Chinese arrived with the massive and sudden migration of 30,000 gold-seekers and merchants from San Francisco and the California goldfields with the Fraser Gold Rush of 1858, forming the nucleus of Victoria's Chinatown and leading to the establishment of others at New Westminster, Yale and Lillooet, though most Chinese gold-seekers were not in the newly emerged towns but busy prospecting and working the goldfields. Estimates indicate that about 1/3 of the non-native population of the Fraser goldfields was Chinese. As more and more goldfields were found, Chinese spread out all over the colony, and confrontations at Rock Creek and Wild Horse Creek with mostly American miners, but the colonial government intervened on the side of the Chinese (other similar situations were fairly rare, until the railway era).