THE WORKS OF HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. VOLUME XXXII. HISTORY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA. 1792-1887. SAN FRANCISCO: THE HISTORY COMPANY, PUBLISHERS. Entered according to Act of Congress in the Year 1887, by HUBERT H. BANCROFT, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. All Rights Reserved. PREFACE. MORE than a century elapsed after a charter was granted by Charles II. to Prince Rupert and a company of seventeen others, incorporated as the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay, before the first trading posts were built among the almost unpeopled solitudes of British Columbia, or, as the Mainland was then termed, New Caledonia. And yet it was but an accident that the construction of these little picket-fenced enclosures did not lead to the acquisition by Great Britain of an empire no less valuable than is now the dominion of Canada. In 1579, Sir Francis Drake anchored in the bay that still bears his name on the coast of California, and, in behalf of his sovereign, took possession of the country, which he called New Albion, this name being afterward applied to all the territory northward from Drake's Bay almost to the Columbia River. Long before the first American settlers, bringing with them their flocks and herds, had crossed the snow-clad mountains which form the eastern boundary of Oregon, forts and trading posts had been established in the valleys of the Umpqua and the Willamette. Toward the north the English claimed, by right of discovery, the country in the neighborhood of Nootka Sound. Finally, in 1840, a proposition was considered by the manager of the Hudson's Bay Company to purchase the Ross colony, established by the Russians on the coast of New Albion. That the bargain was not concluded was probably due to the fear of troublesome complications with the United States. Thus to the right of discovery and prior occupation in the far northwest would have been added the right of purchase, and if, at the time of the gold excitement, a few years later, the English had gained a foothold in the country, it is probable that they would have laid claim to a part of the territory ceded by Mexico to the United States in 1848. Originally a mere portion of the vast game preserve of the Hudson's Bay Company, little has been handed down to us of the early records of British Columbia, although that little forms perhaps the most interesting portion of its history. Among the sources whence I have derived the information that I now lay before the reader, are valuable manuscripts handed to me by some of the principal actors in the events which they describe; as, Roderick Finlayson, James Deans, and Alexander Caulfield Anderson. For other portions of my narrative, I have also depended largely on manuscripts, all of which have received due mention in this volume. In 1856 gold was discovered in the bed of the Fraser River, and in 1857 the San Juan Island difficulty was approaching a crisis. It was probably due in part to both of these causes, and also to the fear that New Caledonia, already largely occupied by Americans, might be absorbed into the territory of the United States, that, in 1858, an act was passed by the parlia |