and finding who they were, was satisfied as to their friendship for us. They had leather bags, full of gold nuggets, which they offered to me in exchange for goods."
This gold he took at eleven dollars an ounce in trade.
In 1849 the first independent party of colonists, that is, those other than Hudson's Bay Company servants, arrived in the colony and it will be necessary to discuss a little the prospects for settlement under the crown grant made to the Company by the British Government.
The Hudson's Bay Company and Colonization.
We have noted the inherent and fundamental opposition of the trader and the farmer in these Indian lands newly opened to the white man. The Hudson's Bay Company officials apparently saw that permanent settlement was bound to come throughout the northwest as it had done in the Willamette Valley, and yet they resisted it as long as they could. If colonization had to go forward, it should be, if they could compass it, just as slowly as they might think best for their interests. They offered to take over from the British Government the whole of the territory now comprising British Columbia (the mainland was then called New Albion) and administer it for settlement. Interest in emigration was keen in England at the time on account of the distress everywhere prevalent (Chartism reached a crisis it will be remembered in 1848), and the government did not dare to grant this even if it had wished to. The Company graciously consented to entertain the idea of restricting their plan to the island, but this offer was opposed from two quarters when the government seemed to favor it. Radical members like Roebuck attacked the scheme on the ground that it gave too much to a great monopoly at the expense of settlers; even Mr. Gladstone opposed it. Another attack from a somewhat different quarter was that of men like James Edward Fitzgerald who had colonization schemes of their own, conceived in a more generous spirit.
