THIS ONE SETTLEMENT

Because it needs reiterating: nearly a millennia after the first known European settlement in present-day Canada, well over two centuries after the first permanent French settlement here, more than 150 years after the first Hudson's Bay Company trading post was erected, 80 years after the first Eurasian mapping and settlements in the northwest coast of the continent, and a couple of generations after the first direct traders of provisions and illnesses and genetics to and from Asia, Africa, and Europe, the premier fur-trading fort was built in the lands of what would become known as British Columbia.

The fort, named Fort Langley, was established on the mainland in 1827, along the critical transportation route of the Fraser River and at an ideal location for trade with the Kwantlen, Katzie, and Matsqui First Nations. In 1839, the fort was relocated a few kilometres upstream to avoid flooding and take better advantage of land suitable for farming. The trade hub relied upon local First Nations for food and pelts and typically traded firearms, tools, and blankets for those items. On the Fort Langley National Historic Site webpage, Parks Canada insists “The fort maintained a good and peaceful trade in furs, salmon, and even cranberries with the Indigenous communities.” Eventually another trading hub took prominence when, in 1843, the land the city of Victoria now sits upon was selected as a site of the new Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters for all the territory west of the Rockies.

Check out all the amazing sketches, paintings, and photographs of early Fort Camosun/Victoria at

https://www.fortvictoriajournal.ca/gallery.html

Some sources tell us James Douglas, the Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, designated the location because it bordered large tracts of land suitable for agriculture and offered a potential spot for a mill along the surging waters of the tidal inlet known today as “the Gorge”. Douglas was joined by around a dozen company employees and eventually a few dozen more to build on the site; however, those folks didn’t do all or even most of the work. They didn’t even procure the materials. Nearly all of the lumber and labour for the fort was actually volunteered by the locals, the Songhees, several hundred of them it is said. Some modern commentators propose that the community committed the resources and work to sincerely establish through sweat equity their rightful co-ownership of this new structure and its future uses. Many also note how, just as with all the HBC's other trading posts and forts, the locals were integral to operations, the villages and economies that would spring up around this and other sites, as well as the whole of the fur trade. Worth noting, too, is that the fort was not named Victoria originally but instead Camosun (Camossung). Camosun, which is today the name of the local college and a branch of the public library system, is a Lekwungen (lək̓ʷəŋən) term I would translate to something like "a transformative confluence of waters." And what a perfect name. As Graham Brazier offers in his essay Land, First Nations, James Douglas, and the Background to Treaty Making on Vancouver Island:

By 1849, [the Hudson’s Bay Company] had become a significant presence upon the landscape of southern Vancouver Island, dependent for its daily operations on agreements with numerous Indigenous individuals. As long as the company was simply a trading enterprise, exchanges in the form of employment, trade, and intermarriage had all become essential components of the social and economic fabric in and around Fort Victoria, where Songhees, Hawaiians, Skagits, French-speaking “Canadians,” Iroquois, Makah, English, and Scots, along with a dozen or so other Indigenous groups, regularly intermingled.

Sadly, the fort was eventually renamed after the new Queen, Victoria, likely to try and capture her attention and thus win material support — which, at least in theory, may not have been a terrible idea. 

Deep in the BC Rockies is the amazing village of Field. (You should go and head into the mountains, at the top of which sits a whole fossilised sea of the earliest occupants of an ancient ocean…) There I learned the place was named Field for no other reason than an attempt to lure investment from Cyrus West Field, the American businessman and investor in the Canadian Pacific Railway. Similarly, it is said that the town administrators of Carnegie, Oklahoma and Carnegie, Pennsylvania renamed those places seeking Andrew’s endowment. It's a whole thing...

The building and naming of the fort was an interesting development with an interesting context but the structure was here and then gone in no time. In Victoria today you’ll find markers in the sidewalk and on adjacent buildings, on what are today Government and Fort streets, demarcating the original fort’s bastion, walls, and gate. One of those markers explains how the last of the original structures was taken down in 1864, after only twenty years in use. The last real remnants of the fort are the original mooring rings for docking ships. Down by the water, they may still be found, painted in white. Nearby, you'll also find another marker explaining that the primary export destinations for all natural products acquired in this part of the world were not Asia or Europe, as you might suspect (as I certainly assumed), but the US, specifically Alaska, California, and Hawaii — which is also where a lot of the folks who would help establish this place arrived from.

