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THE year 1843 was a turning
point in the history of the north-west coast. Fate had by that time
unequivocally declared that the north and not the Columbia must be the final
abode of the fur trade and the nation whose protection it enjoyed. The
company read the signs of the times, and had begun to prepare for the
inevitable. Long before the boundary had been named, the desirability of
shifting the chief seat of the trade northward had become manifest. It was
impossible to secure peltries on the Columbia in the face of increasing
settlement; and for some time past a point of strategic and commercial
advantage, beyond reach of the conditions that were rendering Vancouver
untenable, had been diligently sought by the company. There were many
reasons why Camosun, the Indian village on the site of which the city of
Victoria now stands, should have attracted the attention of the traders.
Esquimalt, where a more commodious harbour exists, might have been deemed
more suitable for a city; it was not, however, a city that the company
thought to establish, but a post for the prosecution of the fur trade. As
early as 1837, McNeill had explored the southern end of Vancouver Island and
had found an excellent harbour and fine open country, apparently well
adapted for tillage and pasturage, along the shore. Simpson himself, during
the voyage previously referred to, had noted the fertile soil, the abundance
of timber, and the equable climate of Camosun, and had predicted that the
place would become in time "the most valuable section of the coast above
California." Douglas, finally, in 1842, had made a careful examination of
the locality and had reported favourably. The agricultural possibilities of
the region, which rendered the vicinity of Fort Vancouver of such value,
were insisted upon, the requirements of the Puget Sound Company having now
to be consulted no less than those of the Hudson's Bay Company proper. On
the whole, the directorate in London had unrivalled information at its
command before resolving on any change. McLoughlin, Douglas, Work, Ogden,
Tolmie, Finlayson, Anderson and McNeill formed a body of men whose local
knowledge might he regarded as perfect; while at home the company's
management included several to whom every project in the councils of the
nation was well-known. Fortified with the approval of both London and
Vancouver, official sanction to the establishment of a fort at Camosun was
soon given. The new post would be near the ocean, yet
protected from it. A great island lay to the northward ; and to a huge
continent it formed the natural entrepot. It stood at a crossways of the
waters, to the west being the Strait of Juan de Fuca, to the south Puget
Sound, and to the north the Gulf of Georgia. It commanded the first good
harbour north of San Francisco, the entrance to the Columbia having proved
difficult even to the ships of that period. Some idea, too, of the trade
possibilities of Alaska, the Northern Interior, the Orient, the Pacific
Islands, and South America, doubtless crossed the minds of the men who sat
in the council chamber of Lime Street, London. Moreover, it was a point of
great natural beauty, Victoria taking rank to-day as the most picturesque of
all the cities of the Pacific shore.
The expedition which was dispatched to establish the post
set sail from Fort Vancouver on March 1st, 1843. It consisted of fifteen
men, and it was under the command of James Douglas. Nisqually and the
Cowlitz country were visited for supplies; and at New Dungeness the Indians
were notified of the intended action of the company. Crossing Fuca Strait,
the party cast anchor within Shoal Point on March 14th. According to
tradition, the spot on which Douglas first landed was knee-deep in clover at
the time, from which it received the name by which it is still known—Clover
Point. The native Songhees, who had a stockade at the head of the harbour,
showed surprise, but no hostility, surrounding the steamship Beaver,
which had brought the party, with a swarm of welcoming canoes.
Considerations of detail at once engaged the attention of
Douglas. The selection of a site and the obtaining of a supply of timber for
the projected fort were the first steps necessary. The question of an
anchorage apparently decided the former, the post being placed where the
present Court House of Victoria stands on Bastion Square. A steamer of the
draught of the Beaver found no difficulty, in 1843, in casting anchor
off the site of the present wharf of the Hudson's Bay Company. By March
16th, the men were already at work squaring timbers and digging wells. The
natives, pleased at the prospect of trade, were given employment making
pickets, each picket to be twenty-two feet long and three feet in
circumference, axes and other tools being lent them for the purpose and
payment being made at the rate of one blanket for forty pickets. These
preliminaries under way, Douglas steamed northward in April to Forts Taku
and McLoughlin, which it had been decided at headquarters to abandon, and
the crews of which were needed to augment the scanty force at Fort Camosun.
