each of the individual gold rushes could have its own article and this could turn into a list, or a partial list with the minor ones decribed here. Or you might want to write the Fraser Canyon and Cariboo Gold rushes separately right away. (I think those are the two most significant, but I could be wrong).

2. Rename this article "Fraser Gold Rush" (Not "Fraser Canyon Gold Rush" for reasons explained below) and only have it deal with the Fraser Canyon gold rush. Note, however, that if you click on the "What links here" link in the "toolbox" (on the left, below search), you will see that Cariboo Gold Rush is redirected here, as is "Fraser Canyon Gold Rush", as do some articles dealing with the Cariboo (e.g. William Barker (prospector). So it would be best to write an article on the Cariboo gold rush before renaming this article, and making sure that the other articles link to the right place.

To rename an article, you click on the "move" tab at the top of the page. However, Wikipedia software won't let you do it if there is already an article by that name, even if it is a simple redirect. (Hence you can't rename this "Fraser Canyon Gold Rush" because there is already a redirect.) This is so Wikipedia keeps the history of edits and the proper copyright attributions for everybody. Also, do not just cut and paste stuff into another article to rename it. This is severely frowned upon for legal/copyright reasons. You will get dumped on if you do this (I have).

You can edit a redirect article the same as any other, just getting there can be a little tricky. So, if you wanted to write a Cariboo gold rush article: go to the British Columbia Gold Rush Page, Click on the "What links here" link in the "toolbox" on the left, then click on "Cariboo Gold Rush" in the leist of articles, and start editing.

Also, it helps if you sign your questions and comments on talk pages. To do that, you add four tildes ('''~~~~'''). That puts in your user name and the date and time of your comment. Finally, if you've got any questions or need help, don't hesitate to ask here or on my talk page User talk:Luigizanasi. — Luigizanasi 05:14, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Looking at the options you've proposed, the best thing to do would seem to be to make this article "British Columbia Gold Rushes" and do the list of gold rush names I've already provided - nb there are others I didn't name (Atlin, Bridge River etc) but I can add them later. Then on the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush page (already extant) supplant the redirect with the material on the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush currently on THIS page, i.e. the current British Columbia Gold Rush page I'm adding this talk-comment to. BTW there are historical links between gold rushes in Oregon/Washington territories and the BC ones, e.g. the Fort Colville Gold Rush was in the same time period as the Fraser Canyon, Rock Creek, Big Bend, Cariboo and Wild Horse Creek gold rushes and there was a lot of cross-border movement and interconnected social history; the same is true of the entirety of Pacific Northwest history, i.e. the crossborder nature of events is obscured because of the respective national biases of American and Canadian historiographical writing (you'll note recent and upcoming edits to the Oregon Treaty and San Juans/Pig War articles that present the British/Canadian perspective). What I'm getting at is maybe there should be a History of the Pacific Northwest category in addition to History of British Columbia, History of Washington State, etc.

I'll try and expand this article with a more detailed account; I'm also writing one for my own website http://www.cayoosh.net/ as well as for another website which chronicles North American Gold Rushes that I've been asked to write up the Fraser Gold Rush for; one interesting thing is that it's considered to be the largest single movement of men on any gold rush ever, more than the California or Klondike Gold Rushes, i.e. 30,000 men in one month, as opposed to an accumulative tide as in the case of Cali and the Yukon.

Enough blather; go ahead with the list of British Columbia Gold Rushes and I'll work any new material into their respective pages; I'll try and get the Cariboo Gold Rush written up, at least as a stub, by the end of today.

Skookum1 00:34, 31 October 2005 (UTC)