2401 F MILLSTREAM ROAD |
British Columbia Tourism Region : Vancouver Island
Description From Owner:
- Miniskirt - Nearby Skirt Mountain (originally Skirt Hill) was named as early as 1858.
- When in 1976 a name was wanted for a minor eminence to the northeast of it, Miniskirt seemed a logical choice. This is the complete official name.
- New Caledonia (Historical) - The department of the HBC extending from the Coast Range to the Rockies and north from Alexandria to approximately the fifty-seventh degree of latitude was usually termed New Caledonia.
- According to family tradition, Simon Fraser gave the name because, after he had crossed the Rockies, he found that the country reminded him of his mother's descriptions of the Scottish Highlands.
- Earliest recorded use of the name comes in 1808.
- For a while it seemed that New Caledonia might become the name of British Columbia, but this idea was discarded since the name New Caledonia had become attached to some French islands in the South Pacific.
- The name does not appear in the modern gazetteer of British Columbia. It survives, however, in clipped form in the Anglican Diocese of Caledonia, whose bishop has his cathedral in Prince Rupert.
- Observatory Hill - Formerly Little Saanich Mountain but renamed in 1917 following the building of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory here.
- The Saanich Indians, impressed by the appearance of the dome when it was opened, applied to it their word for 'grimace' or 'snarl.'
- Ogden Point - Named in the first days of Fort Victoria after Peter Skene Ogden (1794-1854), one of the most important figures during HBC days early in the nineteenth century.
- His trapping expeditions for the company into the Snake River country between 1824 and 1830, intended so to deplete the area as to make it unattractive to American trappers, demanded incredible stamina and courage.
- These expeditions covered most of the American northwest and took him as far as California and Utah. (Ogden, Utah, is also named after him.)
- In 1835, now one of the company's Chief Factors, he took charge of the New Caledonia Department, with his headquarters at Fort St. James.
- After the resignation of Dr. John McLoughlin in 1846, Ogden and Douglas jointly administered the HBC'S Columbia Department. In 1847, in what had become American territory, he rescued the survivors of the Whitman Massacre.
- Always a heavily built man, Ogden became extremely fat in his later years. Throughout his life he seems to have been notable for his high spirits.
- Back in 1817, when Ogden was a young Nor'Wester, Ross Cox wrote appreciatively of 'the humorous, honest, eccentric, law-defying Peter Ogden, the terror of the Indians, and the delight of all gay fellows.'
- In 1841 Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, USN, reported of the Chief Factor, 'Mr. Ogden is a general favourite; and there is so much hilarity, and such a fund of amusement about him that one is extremely fortunate to fall into his company.'
- Descendants of Peter Skene Ogden are living to this day in the Lac la Hache area. With permission from G.P.V and Helen B. Akrigg 1997 British Columbia Place Names. UBC Press.
Address of this page: http://bc.ruralroutes.com/VictoriaLandDistrict