New Caledonia (Canada)

From Open Encyclopedia

Though not a British colony, New Caledonia was part of the British claim to North America, though otherwise unincorporated except as the name of a fur district of the Hudson's Bay Company.

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History

Unlike Rupert's Land east of the Rockies (and south of the Mackenzie basin¹), New Caledonia and its companion to the south, the Columbia Fur District, New Caledonia was not owned by the fur company, which only had a monopoly to trade with the Indians and no more. The boundary between the two was vague although Cariboo and sometimes the Thompson River were included in the meaning. In its proper sense New Caledonia was the lakes and hills of the northwestern Interior Plateau where the Peace, Stuart and Bulkley River systems verge in a region that reminded the Scots in the fur company of the Highlands of Scotland. Prince George, then Fort George, is at the region's southeast corner, south of which is the Cariboo region, which as a fur trading area was administered from Fort St. James, the "capital" of the company administration in the region at Fort St. James. The name was conferred around the time of the founding of the first fur posts in the first decade of the 1800s, prior to which there had been no name nor knowledge of this region other than in the journals of Alexander Mackenzie.

At the opening of the Gold Rush the name New Caledonia was used briefly to refer to the politically-vacant (other than the historic peoples already there in great number) British mainland of the Pacific Northwest in the period between the Oregon Treaty (1846) and the declaration of the Colony of British Columbia by Governor James Douglas (1858), and its use as a description for the Fraser Canyon and Cariboo continued until about 1860. Earlier on, the coastal mainland had been nominally dubbed New Georgia and New Hanover on maps (in a period when Vancouver Island was sometimes shown as "Wakish Nation", after the Wakashan speaking peoples who dominated its west and north), but these terms never came into use.

It had been assumed locally that New Caledonia would be the name, but when the subject was presented to Queen Victoria for signing of the bill to name the new colony, she demurred on New Caledonia because of the French colony of the same name in Melanesia, and likewise on New Georgia because of the island of that name nearby. The other fur-district name, Columbia, she agreed had a more poetic ring and it also represented the British retention (and name) of a region aggressively claimed by the Americans, but inserted the "British" to emphasize it being the British portion of what had been the Columbia District. in its last days, the New Caledonia fur district was administered from Fort Vancouver, the capital of the Columbia District until 1843, when Fort Douglas (Victoria) was founded) - but even so, in technical meaning the New Caledonia region, for the most part, lay close enough on the line of 54-40 as to be definably different than the vulnerable Coast and south-flowing river basins of the Fraser and Columbia. It was when news of the discovery of gold on the Fraser River spread to San Francisco that newspapers there began to refer to New Caledonia by way of a vague direction or region to place the find in; the fur posts in the area, Fort Yale, Fort Hope, and Fort Langley were all administered from Fort Vancouver, and then from Victoria, not from Fort Saint James. Typically Victoria newspapers referred - and still do - to "the Mainland" instead of to New Caledonia, unless they were meaning Cariboo or to its north.

The name Caledonia is used in official and commercial names in the region.

Under the Treaty of Oregon in 1846, parts of New Caledonia south of the 49th Parallel was ceded to the United States. In 1848, the area was merged with the former Hudson's Bay Company department Columbia (Oregon Country) into the Oregon Country.

¹The Mackenzie Basin also was not part of Rupert's Land, nor likewise the region that would be incorporated as Yukon. in North America joined with Vancouver Island to form the colony of British Columbia, which later joined Confederation and became a province of western Canada..

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