Colony of British Columbia (1866–1871)

The Colony of British Columbia was a British Crown Colony that resulted from the amalgamation of the two former colonies, the Colony of Vancouver Island and the mainland Colony of British Columbia. The two former colonies were united in 1866, and the united colony existed until its incorporation into the Canadian Confederation in 1871. History of British Columbia The Colony of Vancouver Island had been created in 1849 to bolster British claims to the whole island and the adjacent Gulf Islands, and to provide a North Pacific home port for the Royal Navy at Esquimalt. By the mid-1850s, the Island Colony's non-indigenous population was around 800 people; a mix of mostly British, French-Canadian, Hawaiians, but with handfuls of Iroquoians, Métis and Cree in the employ of the fur company, and a few Belgian and French Oblate priests. First Nations' populations had not recovered from smallpox epidemics in the 1770s and 1780s. Three years earlier, the Oregon Treaty had established the boundary between British North America and the United States west of the Rocky Mountains along the 49th parallel. The mainland area of present-day British Columbia was an unorganized territory under British sovereignty until 1858. The region was under the de facto administration of the Hudson's Bay Company, and its regional chief executive, James Douglas, who also happened to be Governor of Vancouver Island. The region was informally given the name New Caledonia, after the fur-trading district which covered the central and northern interior of the mainland west of the Rockies. All this changed with the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1857–1858, when the non-aboriginal population of the mainland swelled from about 150 Hudson's Bay Company employees and their families to about 20,000 prospectors, speculators, land agents, and merchants. The British Colonial Office acted swiftly, proclaiming the Crown Colony of British Columbia (1858–1866) on 2 August 1858, and dispatching Richard Clement Moody and the Royal Engineers, Columbia Detachment, to establish British order and to transform the newly established Colony into the British Empire's "bulwark in the farthest west" and "found a second England on the shores of the Pacific".