It’s an almost entirely forgotten history. It’s hidden away by all the prevailing postmodernist doctrines that oblige Canadians to be ashamed of themselves, and it’s not particularly convenient to certain of the more strident tendencies within the “anti-woke” schools of thought, either. But now that the Emancipation Day weekend falls on the British Columbia Day weekend, it’s worth taking the time to acknowledge a sprawling, dramatic chapter of Canadian history that only rarely gets a proper look-in.
In that story, Canada came within a hair’s breadth of a war with the United States and the loss of what the Fathers of Confederation would go on to imagine as a peaceable dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Trump administration’s “51st state” provocations invoke memories of those times, and there’s a great deal of bloodshed, intrigue and betrayal in the story, which played out across the entire western half of the North American continent.
There’s certainly no dearth of irony involved. British Columbia, which ended up uniquely belligerent to Indigenous rights among Canadian provinces, owes its very birth and survival to a visionary British colonial defence of Indigenous rights against American marauders and mob rule. The doctrine that treaty-making should precede European settlement and that Indigenous people were to be afforded all the rights of British subjects goes all the way back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. There’s nothing “woke” about it. It remains a legal doctrine that was one of the chief grievances of the American Revolution of 1776.
All these years later, here we are: All the frantic panic about last year’s Supreme Court of B.C. decision declaring Aboriginal title in the Cowichan land claims lawsuit in Richmond, and all the incoherence arising from the B.C. government’s own-goal quagmire in its preoccupation with the serial redundancies of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), are legacies of that same old belligerence.
While it wasn’t until 2021 that the House of Commons and the B.C. legislature finally got around to officially commemorating Emancipation Day — the first statutory spike in the coffin of slavery throughout the British Empire, in 1834 — the celebration was already a civic holiday in Victoria, B.C.’s capital, in the 1850s. So much for the sins of colonialism.
It’s become sensibly unfashionable to comprehend history as a chronicle of the deeds of powerful men, great or wicked, but there are two men worth paying attention to in the story of British Columbia and Emancipation Day. Their radically conflicting legacies come together in a way that tells the story well.
The first man is the great Sir James Douglas, born in Dutch Guyana, the son of a Scottish planter and a “free coloured woman” from Barbados. A lifelong fur trader, Douglas had just risen to the rank of chief factor at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s headquarters at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River when the vast Columbia territory was partitioned at the 49th parallel by the Oregon Treaty of 1846. Douglas would go on to become the governor of both the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia.
The other man is the U.S. Army’s Gen. William Harney , known to the Lakota Sioux as Woman Killer. Notorious for his policy of slaughtering the inhabitants of entire Indigenous villages, Harney was court-martialled four times, but he always landed back on his feet owing to his close association with the senator, slavery enthusiast and secretary of war Jefferson Davis, who would go on to serve as the president of the Confederate States in the U.S. Civil War.
In the exodus north of the 49th parallel to establish a new headquarters in Victoria on Vancouver Island, Douglas brought with him what HBC governor George Simpson described as “the prettiest congregation of nations, the nicest confusion of tongues, that has ever taken place since the days of the tower of Babel.”
While Douglas was a bear of a man with a quick temper he was a devoted follower of the British abolitionist William Wilberforce. When he was appointed Vancouver Island’s governor in 1851, the Crown Colony was already a thriving loyalist society of Orkney Islanders, Iroquois and Métis traders, Québécois voltigeurs, Hawaiian Kanakas and various “King George Indians” who had retreated ahead of the American advance across the Rockies into what is now Montana and Idaho.
It wasn’t long before Victoria’s Chinatown was the second largest on the continent after San Francisco’s, and Douglas invited a community of Black pioneers in California to make a new home under the Union Jack. During the height of the gold rush, in 1860 — in the days immediately before the American Civil War — miners arriving in Victoria harbour from San Francisco were greeted at dockside by the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps, an all-Black militia known as the African Rifles.
Everyone north of the 49th soon became aware of the American cavalry’s wars of extermination to the south: the Cayuse War, the Klamath War, the Salmon River War, the Yakima War, and the Nisqually War. In his genocidal zeal to clear the West of its independent tribes, Harney once told the New York Times: “I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honourable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”
On Vancouver Island, the local tribes — the Songhees, the Esquimalt, the Tsartlip, Tseycum, Malahat and the rest — welcomed a military alliance with Douglas and the Crown. They didn’t have to be strong-armed into the treaties Douglas offered them, which were co-existence arrangements derived from the Crown’s Treaty of Waitangi with the Maoris in New Zealand.
