Area History

For more than 10,000 years people have been living in the area known as present-day Vancouver. The culture discovered by the first European explorers had existed around English Bay and Burrard Inlet relatively undisturbed since roughly 500 CE. The first nations people lived in villages of large rough-hewn plank houses arranged in rows with totem poles set up nearby marking the families and telling the historical mythology of the tribe.

Actual European contact with the native people of the Vancouver region was infrequent and isolated up until 1792, when Captain George Vancouver (for whom the city is named) returned to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and spent the next two years exploring the area with the aim of finding the western end of the elusive "Northwest Passage".

1849 was the magic year for gold in western North America. In British Columbia, the settlement on Vancouver Island around Victoria officially became a British Colony, the same year as the California Gold Rush. In 1858, gold was discovered in the lower Fraser River and more than 25,000 prospectors – including many who gave up after the California Gold Rush of '49 – managed to find over $500,000 in gold.

After the railway connected Vancouver to the rest of Canada, it was only natural to connect Canada to the rest of the world. In 1891 the Canadian Pacific Railway's "Empress of India" was the first ocean liner to arrive from the Orient. In 1904, the Great Northern Railway connected Vancouver to it international neighbor to the South, Seattle. Finally, the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal made Vancouver an important west coast port as continental trade became integrated into a transoceanic network of routes routed amongst the world's great ports.