The Great Vancouver Fire razes the entire…

The Great Vancouver Fire razes the entire city on June 13, 1886, a little more that two months after its incorporation on April 6, in the same year that the first transcontinental train arrived.

CPR president William Van Horne had arrived in Port Moody to establish the CPR terminus recommended by Henry John Cambie, and had given the city its name in honor of George Vancouver.

The Vancouver Fire Department is established this year and the city quickly rebuilt.

Vancouver will quickly become the largest city in the province, its ports conveying both the resource wealth of the province as well as that transported from the prairie provinces by rail, to markets overseas.

The Fraser Gold Rush of 1858 had brought over twenty-five thousand men, mainly from California, to New Westminster (founded February 14, 1859) on the Fraser River, on their way to the Fraser Canyon, bypassing what will become Vancouver.

Vancouver is among British Columbia's youngest cities; the first European settlement in what is now Vancouver was not until 1862 at McLeery's Farm on the Fraser River, just east of the ancient village of Musqueam in what is now Marpole.

A sawmill established at Moodyville (now the City of North Vancouver) in 1863, had begun the city's long relationship with logging.

It had quickly been followed by mills owned by Captain Edward Stamp on the south shore of the inlet.

Stamp, who had begun lumbering in the Port Alberni area, had first attempted to run a mill at Brockton Point, but difficult currents and reefs had forced the relocation of the operation in 1867 to a point near the foot of Gore Street.

This mill, known as the Hastings Mill, becomes the nucleus around which Vancouver forms.

The mill's central role in the city wanes after the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in the 1880s.

It will nevertheless remain important to the local economy until it closed in the 1920s.

The settlement which comes to be called Gastown had grown up quickly around the original makeshift tavern established by "Gassy" Jack Deighton in 1867 on the edge of the Hastings Mill property.

In 1870, the colonial government had surveyed the settlement and laid out a townsite, renamed "Granville" in honor of the then-British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Granville.

This site, with its natural harbor, had been selected in 1884 as the terminus for the Canadian Pacific Railway, to the disappointment of Port Moody, New Westminster and Victoria, all of which had vied to be the railhead.

A railway had been among the inducements for British Columbia to join the Confederation in 1871, but the Pacific Scandal and arguments over the use of Chinese labor had delayed construction until the 1880s.