https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/
For me, every January begins with another trip through the key events of Canadian history since 1867, courtesy of a course I have taught for nearly 20 years at Memorial University of Newfoundland. As I write, I just stepped out of a class on Confederation, where we examine all the reasons that four tenuously related colonies decided to become the nation we call Canada.
As most teachers do, I covered off some key factors that produced a new political union: political gridlock and instability in the two Canadas (present-day Ontario and Quebec), fears of an attack from the U.S., dreams of a transcontinental nation, and the mania for railroads that might knit British North America together as a powerful, integrated industrial economy.
There is one important inspiration for Confederation that often gets left out of standard textbooks and classrooms: gold mining. This part of the story can be traced back to 1858, when the SS Otter arrived at San Francisco with 800 oz. of gold from the Fraser River and sparked a rush northward among miners who were working the increasingly unproductive gold deposits of the Sierra Nevada.
For the rest of this article: https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/featured-article/mining-and-the-idea-of-canada/