History
The Golden Triangle
The first documented gold find in the Golden Triangle was in 1861. Alexander “Buck” Choquette travelled north by Tlingit canoe to Wrangell, then in Russian America. He married Georgiana, daughter of Stikine chief Shakes, and went up the Stikine River. That fall he found gold in the gravels at Buck Bar, just below where the Anuk River joins the Stikine. The find started the Stikine Gold Rush. In 1862 Britain created the Stickeen Territories.
A larger rush followed in the early 1870s on Dease, Thibert and McDame creeks, in the Cassiar. In 1877 a nugget of about seventy-two ounces was discovered on McDame Creek. It is one of the largest gold nuggets found in British Columbia.
In 1898, a Seattle promoter named Burgess charged more than sixty men a fee and told them he had found placer gold on the Nass River. He took them to the Bear River flats at the head of Portland Canal. Burgess left. No gold was found. Most of the men left – without any gold. D. J. Rainey stayed, built a cabin in 1899, and staked claims on the mountain peaks. Because the border was not settled, he filed the claims in both Alaska and Canada. Other prospectors followed, including John and Robert Stewart of Victoria. They staked claims, laid out a townsite, and named the port, Stewart.
Mining companies arrived, and a railway was started. The First World War ended the boom.
A company named Premier started in 1910, when William Dillworth and the Buntings staked claims on a ridge north of the town. Early backers drove short tunnels and ran out of money. Then the next group from New York stopped short of the ore. The next prospector, Pat Daly, later brought in R. K. Neill, who bonded the property with partners from Fernie. In 1918 they extended the old tunnel and found silver ore with high gold values. Ore shipped to the Tacoma smelter led ASARCO to buy a 52 percent stake in 1919. A mill opened in 1921. The mine operated until the early 1950s.
In the 1950s and 1960s, attention turned to copper. The Granduc deposit was designated in that period. Tunnel work began in 1964. In February 1965, an avalanche killed twenty-six men at the Leduc camp and stopped work at that end. The tunnel was finished from Tide Lake in 1968. Granduc shipped its first concentrate in late 1970 and produced through the 1970s.
Two high-grade mines followed: Snip (1991 to 1999) and Eskay Creek (1995 to 2008). Eskay Creek was Canada’s highest-grade gold mine and a major silver producer, with about 160 million ounces of silver. By the time it closed in 2008, most of the high-grade ore had been mined.
The Stewart–Cassiar highway, the port at Stewart, and the Northwest Transmission Line lowered the cost of operating in the region. Brucejack and Red Chris are in production.
Seabridge Gold’s KSM project is one of the largest undeveloped copper-gold deposits in the world. The Nisga’a and Tahltan support it. In 2026, a court ruled that the province had not properly consulted the Tsetsaut Skii km Lax Ha before designating the project as substantially started. That designation is being challenged.