Crossing the border in 1858: Gold Rush routes from Washington to the Fraser and Thompson Rivers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The discovery of gold along the Thompson and Fraser rivers in 1857 caused a stampede of thousands of miners into what became, by November 1858, the colony of British Columbia. As well as the Fraser River, several overland routes from Washington Territory were taken to the goldfields, including the Whatcom Trail, Semiahmoo Trail, and the Similkameen, Okanagan, and Columbia river valleys. James Douglas, governor of Vancouver Island and chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the nearest de facto representative of the Imperial Crown, proclaimed that miners were required to obtain a license upon entry to the gold region, although some of the routes allowed miners, for a time, to circumvent British customs and fees. Douglas' response to this influx was aided by the resistance of First Nations and the role of the HBC in selling supplies to miners. Both British and American officials and entrepreneurs tried to capitalize from the trans-boundary traffic. Using archival and newspaper sources, this study traces the use of cross-border routes along the 49th parallel in 1858, focusing on routes from Whatcom County, and analyzes the intervention by the HBC and colonial authorities to control the movements of miners. New research sheds light on the gold rush geography of the British-American frontier.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".