Co-authored by Provincial Librarian E. O. S. Scholefield and historian F. W. Howay, British Columbia from the Earliest Times to the Present is a monumental four-volume history detailing the province's evolution from Indigenous territories and fur-trade outposts into a modernized Canadian province. The exhaustive 1914 work extensively chronicles the era of maritime exploration, the monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the chaotic gold rushes that forced the rapid implementation of British colonial administration. In keeping with the era's subscription-based publishing model, the historical narrative is heavily supplemented with flattering biographical sketches of prominent local patriarchs, effectively celebrating the region's industrial and political development as a triumph of Anglo-Saxon enterprise. A keen insight drawn from the work is how the collaboration between the state's chief archivist and a sitting judge served to officially institutionalize a legalistic justification for colonial expansion; by framing the province's history as an orderly, bureaucratic progression from corporate rule to British law, the authors deliberately obscured the unceded nature of First Nations land behind a veneer of inevitable constitutional progress.