Gold Rush Trail SS Beaver National Historic Event – Fort Langley

The BEAVER, the first steamship on the North Pacific Ocean, was a wooden paddle boat of 109 tons built in England, in 1835, for the Hudson’s Bay Company.  For over twenty years she was supply ship to Company posts on the Northwest Coast.  During and after the 1858 gold rush she carried freight and passengers between Vancouver Island and the mainland.  Subsequently chartered to the British Admiralty, she was used as a hydrographic survey ship between 1863-70.  Sold in 1874, and in her final years used as a towboat, she was wrecked at Prospect Point, at the entrance to Vancouver Harbour, in 1888.