Mount Douglas (Victoria, B.C.)
As the son of a black woman, Sir James Douglas attained a staggering degree of success for his era, becoming the influential first governor of what would become British Columbia. His mistake, though, was allowing settlers to flood onto untreatied land — a legal situation that persists to this day. While Douglas signed some early “postage stamp” treaties for small plots of land around Victoria, he had effectively given up by the time gold rushes started to hit the B.C. interior in the mid-1800s.
Sir James Douglas.