With Douglas to Victoria came Bolduc, the Jesuit
missionary, reputed the first priest to set foot on Vancouver Island. The
natives proved ready converts; over twelve hundred Songhees, Clallams and
Cowichans were baptised after the first mass, which was celebrated in a
chapel of pine branches and boat's canvas on March 19th, 1843. Bolduc
afterwards passed to Whidby Island, where, though conversions were numerous,
attempts to reform the habits of the savages met with indifferent success.
By April 3rd, the missionary was back at Nisqually.
It was on the first of June that the Beaver
returned from her northern voyage. Taku and Mc-Loughlin had been dismantled,
and with the reinforcements thus obtained some fifty men were available for
the work at Camosun. Within three months, in the prevailing pleasant
weather, the stockade, one hundred and fifty yards square and eighteen feet
in height, with blockhouse or bastion (thirty feet high and armed with
nine-pounders, blunderbusses and cutlasses), at each corner, was finished.
As finally completed, the stores, five in number, together with the
post-office, smithy, carpenter shops, sleeping quarters for the men,
officers' quarters, chapel, powder magazine, etc., were all within the
stockade. For the sake of economy, the fort was built without nails or
spikes, wooden pegs alone being used. The site selected was an open glade of
oak trees, in the midst of the dense forest which ran down to the harbour
and inlet. Flocks of Indians from Vancouver Island, the neighbouring
archipelago, and the mainland, attentively watched proceedings, but in the
face of constant vigilance offered no opposition beyond acts of petty theft.
Later they too began to erect lodges along the harbour bank. The schooner
Cadboro arrived with further supplies from Fort Vancouver while the work
was in progress; and by October, Douglas, regarding the establishment as
capable of self-defence, set sail with the Beaver and Cadboro
for the Columbia. Charles Ross, who had been in charge at Fort McLoughlin,
was left as senior officer, with Roderick Finlayson, transferred from Fort
Simpson, second in command. Finlayson, whose duties included the supervision
of construction operations, thus became the first builder of houses on
Vancouver Island.
A word apart should surely be spared in honour of those
staunch and trim little vessels, the Cadboro and the Heaver,
whose doings have already figured prominently in this narrative. For nearly
forty years their names appear in almost every record of the company's
seaward movements. Every island and canal of that dangerous labyrinth of
waters which lies, a by-word to sailors, between Sitka and Fort Vancouver,
was known to their captains as a book. The schooner Cadboro,
seventy-two tons burden. had been built at Rye in 1824. Before her
destruction in 1862, every soul but one of the thirty servants of the
company whom she brought on her maiden voyage from England had been buried.
With her picked crew of thirty-five and her six guns, she did the work of
many men in the spread of civilization on the Pacific. The Beaver,
which had the unique distinction of being the first steamship to navigate
the great western ocean, was also built for the company in Great Britain. In
August 1835, with her escort, the Columbia, she was pointed for Cape
Horn, rounding which she buffeted her way northward for four months under
sail, her machinery not being installed until she reached Fort Vancouver.
Built of live oak and teak, with engines the best of their day, for
forty-three years of hard and constant usage she plied the thousand bays and
estuaries of the coast. She was still sound in every timber in spite of
adventures innumerable with rock and reef when, on a dark night in 1888, she
met her doom at the entrance to Burrard Inlet.
In the spring of 1844, Ross, who was in charge at Fort
Camosun, died, and Finlayson was appointed in his stead, the son of Ross
being sent as second in command. Of Scottish birth, Finlayson had joined the
company in 1837, and had seen hard service at Taku, Stikien and Simpson.
Shrewd and kindly, he had commended himself to Douglas by his rigid devotion
to duty. His narrative of the events that culminated in the founding of Fort
Camosun is among the most valuable of the contemporary documents that have
survived and are available relative to the history of the north-west coast
during the first half of the nineteenth century. Events proceeded smoothly
at Camosun for some time after the accession of Finlayson. The first serious
test of the defences of the post arose through the restlessness of the
neighbouring Indians. Directly opposite the fort, at a distance of four
hundred yards, lay the village of the Songhees, under their chief
Tsilalthach. Communication was constant between the points by means of
boats. A wandering band of Cowichans under Tsoughilam were encamped near by.
The cattle of the fur-traders feeding in the open spaces about the fort,
proved too great a temptation to the savages and a number were slaughtered
and eaten. The company had not made the animals, they averred, nor did it
own the fields that fattened them. A demand for payment provoked at first
surprise, then anger, ending in a united but ineffectual attack upon the
fort. Finlayson contented himself in reply with revealing the deadly powers
of the company's nine-pounders by blowing to pieces a lodge from which he
had previously taken care to remove the occupants. The effect was
instantaneous; on the following day full payment for the cattle was made.
