Unlike the good people of Victoria, Governor Douglas had reason to be apprehensive although hardly surprised on that Sunday morning of April 25, 1858 when the sternwheeler Commodore out of San Francisco disgorged her impatient passengers. Among the some 450 aboard were stowaways who jumped from the deck and swam ashore as the ship passed through the narrows into Esquimalt harbor.

People picking their way home from church watched in astonishment as the long line of men laden with their blanket packs and shovels, their gold pans, axes and firearms, struggled over the muddy five-kilometre trail from Esquimalt Suddenly the white population of quiet rural Victoria, where cattle grazed on surrounding lands and goats and swine roamed freely, had more than doubled. (Goats and swine continued to nun free]y until August, 1862 when Victoria was inconporated, with Douglas reserving the right to veto decisions of the elected council Then he gave assent to an act "to prohibit swine and goats from running at large in the town of Victoria and to prohibit goats from running at large in the settled districts of Vancouver Island.")

Except for the land speculators and the merchants and tradesmen who had come to size up the prospect of a new boom town, the men had one destination - the gold-laced bars of the Fraser River. Undeterred by finding no vessel in port to take them across the Gulf of Georgia, they paused no longer than it took them to acquire canoes and boats or to build rafts.

For many, wrecked in storms and foundering in heavy seas, the crossing to the Fraser was the end of an unfinished journey. Still others drowned in the eddies and currents of the rising river waters. The survivors pressed on, strung out along the banks, past Fort langley, past Fort Hope, until on what became known as Hill's Bar below the canyon mouth, an advance party struck pay dirt - at $50 a day, incredibly rich.

The Native peoples of New Caledonia, soon to become British Columbia, prized copper, not gold. The ancient hammered copper tradition whose origin they shared with the 'Old Copper' culture around the Great Lakes embodied both their wealth and their art. (The people of the Old Copper culture in what is known as the Archaic woodlands period between 3,000 and 2,100 years ago were the earliest known metal workers in the Americas. They were making tools of hammered copper in a style derived from Asia 1,000 years before metal working appeared in Latin America.) At their potlatches the most ostentatious display of wealth was the breaking of a copper and distribution of the pieces to visiting chiefs. Not until they learned that for the whites gold was the symbol of wealth did they begin working the river gravel for the precious metal.

If Douglas appeared to display little interest before 1856, it was out of fear for the consequences of a gold rush rather than indifference to the discoveries already made. As early as 1852, Donald McLean, the company's chief trader at Kamloops, was buying gold nuggets from the Natives.

Douglas' dispatches to Labouchere trace the extent of discoveries which he did not regard as lending "much support to the opinion entertained of the richness of these deposits." What he regarded as "inconsiderable quantities," however, were contradicted by company men in the field. In April, 1856, Angus McDonald had informed him that "gold has been found in considerable quantities in British territory on the upper Columbia," and that daily earnings of those digging for gold ranged from £2 to £8.

By the fall of 1857 he had changed his opinion. Despite attacks from Native peoples defending their ancestral lands, prospecting parties from California were making their way through the Oregon and Washington interior. Some had already crossed into New Caledonia and joined the Natives in washing gold above and below the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson rivers.

By the end of the year the rumors of a new goldfield could no longer be contained. Douglas was writing that the gold-bearing potential of the country was being revealed through "the exertions of the Native Indian tribes who, having tasted the sweets of gold-finding, are devoting much of their time and attention to that pursuit." Between Oct 6 and year's end the company had received 300 ounces of gold from its agents on the Thompson and Fraser. And by February. 1858 when the Otter docked at San Francisco with the gold, that figure had increased to 800 ounces, washed out "almost exclusively by the Native population," as Douglas later reported.

A frenzy of gold fever seized San Francisco. Farmers and their laborers left their crops in the field. Sawmill workers and store clerks quit their jobs to join brokers for the voyage to Victoria or Puget Sound ports. Ship owners, by crowding them aboard dangerously overloaded vessels, were the first to enrich themselves from the gold rush even while offering bargain fares of $30.

Almost overnight Victoria became a boom town, crowded far beyond capacity like the ships that discharged hundreds of passengers into its midst every week. At its expanding core new buildings went up as fast as lumber could be sawn to build them and land prices soared. Around the core sprawled a suburb of tents and shanties whose transient residents raised company profits to a new level with their purchases of supplies.

