History of British Columbia

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The history of British Columbia covers the period from the arrival of Paleo-Indians thousands of years ago to the present day. Prior to European colonization, the lands encompassing present-day British Columbia were inhabited for millennia by a number of First Nations.

Several European expeditions to the region were undertaken in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. After the Oregon boundary dispute between the UK and US government was resolved in 1846, the colonies of Vancouver Island and colony of British Columbia were established; the former in 1849 and the latter in 1858. The two colonies were merged to form a single colony in 1866, which later joined the Canadian Confederation on 20 July 1871.

An influential historian of British Columbia, Margaret Ormsby, presented a structural model of the province's history in British Columbia: A History (1958); that has been adopted by numerous historians and teachers. Chad Reimer says, "in many aspects, it still has not been surpassed". Ormsby posited a series of propositions that provided the dynamic to the history of the province:

the ongoing pull between maritime and continental forces; the opposition between a "closed", hierarchical model of society represented by the Hudson's Bay Company and colonial officials, and the "open", egalitarian vision of English and Canadian settlers, and regional tensions between Vancouver Island and the mainland, metropolitan Vancouver and the hinterland interior.^[1]