Shortly after, danger from fire having been caused in the vicinity of the
fort, Finlayson compelled the Indians, not without angry parleyings, to
remove to the other side of the harbour, thus originating the present Indian
reserve at Victoria. In the spring of 1845, again, a party of Skagits from
the mainland coming to trade at the fort were waylaid by the Songhees
at Clover Point and their goods stolen. Whereupon Finlayson again interfered
and compelled the restitution of the goods. A demonstration of the powers of
the great gun being a second time asked for, Finlayson directed that a canoe
be placed in the harbour opposite the bastion. Pointing the canon at the
object, he fired, the ball passing through and bounding to the opposite
shore. The lesson had its effect.
Next in importance to
relations with the Indians in the early annals of the post was the birth and
progress of its shipping. It was in the spring of 1845 that the first vessel
consigned to Fort Victoria direct from England arrived in the harbour. This
was the bark Vancouver belonging to the company. With the Cowlitz and the
Columbia she made yearly voyages thereafter from London, bringing outfits
for a twelvemonth in advance. In the same year also occurred the visit of
the frigate America with Captain the Hon. John Gordon, brother of the Earl
of Aberdeen, then Prime Minister of England, on board. Gordon's mission was
to examine into and report on the value of Oregon, including Vancouver
Island, the controversy concerning which with the United States was at the
moment entering upon its final stage. An incident related by Finlayson of
his visitor's ill-success at salmon fishing gave currency to the popular
fiction that Oregon was lost to Britain because the sockeye would not rise
to a fly. That Gordon's prejudices, however, and the unfavourable impression
carried away by his party concerning the Columbia valley did not assist the
home authorities in attaching a proper importance to the country, may be
assumed. From the year 1845, also, the American whalers of the North Pacific
touched occasionally at Victoria for supplies, until the Hawaiian Islands
were found to afford a more convenient port of call. About the same time,
while the cry "fifty-four forty or fight," was still reechoing through the
United States and excitement ran high in Great Britain as well, H.M.S.
Constance, with five hundred men and officers, arrived at Esquimalt.
Finlayson seized the opportunity for a military display, for the sake of the
effect upon the Indians. The frigate Fisguard also visited Victoria
in the same year and exercised her men on shore with a similar object in
view. Two surveying ships, the Herald and Pandora came in the
following season, and re-mapped the Straits of Juan de Fuca, the harbours of
Esquimalt and Victoria, the Canal de Haro and other waters. These and other
ships of war despatched for the protection of national rights were supplied
with beef and vegetables from the farms of the company. Meanwhile the
general trade, which during the preceding twenty years had converged upon
the Columbia and Fort Vancouver, came gradually more and more to centre at
Victoria.
The farming operations of the company had engaged
attention from the first. Even before the fort itself had been completed, a
number of men were set to work at clearing the surrounding land for the
raising of vegetables and cereals. Wooden implements alone were available
the first year, an example of the thrift of Douglas, and the corn was
trodden out by cattle in the barn. Some of the younger natives were employed
at the work, proving useful ox-drivers. They were paid, as usual, in goods.
Horses and cattle were imported later from Nisqually, by the ever active
Beaver and Cadboro, and a farm of several hundred acres was
eventually opened in the immediate vicinity of Victoria. In all, the
company's farms on the island were three in number; the Fort Farm as it was
called, on the level space where the city now stands; Beckley Farm, in the
neighbourhood of James Bay;and the North Dairy Farm, which was situated
inland. The latter, as the name would imply, was devoted chiefly to dairying
which would seem to have received special attention; three dairies, each
with seventy milch cows, producing seventy kegs of butter each in a season,
being in full working order within four years of the beginning of
operations. Oats, barley, pease and potatoes were also raised; and forty
bushels of wheat to the acre was a not uncommon yield. The price obtained
for the latter from the Russians was four shillings and twopence per bushel,
paid by bills on St. Petersburg. A large wooden building, long to be seen at
the company's wharf at Victoria, was used as a granary, wherein the grain
from Port Vancouver, Puget Sound and Langley, as well as that grown on the
island itself, was held for shipment to Sitka. Both Russian and British
vessels were engaged in the traffic. The profitableness of the agricultural
venture on Vancouver Island was assured throughout by the abundant supply
and cheap price of labour. The natural increase of the cattle, moreover, was
such that it was soon found impossible to herd them, many escaping into the
woods, where they were found years afterwards by hunters in the interior of
the island.