It was the gold rush to the Fraser Canyon that threatened to spark an all-out war pitting Douglas and his polyglot community of loyalists, along with B.C.’s Indigenous people, against the thousands of heavily armed American miners who had flooded into the Stó:lō and Nlaka’pamux territories in 1858.
Douglas had retained his HBC duties on the mainland while serving as Vancouver Island’s governor, which left him in charge of the entire British half of the old Columbia territory. That August, in the rush to assert British sovereignty on the mainland against what would have been certain and bloody American annexation, the Colonial Office in London established the mainland Colony of British Columbia and appointed Douglas its governor.
That same year, the U.S. Army assigned Gen. Harney to the border districts of the American half of the former Columbia territory, in what is now Washington State. Where there was once peace between the tribes and settlers under the Crown’s authority, Harney pursued a policy of destroying Indigenous livestock, harassing civilians, hanging Indigenous people to terrorize their chiefs and taking measures to ensure against any “overtures of friendship” with the local tribes.
It was a petty affair, the following year, that kicked things off. An American squatter shot a pig owned by the HBC farm on San Juan Island, just seven sea miles from Fort Victoria. Gen. Harney had long opposed the Columbia territory border compromise and sided with the Democratic Party’s “54-40 or fight” pretensions, originally championed by U.S. president James Polk: 54 degrees 40 minutes latitude was the southern point of Russia’s possessions in Alaska. Harney had long dreamt of annexing everything the Oregon Treaty had left in British hands.
It was only the American war of annexation waged against Mexico that sidelined the American ambition to annex Britain’s half of the Columbia territory. Concluded with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, the pattern repeated itself from Wyoming to Southern California: the Yavapai slaughter, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Mendocino War, the Yuki genocide, the Snake River War, the Colorado War, and so on.
After the HBC pursued its claim against the squatters on San Juan Island in 1859, Gen. Harney dispatched 64 troops from the 29th U.S. Infantry to occupy the island, a force that soon grew to 460 soldiers. Gov. Douglas, meanwhile, sent three minor warships to reinforce the “English camp” on the island. It wasn’t until the White House recalled Harney and ordered the troops to hold fire that matters settled down.
Meanwhile, in the Fraser Canyon, a shooting war had broken out between the American miners and the local tribes. Douglas intervened by reminding the Americans that they were no longer under the protection of the Stars and Stripes. He appointed several local Indigenous leaders as government agents and magistrates and lectured the tribes sternly against taking the law into their own hands. In his report to the Colonial Office in London he explained that he had spoken “with great plainness” to the white miners, reminding them that they were in British Columbia only on sufferance, and north of the 49th parallel “the laws would protect the rights of the Indians no less than those of the white man.”
The policy Douglas and the Colonial Office embraced was to discourage American settlement of what was to become British Columbia, and to restrain European settlement until treaties had been concluded. His clear intention was to grant large tracts of land exclusively to Indigenous people until such time as the tribes got a proper footing in the new society they had been building, in common with Douglas and his loyalists.
But Douglas and his old regime was on the way out. His land commissioner, R.C. Moody, undermined him at every opportunity — it was Moody’s double-dealings in the Cowichan case that forced that judge last year to declare unceded Aboriginal title to a patch of Fraser River foreshore in Richmond.
After Douglas came Gov. Frederick Seymour and a policy that Indigenous people had no more right to the land “than the he-panther or the she-bear.” British Columbia absorbed the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1866, and it would not be a stretch to say that by insisting that there was no “Indian land question” to settle west of the Rockies, B.C. lied its way into Confederation in 1871.
The dispute on San Juan Island was resolved in an arbitration overseen by German Emperor Wilhelm Bismarck in 1872, by redrawing the boundary in such a way as to place San Juan Island and several other formerly British islands inside the United States border. The Royal Marines abandoned the island that year. U.S. troops were withdrawn in 1874.
The “prettiest congregation of nations” that was the wellspring of British Columbia was soon overwhelmed by settlement from every corner of the Earth, but the memory of James Douglas and his loyalists is not a thing to cause any of us any shame.
National Post
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