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The central region was given the name of “New Caledonia” by explorer Simon Fraser. To avoid confusion with Colombia in South America and the. B.C. is the western-most province in Canada, bordering the Pacific Ocean. Internationally known for its stunning natural beauty (there are six national parks). British Columbia, westernmost of Canada’s 10 provinces. It is bounded to the north by Yukon and the Northwest Territories, to the east by the province of.
Is british columbia different than canada – is british columbia different than canada. The Origins of British Columbia in Canada
Signing up enhances your TCE experience with the ability to save items to your personal reading list, and access the interactive map. British Columbia is Canada’s most westerly province, and is a mountainous area whose population is mainly clustered in its southwestern corner.
British Columbia is a land of diversity and contrast within small areas. Coastal landscapes, characterized by high, snow-covered mountains rising above narrow fjords and inlets, contrast with the broad forested upland of the central interior and the plains of the northeast.
The intense “Britishness” of earlier times is referred to in the province’s name, which originated with Queen Victoria and was officially proclaimed in These regions are the Cordillera and the Interior Plains. The vast majority of the province is in the Cordillera region, while the northeast corner is part of the Interior Plains. The Cordillera is part of a mountain system that extends the length of the western third of North and South America.
The Cordillera mountain system covers most of British Columbia. It consists of two main mountain ranges. These ranges are the Coast Mountains in the west and the Rocky Mountains in the east. Both ranges are west of the Rocky Mountains. The coniferous trees of coastal British Columbia are the tallest and broadest trees in Canada. Douglas fir , western cedar , balsam fir , hemlock and Sitka spruce grow very well in the mild, wet climate.
Similar trees, plus lodgepole pine , ponderosa pine and aspen , grow on the middle slopes of the interior mountains and plateaus. In contrast, the Coast Mountains and the lower river valleys across the southern third of the province have a drier climate. The drier climate creates grassland in these regions. A slightly broader region, sometimes called the Georgia Strait region, includes Victoria and the southeast coast of Vancouver Island.
See also Geography of British Columbia. Metropolitan Vancouver is the largest city in the province. There are three additional metropolitan areas: Abbotsford-Mission , Kelowna and Victoria , the capital. John , Terrace and Williams Lake. In , the sectors employing the most British Columbians were retail, health care and social assistance, and accommodation and food services.
The unemployment rate was 6. Similar to other provinces, the top ethnic origins reported in the Census reflected European roots the top three were English, Canadian and Scottish. There is also a relatively significant Indigenous population 5. In the midth century Chinese people began working in the mines of the Cariboo, and in the early s many more Chinese were brought to BC as labourers for the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway CPR.
Afterwards many of them settled in Vancouver, and a smaller “Chinatown” also arose in Victoria. Japanese Canadians also settled in southwestern BC between and As in other parts of Canada, the percentage of people of British origin has declined rapidly since The earlier part of the province’s history was marred by racism , particularly the anti-Asiatic riots of and the Komagata Maru incident of Stirred up by politicians of all parties, fears were rampant that British Columbia’s future as a “white province” was threatened.
The population of Japanese and Chinese was less than 40, in , but their concentration in the Lower Mainland and southern Vancouver Island, combined with the restricted forms of employment available to them, made them conspicuous.
Because they were hard-working and forced to take lower wages the Japanese and Chinese population was considered unfair competition by the unions and the agricultural community. The campaign of the Asiatic Exclusion League established and others resulted in the Chinese Immigration Act of , which effectively ended Chinese immigration. Many Japanese were evicted from their coastal fishing villages during the Second World War and placed in internment camps. Political discrimination against non-whites in BC finally ended after the Second World War when the Chinese and Hindu populations were enfranchised in , and the Japanese in Since the near majority of people in BC have some British background and are English-speaking, as in other parts of Canada, they are predominantly Christian about 45 per cent according to the National Household Survey.
Those claiming no religious affiliation numbered just over 44 per cent. The coasts and interior valleys of British Columbia were first occupied sometime after the last Ice Age. Occupation of some sites in BC has been confirmed by carbon dating at about 6,—8, years ago. The people of the Northwest Coast lived in autonomous villages of to 1, people and had access to a particularly bountiful environment that provided abundant shellfish, salmon and even whales.
Groups living along the coast used a variety of fishing tools and techniques, and used forest resources to build large and sophisticated plank houses. The coastal people concentrated along the lower reaches of the major salmon rivers. The interior inhabitants, such as the Carrier , Interior Salish and Kootenay were generally nomadic and depended on hunting.
Those groups living in the Subarctic region of the interior generally fished and hunted moose and caribou, while those living in the southern interior had a milder climate.
The availability of salmon made it possible for the groups living in the southern interior to winter in small villages. Due to its distance from the eastern coast of Canada and the barrier to east-west movement created by the mountains, the Pacific Northwest was very difficult for early Europeans to reach and was the last part of North America they explored.
The first permanent European settlement came with the development of the fur trade in the early 19th century. A flurry of activity followed the discovery of gold on the lower and middle Fraser River see Fraser River Gold Rush , resulting in an inland system of supply and transportation along the Fraser River to the Cariboo Mountains.
By the s more permanent mining towns began to dot the valleys of the southeast — each supported by local forestry, small farms and complex rail, road and water transport. In contrast, on the southwest coast settlement was more urban and commercial.