In 1848, the brigades from the northern interior, instead
of descending to the Columbia by way of Kamloops and Okanagan as usual,
followed the more direct route of the Fraser Valley to Lang-ley. A year
before the settlement of the Oregon boundary, Anderson, who was then in
charge at Alexandria, had foreseen the necessity of the change and had
carefully explored the country between Kamloops and the Lower Fraser,
notwithstanding the stupendous obstacles interposed by nature. Fort Yale was
founded as a result in 1848 and Fort Hope a short time later. For the decade
which followed these events, the main route to the interior lay from Langley
to Fort Hope by water, thence by trail across the defile of the Coquihalla
River to the Thompson.
The completion of this arrangement marks all but the end
of Fort Vancouver. With the levying of American duties, its days were
numbered. The great McLoughlin had passed from the scene, the victim, as has
already been described, of forces which he had neither the will nor the
power to resist. To curb his influence, a board, of which Douglas and Ogden
were the other members, had been appointed some time earlier for the
management of the Western Department. The end came in 1846 when his
resignation followed a report by a commission sent by the British government
to make inquiry into the military conditions of Oregon, with a mandate from
the company as well. Douglas thereafter became the senior officer of the
Western Department, McKay being given the supervision of the northern posts
which till then had been under the immediate eye of Douglas. McLoughlin
passed to Oregon City, then rising at the falls of the Willamette. Sorrow
ended his days. He had renounced, after the quarrel with the company, his
allegiance to Great Britain. But his new countrymen would have none of him.
His lands were taken from him by the United States and restitution deferred
until he himself was beyond caring. He was the patriarch, as Whitman was the
martyr, of Oregon. There was a time when a word from McLoughlin would have
hurled the American immigrant across the mountains and left to the United
States no other alternative but a conquest by arms. Yet who would name him
traitor? His humanity lifts him above common men.
With the year 1849 an important period is reached in the
history of Victoria and British Columbia. With the events of that year and
their immediate results, the city enlarges into a colony. Briefly, these
events included the final removal of the chief emporium of the company from
Fort Vancouver to Victoria; the discovery of gold in California; the opening
of the first coal mines on Vancouver Island; the acquisition of Vancouver
Island by the Hudson's Bay Company; the conversion of the island into a
Crown colony; and the appointment of a governor from England. To each of
these developments in turn a word must be given.
The abandonment of Fort Vancouver was marked by the
removal of Douglas with his wife and family to Victoria. They came by the
ship Cadboro, having crossed by horses from the Columbia to Puget
Sound. The family at first took up its abode in the fort, in the absence of
a separate residence for the chief factor. Finlayson, on the assumption by
Douglas of the chief command, was made the head accountant for the Western
Department, a position which he held until 1862. Another notable arrival of
the year was the Rev. R. J. Staines, of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, who came as
chaplain to the company, and whose eccentricities, tribulations and death
form a strange mixture of the ridiculous and the tragic. Helmcken, the
future speaker of the legislature and son-in-law of Douglas, was a second
arrival of the same year. Victoria henceforth became the centre of the
Hudson's Bay Company's interests west of the Rocky Mountains.
Victoria being after San Francisco almost the only point
on the north Pacific coast from which supplies could be obtained, the effect
of the gold discoveries of 1848-9 in California on the life of the place was
immediate. Prices rose to an exorbitant degree at San Francisco and the
miners employed the winter months, when work on the placers was Impossible,
in the search for a cheaper market. Finlayson mistook the first contingent
for pirates. Their mission explained, however, they were allowed to purchase
such goods as were less immediately required for the company's trade at the
rate of eleven dollars per ounce for their gold. Gold in its native state
had never before been seen by Finlayson, and the transaction gave him
serious doubts until he had communicated with headquarters. The reply
received was that more goods would be sent for the new demand. The traffic
however, was not without its disadvantages, as the excitement caused among
the company's employees seriously disorganized the service, a large number
leaving for the diggings, while the pay of others had to be increased in
order to induce them to remain. Indians were employed to replace the
stragglers. Finlayson himself was offered a thousand dollars a month to take
charge of a store in San Francisco, an offer which he declined, for the
reason that though his salary was but one hundred pounds per annum from the
company, he was under an engagement to give twelve months' notice before
quitting the service.
