1 As early as 1852, tales of gold in British Columbia travelled around the world. One of these tales was that the First Nations people were trading in gold dust. Another was that James Douglas, who worked for the Hudson Bay Company, sent his employer two small pickle jars of gold in 1856. The news travelled over land and sea.
2 Gold hunters came from California, Australia, Scotland, England, Germany, China, and a few from Eastern Canada. The first group of miners arrived on the American steamer ship, the Commodore, on April 25, 1858. They landed at Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. Victoria now is the capital of British Columbia, but back then it was just a small community of four hundred fifty people. Within two months, as more and more people arrived with the dream of finding gold, the town's population grew to over twenty thousand.
