Colonial Despatches

Cornish Bar, roughly 6 km south of Hope, was one among dozens of gold rush sites worked along the Fraser River, largely, from 1858 to 1859.1 It was named Murderer, or Murderers, Bar in reference to a murder committed there, but Douglas found the name distasteful and decreed that it change to Cornish Bar,2 likely in homage to the men of Cornish descent who worked the area, along with hundreds of others, at the time of Douglas’s visit in 1858.3

• 1. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 32, History of British Columbia 1792-1887 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1887), 440.
• 2. G. P. V. Akrigg and H. B. Akrigg, British Columbia Chronicle, 1847-1871 (Victoria: Discovery Press, 1977), 149.
• 3. Bancroft, History of British Columbia, 441.