In 1849, the development of the first coal mine in
British Columbia was begun. Outcroppings of the mineral had been noted years
before in several localities; at Beaver Harbour, where Fort Rupert was
erected after the abandonment of Fort McLoughlin, considerable quantities
had been known to exist. Fort Rupert was uncompleted when Michael Muir, a
Scottish miner, with his wife, a family of sons and daughters, and a small
party of miners, was sent by the company to establish workings on the
deposits. Upon sinking a shaft ninety feet, however, Muir declared the seam
too small to be workable, and, complications with the Indians arising, the
miners left for California. The Muir shaft was continued later to a depth of
one hundred and twenty-five feet, but without favourable result. Additional
and better mining machinery arrived in 1851, but more promising deposits
having been disclosed by the Indians at Nanaimo, the plant was removed
thither, and the beginning of what was destined to be one of the most
important industries of the Pacific slope was made. The famous Douglas seam
was located in 1852. In the same year, Fort Nanaimo was erected in the
neighbourhood. Two thousand tons were shipped in the following year,
bringing eleven dollars per ton at Nanaimo, and twenty-eight at San
Francisco. Coal outcroppings were subsequently discovered at various points
on the island, on the contiguous coast of the mainland and on the Queen
Charlotte Islands, but the fields in the vicinity of Nanaimo were the only
ones on the coast that became of commercial value. The Muir family, it would
seem, retired eventually from the service of the company, as the names of
five of them are attached to a petition of the independent settlers which
was presented to the first governor of the colony on his departure for
England.
There remains to be dealt with the highly important
series of incidents that group themselves about the acquisition of Vancouver
Island by the Hudson's Bay Company, the first attempt at colonization, and
the first and tentative establishment of civil government. The three
divisions of the subject are inextricably interwoven.
In 1838, the license which had been granted to the
company in 1821 to trade, to the exclusion of all other British subjects, in
the territory owned by Great Britain north and west of Canada and the United
States, was renewed, with certain important additions, for a further period
of twenty-one years. The additions bound the company among other things to
enforce the execution of criminal processes, and to frame rules and
regulations for the moral and religious improvement of the Indians. To the
government the right to erect colonies or provinces within the territories
included in the grant was retained, together with the privilege of applying
thereto any form of civil government, independent of the company, which
might be deemed proper. Though this license, as will be seen, did not expire
until 1859, the question as to the policy to be adopted by the government
with regard to the colonizing of the country arose at a much earlier date.
Almost immediately upon the arrangement of the international boundary, the
example afforded by events on the Columbia had its effect in England.
Immigrants were pouring into that favoured region, towns were springing into
being, and industry was expanding with a speed that was full of meaning to
the overcrowded population of Great Britain. From the company's standpoint
also, the moment was an anxious one. There seemed every prospect that the
wave of settlement which had driven the trade north of the 49th parallel
would follow it even further. The company's conduct in Rupert's land,
moreover, had recently come in for severe criticism. Yet concessions must be
obtained if the monopoly was to be saved with any semblance of its old-time
power. Closely in touch as the directorate was with the official mind of
Great Britain, it was realized that the time for action was before the
settler had appeared and the subject had achieved prominence. It was
shrewdly perceived also that the company would best attain its object, not
by opposing colonization, which was now seen to be inevitable, but by
securing control of the colonizing process so that it might retard or direct
it at pleasure. The government was, therefore, approached with a proposal on
the part of the company to undertake the rule and colonization of its
various territories in North America. The magnitude of the suggestion
apparently startled the cabinet, which, with the recent troubles of Lord
Selkirk's colony on the Red River in mind, had now clear knowledge of the
relations which the settler bore to the fur trader. The negotiations were
suspended, in something not unlike alarm; whereupon the company adroitly
diminished its proposals to include only the territory west of the Rocky
Mountains. Failing that, even Vancouver Island alone, it was intimated,
would be accepted. Colonization, the company affirmed as a part of its
suggestion, would be assisted in every way possible, and all moneys received
for lands or minerals would be applied to the improvement of the country.
