ABSTRACT
The city of Vancouver is truly of the 20th century. When the small town of Granville was incorporated as the city of Vancouver in 1886, it had more in common with American cities west of the Rocky Mountains than with the rest of Canada. San Francisco had served as Vancouver’s main link to the east before the completion of Canada’s transcontinental railway in 1887. Within five years the community of 1000 had grown to nearly 14,000 and the young city became a supply depot and investment center for the Klondike gold rush of 1897-98. From these boomtown beginnings, metropolitan Vancouver is now home to more than 1.8 million people.
