Up until this week I was going around with an unfounded notion that I knew my Canadian history. And then I came across this map, and while finding out about it I realized that I know pretty much none of the history of British Columbia. I'm even more abashed because the main character in the story is a guy named Douglas.
BC was far and away the largest Canadian province when it entered Confederation in 1871, because it was in its own way an assemblage of parts. The mainland (first as New Caledonia, then British Columbia), Vancouver Island, and the Queen Charlottes were all separate colonies at the beginning of the 1860s -- though the entire non-Haida governmental apparatus of the Queen Charlotte Colony could have fit into a drawer in the desk of Governor James Douglas in Victoria. Sir James was either governor or administrator of all of the West Coast colonies. He's a bit like Lord Monck in the east, who himself was governor of everything in the early 1860s. Handing control of multiple colonies to the same man was just London's way of saying it wanted Confederation to happen, quickly.
The colonial organization of BC was spurred on by a series of gold rushes, and it was the Stikine gold rush of 1862 that led Sir James to petition London to carve that area off of its enormous North-Western Territory and put it in another of his desk drawers. The Stikine Territory occupied what is now the northwestern corner of British Columbia plus a strip of the Yukon. It was very sparsely inhabited and cut off from the sea by the Alaska Panhandle, and within a year Douglas had got it annexed to the expanding British Columbia. Today, with some border changes, it is the largest and least populous riding in the provincial legislature. Here's how the indigenous
Tahltan people look at it:
When gold was discovered on the Stikine River in 1862, it was still our country. The Governor of the crown colony of British Columbia then organized it into the Stikine Territory. It was administered by British Columbia. In 1863, Governor Douglas claimed all territory north to the 60th parallel and west to what is now the British Columbia - Alberta border. This territory then became part of British Columbia ... " On 20 July 1871, the crown colony of British Columbia entered Confederation. That is how we became part of a province in the country of Canada. Notice that we did not sign a treaty with the governments of British Columbia or Canada. That is the reason we are talking about land claims with them now.