Thinking about who was here and what they were up to, some mention must be made of this character James Douglas. He was born in Guyana to a mother of Barbadian-Creole ancestry and a father from Scotland. That’s problematic, as they say, because it would be so much easier for commentators to ascribe to the man, as they so persistently wish, all the nationalist, imperialist, and race-based biases and motivations were he born in England to English parents. Obviously he still could have had such biases and is villanized as if that was so, regardless. That might seem sensible until you actually learn more about him and what he was up to. After coming to Canada, at age 16, Douglas joined a fur trading operation and quickly climbed the ranks. Eventually he was married to Amelia Connoly, who was Métis and born in Manitoba. Amelia’s mother was Cree and father, also an HBC Chief Factor, was born in Quebec and, as the family name suggests, of Irish descent. I’m not going to walk you through all of Scottish and Irish history and those nations’ relations with the English, or the histories of Guyana or any Cree nations, but I would be happy to argue that — contrary to so much of the favoured narrative — this couple seems about as far removed geographically but also in their cultural heritage and any possible loyalties from the Crown and the Empire as conceivable, almost comically so. They also seem quintessentially Canadian, to me. The pair had themselves 13 children, as was the norm at that time. Also the norm, only six of their children survived to adulthood. So, this was the first of the modern settlers to this part of the world and the representative of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and thereby, most hilariously, the British Crown.

Fort Victoria became the official seat of government in 1849 when Vancouver Island was formally inaugurated as a colony. That’s a confusing fact for a couple of reasons. Firstly, most sources appear to agree that to this point the empire had no desire at all to found settlements or colonize the west coast of this continent. Though, it is true, once there were rumblings from America, about them taking control of the whole region and then eventually agreement on dividing the land at the 49th parallel, some in London started thinking along the lines of endorsing some permanent settlements out west. In the case of Victoria and Vancouver Island, however, the empire was not actually going to do much of anything and were instead happy to have the Hudson's Bay Company, who was already there and motivated to keep Russia and America from taking over, to make moves in the direction of building a permanent settlement on their behalf. The company was granted a charter on the understanding that doing so "would conduce greatly to the maintenance of peace, justice, and good order, and the advancement of colonization and the promotion and encouragement or trade and commerce in, and also to the protection and welfare of the native Indians residing within that portion of Our territories in North America called Vancouver's Island…” That said, historian Barry Gough notes that “For political reasons, the government could not invest even a farthing in colonial development [at Victoria]: it had to be self-sustaining in every sense other than naval protection.” When the plan was put to Douglas, their man on the island, he famously wrote back that, as a company man concerned his whole life with trading in furs and turning a profit, colonization, he insisted, “is a subject that I have never given a moment’s consideration.” Even the popular press thought such a project was ludicrous on several fronts. The Times of London, for example, observed that:

[The HBC is composed of] fur traders and monopolists, and in neither capacity can they give hearty encouragement to the pursuits of civilised or colonial life. They want beavers and sables to multiply, hunting grounds to be pre-served, and hunters and trappers to thrive. Their function is to perpetuate what it should be the aim of a colony to destroy.

The Dublin World went a little further, arguing they could conceive of no reason anyone in their right mind would even go to Vancouver Island of all places:

The enterprising colonist ... must undertake a voyage half as long again as to Australia to reach a terr­itory as yet untried.... Is land so scarce in Canada, Nova Scotia, the trackless leagues of fertile South Africa, and the endless plains of New Holland, New Zealand, Ceylon and fifty other places more or less within the hail of the haunts of men, that people should wander to the remoteness of Vancouver? In Heaven's name, what sane man would go there, and for what would he go? 