Between May and July an estimated 23,000 people left San Francisco bound for the Fraser. (As related by Begg in his History of British Columbia, this estimate was made by John Nugent, acting U.S. consular agent, who subsequently reported that all except about 3,000 had returned to the U.S. by January, 1859.) Some 8,000 more made their way overland by following the fur trade route along the Columbia and through the Okanagan to the Thompson and Fraser.

Watching the daily inpouring of gold-seekers, Douglas faced the ambivalence of his dual capacity. The influx was bringing to Victoria a new prosperity of which the company was the chief beneficiary. Inevitably the company would lose its trade monopoly, but as chief factor he was determined in the meantime to direct the new situation to the company's advantage while protecting Britain's interest.

As governor of Vancouver Island, he had sought, at the end of December, 1857, to head off a gold rush by issuing a proclamation for publication in Washington and Oregon newspapers "forbidding all persons to dig or disturb the soil in search of gold" in the Fraser or Thompson River districts without the government's permission.

He followed this up on May 8, 1858 with another proclamation advising shipowners and their skippers that the company had sole rights to trade with the Natives "to the exclusion of all other persons, whether British or foreign." All vessels found in the Fraser or elsewhere along the mainland coast without a Hudson's Bay license and Victoria customs clearance were subject to forfeiture and seizure of the goods aboard. That proclamation evoked a protest meeting in Victoria, but Douglas was not to be deterred.

Eventually, after lord Lytton had introduced a bill in the British parliament on July 8 to create a separate colony in New Caledonia, Douglas would be told he had exceeded his authority. (The name British Columbia was chosen by Queen Victoria to avoid confusion with the French island colony of New Caledonia in the South Pacific.) The company's monopoly of trade with the Natives could not be extended to prohibit others from engaging in any form of trade.

Lytton's concern was for the effect of Douglas' arbitrary measures on Britain's international relations. Douglas' fear was that without resolute action to establish British authority, the miners might organize their own form of government and afford a pretext for New Caledonia to follow Oregon into the embrace of Manifest Destiny.

Autocrat Douglas might be, opposed to the democratic aspirations of what he contemptuously termed the 'lower orders,' but now he would demonstrate his ability as an administrator. Acting without constitutional authority, the measures he took were decisive in the few months before disillusioned gold-seekers were filling the ships back to San Francisco. He imposed a 10 percent value added customs duty on all supplies and goods imported through Victoria for the mining operations. He placed a $12 tax on all craft from canoes to ships going up the Fraser, changed the fee for a miner's license from 21 shillings to $5 and stationed vessels at the mouth of the river to enforce collection. (Lytton, commenting on the miner's license fee in a dispatch of Oct.28, 1858, reminded Douglas of the Eureka Stockade, saying: That such an arrangement may on the whole be most congenial to the disposition of the California miners, whom you have to consider, but it was the system of enforcing from time to time, the license fee which created in the colony of Victoria so much dissatisfaction and led to the Ballarat riot, and the adoption of new rules. The Victoria system was in the main the sarne as that which you have adopted. It exacted a fee of £1 from each miner per month...") And, on the ground that the company imported its supplies from Britain, he proposed an agreement to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, a U.S. line, whereby it would carry passengers and supplies from Victoria up the Fraser. The vessels would be restricted to transporting supplies provided by the company and to carrying only passengers who could produce a miner's licence. For its part in arranging the agreement, the company would get $2 for each passenger carried. The company rejected the agreement and it was subsequently ruled iliegal by the British government.

As he had done in inspecting the Nanaimo coal seams, Douglas, resplendent in his uniform aboard the Otter, went upriver with HMS Satellite to see for himself how his proclamation was being enforced. Finding 16 canoes without licenses at Fort Langley, he added his personal authority to the enforcement by seizing them until their owners paid the license fees. But he ordered goods being offered for sale by traders forfeited as contraband.

His immediate fear was of conflict between miners and the Natives, who bitterly resented the white intruders taking gold without payment from what they regarded as their land.

At Yale, Douglas met with Native chiefs, attempting to allay their hostility. He promised them that village sites would be respected and, where necessary, new sites provided; their right to hunt and fish would be protected.

As intermediaries in the judicial process, he named several Native magistrates to bring those of their own people charged with offences before the newly appointed justices of the peace, George Perrier at Hill's Bar and Capt. P. B. Whannell at Yale, who would also hear their accusations against white miners. The law, he said, would "protect the rights of the Indian no less than those of the white man.

When the first contingents of miners arrived in Victoria, Douglas was relieved to find how orderly they were. "They are represented as being with some exceptions, a specimen of the worst of the population of San Francisco, the very dregs, in fact, of society," he wrote. "Their conduct here would have led me to form a very different conclusion."

