Victoria, the little provincial capital on Vancouver Island, suddenly awoke to the noise and bustle of a commercial city. In a single summer 25,000 men landed there, while 8,000 more found their way to the frontier by land after a three weeks’ ride on horseback. Those who had come by water deposited their capital—sacks of raw gold—in the office of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Victoria, and set themselves to build rafts, boats, and canoes in which to reach the mainland and ascend the golden Fraser River. Many of them were drowned on the way; and of the 33,000 who reached the river, thirty thousand turned back in disgust to their deserted California. The three thousand who remained had to be kept in order and provided for in some way. Governor Douglas, of Vancouver Island, was ready to undertake this awkward task, but on the mainland he had no authority except that of a Hudson’s Bay factor. On November 17, 1858, proclamation was made that company rule over the mountains and islands of the West was ended forever—surviving the East India Company’s rule over the plains of Hindustan by just eleven weeks. The Hudson’s Bay Company might continue to exist, but its trading monopoly on the mainland and its political supremacy on Vancouver Island were extinguished together. Douglas, giving up the attempt to serve two masters, resigned his connection with the Company. He received in exchange the Queen’s commission as Governor, not only of the island, but of the new colony, “British Columbia,” stretching four hundred miles eastward from the Pacific Ocean to where the Rocky Mountains look down upon the inland plains. [Illustration] _On the Cariboo Trail, Thompson River_ The immigrant might well be appalled by his first experience of British Columbian gold-streams, for these do not meander along gentle valleys, but pour through gloomy gorges, walled for hundreds of miles by precipitous mountain sides. At the season when the human tide poured in, the water was at its highest too, and the sand-bars where men expected gold were hidden deep under the torrent of the Fraser. Such ground as still lay high and dry was soon crowded with miners, each hunting for a fortune in a little patch of earth twenty-five feet square. Those adventurous spirits who pressed on to the upper reaches of the stream, and into the tributary gorge of the Thompson River, had to scramble along trails where mountain goats alone had trod before. All provisions had to be brought up on the backs of men, and before a mule track could be cut along the precipices the men were reduced to a diet of wild berries. Yet some were not too hungry, nor too absorbed in dreams of gold, to be charmed by the wild magnificence of the canyon—the gloomy depths closed in for miles by perpendicular walls, then opening out in steep fantastic slopes, all splashed with brown and cream and orange and purple and black, and sprinkled with dark green solitary pines.