This, the fruitless frivolity of such a venture or adventure, really did seem to be the popular sentiment. It can even be found in the private correspondences between government officials and businesspersons. For example, Charles Enderby, businessman and lieutenant-governor of the Auckland Islands, spelled out the same in a letter to George Grey (third Earl Grey), former British parliamentary under-secretary at the Colonial Office and secretary of state for the Home Department. Enderby noted “It is impossible to imagine how Vancouver's Island, considering its remote position and great distance from the Mother-Country, can be of any commercial advantage, or made to hold out any inducement to parties to locate themselves there as Settlers, unless by being adapted to the purposes of a Whaling Station.” (Victoria was never a whaling station but, as the main hub in the area, did service all manner of fishing and whaling taking place in the region and, in the 20th century, was home to the Victoria Whaling Company who operated up-island and out of Haida Gwaii.) So, even with abundant opportunities for logging, fishing and whaling, farming, as well as mining — with well-known deposits of coal and gold, and all of that paired with the most temperate climate — no one could see political, military, or economic justification for attempting to exploit any of those or make a forceful push to colonize the region. The second confusing factor surrounding this curious "colonization" is that Vancouver Island, like British Columbia later, was a colony in name only. That is to say, no definition I can find even remotely resembles what took place here. Every source I seek agrees that a colony is: “A settlement formed under the auspices of a land company or by a group of persons of the same nationality, ethnic background, or religion, or having similar principles.” If that's so, there is so little agreement between this concept and the reality here in eventual British Columbia that you can really only impose the label if you first erase the whole history of Victoria-Camosun and Vancouver Island, including who was here and what they were up to; which, I hope you agree, is a pretty radical move. If you don’t want to do that but are still insistent, the only other way to label Vancouver Island (or Victoria or BC) a colony would be taking the equally out-there step of reimagining the term, as has been all the rage in recent decades, to get something near-meaningless like, maybe "a home to recent arrivals." How else? All I know is that, going forward, use of the term “colony” in the local context will indicate to me the person I’m reading or listening to hasn’t made a cursory look into anything about the circumstances here. That, or they’re trying to rectify language for political ends or something nefarious of this sort.

Well, thinking about remoteness, authority, and communication, there are some great anecdotes I came across from this same time giving a good sense for how different the situation was at that time and just how isolated this land remained. Even at this late date (almost a decade after the settlement’s founding, with ships passing through and arriving from all over, and even with trains and the telegraph having been popular and spreading out like an invasive metal ivy across whole continents for some time), train tracks and telegraph lines would not extend through the Rockies and down to Gastown (which would become Granville and then eventually Vancouver) until 1886. And the Panama Canal, of course, would not open until 1914. That meant the primary route between England and Vancouver Island was a 25,000-33,000km voyage of between six and eight months around the southern tip of South America and up the west coast of the Americas. As such, when Douglas was appointed to a new role, Governor and Vice-Admiral of Vancouver Island and its dependencies, on May 16th of 1851, news of his new appointment only finally reached Douglas here on Vancouver Island on October 30th of that year. That's the remoteness we're talking about. As well, though many ships left England during this time with folks destined for the west coast of North America, it was perfectly common for only half the passengers, or even none at all, to arrive at their final destinations. Maritime disaster was common, abandonment or mutiny was perfectly normal (imagine leaving Blackpool or Galway in February and arriving in the Caribbean, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and California, at some point you're likely saying "This'll do") illness was nearly inevitable…

So, what did the populating of this non-colony actually look like? In his leadership capacity, Douglas negotiated 14 written and oral agreements, commonly termed the “Douglas Treaties”, with the existing communities on the island. The agreements covered more than 900 square kilometers of land on Vancouver Island, around modern-day Victoria, Nanaimo, and Port Hardy. Along with his treaties, historians and commentators also agree that as he went about attempting to procure land for future farms and housing Douglas first instructed his surveyors to establish and preserve any and all sites needed and wanted by the locals. Seeking to preserve Indigenous rights and limit future conflict with company employees, he asked his men to determine all the locals’ wishes with regard to “the permanent Village sites, the fishing stations, and Burial grounds, cultivated land and all the favorite resorts of the Tribes, and in short to include every piece of ground to which they had acquired an equitable title through continuous occupation, tillage or other investment of their labour.” Douglas also saw fit to ensure that, along with whatever land and resources communities desired or required, any individuals always remained free to procure any additional lands they wished at any future time “on precisely the same terms and considerations in all respects, as other classes of Her Majesty’s subjects.” But he didn’t just have this as his own subversive plan or offer it only to those under him. Douglas put all this in writing in correspondence with his superiors in London. And he went a little further, too. He didn’t suggest taking land by force nor did he recommend buying any lands not needed or desired by the locals outright; instead, he proposed a mutually beneficial lease of the land and to formally protect all Indigenous sites under British law. He suggested:

Some arrangement should be made as soon as possible with the native Tribes for the purchase of their lands and I would recommend payment being made in the Shape of an annual allowance instead of the whole sum being given at one time: the will thus derive a permanent benifit from the sale of their lands and the Colony will have a degree of security from their future good behaviour. I would also strongly recommend, equally as a measure of justice, and from a regard to the future peace of the colony, that the Indians Fishere’s, Village Sites and Fields, should be reserved for their benifit and fully secured to them by law.

