Qualla: Leechtown, British Columbia

Leechtown, British Columbia: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

John Foley found the gold. Peter Leech got the river. That is the shortest summary of how Vancouver Island's one genuine gold rush town came by its name, and it is how these things tend to go: the man with the pan makes the discovery, the man with the official report gets the geography. In July 1864 the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, working the country northwest of Victoria, found colour in a tributary of the Sooke River. Robert Brown, who led the expedition, is credited with the line that carried the news: the gold will speak for itself. Within four months, twelve hundred men were working the creek.

Leechtown, British Columbia: The Fault That Made the Gold

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Leechtown sits where the Leech River joins the Sooke, and the river itself runs along the Leech River Fault - a regional break marking the seam between two different pieces of the earth's crust. On one side is the Pacific Rim Terrane; on the other, the Crescent Terrane, part of t...

Leechtown, British Columbia: Twelve Hundred by November

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The news moved fast because the audience was already assembled. Victoria in 1864 was full of men who had gone up the Fraser Canyon six years earlier and come back with less than they hoped for, and they knew what to do with a rumour. They came overland by trail, or by steamer to ...

Leechtown, British Columbia: Working the Leftovers

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The river was never quite finished with. In the decades after the rush, the people working it were mainly Chinese prospectors - men who took ground the first wave had written off and made it pay through patience and sheer repetition, in a province whose laws were arranged to make...

Leechtown, British Columbia: A Station the Size of a Chicken Coop

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The railway reached Leechtown long after the gold fever broke. The Canadian National line up from Victoria served a station that opened around 1926, described by someone unkindly and accurately as no larger than a chicken coop. Logging is what the twentieth century actually mean...

Leechtown, British Columbia: The Caves Nobody Could Find Again

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every gold district generates its lost mine, and Leechtown has two. In 1864 a prospector named Hans Christen went looking for a stray mule after a storm and found it sheltering in the mouth of a small cave; just inside, he said, a vein of gold two feet wide ran back into the rock...