Patterns of Trade and Investment on the Pacific Coast, 1867-1892: The Case of the British Columbia Salmon Canning Industry

Abstract

After noting the indisputably important part played by California and Californians in the Fraser River gold rush of 1858, historians have tended to emphasize the continued predominance of California, and more especially San Francisco, in the economic and social life of British Columbia. San Francisco, it is agreed, was the metropolis of a region that included British Columbia in its hinterland. This situation is considered to have lasted through the succeeding rushes to Cariboo, Wild Horse Creek, and the Big Bend, and to have continued in face of the rapid decline of the gold fields after 1865, ending only in the decade after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886. It has been further argued that not only was San Francisco the commercial metropolis of the region, but entrepreneurs with United States backgrounds predominated in the new resource-based industries that began, albeit slowly, to give the area a new economic base. Political life might be reserved for Britishers and Canadians, but Americans were the leaders in economic life. It seems, therefore, worthwhile to examine, in general terms, the growth of one of the resource industries salmon canning to test the validity of this hypothesis. The development of canning was decisive in the growth of commercial fisheries in far-away western North America, the very outward edge of European expansion. The distance of this coast from large population centres ensured that canning would be the dominant method of processing. Prior