Pie ACT,

HE present volume is an enlargement of a paper the
ae writer had prepared on Aboriginal History,embody-
ing facts which, on account of the light they throw
on the manners and customs of the natives in pre-Euro-
pean times, he thought it well to preserve for posterity. As
he went on in his studies, he soon discovered that only a
part of the history of British Columbia had so far been
written ; that which is most interesting and, from a certain
point of view, most important, has to this day never been
presented to the public. Who knows, for instance, that
long before Victoria and New Westminster had been called
into existence, the province had been settled in a way, and
had possessed a regular capital—at Stuart Lake—whence
a representative of our own race ruled over reds and whites ?
Not one in a thousand Canadians or even British Colum-
bians. The record of these times and ways of life which
are irrevocably past has never been written, not to say
published, and the only author who has ever touched on
some of the events with which we will soon entertain the
reader, Hubert Howe Bancroft, is so irretrievably inaccu-
rate in his remarks that his treatment of the same might
be considered well-nigh worthless. Nay, two months have
scarcely elapsed since there was issued in this city, under
the auspices of that same Hudson's Bay Company to which
we shall have so frequently to refer, a little pamphlet, in
which we read that “although McKenzie came west .
in 1793, it was not until thirty years later (or in 1823) that
the first post was established in British Columbia.” What
111.