New Caledonia was the name given to a fur-trading district of the Hudson's Bay Company that comprised the territory of the north-central portions of present-day British Columbia, Canada. Though not a British colony, New Caledonia was part of the British claim to North America. Its administrative centre was Fort St. James. Even before the partition of the Columbia Department, known to Americans as the Oregon Country, by the Oregon Treaty in 1846, the rest of what the southern half of what is now mainland British Columbia, the term was often used to describe anywhere on the mainland not in the Columbia Department per se, such as Fort Langley in the Fraser Valley.