Had he known it, the majority of the first arrivals were skilled miners for whom the California goldfields, now dominated by large mining companies, offered little opportunity for new discoveries. Some were veterans of the 1849 California gold rush. Some had followed the gold rush to Ballarat where armed miners had fought troops at the Eureka Stockade in 1854 "as part of a movement generally regarded as laying the foundations of Australian democracy and providing the basis for union development. (A History of the Miners Federation of Australia by Edgar Ross (Australian Coal and Shale Employees Federation, 1970) p.17.)

Although generally referred to as Californians - and by the Natives as 'Boston Men' - the 10,000 or more on the Fraser by August were drawn from most of the countries of Europe and around the Pacific Rim, a cross-section of the three million immigrants who flooded into the U.S. between 1845 and 1855

In Yale, where tents and shacks rose like mushrooms, native-born Americans from every state rubbed shoulders with English and French-Canadians and men from the British Maritime colonies who had made their way to California. With them came the camp followers of every gold rush, the gamblers and the bar girls who filled the saloons and dance halls along the river bank.

Out of the need to prevent claim jumping and violence, the miners framed their own regulations governing the width of claims and limiting to two the number held by any person, one by staking and the other by purchase.

They also passed resolutions prohibiting the sale of liquor without a license in the vicinity of Yale, imposing a penalty of "30 lashes on the bare back," and expulsion of anyone selling liquor illegally or furnishing firearms and ammunition to the Natives.

These regulations, by which they established their own democratic order, were subsequently approved by Douglas, but if he believed his system of justice to enforce equality before the law would "prevent much evil," he was soon disillusioned.

For a time whites tolerated Natives working the same bars, scorning their demands that they pay for the claims they had staked. Then, as newcomers swelled their ranks, they drove the outnumbered Natives from the bars.

The Natives retaliated by waylaying and robbing parties of miners making their way through the canyon in search of the source of the fine flour gold found on the lower bars. Presently not all the bodies floating downstream were those of miners who had drowned in the turbulent canyon waters, for many were stripped and mutilated.

The fear that gripped Yale was voiced at miners' meetings at which military style units were formed to drive the Natives from the canyon.

The first of these fought a three-hour battle at Boston Bar before the Natives withdrew, taking their dead with them. The punitive force returned to Yale, burning three villages along the way, further incensing the Natives whose attacks on miners working the bars continued to take a heavy toll.

German-born Ned Stout, a 49'er and among the first to ascend the Fraser, was one of five survivors, all wounded, of a party of 25 Californians fighting their way downstream from Nicomen. Awaiting another attack behind a log barricade at China Bar, they were saved by the timely arrival of Capt. H. M. Snyder who had been elected from a gathering of some 2,000 miners at Yale on Aug.17 to command a larger force.

At Spuzzum, Snyder and a force of around 150 miners joined with a small company of Whatcom men led by a Capt. Graham, an American. Meeting to decide their course of action, Snyder argued that the river could only be made secure by reaching a peace accord with the Natives. Some, angered by the number of headless bodies they had seen on their way upriver, wanted to avenge the killings, but eventually Snyder prevailed.

His conciliatory approach had the support of two Hudson's Bay traders, Ovid Ellard and Yates, at Spuzzum. Despite the Natives' hostility toward the miners, company men continued to go unmolested among them and the two traders persuaded them to meet with Snyder and his men.

The meeting concluded with the Natives agreeing to a peace treaty, but when a group of them carrying a white flag of truce went to Graham's camp, Graham seized the flag and trampled it underfoot.

Two nights later, after Snyder and his force had continued on their way upriver, Graham and two companions were standing by their campfire, a target for the muskets aimed at them from the dark. Three shots rang out and all three paid with their lives for Graham's insult to the flag of truce.

By Aug.23, when Snyder returned to Yale with his force, he estimated that the peace treaties he had negotiated covered about 2,000 Natives. His strategy to end the conflict had been simple and effective. By keeping the Natives away from the river at the peak of their fishing and berrypicking season, his force threatened their winter's food supply. Where they remained hostile, he forced them to terms by burning their caches of dried salmon and berry cakes.

Dangerous as Native attacks had made the Fraser Canyon, the old fur trade route through the Okanagan to Kamloops was still more perilous. Across the border the Natives in Washington Territory, Yakimas, Palouses and Coeur d'Alenes, were battling U.S. troops, and attacks by Natives in the Okanagan compelled miners headed for the goldfields to travel in large well-armed expeditions.

One such expedition of 160 men under David Mclaughlin, herding several hundred horses, mules and cattle, lost three men when it was ambushed in a canyon. It repulsed a second attack by mounted warriors trying to separate the herds from the herdsmen, yet even after Mclaughlin reached a truce with their chiefs, the Natives succeeded in making off with 60 head of cattle.

Another large expedition perpetrated a cold-blooded massacre of the Natives who trailed it, not to harass but merely to salvage whatever they could from articles discarded when the expedition broke camp each day.

At Okanagan lake some of the men had already shown their callous disregard for the Natives by breaking into huts in which the Natives were storing berries for the winter. After filling sacks with berries to take with them, they dumped the rest in the lake.

Knowing the Natives would cross the lake to the campsite as soon as the expedition moved on, 25 of the men stayed behind, concealed in a gully. As the unarmed Natives approached, they opened fire on them, ignoring their pleas for mercy, and continued firing on those who fled to their canoes or plunged into the water until the few survivors were out of range, A French contingent was so outraged that it refused to remain with the expedition and went its own separate way.

Uncontrite, the expedition went on to Fort Kamloops, taking with it some Shuswaps seized as prisoners along the way. There old Chief Nicola, supported by Hudson's Bay employees, confronted the 'Boston Men', denouncing them for the massacre and shaming them into freeing the Shuswaps. (A full account of the massacre will be found in The Golden Frontier: The Recollections of Herman Francis Reinhart 1857 - 1869. G. P. V. Akrigg quotes from it in 'The Fraser River Gold Rush', a paper contributed to The Fraser's History, published by Burnaby Historical Society in 1977.)

Racist attitudes toward the Natives, particularly violent among the Californians, had their counterpart in prejudice against the Chinese.

One of the ironies of history is that the early explorers, Meares and Alexander Mackenzie, as well as a U.S. House of representatives committee, regarded China as a favored source of population for the Pacific coast. Yet when Chinese began to arrive in considerable numbers, as they did during the gold rush, they met with hostility, setting a pattern of racial hatred against Japanese and East Indians as well as Chinese that would stain British Columbia politics for a century.

During the first few weeks of the gold rush, a white skipper arrived at Fort Hope, his boat loaded with Chinese. California miners lined the bank, refusing to let the Chinese land. While the skipper argued that he had been paid to bring the Chinese upriver and he would not take them back unless he were paid for the trip, chief trader Donald Mclean made his way to the bank and confronted the Californians, cocked revolver in hand. "Who says they shall not land?" he demanded. "I say they shall. With that he sent his son to the rancherie to fetch Natives to unload the baggage. Then, under his watchful eye, the Chinese landed and he escorted them to the fort to camp inside the stockade.

The miners at Yale endeavored to prevent Chinese from going farther upriver, but with limited success. When Snyder and his force reached China Bar, white miners accused the Chinese working there of supplying ammunition to the Natives. To avert trouble, Snyder persuaded the Chinese to go down to Yale until peace had been reached on the river, assuring them that their claims would be respected.

By the fall of 1860, about 200 Chinese were mining near the forks of the Fraser and Thompson and in subsequent years they were working in every district except the Cariboo. White miners kept them out of Barkerville until the fall of 1864, although more than 1,000 Chinese worked on construction of the Cariboo Road to Barkerville between 1863 and 1865. Then their discrimination broke down as Chinese began buying up supposedly worked out claims, from some of which they got rich returns.
Although relatively few blacks found their way to the mining towns, those who did were readily accepted, encountering little of the acrimony directed against them in Victoria.

Some of the blacks drawn by the gold rush came from Jamaica and other British West Indian colonies, but the majority were from California. Officially a free state, California was rife with anti-black prejudice, reflected in the laws on its statute books. One law, enacted in 1850, barred blacks from testifying against whites. Another, passed in 1852, allowed any escaped slave to be arrested and returned to slavery in another state, again denying the slave the right to testify.

Blacks' fears were heightened in 1858 by introduction in the state legislature of Bill 339, designed "to restrict and prevent the immigration to and residence in the state of negroes and mulattooes." The proposed law, which failed only because the legislature adjourned before it came to a vote, would have required all blacks illegally in the state to register and be licensed to work. Those failing to register could be arrested and hired out by the state to work until their wages covered the cost of their deportation.

In a case that pitted pro-slavers against abolitionists in 1858, Archie Lee, a young black, was held for deportation as "a fugitive slave," freed, again arrested for deportation and then kidnapped by his owner, who planned to transport him secretly to Panama. On April 14, the day that Lee was finally declared not to be a fugitive, blacks in San Francisco held a mass meeting to celebrate his release. The larger purpose of the meeting, however, was to discuss a mass emigration). (Details of the Archie Lee case are given by Crawford Killian in Go Do Some Great Thing (Douglas and Mcintyre, Vancouver, B.C., 1978) the most comprehensive work on black immigration to B.C. yet written.)

The outcome of the meeting, at which Capt. Jeremiah Nagle of the Commodore spoke of the certain welcome awaiting black immigrants to Vancouver Island, was formation at a follow-up meeting of a pioneer committee. When the Commodore sailed on April 20 amid the excitement of the gold rush, among her 450 passengers were 35 members of the pioneer committee, the advance party of about 600 blacks who would join the exodus to Vancouver Island during the summer months.

The advance party reported back to San Francisco that its spokesman had been well received by Douglas. They were particularly heartened by his assurance, later to be brought into question because the colony had no naturalization law, that those buying land would have the right to vote after seven months' residence. In San Francisco those blacks who paid poll tax had been driven from the polls when they tried to vote.

In Douglas the advance party found a sympathetic listener conscious of his own ancestry in British Guiana, where he was born in 1803, the son of a Scottish sugar plantation manager and his Creole common law wife. Sent by his father to Scotland for his education, his attitude to color had been shaped by the realities of the fur trade since the age of 16 when he landed in Canada to begin his career as a clerk for the North West Company. Common law marriages to Native and Metis women were an accepted fact and Douglas himself took Amelia as his Metis common law wife after he was sent to New Caledonia.

Douglas saw the blacks as a potential force in resisting American influence. They would not call for annexation to a country which, by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1857, denied citizenship even to free blacks. Among them were men of means, like Mifflin Gibbs and his partner, Peter Lester, whose grocery and provisions store soon posed the first serious threat to the Hudson's Bay monopoly. Others were tradesmen whose skills were in demand. Most, however, were hired as laborers on farms or for various jobs around town, easing the labor shortage created by the rush to the goldfields.

The advent of the blacks merely added another hue to the changing face of Victoria, where Chinese rubbed shoulders with Kanakas from Hawaii, Jews from Poland, Mexicans and French-Canadians.

Beyond the shanties and tents on the outskirts, Natives drawn from all parts of the coast to trade camped in their hundreds and prostitution with what one clergyman called "debased miners" flourished. Venereal disease was the first but not the most virulent of the contagions accompanying the gold rush.

Not Victoria, but the new mining towns on the Fraser River and the need to establish a system capable of maintaining law and order preoccupied Douglas in the first months of the gold rush.

On Aug. 2, 1858, a bill to establish a separate crown colony of British Columbia received royal assent and a month later, on Sept. 2, the Hudson's Bay Company's exclusive right to trade with the Natives on the mainland was revoked.

Douglas was offered the governorship of the new colony at a salary of £1,000, in addition to the £800 he already received as governor of Vancouver Island. Always with an eye to his own financial gain, Douglas complained to Lytton that his personal fortune had suffered because the £800 salary had been inadequate for the Vancouver Island post, ignoring his company salary as chief factor. He asked for £5,000 but settled for £1,000 on the terms laid down by Lytton, who demanded assurance "that all connection between the company and yourself is terminated...

By relinquishing his posts and interests in the company after 40 years and divesting himself of his shares in the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, Douglas could anticipate honors no company could bestow, the first a Companion of the Bath, entitling him to put the initials CB after his name, the second the knighthood to put Sir before it.

Before the year ended, Douglas could see his plans for the new colony taking shape. Casting around in his mind for a shorter and less arduous route to the upper reaches of the Fraser, he recalled the exploration of Alexander Caufield Anderson, one of the company's chief factor, in seeking an alternative to the old fur brigade route down the Columbia to Fort Vancouver bisected by the Oregon Treaty. Of several routes surveyed by Anderson, one had led from the head of Harrison lake to Lilboet.

He promptly ordered Capt. J. C. Ainsworth aboard the Umatilla to determine if the water route from the Fraser up the Harrison River was navigable. Alnsworth returned with the encouraging report that he had been able to take the vessel to the northern end of Harrison lake where the proposed road would start.

It was all Douglas needed to know. He would not learn of his new appointment until late September and in his continuing capacity as chief factor he devised a plan to get the road built at little cost to the company and the colonial government.