All of this and more is, obviously, exactly why past and present desires to deviate from what was agreed to is so offensive — doubly so when you consider how reliant this deeply impoverished minority of recent arrivals, and everything that would come, was upon a willing partnership with locals and also Native traders from afar. Right up until the present, courts continue to settle disputes around differing accounts and interpretations of what was or was not originally agreed to. A great collection of thoughts on these matters, including a great number of fantastic references, is the 2021 essay collection titled, To Share, not Surrender: Indigenous and Settler Visions of Treaty Making in the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. There, as elsewhere, you’ll find that by the terms of the Douglas Treaties the Crown recognized existing village sites and acknowledged rights to the land and sea and to anything that may be acquired from them. It does seem that most of the impacted communities as well as the scholars and legal professionals working on related cases agree that little or nothing was ceded to anyone in this part of the world and that impinging on any of people’s rights is not in keeping with what was written, spoken, or intended — and even if it were, any such attempted negotiation would appear to violate other precedents established by prior monarchs, subsequent UN treaties to which Canada is a signatory, and the current will of the majority of Canadians, British Columbians, Vancouver Islanders, and residents of Victoria... Despite all of this agreement, yes indeed, these and adjacent issues continue to be an abundant source of sufficiently messy business.

Zoinks! Just let all the above sink in a moment. It's okay, I'll wait… Now, even this far in, how does the history I’ve spelled out accord with any impression you were ever given, formally or informally, about what was happening here? For me, all of this is as close to the opposite as imaginable from everything I was taught in the past and everything I hear and read still today. Not only does the “colony” not really fit any functional definition of the term but the guy running the show for his band of outsiders was, in accordance with company and imperial policy, taking no actions that looked anything like the conquest and colonialism so eagerly misapplied all over the place… But just wait, this story (or at least my version of it) is about to really deviate from your and my own miseducation.

Sources such as The Canadian Encyclopedia note that in these early years Fort Victoria was home to only a few hundred people, or about one boatload, mostly Hudson’s Bay Company employees and their families (as was company policy at that time). And that was the overwhelming majority of newcomers in the region. There were virtually no non-Indigenous folks on the rest of Vancouver Island (which by some estimates had 20,000-26,000 native inhabitants). Too, this island’s outsider population exceeded all of those on the mainland in these parts. As one seemingly must, some attempts at guessing the total population around this time for all people residing in the whole area today known as British Columbia, from government and academic sources, come in at around 40,000-50,000. (For scale that’s 10,000 fewer than the capacity of the football stadium in Vancouver today or about half the daily average passenger traffic at Vancouver’s airport.) The Journal of the Haida Nation dramatically disagrees, offering estimates of 180,000 people in the province, with 20,000 on Haida Gwaii alone. John Belshaw, in his Becoming British Columbia: A Population History, suggests the carrying capacity of the land would have allowed for as much as half a million people (and also noting that the pre-contact population was reduced by alien illness to maybe as little as 100,000.) A local corporate training program covering this subject feigns modesty but goes even harder, suggesting “Pre-contact population estimates for BC vary widely with some estimates ranging from a conservative 200,000 to more than a million.” We can agree on nothing, obviously, and “forty thousand or maybe a million and some change” is, indeed, if only to me, worse than offering no estimates of any kind.

In these early days of the “colony”, you might think, as I mistakenly did, that those authorities supporting the settlement — at least in letters of support or in their prayers if not with an investment of “even a farthing” — were trying to rapidly infuse the whole region with settlers or just encourage as much. Or at least, cognizant of how unfavourable the opportunity appeared, you might assume they were certainly not actively dissuading people from coming. Nope. All the sources I've found seem to agree the Hudson’s Bay Company and British Empire were happy to maintain a monopoly on trade and the smallest, most efficient operation possible to achieve that, just as always done elsewhere on the continent for almost 200 years by this point. But there were also formal policies keeping people away. There was no desire to have just anyone show up and take residence, for instance, so James Douglas set land prices more than three times the rate of almost anywhere else, such as vast swathes of Canada, the United States, and Australia. Similarly, when gold was found on Haida Gwaii in 1850, Douglas and the company took efforts to suppress the news. They wanted nothing to upset their fur trade monopoly or drive up costs of all kinds by helping deliver thousands of Americans and others to the area. Folks generally consider transient goldseekers to be degenerate, with sources from the time spelling out how anyone would have to admit that it was easier to tolerate any visitor or neighbour of any race, colour, or creed over those despicable miners. With that, locals were also unwelcoming to those who managed to learn of the opportunity to profit and arrived in Victoria seeking passage north. Further, Douglas officially announced that: no land would be made available for any miners to occupy; that all Indigenous rights to resources, land, and liberty would be upheld; and, to make that clear, there would be civil and criminal punishments for unauthorized mineral extraction or any deviations from the status quo. Still, people came. But the locals on Haida Gwaii expelled all miners and shut down the goldrush within two years of its announcement. They weren’t having it, either.

Just a few years later, in 1858, gold was found on the Fraser River (that river that runs 1,375km right through the middle of the province running from the Rockies to the Pacific, terminating just south of present-day Vancouver). This time the deplorable miners simply could not be held back. That was a problem because between 1849 and the gold rush in ‘58 less than 1,000 people from elsewhere had come to live on the island. Of them, only 180 had bought land in the vicinity of Fort Victoria and only 15 of those people were not current or former employees of the Hudson's Bay Company or its affiliate, the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company. And with this rush for gold Victoria quickly became a layover and procurement point for tens of thousands of folks heading for the Fraser Canyon. Many feared that such a large influx of Americans, scores almost inevitably transitioning from California’s recently spent and spoken for goldfields, would surely result in US annexation of this dispersed, low-populated and non-sovereign territory.

As such, another colony was hastily declared and named into being, with Douglas made governor of this new territory, too. Prior to this, several different names for the newly mapped and claimed region appeared in various sources. Many Americans called the territory Oregon or Columbia District while elsewhere it was named North West Georgia. Simon Fraser, who said the central plateau of the province reminded him of his mother’s descriptions of the Scottish Highlands, called the place New Caledonia. George Vancouver gave the land the label New Hanover. Seeking to establish British control and bring British law to a region undergoing a gold rush and rapid population growth, the Queen named the colony British Columbia. Some sources suggest the name was intended to distinguish the area from the French colony, New Caledonia, in the South Pacific. Others point out that it was called this only to separate it from the American district of Columbia to the south, named such for being all the territory drained by the Columbia River (who was named after the American ship that entered that river in 1792, the Columbia Rediviva, itself named after a certain Genoan…)

Two asides:

1) Such impromptu organization by disparate, even antagonistic, parties has really been the story of Canada and is analogous to the founding of the whole country. “Quick, they’re coming, link arms and puff up your chest!” Which is why I found it so funny when the US president recently started talking about America seeking to claim Canada as the 51st state. To me it landed as I imagine it would in America if the British Prime Minister suddenly started threatening to tax tea…

2) British Columbia is a silly name. Can we agree? If I was emperor I would hold a vote for renaming the province. There would be three options on the ballot:

A) “Provincy McProvince Face”. Obviously, you have to give the people what they want… 

B) A word newly coined out of one or more of the 35 local languages. Ideally the word would contain 47 letters or more and incorporate many adjacent vowels, have plenty of Xs and superscript Ws, as well as a smattering of non-Roman letters, like that lowercase N with the attached hockey stick, the one with the sweet curve on it. Hopefully its meaning would approximate something like “Forest and meadow paved over for paddle-less land-kayaks” or maybe “Not American Columbia District”

C) “New Genoese Australya” or perhaps “Cooksylvania”

This sudden and unwanted demographic pressure, caused by some shiny nuggets, forced Douglas to try and increase the ranks of those loyal to the colony and perhaps to Britain, or at least find folks sufficiently disloyal to the US and willing to help resist American expansion. And he did come up with a plan that proved very successful. Douglas actively pursued Black entrepreneurs, gold miners, and labourers from California. Without a doubt, the combination of the British spearheading the abolition of slavery, the history of British colonies to the north being a sanctuary for those escaping the south, and America’s Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott, seeking to forever deny these same people American citizenship, provided much of the motivation for folks to relocate. A mutually beneficial promise of a path to citizenship and land ownership as well as recent gold rushes likely did not hurt, either.

Initially a group of a few dozen adventurous souls tested the waters early in 1858. Roughly another 800 soon followed from San Francisco. Directly invited to settle here by Governor James Douglas, they helped… 

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE: 

A) …stabilize the fledgling community and help keep the region for the British Empire. 

