The discovery of gold played a great part in the making of the province. In the earlier decades of the nineteenth century British Columbia was occupied only by the Indians and by the traders of the Hudson Bay Company, with posts scattered at wide intervals through the wilderness. About 1839 a few Scotch and Canadian farmers were brought out to supply the traders with some of the necessaries that had hitherto been brought round by Cape Horn from England. Meanwhile, the United States was casting envious eyes on the country; but after noisy demands on the part of some Americans for the whole coast as far north as the Alaskan boundary, it was agreed by the Treaty of Oregon in 1846 that the 49th parallel of north latitude should be the mainland boundary, and that the whole of the island of Vancouver should remain under the British flag. In 1849 that great island was granted to the Hudson Bay Company, on condition that they should bring in settlers. The conditions were not fulfilled, and as late as 1854 there were scarcely five hundred white people on the island, including the traders; but in 1857 it became known that gold had been discovered along some of the rivers of the mainland (New Caledonia, as it was then called), and in the following spring thousands of prospectors arrived at Victoria. The little town was soon surrounded by an encampment of rude huts and tents, and the newcomers swarmed across to the new “Eldorado” in all kinds of craft, some paying for their temerity with their lives. The rush of gold seekers caused the government to try to open roads to the mining country, and the traveller on the railway through the Thompson and Fraser valleys catches many a glimpse of the old “Cariboo road,” sometimes clinging to the cliff as much as a thousand feet above the water. This road has been practically abandoned since the opening of the railway; but now government is again occupied with the project of a highway from Alberta to the Pacific coast. In the first decade, after the rush to the “diggings” began, about fifty million dollars’ worth of the precious metal was obtained in the Cariboo and Cassiar country, and still gold is being obtained there by more scientific methods of working. There are also valuable deposits of silver, lead, copper, zinc, coal, building stone and brick clay, all of which are worked more or less; and the different mining camps employ a large number of men. The value of the mining output for 1912 was about thirty-two and a half million dollars.