Vancouver History

Vancouver, with its location near the mouth of the Fraser River and on the waterways of the Strait of Georgia, Howe Sound, Burrard Inlet, and their tributaries, Vancouver has, for thousands of years, been a place of meeting, trade and settlement. Archaeological records indicate that the presence of Aboriginal peoples in the Vancouver area dates back 4,500–9,000 years. The city is located in the traditional territories of Skwxwú7mesh, Xwméthkwyiem, Tseil-waututh peoples of the Coast Salish group. They had villages in parts of present-day Vancouver, such as Stanley Park, False Creek, and along the Burrard Inlet. Some of these still exist in North Vancouver, West Vancouver, and near Point Grey. The first European to explore the coastline of present-day Point Grey and part of Burrard Inlet was José María Narváez of Spain, in 1791. George Vancouver explored the inner harbour of Burrard Inlet in 1792 and gave various places British names. The first Vancouver City Council meeting after the 1886 fire. The explorer and North West Company trader Simon Fraser and his crew were the first Europeans known to have set foot on the site of the present-day city. In 1808, they traveled from the east, down the Fraser River perhaps as far as Point Grey, near the University of British Columbia. The Cariboo Gold Rush of 1861 brought 25,000 men, mainly from California, to the mouth of the Fraser River and what would become Vancouver. The first European settlement was established in 1862 at McLeery\'s Farm on the Fraser River, just east of the ancient village of Musqueam in what is now Marpole. A sawmill established at Moodyville (now the City of North Vancouver) in 1863 began the city\'s long relationship with lumbering. It was quickly followed by mills owned by Captain Edward Stamp on the south shore of the inlet. Stamp, who had begun lumbering in the Port Alberni area, first attempted to run a mill at Brockton Point, but difficult currents and reefs forced the relocation of the operation to a point near the foot of Gore Street, known as Hastings Mill. This became the nucleus around which Vancouver formed. The mill\'s central role in the city waned after the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in the 1880s. It nevertheless remained important to the local economy until it closed in the 1920s.

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