The camas, by the way, was their favorite vegetable; it is a bulbous root, looking like an onion, but “more like a potato when cooked, and very good eating.” Fish, of course, was the principal food all along the coast. In fact, salmon pemmican was carried far inland. The coast canoe, very large but very light, was hollowed out of a cedar tree by fire and smoothed off with stone axes. One of the chief amusements Paul Kane found among the Chinooks was picking and eating insects from each other’s heads. “On my asking an Indian why he ate them, he replied that they bit him, and he gratified his revenge by biting them in return.” The Flat-head monstrosity which Kane found and depicted was cultivated by whole tribes on the mainland and around Victoria on the island. The infant, strapped to its papoose board for the mother to carry on her back, had its head pressed by a leather band passing tightly over the forehead and through holes in the board. This pressure was kept up steadily till the child was eight or twelve months old; that was enough to give its head the shape of a wedge for the rest of its life. Kane says that he never heard an infant cry under this treatment until the fastenings were removed, when it would cry until they were replaced. Farther north on the island the head was pressed by bandaging into the shape of a cone. About this time a proposal was made in England to organize a colony on the Pacific coast. The Hudson’s Bay Company asked to be entrusted with the task. Mr. Gladstone and other British statesmen argued that the Company had always opposed settlement and was quite unfit for such an enterprise: as well ask the wolf to guard the sheepfold. The protest was in vain, and in 1849 Vancouver Island was organized as a colony under the Company’s rule. The experiment was an utter failure. The Company charged $5 an acre for land, while any settler could get 320 acres for nothing on the American side of the frontier. After five years the white and part-white population of Vancouver Island numbered 450 in all, and only 500 acres were under cultivation. A poor little parliament of seven members was elected in 1856, and assembled at the miniature capital called Victoria; but they had little power and less revenue. The Company was still the master, and its chief agent held at the same time the position of royal governor. The settlers petitioned for direct imperial rule, and in 1858 an event occurred which compelled the Government in England to grant their request. This event was the outbreak of the gold fever. Several years before, Indians canoeing down from Queen Charlotte’s Islands to trade at Victoria had brought with them specimens of gold, and now a rumor spread that quantities of the precious metal had been found along the river bottoms of the mainland. The men who had turned California into a mining camp pulled up stakes and flocked northward to collect what they imagined would be easier and richer spoil in British territory.