Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Work of the Royal Engineers in British Columbia, 1858 to 1863
James Douglas, the Governor of Vancouver Island, and the head of the Hudson's Bay Company west of the Rockies, being the nearest representa tive of the Crown, was by letter from Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, dated 16th July, 1858, authorised under the necessity of the case to perform the duties of Governor of the unorganised territory, pending the passage of the organic Act, and his own formal and legal appointment as Governor.
Douglas, from a lad, had been accustomed to the natives, knew their habits, their manners, their lines of thought and of action, and understood the motives and impulses which prompted their c duct; but these foreign gold-seekers, these wild and adventurous Spirits, many of whom brought un savoury reputations from California, and whose sympathies, as he himself said in his letters to the Secretary of State, were decidedly anti-british these he looked upon with suspicion and dismay. The inrush of land-seekers had robbed the British Crown of the fertile fields of Oregon; this inrush of gold-seekers might rob it of New Caledonia. With such thoughts in his mind he felt the necessity of a power behind the throne. Writing to Sir E. B. Lytton on the lgth August, he says: The affairs of Government might be carried on smoothly with even a single company of infantry; but at present I must, under Providence, depend in a great measure on personal in?uence and management - a position inconsistent with the dignity of the Queen's Government.
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