"representatives of the best of British culture, not just a police force," sought men who possessed "courtesy, high breeding and urbane knowledge of the world," and decided to send Moody, whom the Government considered to be the archetypal "English gentleman and British Officer" at the head of the Royal Engineers, Columbia Detachment. Moody and his family arrived in British Columbia in December 1858, and was sworn in as the first Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia and appointed Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works for British Columbia. Throughout his tenure in British Columbia, Moody was engaged in a bitter feud with Douglas, whose jurisdiction overlapped with his own. Moody's position as Chief Commissioner and Lieutenant-Governor was one of ‘higher prestige [and] lesser authority' than that of Douglas, despite Moody's vastly superior social position in the eyes of the Engineers and the British Government. Moody had been selected by Lord Lytton due to his possession of the quality of the archetypal 'English gentleman and British Officer', his family was 'eminently respectable': he was the son of Colonel Thomas Moody, one of the wealthiest mercantilists in the West Indies, who owned much of the land in the islands where Douglas's father owned a small amount of land and from which Douglas's mother, 'a half-breed', originated. Douglas's ethnicity made him 'an affront to Victorian society'. Mary Moody, the descendant of the Hawks industrial dynasty and the Boyd merchant banking family, wrote on 4 August 1859 'it is not pleasant to serve under a Hudson's Bay Factor' and that the 'Governor and Richard can never get on'. In a letter to the Colonial Office of 27 December 1858, Moody boasted that he has ‘entirely disarmed [Douglas] of all jealously' Douglas repeatedly insulted the Engineers by attempting to assume their command, and refusing to acknowledge their value in the nascent colony. Margaret A. Ormsby, author of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry for Moody (2002), condemns Moody for a contribution to the abortive development of the city. However, most other historians have exonerated Moody for the abortive development of the city and consider his achievement to be impressive, especially with regard to the perpetual insufficiency of funds and the personally-motivated opposition of Douglas, whose opposition to the project continually slowed its development. Robert Edgar Cail, Don W. Thomson, Ishiguro, and Scott have praised Moody for his contribution, the latter accusing Ormsby of being ‘adamant in her dislike