Frustrated by continuing high water, some 4,000 of those who had rushed to the new goldfield had already returned to San Francisco denouncing it as a 'humbug'. But newcomers continued to wait in Victoria for the river waters to fall.

Douglas called for 500 volunteers who would be transported in company vessels to work on the road without pay under Anderson. To ensure that they stayed until the road was built, each would have to deposit $25 with the company to be refunded in company goods on completion of the work. The incentive for the volunteers was that they would have two weeks to stake their claims before the road was opened to others.

By Nov.19, the day Douglas was sworn in at Fort langley as governor of B.C. by the colony's newly appointed chief justice, Matthew Baillie Beghie, 112 kilometres of rough road from Port Douglas on Harrison lake to Lillooet had been completed. (The initial choice of a site for the capital was Langley, on a town site adjoining the original Fort Langley laid out by the colonial surveyor, J D Pemberton.. This was abandoned for a new town site in adjacent Derby.)

Begbie, who had landed at Esquimalt only three days earlier, was one of several newcomers who would leave their mark upon the colony. Like Douglas, he used the garb of office accentuated by his sense of theatre, to impress an audience. Wearing his gown and wig, often incongruously in a makeshift courtroom, his great height, pointed beard and twirled moustache, made him a dominant figure in any proceedings.

Begbie shared with Douglas an affinity with the Natives, whose rights he felt he was upholding in many cases. In his early years before he accepted reserves as the political solution, he favored recognition of aboriginal title which, as he informed Douglas in April, 1860, "is by no means extinguished," urging that separate provision be made for it in any land scheme.

His respect for Natives, however, was at odds with his record of sentencing which has earned him a reputation in history as a hanging judge. Of 27 men hanged for murder between 1859 and 1872, 22 were Natives, for all except two (Complete figures are given by David R. Williams in his "...The Man for a New Country... Sir Matthew Baillie Beghie (Gray's Publishing, Sidney, B.C., 1977) pp.141 - 142.) of whom Begbie opposed clemency, four were whites and one was Chinese

At one point, recognizing the difference between a system of laws derived from Britain and Native concepts of punishment for violent crimes, he even proposed separate courts to try Natives. But although he maintained that he had never known Natives to deny the justice of a sentence he himself had approved, that justice was conditioned by the prevailing harsh colonial laws, which included public execution, flogging, the chain gang and, had Douglas been allowed his way, transportation to Australia. (For lack of an accessible penal settlement, Douglas suggested to Lytton in November, 1858, that prisoners in B.C. sentenced to transportation be sent to Australia. Lytton replied that the Australian penal colony was only for prisoners sentenced in Britain. In fact, some of the Canadians sentenced to transportation following the 1837-38 Rebellion were sent to Australia.)

Begbie also shared with Douglas a contempt for the 'lower orders'. A man of many accomplishments he was a gifted linguist, speaking French, Spanish and German, versed in latin and Greek, and able to converse in two or three Native tongues he was also imperious, imbued with the superiority of a great imperial power. He would accept American lawyers defending U.S. citizens in his courts, but he would refuse to recognize any lawyer educated and admitted to the bar in Canada.

Juries with whose verdict he disagreed, particularly when acquittal or reduction of the charge defied the evidence, were apt to feel the sting of his tongue. Berating one jury for taking only 10 minutes to acquit a man charged with attempted murder, he told them that any future jury bringing in so unreasonable a verdict would be locked up until it brought in a verdict he could accept on the evidence.

Another jury that brought in a verdict of manslaughter against a man charged with murder he castigated as "a pack of Dallas horse thieves and, permit me to say, it would give me great pleasure to see you hanged, each and every one of you..." And to a man acquitted of manslaughter he thundered, "Go and sandbag some of these jurymen," referring to an assault weapon used because it left no mark, "They deserve it."

For five years, Douglas, Begbie and Col. Richard Clement Moody of the Royal Engineers, were the effective government of B.C., ruling through a largely compliant appointed executive council.

Lytton's response to Douglas' apprehensions about "the introduction of a foreign population, whose sympathies may be entirely anti-British," was twofold: he ordered British naval vessels at Esquimalt to give full support to Douglas "if the civil government should require it to maintain order," and he undertook to send detachments of the Royal Engineers, one of which was already in the colony with the British section of the International Boundary Commission.

The detachments were composed of men selected for their skills whose "superior discipline and intelligence," Lytton told Douglas, "...afford ground for expecting that they will be less likely than ordinary soldiers of the line to yield to the temptation to desertion offered by the gold rush...