B) …further bespoil what had been a sublime wilderness and wipe out the Coast Salish population. 

C) …prevent the territory from plunging forever below that acerbic and menacing fog that was the disunited states of America. 

D) Insert your own reading here: _____________________________________________________________.

Whatever happened and whatever the meaning of that, one of those colonists who took up Douglas’ offer was Mifflin Wistar Gibbs. It’s a fabulous name and one that more folks should know. Prior to arriving in Victoria, Gibbs had spent eight years in California’s goldfields after having accompanied Fredrick Douglass on an abolitionist speaking tour of New York state. In his autobiography, Gibbs describes hopping on the steamship Republic for Victoria with enterprising souls from all over. “We had on board upward of seven hundred, comprising a variety of tongues and nations. The bustle and turmoil incident to getting off and being properly domiciled; the confusion of tongues and peculiarity of temperament resembled the Babel of old.” Gibbs writes of the burgeoning settlement being “delightful as a place of residence and well adapted to great mercantile and industrial possibilities” due in no small part to the “salubrity of its climate” and spacious harbour. Indeed. He mentions everyone aboard the Republic receiving warm welcome from colony officials and its governor and of the delight in finding this place. “I cannot describe with what joy we hailed the opportunity to enjoy that liberty under the ‘British lion’ denied to us beneath the pinions of the American Eagle,” Gibbs recalls. He notes how hundreds of people just like him from all across America “settled in Victoria, drawn thither by the two-fold inducement — gold discovery and the assurance of enjoying impartially the benefits of constitutional liberty … they built or bought homes and other property, and by industry and character vastly improved their condition and were the recipients of respect and esteem from the community.” For his part, Gibbs knew what he was doing and quickly got down to business. Immediately he established himself as a successful retailer, competing with the Hudson’s Bay Company in equipping those heading to the goldfields. He also became an early real estate speculator. His prosperity led him to return to the US to find and marry his wife, Maria Ann Alexander. The pair settled back in Victoria, bought land and built a home right in the middle of what is now James Bay, and had themselves five children. Soon Gibbs won a seat on Victoria City Council, representing James Bay, and served as acting mayor (becoming the first Black person elected to public office in what is today BC, the second to hold elected office in what is now Canada, and only the third such person in all of North America). He also built British Columbia’s first railway, for a mining operation on Haida Gwaii. Apparently, all of that wasn’t enough for him. With the end of the US Civil War and ratification of the 13th Amendment officially ending slavery, Gibbs, now a British citizen, followed his wife back to the US in 1870. (His adventures in British territories over, Gibbs decided to read law, pass the bar, and eventually open his own firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was elected America’s first Black municipal judge and worked as a state official for the Republican Party before President William McKinley named him US Consul to Madagascar at age 75, in 1898. In 1901 Gibbs returned to Arkansas and published Shadow and Light: An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century. In 1903, he opened the Capital City Savings Bank with a health insurance division, the People’s Mutual Aid Association. Mifflin Wistar Gibbs thrived until 1915, aged 92.) What a life!

Gold rush number three soon arrived, the Cariboo Gold Rush, after Wilhelm “Dutch Bill” Dietz struck gold on the Horsefly River in 1861 and William “Billy” Barker found more of the shiny stuff on Williams Creek the following year. What became the town of Barkerville quickly grew to be “the largest city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco”, with a peak population reaching 8,000. Once again, Victoria became the first stop and primary trade centre for those arriving from California and heading into the interior. There are many differing estimates of Victoria’s population at this time as the first census was not taken for another decade. Conservative estimates appear to suggest Victoria proper comprised roughly 3,000-4,000 Indigenous, around 2,900 “white” and 1,600 Chinese settlers, as well as, for such a small population, significant numbers of Black, Hawaiian, Greek, Jewish, and other ethnic groups.

I take the time to spell all this out here because, of course, just as I’ve said throughout, the miseducation I received on this topic and related themes impressed upon me the perfect delusion that “the British” showed up, Queen and country imposed their will on their own and everyone around, and, well, that was that. I hope you can see that none of that happened. Nothing like that transpired. 