From to Victoria, the capital, was the main administrative and commercial settlement, and the supply centre for interior and coastal resource development. Vancouver, on Burrard Inlet north of the mouth of the Fraser River, was selected as the site for the western terminal of the CPR in Vancouver soon replaced Victoria as the commercial centre and became the main port for both coastal and interior products to move to world markets.
Overall, British Columbia developed contrasting coastal and interior settlement patterns which remained the same throughout the 20th century, although densities increased. The population has always been primarily urban, living in the southwest region. The remaining population is dispersed across the southern half of the province, mainly occupying the north-south valleys or resource-based settlements along the main transportation lines.
The only major farming populations live in the Okanagan Valley and dispersed along the highway between Kamloops and Prince George. These linear population clusters are separated from each other by unoccupied mountain ranges. With the exception of an urban and agricultural cluster in the Peace River area of the northeast, few people live north of Prince George and Prince Rupert.
Europeans arrived at the northwest coast much later than they did other areas of the continent. Within a few years British traders came by sea and developed a flourishing fur trade with coastal Aboriginal peoples. This Nootka Sound Controversy was settled by the Nootka Conventions of —94, which did not determine ownership, but gave equal trading rights to both countries.
British claims were strengthened after when ships under George Vancouver carried out a careful three-year mapping of the coast from Oregon to Alaska. Vancouver named many of the bays, inlets and coastal landform features. In this period of worldwide European colonialism, there was no concern among European governments and businessmen that this area was already occupied by Aboriginal peoples. He entered the region from the east via the Peace and Upper Fraser rivers, and explored westward across the Chilcotin Plateau and through the Coast Mountains to the long inlet at Bella Coola.
Two other members of the North West Company, Simon Fraser and David Thompson , explored other parts of the interior early in the 19th century. In Fraser reached the mouth of the river which now bears his name, and in Thompson found the mouth of the Columbia River after exploring the river routes of southeastern BC. For about 50 years, while eastern North America was being occupied and settled by European agricultural people and dotted with commercial cities, the mountainous western part of the continent remained little-known territory on the fringes of fur-trade empires controlled from eastern cities.
In the s American settlers began to move into the southern part of this region, and refused to recognize the authority of the British company. Conflicting territorial claims were settled in the Oregon Treaty , which established the southern boundary of BC along the 49th parallel, with the exception of Vancouver Island. In anticipation of this result the HBC had moved its headquarters to newly-established Fort Victoria in In the British government granted Vancouver Island to the HBC for colonization, and in James Douglas , an official of the company, became governor of the new colony.
In Douglas established a legislative assembly for Vancouver Island. At mid-century the only non-Aboriginal settlements within the boundaries of present-day British Columbia were fur trade posts on the coast, such as Victoria, Nanaimo and Fort Langley , and in the interior, such as Kamloops, Fort later Prince George and Fort St. This relatively quiet period of history ended in when gold was discovered in the sand bars along the Lower Fraser River.
The ensuing gold rushes brought thousands of fortune hunters from many parts of the world, but mainly from the California goldfields. Many fortune hunters came by boat from San Francisco, crowding into inadequate facilities in Victoria to buy supplies and receive permits. Prospecting took place upstream along the banks and bars of the Fraser River during The town of Yale was established as a trans-shipping centre at the south end of Fraser Canyon, and as the eastern end of water transport from the Fraser River mouth.
Gold seekers walked the tributaries of the Fraser River and major gold finds were made east of Quesnel. The boomtown of Barkerville arose at the western edge of the Cariboo Mountains as the chief service town for the Cariboo goldfields. At its peak in the early s Barkerville likely held a fluctuating population of about 10,, making it the largest settlement in western Canada at that time. In order to establish government and maintain law and order around the goldfields, the British established a separate mainland colony of British Columbia in under the authority of James Douglas, who also remained the governor of Vancouver Island.
The new settlement of New Westminster , located slightly inland on the north bank of the Fraser River delta, was proclaimed capital of the new colony in and controlled river traffic entering the Fraser River en route to the interior. In the early s the amazing feat of building the Cariboo Road along the walls of the Fraser Canyon was accomplished in order to move supplies to interior settlements.
In , with gold production declining and people leaving, the British government united the two colonies to reduce administrative costs. New Westminster was the capital of the combined colony for two years before protests from the older capital, Victoria, resulted in the seat of government being moved there in The resulting physical separation of the capital from the majority of the people and economic activity on the mainland later led to communication problems for the region, and many government services and offices had to be duplicated on the mainland.
After the British colony on the West Coast debated whether it should join the new Confederation of eastern provinces known as Canada. In the 12, non-Aboriginal residents of BC agreed to enter the Dominion of Canada on the condition that the federal government build a transcontinental railway to link it with the eastern provinces. The federal government agreed, but the new province waited, rather impatiently at times, for 15 years before the Canadian Pacific Railway reached the southwest coast.
See also British Columbia and Confederation. The union with Canada was an unhappy one at first. The new province ran heavily into debt; the cost of governing a large mountainous area with few people was very high, and revenues from resource users were low.
More than one-third of the province’s white residents lived in or near Victoria. Even by the white population of 24, was less than the estimated 25, Aboriginal peoples.
The Origins of British Columbia in Canada – Popular Posts
Susan Munroe is a public affairs and communications professional based in Canada. The province of British Columbia, also known as BC, is one. British Columbia, westernmost of Canada’s 10 provinces. It is bounded to the north by Yukon and the Northwest Territories, to the east by the province of. British Columbia (BC; French: Colombie-Britannique) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains.