Mining Camp Tales of the Silvery Slocan

Auteur

Peter Smith is a lifelong history buff, award-winning author, and retired civil servant. He holds a post-graduate degree in Folklife Studies from the University of Leeds (UK), and has published articles in British Columbia Magazine and the Silvery Slocan Historical Society newsletter. In 2020, he won the BC Historical Federation’s Community History Award for his extensively researched first book on BC’s silver rush.

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The intriguing story of British Columbia’s most productive silver mining region and the vibrant communities that built up around it in the late 1800s.

Mining Camp Tales of the Silvery Slocan tells the often-overlooked story of British Columbia’s silver rush and its accompanying boom towns. In the 1890s, mining camps like Sandon, Three Forks, Whitewater and their neighbours, New Denver, Silverton, Slocan City, Kaslo and Nakusp, thrived. Prospectors and miners from Idaho, Montana, and other mining centres arrived in droves to reap the silver harvest. Capitalists flooded in from Spokane, Seattle, Vancouver, and from investment centres across North America and the world.

At its height, the silver rush ushered in a frenzy of activity, where “cities” sprang up out of nowhere, cultures clashed, greed and racism prevailed, law and order was a matter of perspective, and yet, somehow, people still united in song, dance, and a spirit of community. Although the boom era was short-lived—as plummeting silver prices, labour disputes, natural disasters, and the discovery of Klondike gold severely dampened the spirits of the Silvery Slocan—the rush left a legacy that endures to this day. This book opens up a wealth of historical facts, anecdotes, and archival material on a chapter of mining history that has been largely forgotten until now.