Among the ships arriving early that same year was the Brother Jonathan, a steamship from San Francisco packed with clothing, homegoods, consumables, livestock, and around 115 seekers-of-gold. The steamer also brought with it carriers of smallpox. By this time, in 1862, everyone living in the region had been well-acquainted with the illnesses signs and impacts and much of the population would have also had direct prior exposure. Not only were there a 1770s and ‘80s epidemics, likely brought in by “the Spanish” and whose repercussions were spelled out by James Vancouver, as noted earlier, but major outbreaks are also known to have followed in 1801-03, 1836-38, and 1852-53, at least. Meaning that anyone over the age of ten, certainly anyone around the hub of Victoria or any transient or trading population, was likely to have had exposure.

Only days after the steamship Brother Jonathan left The Daily British Colonist (today’s Times Colonist) confirmed a pair of new arrivals carried with them the "varioloid". The paper also soon reported the arrival of a third carrier on the Oregon, another steamer from San Francisco. And with that the latest epidemic began its conflagration. Just as in 2020, the local paper was full of discussion of the decimation of the community by a terrible plague, of the necessity of quarantine and of vaccination, with particular concern for those who might be less well equipped to respond. On March 27th, James Douglas publicly disclosed his awareness of the arrival of the illness and insisted to the House of Assembly that it was "desirable that instant measures should be adopted to prevent the spread of the infection..." To that end, Douglas also offered his firm recommendation that the community appropriate funds to construct a hospital at some distance from town for mandatory quarantine and “proper care and treatment” of all cases of smallpox.

The April 1st edition of the paper sought to compel vaccination by insisting that “nearly everybody goes in for vaccination now-a-days, and it is safe to say that at least one-half of the resident Victorians have had a cuticle of their left arm slightly abraded and vaccine matter insinuated.” And then the paper pleads with everyone to go get vaccinated. In the same edition, the public is informed that the town's Assembly considered the Governor's proposal but Dr Helmcken and others felt Douglas was being alarmist and that his hospital would be far too costly. Most members agreed and also expressed concern about compelling quarantine, that this would unduly impinge upon people’s liberty. (2020 really was just 1862 all over again.)

CRITICAL CONTEXT (or SPEAKING OF “NOTHING LIKE THAT TRANSPIRED”):

At the time of writing and for my entire adult life, many people have argued that this one smallpox outbreak in 1862 was a deliberate act and single major source of genocide against the whole regional Indigenous population or, by some tellings, merely individual populations such as the Haida. This is asserted in writing in many places and, to my mind, by the only sources that could possibly matter: for example, the Haida themselves. Corroborating those accounts are folks like Dr Robert Boyd, in his seminal work The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence, who tells us that from April to December of 1862 there were 14,000 fatalities from smallpox among the Indigenous population living along the coast between Victoria and Alaska. More than that, Boyd asserts that the "epidemic might have been avoided, and the Whites knew it." You'll find Boyd's work cited everywhere. Tom Swanky agrees, though, of course, with different numbers — as required by law, or so it seems. He claims there were 18,000 direct smallpox deaths on Haida Gwaii alone which, he tells us, would have been a fatality rate of 90% for the Haida Nation. In The Smallpox War Against the Haida, Swanky also offers:

Beginning in 1860, Douglas answered the Haida’s prior refusal to submit unconditionally for rule by the Crown with a program of increasing violence that culminated in spreading smallpox as a political tool. After colonists knowingly imported smallpox in 1862, the Douglas administration violated British law to pervert standard disease control measures while reducing the population underpinning native authority in numerous autonomous territories. Officials concealed their true intentions at each stage by supplying the public with misdirection.

A related article in MacLean’s Magazine, titled “How a smallpox epidemic forged modern British Columbia,” agrees with all of this, noting that at least 30,000 Indigenous people died from smallpox. They also highlight a Victoria-based anthropology PhD and artist, Marianne Nicholson, from the Dzawada’enuxw Nation of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, up-island and including adjacent northern islands. She tells us colonial authorities spread smallpox throughout British Columbia in a deliberate act of genocide — so that the local government could claim those lands without having to compensate or recognize Indigenous title. We’re told that as a result of this extermination policy, the population of Nicholson’s nation dropped from 10,000 to 1,500, a decline from which it has never fully recovered.

