Community history

The Village of Hazelton, often called Old Hazelton, sits where the Bulkley and Skeena Rivers meet. It is beside the ancient Gitxsan village of Gitanmaax and is one of the oldest communities in northern British Columbia.

A crossroads for thousands of years

Gitanmaax stood here in the shadow of the Rocher Déboulé Range for thousands of years. It was a rich fishing site and an important trading crossroads, where trails joined the Gitxsan with nations on the Skeena and Nass Rivers and far inland through Wet’suwet’en territory.

Gitanmaax grew even more important as a trading centre when the Hudson’s Bay Company and other European traders arrived in the 1800s. European goods were moving through these trade networks long before the first Europeans reached Gitanmaax.

The telegraph and the gold rush

Settlement began with the Collins Overland Telegraph, a plan to link North America and Europe by a line through BC, Yukon and Siberia. Work crews reached Gitanmaax in 1866, but the project was dropped the next February when a cable across the Atlantic was completed. Some of the crew stayed to look for gold, and Old Hazelton was born.

Gitanmaax became a main supply point for the Omineca Gold Rush in the 1860s and the Cassiar Gold Rush in the 1870s. Two former Hudson’s Bay Company traders, Robert Cunningham and Thomas Hankin, saw the opportunity. In 1871 Cunningham founded Port Essington at the mouth of the Skeena, while Hankin set up a trading post at Gitanmaax. Hankin named the community for the hazel trees growing on the flats, and his store was the start of the Village of Hazelton.

The riverboat era

Supplies for the whole region were brought up the Skeena in freight canoes by First Nations freighters, then loaded onto pack trains of mules in summer and dog teams in winter. As more people arrived and workers moved to the coastal canneries, steamboats took over.

The Hudson’s Bay Company launched its first sternwheeler, the Caledonia, in 1891, and that summer it became the first steamboat to reach Hazelton. The riverboat era lasted only about 20 years, but it shaped Hazelton’s identity. Today a replica of the S.S. Hazelton stands beside Polly Sargent Park, along with other pieces of the steamboat era.