The question was considered by the government with reference solely to
Vancouver Island. Parliament debated the proposal, Gladstone being among
those who spoke against it. In the end the government declared itself in
favour of concluding an arrangement with the company. No other agency had
the necessary capital, organization and experience for the undertaking, and
the company already possessed the exclusive right of trade in the Indian
territory for eleven years longer. It was willing, moreover, to vest the
appointment of a governor in the Crown. After protracted negotiations as to
terms, the grant was consummated on January 13th, 1849. Vancouver Island,
with the royalties of its seas and mines, was handed over to the Hudson's
Bay Company, in perpetuity, subject only to the domination of the Crown, and
to a rental of seven shillings payable on the first day of each year. The
company was to settle a colony of British subjects within five years; to
sell the land at a reasonable price, retaining only ten per cent, of the
proceeds and applying the balance to improvements; to reserve such lands as
might be necessary for naval stations and government establishments; to
report every two years with regard to the number of colonists settled and
the acreage of lands sold; and to defray the expenses of all civil and
military establishments, except during hostilities between Great Britain and
a foreign power. The grant, it was stipulated, would be forfeited if no
settlement were effected within five years. The imperial government reserved
the right to recover the island, at the expiry of the company's exclusive
license, by payment of the sum actually expended by the company in
colonization.
The wisdom of the grant was widely questioned.
Undoubtedly the desire of the company was to control rather than to promote
the settlement of the coast. This was shown at once by the prospectus and
advertisement which it published on the conclusion of the arrangement. A
reasonable price for land, it appeared, was, in the company's view, one
pound per acre. Moreover, for every hundred acres so purchased the buyer was
to convey at his own expense three families or six single settlers to the
colony.
Needless to say, these conditions placed a hopeless
burden on settlement. It is not to be thought that they were ever intended
to do otherwise. Colonization was incompatible with the fur trade. As a
business matter, the agreement was very profitable. It continued to the
company the use of the country; and vested rights were created for which, in
the end, the traders were well paid.
Even apart from the above, the methods which were adopted
to induce immigration to the new colony were worthy of censure. It would not
be fair to say that the company did not want settlers on Vancouver Island: a
certain number were needed to preserve the semblance of good faith;
moreover, servants for the Puget Sound Agricultural Company were a
necessity. In the representations made, however, to the few who were rich
enough to undertake the company's terms, and to those sent out as employees,
an impression was conveyed as to the state of affairs in the colony, which,
if not actually contrary to fact, led the people to expect entirely
different conditions from those which prevailed. The directors in London, of
course, knew little of the life of the colony; while the officials on the
ground had been graduated in a school of hardship which prevented them from
appreciating the feelings of men and women transplanted from the garden of
civilization to an unbroken wilderness. The situation of the American
settler in Oregon, where land without money and almost without conditions
was to be had, did not tend by comparison to increase satisfaction. The
California gold fields, too, exercised their lure and did much to retard the
settlement of the British colony.
The first settler on Vancouver Island under the terms of
the agreement was W. Colquhoun Grant. Hearing of the project, he had sold
his commission in an English cavalry regiment, and with a party of eight
persons, fitted out at his own expense, arrived on the island. After careful
examination of the country, he chose a location at the head of Sooke Inlet,
twenty miles north-west of Victoria. After two years he tired of the life,
and leased his farm to the labourers he had brought out. Under their tenure
the place fell into neglect, and was subsequently sold to the Muir family.
Grant's purpose, according to Finlayson, was to form a purely Scottish
settlement; the plan, it was even said, included a Gaelic schoolmaster and a
Highland piper. James Cooper was a second early arrival who was to figure
for a longer time in the history of the colony. Landing in 1851, he brought
from England a small iron vessel in sections, to be put together at
Victoria. He had previously been in the service of the company as commander
of a vessel between London and Fort Vancouver, and his object now was to
carry on an independent trade, for which his experience had well fitted him.
In 1852 he launched a scheme for buying cranberries from the natives of the
Fraser River for the San Francisco market, where under the prevailing
conditions he could obtain as high as one dollar per gallon for the produce.
The Hudson's Bay Company, however, had no mind for enterprises of this
nature. Cooper had no sooner opened his traffic than Douglas sent
instructions to Fort Langley to buy all the cranberries the Indians offered
at a price beyond the reach of other traders. Cooper thereupon took up land
at Metchosin and farmed three hundred acres for some years in partnership
with one Thomas Blenkhorn.
