British Columbia

The province beyond the mountains, which joined Canada for a railway. The Pacific coast held the densest Indigenous populations north of Mexico, sustained by salmon rather than agriculture, with the ranked societies, monumental carving and potlatch ceremonies that anthropology took as its type case for wealth without farming - and which Canada banned outright from 1885 to 1951. Contact came by sea, with Spanish and British expeditions in the 1770s and 1790s and then the maritime fur trade, and smallpox killed a large majority of the coastal population, most catastrophically in 1862. The Hudson's Bay Company ran the region from Victoria until the Fraser Canyon gold rush of 1858 brought thirty thousand prospectors, mostly American, and Britain hurriedly declared a mainland colony to hold the ground. British Columbia entered Confederation in 1871 on the explicit promise of a transcontinental railway, which arrived in 1885 built substantially by Chinese labourers who were then charged a head tax to discourage them from staying. Race politics shaped the province for decades, culminating in the Komagata Maru's expulsion in 1914 and the internment and dispossession of Japanese Canadians in 1942. Unlike most of Canada, almost no treaties were signed here, which is why Indigenous title remains legally live and produced the Delgamuukw and Tsilhqot'in judgments. Forestry, mining and Pacific trade drive the economy. Vancouver is Canada's warmest large city and its most expensive. Victoria on Vancouver Island remains the provincial capital. The Fraser River salmon runs are the largest in the world. Haida Gwaii's totem poles at SGang Gwaay are a World Heritage site. The province holds most of Canada's temperate rainforest.

• Existed: 1843 CE – present
• Type: Entity