Columbia District

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Columbia District was a regional department of the Hudson's Bay Company, and included all of the Columbia River basin, extending as far north as the Thompson River. To the north of it was the New Caledonia fur district, in what is now north-central British Columbia. After 1825, the operations of New Caledonia and Columbia were integrated, although New Caledonia continued in use to describe the core region as before.

The district was originally administered from Fort Vancouver on the lower Columbia River. With the signing of the Oregon Treaty in 1846, however, the US-British North America boundary was fixed on the 49th parallel, and the U.S. part became known as the Oregon Territory. The administrative headquarters then shifted to Fort Victoria, which had been founded in 1843 in anticipation of the results of the dispute. In addition to Fort Vancouver, Fort Nez Percé (near present-day Wallula, Washington), Fort Langley, Spokane House, Fort Colville, and Kamloops House were other major trading posts in the district.

After 1846 New Caledonia became loosely applied as a name for the remainder of the British coast north of Puget Sound, which had been Columbia District as far north as at least Queen Charlotte Strait (Forts Simpson and McLaughlin were administered from Fort St. James, the capital of New Caledonia). Even though part of the Columbia District, the unchartered territory of the remainder of the Columbia District after 1846 became informally referred to as New Caledonia, such that in the Fraser Canyon in 1858 and farther north in the Cariboo during the 1860s, were referred to as being New Caledonia, as also had been Fort Langley since 1827. By then the Columbia District proper had been more than halved and the name had fallen into relative disuse, until revived when the new Mainland Colony needed a name.

With the creation of the Crown Colony on the British mainland north of the then-Washington Territory in 1858, Queen Victoria chose to use Columbia District as the basis for the name Colony of British Columbia, i.e. the remaining British portion of the former Columbia District.

In their British Columbia Chronicle, historians Helen B. Akrigg and G.P.V. Akrigg coined the term "Southern Columbia" for the "lost" area south of the 49th Parallel, but this has never come into common use, even by other historians.