George Sheenan

George Sheenan (the name is spelled Sheehan in some accounts) shares with his partner Fred Gwatkins the credit for founding the Fairview gold camp in British Columbia's south Okanagan. In 1887 the pair staked the Stemwinder, the first mineral claim on the gold-bearing quartz ledges in the hills above the Okanagan River near present-day Oliver.

The Stemwinder began operating in 1888 as Fairview's first mine, and the rush that followed built one of the Interior's liveliest camps: by the early 1890s Fairview counted ten mines, five stamp mills and four hotels, and boosters boasted extravagantly of its future. The good years were short. The Stemwinder shut down in 1904, the gold began to play out by 1906, and Fairview was a ghost town by the end of the First World War; today little remains but a historic marker and cemetery.

Of Sheenan himself the record preserves almost nothing beyond the staking of the discovery claim. His origins, nationality, later movements and dates of birth and death do not appear in accessible histories of the camp. He belongs to the large company of nineteenth-century prospectors whose one recorded achievement outlived every other trace of their lives.