Other early arrivals were eight coal miners and two
labourers on the Harpooner in June 1849; eight emigrants on the bark
Norinan Morrison in 1850; and one hundred and twenty hired labourers
on the Tory in June 1851. A number of the latter were sent to Fort
Rupert to work in the coal mines. By this time, there were,
according to contemporary reports, some seven independent settlers in the
vicinity of Victoria, three of whom had previously been in the company's
service. Victoria itself was laid out in streets in 1852, though where the
city now stands was still forest with only occasional spaces of cultivated
ground. In addition to the fort, only twelve houses stood within the
surveyed limits. At the end of 1853, it was estimated that, apart from
seventeen thousand natives, there was on the island a total population of
four hundred and fifty persons of all nationalities, three hundred of whom
were divided between Victoria and Sooke, with one hundred and twenty-five at
Nanaimo and the rest at Fort Rupert. Up to the same date, nineteen thousand
eight hundred and seven acres had been applied for, but of this no less than
ten thousand one hundred and seventy-two acres had been claimed by the
Hudson's Bay Company, and two thousand three hundred and seventy-four acres
by the Puget Sound Agricultural Company. At the beginning of 1854, according
to Bancroft, not more than five hundred acres at the most were under
cultivation on the island, and of this all but thirty acres at Sooke and ten
acres at Metchosin were under the immediate management of the company.
From the outset, open quarrels were incessant between the
settlers and the company. The first and leading cause lay in the conditions
under which the colonists were placed upon the land, the onerous nature of
which has been already indicated. The land itself, the more so as the
company had appropriated the best of it, was not inviting. Fear of the
Indians pressed constantly, and there was loud complaint over the lack of
properly constituted courts of justice. The company's time-honoured method
of barter was hateful and unjust. It was a grievance, too, that the island
was not included in the reciprocity treaty between Canada and the United
States. Besides these matters, which were of general application, a
multitude of individual woes filled the cup to overflowing. A single example
will show the lengths to which the strife proceeded.
Three miles distant from the fort, Captain Lang-ford,
from whom Langford Plains and Langford Lake received their names, worked on
the lands of the Puget Sound Company as one of four bailiffs. He had been a
Kentish farmer, and for a time an officer of the British army, but he was
induced to enlist in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company, to open, as he
supposed, a farm on Vancouver Island. On his arrival he found to his
disappointment that he had bound himself to the Puget Sound Agricultural
Company, and that the quarters allotted to him consisted of but two log
huts, of a single room each—one for himself and his family, the other for
his men. Langford was a distant relative of Blanshard, the first governor of
the colony, and he was not slow to complain. The colonial office was soon
deluged with indictments of the Hudson's Bay Company and its officials, and
though the statements of Langford do not appear to have received full
credence in England, their matter is of interest as throwing light on the
relations in general of the company with the settlers. Langford's bitterest
grievance was that the colonial surveyor had informed him when applying for
a certain tract that the land in question was already sold to Dallas, the
son-in-law of Douglas. But apparently the land at the time had not been
sold, and Langford was therefore mulcted of a prospective profit. He further
complained that although he had applied to Douglas for an immediate inquiry
into the matter, the erring official had been permitted to leave the colony
for England without explanation. In addition, Langford had been hardly used
in court in the matter of a libel which had been printed concerning him, and
he inveighed against the fitness of David Cameron, a linen draper and
brother-in-law to Douglas, who had been appointed the first chief-justice of
the colony. The report of Douglas as governor on the subject of Langford's
charges had at least the effect of eliciting an expression of confidence on
the part of the home authorities in the various officials of the colony.
That Langford's onslaught upon Cameron had not the sympathy of the entire
community is shown by a document which was presented by a number of the
leading proprietors of the island to the governor, in which a protest is
entered against the petition requesting the annulment of his appointment.
Some interesting particulars having an important bearing
on the same feature in the history of the island appear in the minutes of
evidence taken before a select committee of the British House of Commons
which was appointed in 1853 to consider the state of the British possessions
in North America then under the administration of the Hudson's Bay Company.
