History
Long before the coming of Europeans, British Columbia's coastal region supported five key First Peoples - The Kwakiutl, Bella Coola, Nuu-chah-nulth, Haida and Tlingit - all of whom lived largely off the sea and developed a culture in many ways more sophisticated than that of the nomadic and hunting-oriented tribes of the interior. Although it's rare these days to come across aboriginal faces in interior southern BC, aboriginal villages still exist on parts of Vancouver Island, and you can find examples of their totemic art in the excellent museum displays of Victoria and Vancouver. The British explorer Francis Drake probably made the first sighting of the mainland by a European, during his round-the-world voyage of 1579. Spanish explorers sailing from California and Russians from Alaska explored the coast almost two centuries later, though it was another Briton, Captain Cook , who made the first recorded landing in 1778. Captain George Vancouver first mapped the area in 1792-94, hard on the heels of the Nuu-chah-nulth Convention of 1790 - a neat piece of colonial bluster in which the British wrested from the Spanish all rights on the mainland as far as Alaska. Exploration of the interior came about during the search for an easier way to export furs westwards to the Pacific (instead of the arduous haul eastwards across the continent). Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company made the first crossing of North America north of Mexico in 1793, followed by two further adventurers, Simon Fraser and David Thompson , whose names also resonate as sobriquets for rivers, shops, motels and streets across the region. For the first half of the nineteenth century most of western Canada was ruled as a virtual fiefdom by the Hudson's Bay Company , a monopoly that antagonized the Americans, which in turn persuaded the British to formalize its claims to the region to forestall American expansion. The 49th Parallel was agreed as the national boundary, though Vancouver Island, which lies partly south of the line, remained wholly British and was officially designated a crown colony in 1849. The "Bay" still reigned in all but name, however, and took no particular interest in promoting immigration; as late as 1855 the island's white population numbered only 774 and the mainland remained almost unknown except to trappers and the odd prospector. The discovery of gold on the Fraser River in 1858, and in the Cariboo region three years later, changed everything, attracting some 25,000 people to the gold fields and creating a forward base on the mainland that was to become Vancouver. It also led to the building of the Cariboo Road (the present Hwy 97) and the Dewdney Trail (Hwy 3), which opened up the interior and helped attract the so-called Overlanders - a huge straggle of pioneers that tramped from Ontario and Quebec in the summer of 1862. Britain declared mainland British Columbia a crown colony in 1858 to impose imperial authority on the region and, more importantly, to lay firm claim to the huge mineral wealth that was rightly believed to lie within it. When Canada's eastern colonies formed the Dominion in 1867, though, British Columbia dithered over joining until it received the promise of a railway to link it to the east in 1871 - though the Canadian Pacific didn't actually arrive for another fifteen years. While British Columbia no longer dithers over its destiny, it still tends to look to itself and the Northwest - and increasingly to the new economic markets of the Pacific Rim - rather than to the rest of Canada. The francophone concerns of the east are virtually nonexistent here - for years, for example, there was just one French school in the entire province. For the most part British Columbians are well off, both financially and in terms of quality of life, and demographically the province is one of the region's youngest. If there are flies in the ointment, they're the environmental pressures thrown up by an economy which relies on primary resources for its dynamism: British Columbia supplies 25 percent of North America's commercial timber and exports significant amounts of hydroelectric power, fish, zinc, silver, oil, coal and gypsum. Few of these can be exploited without exacting a toll on the province's natural beauty; British Columbians may be well off, but they're increasingly aware of the environmental price being paid for their prosperity
Your Tip for Southern British Columbia
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