Welcome back to my blog. This is the first blog post and project that we have done this year. The project that we just completed was a project called Gold Digger. In this project, we explored the Gold Rushes of BC, answering the question, “How did the discovery of gold shape our province and its people?” For this project we would be creating a historical fiction about either confederation, migrations patters, conflict among people, or struggles against the geography. Let’s get into it.
This was an interesting project. At the end of last year, we started this project, but we didn’t have enough time to finish it. This year, we started with a lot of building knowledge. Because we did some of this project last year, a lot of the knowledge that we were building was knowledge we already had. The first three things that we did were demonstrations of our knowledge. The first thing that we did was answer some questions about early BC and the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush. Here are my answers.
Next, we imagined ourselves as a gold miner in the Cariboo gold rush. Then we answered questions about our experience. Here are my answers
Next we researched the Chilcotin war. We learned about this along with practicing summarizing. We summarized the events of the Chilcotin war. This is my summary.
The Tsilhqot’in war was a conflict that took place in the interior of BC in 1864. After smallpox had hit the Tsilhqot’in people hard, killing more then half of their 1500 people, they went to a nearby camp begging for food in exchange for their labour. The camp was attempting to build a road through the Tsilhqot’in territory from Bella Coola to Fort Alexandria. When some flour was stolen from a storehouse, a angry road builder confronted the Tsilhqot’in, saying that he would bring smallpox back to their community. “A white man took all our names down in a book and told us we should all die,” said Klatsassin, a chief of the Tsilhqot’in people. The next morning at dawn, 24 Tsilhqot’in men attacked the camp as the settlers lay sleeping in their tents. 12 of them were killed. Following attacks brought the body count to 21. Eight of the attackers, including Klatsassin, the leader, turned themselves in under false pretences of peace. Five of the eight were found guilty by a judge and jury and hung for their crimes.
The judge that presided over the Chilcotin war case was Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie. We’ll come back to that. The next thing that we did was create a cause and consequence chart for the Chilcotin war. Although I am tired of the cause and consequence charts, I found this one quite interesting. Here is my chart.
Next, we created a timeline of important events in BC from 1858 to 1871. I did mine with Dana. You can check out her post on this project here. I am quite proud of how our timeline turned out. You can check it out here.
After these four activities, we started on our keystones. The first keystone we did was quite similar to the Chilcotin war activity. We started with creating a cause and consequence chart, with the event being the mass influx of people to BC. After that, we wrote a paragraph summarizing the impact that the influx had on the people and their province. In this paragraph we answered the question, “How did the Gold Rush shape BC.” When I saw this question, my first thought was, “Isn’t this just the driving question?” I still do kind of think that. I think that this keystone answers a lot of the historical questions, and is more of a straight up representation of our knowledge, while the other keystones focus more on the creative portion and final product of the project. Here is my paragraph and cause and consequence chart on the topic.
Some of the most impactful events in BC’s history have been the Fraser Canyon and Cariboo gold rushes. Gold has been one of the most valuable things throughout history. The California gold rush had been big news throughout the world, so people were ecstatic when they heard news of gold in BC. People from all over the world flocked to BC in search of gold from places as far Germany and Australia, as well as closer places like California. Many miners from the California gold rush moved to BC after the California gold rush ended. The migrants from various places in the world brought many diseases with them to BC. The white settlers there were mainly unaffected, but the diseases killed nearly two thirds of the indigenous population. Because of the mass influx of people, Britain made BC a separate British colony. The gold rushes in BC jumpstarted the economy in the west, connecting the previously largely unexplored land to the rest of the world. BC was built on the gold trade, a very large economy that made it possible for BC to develop as a province. At the start of the gold rush, there were very few white settlers and a lot of unexplored territory. By the end of the rushes, there were nearly 300,000 new white settlers, and much of BC had been explored and developed. While a large portion of colonizing BC had gone with little pushback, but there were still many conflicts with indigenous peoples along the way. Two prominent conflicts were the Fraser Canyon and Tsilhqot’in Wars. These conflicts lead to many wrongful convictions and executions of indigenous peoples. There were also many residential schools operated by the Catholic Church that stripped indigenous children of their culture, “taking the Indian out of the child”. We are still trying to make up for the things that white settlers did to indigenous peoples. The gold rushes were one of the biggest things that made BC the way that it is today. If the gold rushes never happened, it is likely that BC would not be a province, let alone a part of Canada. The rushes impacted the culture in the area as well as greatly diversified the people in the province. We can thank the gold rushes for making life in BC the way it is.
The next keystone that we did was our character cards. We got a template, and then filled it out with information about the character that we would be writing our story about. We each got assigned a group of people that we would be writing our story about(Californian Miners, Hawaiians, Australians, Etc.). I got assigned Europeans. We were instructed to make our cards about the average person of the group we were assigned, with the average background, average name, average story. I found it quite hard to find anything on the average European that came to BC as a result of the gold rush. Because of this, I did mine on Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie, who we learned about a little earlier in the project. This is my character card.
With this keystone, we were instructed to hand in the notes we took on our character. You can view mine here.
The third keystone that we did was the planning for our story. I’ve done a fair bit of writing in the past, and planning usually isn’t something that helps. By the time I sat down to start working on this, we were about to start the first draft of our story. Because of this, I skipped the planning, and starting working on my first draft.
This part of the project was quite strange. After building knowledge for so long, we were launched straight into a lot of the work on our final product. The switch seemed very sudden, and it kinda threw me off.
My first draft didn’t go exactly as I planned. I wrote the required two pages, and then realized that I was not anywhere close to the end of the story. For the next couple of days, I spent most of my free time refining my story into something that I am really proud of. I think that I could have done better with my time management. I think that if I kept my story more concise and finished my first draft in time to get feedback, and just made my story shorter in general.
Overall, I think that I could’ve handled this project a lot better. I think that if I followed the laid out structure of the project more closely, I would’ve had a better experience and produced a better product. I learned a lot about the gold rush and the impact that something simple like a lot of people moving to one place can have. I also learned a lot about writing stories, and how to do it better in the future. I do really enjoy writing stories, and I think that I will start doing it again if I find the time. Enough of my blabbering. Here is the thing that you have all been waiting for. My final story.
Matthew Baillie Begbie, The Hanging Judge
I hope you all had a great time reading, and I will see you in the next project. See ya next time! 👋
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