The first two detachments, one of 20 men, mostly land surveyors, under Capt. R. M. Parsons, and the other of 12 men, mostly carpenters, under Capt. J. M. Grant, reached B.C. in November by way of Panama. The main body of sappers and miners, under Capt. H. R. Luard, did not arrive until March, 1859 after travelling 20,000 kilometers around Cape Horn aboard the clipper Thames City. Among those making the six-month voyage were 31 women and 34 children, dependants of the 165 officers and men eventually assembled under Moody's command.

Moody's introduction to B.C. after his arrival in Victoria on Christmas Day, 1858, was as a leading participant in the frontier farce of 'Ned McGowan's War'.

The 'war' began as a conflict of authority between the two magistrates appointed by Douglas, Capt. J. P. Whannell at Yale and George Perrier at Hill's Bar, both seized with their own importance.

A black barber named Isaac Dixon laid a complaint of assault before Whannell against two American miners named Burns and Farrell. Whannell ordered him held as a material witness. When the two miners were arrested they were taken before Perrier, who ordered them jailed and sent his constable, Henry Hickson, to take Dixon into his custody. Instead Whannell jailed the constable for refusing to take Burns and Farrell before him.

Perrier retaliated by swearing in several special constables, one of whom was Edward (Ned) McGowan. A man whose abilities as a leader and speaker had won him a following among the miners of Hill's Bar, McGowan had a long record of violence.

His early political career as an elected member of the state legislature in his native Pennsylvania ended abruptly when he stabbed the editor of an opposition paper. In Philadelphia he became a police captain, a post he left hastily as a suspected accomplice in a bank robbery. In San Francisco, where he arrived in 1849, he was elected a justice of the peace and then an associate judge, but he had resigned before the Vigilance Committee formed in 1856 placed his name on its blacklist as an accomplice to murder.

McGowan beat the Vigilance Committee as he had beaten every previous charge against him. Eluding its relentless pursuit, he returned to San Francisco after the furor had died down. Through his political connections, he contrived to have an act passed by the state legislature changing the venue of his trial as an accessory to murder from San Francisco to Napa County, notorious for its venality, and there he was acquitted by a jury.

McGowan's reputation had preceded him to the Fraser River, but this apparently meant little to Perrier, who ordered him to arrest Whannell. At the head of a band of his followers, all armed, McGowan went to Yale, arrested Whannell in his courtroom and took him before Perrier ,who fined him $25 for contempt of court.

Whaunell's letter to him of Dec.31 was enough to arouse Douglas' fears of insurrection. 'The town and district are in a state bordering on anarchy; my own life and the lives of the citizens are in imminent peril," he wrote. Similar exaggerated reports reaching Moody and Begbie at Fort Langley prompted them to set out for Yale, accompanied by Lieut. R. C. Mayne of the Royal Navy, with a detachment of Royal Engineers.

Anxious to assess for themselves what had been represented as a violent situation, they left the detachment at Fort Hope and finished their journey alone on Jan.15. Far from bordering on anarchy, Yale was quiet and the miners greeted them with cheers.

The next day, however, McGowan broke the quiet by getting into a fight with Dr. M. W. Fifer, a former member of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee and the leader of a faction that wanted to form a similar committee in Yale directed against McGowan and his associates.

Fearing that the assault would excite more violence, Moody sent Mayne to order up the Royal Engineers from Fort Hope and then to take the steamer Enterprise to Langley for reinforcements of Royal Marines and a party of seamen with an artillery piece. Traveling by night, the Royal Engineers under Capt. J. M. Grant and 12 special constables under Chartres Brew, chief inspector of police, arrived the next morning. And when they were joined by the Royal Marines and seamen Moody had a force of 125 under his command.

Their arrival created a considerable stir among the miners, but no disturbance. McGowan appeared before Begbie on two separate charges of assault against Fifer and Whannell, complaining that the San Francisco Vigilance Committee was still pursuing him. For the assault on Fifer, to which he pleaded guilty, Begbie fined him £5. But he acquitted him of the assault on Whannell, holding that he was acting on a warrant issued by a justice of the peace.

Of the two justices whose feud had created the impression of apprehended insurrection, Perrier was immediately suspended by Moody on Douglas' orders. Whannell continued as a justice, but his desire to be relieved of the office may have been prompted less by the thought of promotion, as suggested by Begbie in a letter to Douglas, than by his fear that his false credentials might be exposed.