One of the recommendations made by the committee after due deliberation was
that the connection of the company with Vancouver Island should be
terminated and that provision should be made for the ultimate extension of
the colony over the adjoining mainland west of the Rocky Mountains. The
report was dated July 31st, 1857, and the recommendations were given effect
in the following year, a step considerably hastened by the discovery of gold
on the Thompson and Fraser Rivers. It was alleged by the committee as the
basis of its findings, that the population under the company's regime had
decreased instead of increasing; that the price placed upon the land was
much too high; that the company's monopoly of the trade of the country had
stifled all competition ; that settlers having no money were compelled to
barter with the company for goods at exorbitant prices; that no proper
protection was afforded from the Indians, there being only one constable and
no military force on the island; that there was no restriction on the sale
of liquors; that no means were provided for transmitting money to England,
or for banking or for the marketing of farm produce; that the company had
done nothing to civilize the Indians, though due credit was given to the
humanity of its policy in this connection; that no survey of lands had been
made except of those belonging to the company's employees; that the company
was directly responsible for the slow progress of settlement; that the
company evaded the export of goods other than its own in its ships from
England; that settlers had been in specified cases induced to come to
Vancouver Island as servants under misrepresentations; and that in general
the powerful influence of the Hudson's Bay Company was in favour throughout
of its own interests and opposed to those of free and independent
land-holders. Added to this arraignment of social and political conditions
in the island, was a mass of useful and interesting information concerning
its climatic and natural resources. With regard to its future, the witnesses
examined by the committee were with one accord sanguine, provided that a
suitable form of government were granted and a favourable opportunity
offered for the process of industrial development.
The history of the early years of settlement on Vancouver
Island, apart from the above, had few features of interest. The first
governor of the colony, Richard Blanshard, was appointed in 1849. It is
difficult to discuss his tenure of office seriously. An independent governor
was not a part of the scheme which the company had in view. The directorate
had, in fact, suggested Douglas for the position; but the nomination was
discretely withdrawn on the intimation of the prime minister that at least
the first governor of the colony should represent the Crown. Blanshard was
accordingly accepted with equanimity by the company, as an instrument which
might be used for a time and cast aside. The company, with or without the
governor, was master of the situation. Blanshard had been educated as a
barrister, and had had some previous experience in colonial administration.
He was ambitious, and he accepted the office at its apparent value,
undoubtedly without exact knowledge of its nature. Under the terms of the
grant of Vancouver Island, the company was required to pay the expenses of
all civil and military establishments during peace. Beyond this, however,
Blanshard seems to have had no definite understanding. A thousand acres of
land had been promised him by the home government; the promise, however, was
construed by Douglas as applying only to lands for the governor's temporary
use while holding office. On arriving at Victoria on March 10th, 1850,
Blanshard read the proclamation of his appointment to an audience composed
of the officers of the ships which had brought him and the servants and
officials of the company; but having no quarters allotted to him at the fort
he was obliged almost immediately to return on board his vessel. Thereafter,
for some time, the seat of government moved with the exigencies of the ship
which bore the governor. The island was coasted and Fort Rupert and other
points of interest visited. At Beaver Harbour, the coal workings, which were
then engaging the attention of the company, were inspected, the judgment of
Blanshard being unfavourable as to their success. The condition of the
miners and natives having been investigated, the governor returned to
Victoria. Without salary, without allowance for expenses, without clerical
assistance of any kind, without evidence of the promise of the land he was
to receive, without official residence, without the sympathy or cooperation
of the officials of the company with whom he was speedily in open
antagonism, without even duties to perform beyond the settlement of disputes
between the settlers and the company, one course only was open—to resign.
Before leaving he nominated a provisional government of three, consisting of
Douglas, Cooper and Tod, and September 1st, 1851, saw his departure from
Vancouver Island. The experiment of an independent governor had been tried
and had failed. A more cruelly treated officer of his rank it would be hard
to find in the history of British colonial institutions.
James Douglas was appointed governor of Vancouver Island
in the place of Blanshard. No one outside of the company was available; and
there were indeed few interests other than those of the corporation to
render outside representation advisable. Until population became more
numerous and industry more diversified, the machinery of government was, in
truth, seldom needed. At most it served but to symbolize the supreme
authority of the Crown. Meanwhile, the autocratic rule which Douglas in his
capacity of governor and chief factor in one was able to enforce, was on the
whole well suited to the conditions. A man more competent it would have been
impossible to find. His knowledge of the country was unrivalled, his control
of the officials and servants of the company absolute, and his influence
with the Indians, whose goodwill was essential, almost unlimited. The
situation was anomalous: from many points of view it was indefensible. But
the time to end the domination of the company was not yet come,—did not, in
fact, arrive till the discovery of gold on the Fraser gave an entirely new
aspect to government and affairs in British Columbia. |
