During the years 1900-50 about fifty non-Catholic private boys' schools existed in British Columbia. Most were small private ventures, a few large incorporations. Some survived only a few years, five endure to the present day. Virtually all the schools were premised on the principles and practices of private education in Britain. Three factors coalesced to bring these schools into being. British Columbia possessed from the mid-nineteenth century a heritage of private education. While acquiescing in the necessity for common schooling for the mass of the population, some families continued to educate their own offspring privately in the province, in Britain, or elsewhere in Canada. The second circumstance behind the creation of boys' schools in British Columbia was the tremendous popularity in late-Victorian Britain of a form of class-based private education particularly amenable to replication, the "public" school and its counterpart for younger boys, the preparatory school. Thirdly, British Columbia society fundamentally altered as a consequence of the national immigration policy initiated in 1896. Over the three decades 1891-1921, about 175,000 British immigrants settled in the province, including upwards to 24,000 of suitable social background to have been supporters of private education. Boys' schools on the British model were founded by enterprising .British immigrants primarily to educate the offspring of fellow settlers. However, schools' clientele gradually extended to encompass established British Columbia families of high socio-economic status. Such families were themselves responsible for the incorporation in Vancouver in the early 1930s of the province's last major boys' school, now its largest. The significance of British Columbia's boys' schools extends beyond their clientele, which did not much surpass 7,500 over the years 1900-50. Families supporting private education were already a distinctive element in the society. Educating offspring apart from vast bulk of their contemporaries helped perpetuate that separate identity from generation to generation. Socio-economic divisions in the society were in effect consolidated and maintained from the top down. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

During the Fraser River gold rush of 1858, over 30,000 goldseekers invaded the Aboriginal lands of southern British Columbia, setting off Native-White conflicts similar to the Indian Wars of the American Pacific Northwest. Prior to the establishment of the Colony of British Columbia, 19 November 1858, British sovereignty was marginal and the Fraser gold fields clearly an extension of the American West. The Native world was not defined by the 49th parallel, nor the kind of violence that crossed the international border with the expansion of the California mining frontier. These goldseekers, in prosecuting military-like campaigns, engaged in significant battles with First Nations, broke the back of full-scale Native resistance in both southern British Columbia and eastern Washington State, and brokered Treaties of Peace on foreign soil. The very roots of Native sovereignty, rights and unrest, current in the province today, may be traced to the 1858 gold rush. This dissertation maintains that British Columbia's 'founding' event has not been explored due to the transboundary nature of the subject. It has little or no presence in Canadian historiography as presently written. The year 1858 represents a period of exceptional flux and population mobility within an ill-defined space. I argue that the key to the Fraser Rush is to be found south of the border: in geographic space (the Pacific Slope) and in place (California mining frontier). It examines the three principal cultures that inhabited the middle ground of the gold fields, those of the Fur Trade (Hudson's Bay Company and Native), Californian, and British world views. The year 1858 represents a power struggle on the frontier: a struggle of local Indian power, the entrance of an overwhelming outsiders' power, transplanted locally and directed largely from California, and regional and long-distance British power. It is a clash of two "frontier" creations: that of "California culture" and "fur trade culture" that not only produced violence but the formal inauguration of colonialism, Indian reserves, and ultimately the expansion of Canada to the Pacific Slope.

During the Fraser River gold rush of 1858, over 30,000 goldseekers invaded the Aboriginal lands of southern British Columbia, setting off Native-White conflicts similar to the Indian Wars of the American Pacific Northwest. Prior to the establishment of the Colony of British Columbia, 19 November 1858, British sovereignty was marginal and the Fraser gold fields clearly an extension of the American West. The Native world was not defined by the 49th parallel, nor the kind of violence that crossed the international border with the expansion of the California mining frontier. These goldseekers, in prosecuting military-like campaigns, engaged in significant battles with First Nations, broke the back of full-scale Native resistance in both southern British Columbia and eastern Washington State, and brokered Treaties of Peace on foreign soil. The very roots of Native sovereignty, rights and unrest, current in the province today, may be traced to the 1858 gold rush. This dissertation maintains that British Columbia's 'founding' event has not been explored due to the transboundary nature of the subject. It has little or no presence in Canadian historiography as presently written. The year 1858 represents a period of exceptional flux and population mobility within an ill-defined space. I argue that the key to the Fraser Rush is to be found south of the border: in geographic space (the Pacific Slope) and in place (California mining frontier). It examines the three principal cultures that inhabited the middle ground of the gold fields, those of the Fur Trade (Hudson's Bay Company and Native), Californian, and British world views. The year 1858 represents a power struggle on the frontier: a struggle of local Indian power, the entrance of an overwhelming outsiders' power, transplanted locally and directed largely from California, and regional and long-distance British power. It is a clash of two "frontier" creations: that of "California culture" and "fur trade culture" that not only produced violence but the formal inauguration of colonialism, Indian reserves, and ultimately the expansion of Canada to the Pacific Slope. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate