scouts of the gold stampede
wander houseless for years from hill to hill, from gully to gully, up
rivers, up stream beds, up dry watercourses, seeking the source of
those yellow specks seen far down the mountains near the sea.
Precipice, rapids, avalanche, winter storm, take their toll of dead.
Corpses are washed down in the spring floods; or the {5} thaw reveals a
prospector's shack smashed by a snowslide under which lie two dead
'pardners.' Then, by and by, when everybody has forgotten about it, a
shaggy man comes out of the wilds with a leather bag; the bag goes to
the mint; and the world goes mad.

Victoria went to sleep again. When men drifted in to trade dust and
nuggets for picks and flour, the fur-traders smiled, and rightly
surmised that the California diggings were playing out.

Though Vancouver Island was nominally a crown colony, it was still,
with New Caledonia, practically a fief of the Hudson's Bay Company.
James Douglas was governor. He was assisted in the administration by a
council of three, nominated by himself--John Tod, James Cooper, and
Roderick Finlayson. In 1856 a colonial legislature was elected and met
at Victoria in August for the first time.[2] But, {6} in fact, the
company owned the colony, and its will was supreme in the government.
John Work was the company's chief factor at Victoria and Finlayson was
chief trader.

Because California and Oregon had gone American, some small British
warships lay at Esquimalt harbour. The little fort had expanded beyond
the stockade. The governor's house was to the east of the stockade. A
new church had been built, and the Rev. Edward Cridge, afterwards known
as Bishop Cridge, was the rector. Two schools had been built. Inside
the fort were perhaps forty-five employees. Inside and outside lived
some eight hundred people. But grass grew in the roads. There was no
noise but the church bell or the fort bell, or the flapping of a sail
while a ship came to anchor. Three hundred acres about the fort were
worked by the company as a farm, which gave employment to about two
dozen workmen, and on which were perhaps a hundred cattle and a score
of brood mares. The company also had a saw-mill. Buildings of huge,
squared timbers flanked three sides of the inner stockades--the
dining-hall, the cook-house, the bunk-house, the store, the trader's
house. There were two bastions, and from each cannon pointed. Close
to the {7} wicket at the main entrance