The extension of Canadian sovereignty beyond the Rockies came about in quieter fashion. After Mackenzie had shown the way, Simon Fraser and David Thompson and other agents of the NorthWest Company took up the work of exploration and fur trading. With the union of the two rival companies in 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company became the sole authority on the Pacific coast. Settlers straggled in slowly until, in the late fifties, the discovery of rich placer gold on the Fraser and later in the Cariboo brought tens of thousands of miners from Australia and California, only to drift away again almost as quickly when the sands began to fail. Local governments had been established both in Vancouver Island and on the mainland. They were joined in a single province in 1866. One of the first acts of the new Legislature was to seek consolidation with the Dominion. Inspired by an enthusiastic Englishman, Alfred Waddington, who had dreamed for years of a transcontinental railway, the province stipulated that within ten years Canada should complete a road from the Pacific to a junction with the railways of the East. These terms were considered presumptuous on the part of a little settlement of ten or fifteen thousand whites; but Macdonald had faith in the resources of Canada and in what the morrow would bring forth. The bargain was made; and British Columbia entered the Confederation on July 1, 1871. East and West were now staked out. Only the Far North remained outside the bounds of the Dominion and this was soon acquired. In 1879 the British Government transferred to Canada all its rights and claims over the islands in the Arctic Archipelago and all other British territory in North America save Newfoundland and its strip of Labrador. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the forty-ninth parallel to the North Pole, now all was Canadian soil. Confederation brought new powers and new responsibilities and thrust Canada into the field of foreign affairs. It was with slow and groping steps that the Dominion advanced along this new path. Then--as now--for Canada foreign relations meant first and foremost relations with her great neighbor to the south. The likelihood of war had passed. The need for closer trade relations remained. When the Reciprocity Treaty was brought to an end, on March 17, 1866, Canada at first refrained from raising her tariff walls. "The provinces," as George Brown declared in 1874, "assumed that there were matters existing in 1865-66 to trouble the spirit of American statesmen for the moment, and they waited patiently for the sober second thought which was very long in coming, but in the meantime Canada played a good neighbor's part, and incidentally served her own ends, by continuing to grant the United States most of the privileges which had been given under the treaty free navigation and free goods, and, subject to a license fee, access to the fisheries."