38 THE CARIBOO TRAIL

and deposed judge of California named Ned
M‘Gowan. The possibility of American occu-
pation had become an obsession at Victoria.
There were undoubtedly those among the
American miners who made wild boasts.
Douglas gathered up all his panoply of war
and law. Along went Colonel Moody, with a
company of his Royal Engineers, Lieutenant
Mayne of the Imperial Navy with a hundred
bluejackets, and Judge Matthew Begbie, to
deal out justice to the offenders. Douglas
remembered the cry ‘ fifty-four forty or fight,’
and he remembered what had happened to his
chief, M‘Loughlin, in Oregon when the Ameri- |
can settlers there had set up vigilance com-
mittees. He would take no chances. The

party carried along a small cannon. Lieu-

tenant Mayne could not take his cruiser the
Plumper higher than Langley ; and there the
forces were transferred to Tom Wright’s stern-
wheeler, the Enterprise. But, when they
arrived at Hope, the whole affair looked like
semi-comic vaudeville. Yale, too, was as
quiet as a church prayer-meeting ; and Colonel
Moody preached a sermon on Sunday to a
congregation of forty in the court-house—the
first church service ever held on the mainland
of British Columbia.