A letter written to Douglas in May, 1859 by Lieut. Col. James H. Ross, commanding officer of the Royal Victoria Yeomanry Corps in Melbourne, Australia, brought the denouncement. Having read a brief announcement of Whannell's appointment in a Melbourne paper, Ross indignantly refuted Whannell's claim to have been a captain as "a deliberate falsehood." He had enlisted in the corps as a private trooper, claiming previous experience in a light cavalry regiment in India, and had never held a commission. The letter concluded: "Whannell's name was erased from the roll of members of the Royal Victoria Yeomanry Corps, he having been reported as an absconder and absent without leave."

The incident, with all its absurdities, ended with McGowan apologizing to Moody, giving assurances of his future good behavior and holding a champagne luncheon at which the invited guests included Moody and Begbie, who could take satisfaction from their swift action to uphold British justice.

The significance of the incident, however, was its expression of the fear of U.S. expansion that pervaded the colony in its early years.

That fear was apparent in Moody's selection of the heavily timbered north bank of the Fraser as the site of the capital, initially called Queensborough and soon renamed New Westminster. Douglas preferred Langley, the town site for which had already been laid out, but Moody insisted that it was too close to the U.S. border. He wanted the river as a barrier "to hold the country against our neighbors at some future day."

It was apparent again in the protracted dispute over possession of San Juan Island arising out of interpretation of the Oregon Treaty. Britain's claim to the island was based on the Hudson's Bay Company's operation of a farm there since 1843. But American squatters had later settled on the island, affording the pretext for the U.S. to send in troops. Douglas countered by landing a detachment of Royal Marines on the island. Finally a compromise of joint occupation pending settlement of the rival claims was reached.

In 1861, however, after the outbreak of the American Civil War, Douglas saw an opportunity to strike at the Americans. His proposal to the Duke of Newcastle was as reckless and ill-conceived as his earlier plan during the Crimean War to seize all Russian settlements in North America to cut off trade and revenues. He had been restrained by Rear Admiral R. L. Baynes, commander of the British Pacific squadron, from taking offensive action in 1859 when U.S. troops were landed on San Juan Island. Now his new plan went far beyond San Juan.

He proposed to assemble a force of British naval vessels in the North Pacific, troops already in the two colonies supported by auxiliaries and reinforcements of one or two British regiments. This force would occupy Puget Sound and, before effective resistance could be organized, push overland to the Columbia River, which he envisaged as becoming a permanent frontier. "With Puget Sound and the line of the Columbia River in our hands, we should hold the only navigable outlets of the country - command its trade and soon compel it to submit to Her Majesty's rule," he wrote.

He was 15 years too late in seeking the Columbia as the international boundary. The Duke of Newcastle enjoined him to observe strict neutrality between the Union and the Confederacy. And even though he no longer held office in 1872, his disappointment was compounded when Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, as adjudicator, awarded San Juan to the U.S.

The last major thrust of U.S. expansion was the purchase of Alaska in 1867 to "set a watchful Yankee of each side of John Bull in his farwestern Canadian possessions," in the words of U.S. Senator Charles Sumner.

If Douglas, in his close relations with the Russian American Company, discussed with Russian agents their offer to sell the Alaska Panhandle leased to the Hudson's Bay Company "and perhaps the rest," as recorded by Dr. Helmcken, the offer made little impression on him. (Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken referred twice to Russian offers to sell all or part of Alaska in his Reminiscences. On page 182 he wrote: "In relation to this, Governor Douglas told me that the British might have bought it, in tact a Russian agent had been here and offered to sell the HBC or the government that coast strip of land from Portland Canal to Sitka which the Hudson's Bay Company had leased from Russia for trading purposes. I think Governor Douglas wrote HM government on this subject - if so, however, the correspondence as far as I know has never been made public." Again, on page 243, he wrote: "I know Russian agents were here and offered to sell Governor Douglas the 'coast belt' and perhaps the rest, but he could not do anything about the matter, though possibly have sent dispatches to HM government on the subject."
Douglas own correspondence contains no reference to the Russian offer, but in an extensive footnote to Helmcken's Reminiscences, Dorothy Blakey Smith, the editor, has compiled corroborative references from Canadian and U.S. sources. On four visits to the USSR, the author had enlisted the assistance of Literanaya Gazeta, the Soviet writers Union and various institutes without finding any record of discussions with Douglas in the archives of the Russian-American Company.)

It remained for his political adversary, Amor De Cosmos, to recognize its importance and to argue to no avail in the House of Commons for action to retrieve British Columbia's northern coast.