The Colonist newspaper, a forebearer of the Victoria Times-Colonist, came into being on Dec. 11, 1858. One can now examine every issue published from that date to June 30, 1910 online at http://www.britishcolonist.ca.
Victoria journalist Tom Hawthorn rhapsodizes about browsing through that paper's inaugural issue.
The inaugural issue of the newspaper now known as the Times Colonist features four pages of dense columns of type. It is unsullied by photography.
The lone graphic is a thumbnail sketch of a leaping stag, part of a small notice for the Washington Restaurant on Government Street, whose proprietors "continue to keep their table well supplied with all the substantials and luxuries which the market affords."
Other advertisers in the debut edition of the British Colonist include a druggist, a shoemaker, a bookseller, an auctioneer, the Victoria Coal Co., and a merchant announcing "GOLD DUST PURCHASED."
Three years earlier, Victoria counted just 148 adult residents. Reports of gold discoveries along the Fraser River in 1858 caused the rapid construction of a ramshackle city of 20,000 with muddy roads and creaky wooden sidewalks. Among the new arrivals was a 33-year-old dreamer from Nova Scotia formerly known as Bill Smith.
The warehouseman had left the Maritimes to seek his fortune in the goldfields of California, where he set up shop as a photographer in Mud Springs. When the settlement changed its name to the evocative El Dorado, plain Bill Smith decided to follow suit. He legally changed his identity to Amor de Cosmos, a name he said expressed what he most loved: "order, beauty, the world, the universe."
In Victoria, he started a newspaper. The editor promised "an independent paper, the organ of no clique nor party - a true index of public opinion." A year's subscription cost $5, a single issue 25 cents.
A history published by the paper at the start of its sesquicentennial celebration stated only 200 copies of Vol. 1, No. 1, were produced on an old hand press.
Today, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the first edition can be read at a computer terminal anywhere in the world at any time of day for free.