Given all of this, what do you understand the modern narrative to be? Roughly what I was taught and always believed was, just as in the above example, that:

Motivated by a blind imperial lust for the conquest of all lands and peoples (and the requisite genocidal racism inherent in that), the Governor of this colony conspired (with the Crown, other administrators, whatever martial force he could muster, and everyone living nearby) to exterminate, in this case at least one remote community, by way of a virus. They did so by deliberately importing smallpox (like a box of nails or a kettle). And they (non-native travellers, company employees, and settlers) were able to pull off their intended genocide because they had privileged knowledge of the virus and how to prevent it or at least limit its spread — whereas the locals were not only unaware but systematically denied the knowledge and tools to avoid or treat the illness. More than that, those kept ignorant and thus made sick were forced against their will to return home to remote villages for the purpose of exterminating the whole of the population there. And, as a result of all this madness, this one-time effort was extraordinarily successful and yielded a fatality rate of between 80% and 99% among immunologically naive populations (on Haida Gwaii and in many other places).

I was always basically onboard with most of that. Only in seeking to write this book did I start looking for more details to describe the situation to folks. As a result of those readings, I'm now convinced the problems with this version of events, and even anything remotely like it, are so vast and severe that I’m not sure how it’s actually presented by serious people. What makes me so confident in that seemingly radical assessment is that there’s nothing radical about it at all. There’s a real abundance of freely available, well-understood and accepted, and truly uncontroversial details, all of which must be systematically ignored to take on and transmit the popular narrative. The radical take, you see, is not mine. Though it's hard to go into any of this without writing another entire book on this topic alone, something should be offered here because one cannot look up the history of Victoria without encountering this particular epidemic and its repercussions — and what you’re likely to find there looks to me to be wildly off-base.

For further context, too, I just came across a similar narrative but spelled out in this instance on a public information panel. Found near Hope, BC — about two hours east of Vancouver by car or 35hrs by foot — it’s really worth spelling out for all its similarities to what I’ve presented and, with that, contradictions to so much trending lore, but also where it agrees with those other publications and deviates from what I’ve offered and am going to suggest. It reads: 

Though Spanish and British ships arrived on the BC coast in 1792, the Stó:lō had already made contact with Europeans ten years earlier — in the form of disease. Smallpox came from the Spanish in Mexico, and reached the Stó:lō via their trade relationships with First Nations to the south. Smallpox devastated the Stó:lō, killing two thirds of the population in six weeks. Entire villages died, and many others were abandoned. When Simon Fraser came downriver in 1808, he found a culture that was still recovering from the disease. But the Stó:lō survived smallpox and even thrived during the early contact period. By 1848, HBC forts at Hope, Yale, Langley, and Victoria gave the Stó:lō access to trade goods they greatly valued, such as steel tools, cooking pots, and guns. But rather than trade in furs, the Stó:lō preferred their traditional “currency” of salmon and cranberries. Several villages moved close to the forts, to better enable trade. But the gold rush of 1858 changed Stó:lō life forever — 30,000 miners flooded the territory, and many stayed to settle. By 1864, large reserves were set aside for the Stó:lō, but these were cut by 92% in 1867, leaving less than 10 acres per family. Today, the Stó:lō are still negotiating with government over resources, rights, and title within their traditional territories.

The HBC and empire in this instance are not presented as the enemy and illness is said to have spread passively prior to contact through organic Indigenous trade networks — not deliberately smuggled in as a kind of dirty bomb as part of an intended genocide by an evil foreign power. Also highlighted is the complicated past and present with regard to newcomers and the ongoing fight for rights and resources. All of that follows with what I believe to be true. Weirdly, though, there’s plenty that doesn’t make sense to me. As noted previously, the Spanish and British didn’t show up here in 1792. (See, literally everyone offers something different. It’s bonkers.) Both were here long before that and the Russians beat all other overseas visitors by many decades, were travelling as far south as Baja California around this time, and delivering everywhere they went novel relationships, goods, and diseases to both friend and foe of the Stó:lō. As mentioned, too, “the Spanish” didn’t come here, Spanish flagged ships typically had a captain and/or a few officers of Spanish descent onboard, though many were born in the Americas with, by this time centuries-old cities and universities across South, Central, and North America; however, the overwhelming majority of folks were of mixed background or entirely indigenous to the lands of what had become New Spain. Too, “Mexico” would not become a thing until it won independence in 1821. I don’t know why any of these points would be seen as irrelevant or wrong or, as such, how you would even offer anything different. Those are the easiest and least provocative points of disagreement, though. 

To give you a sense of how poorly I believe effectively all of the more popular narrative makes meaningful contact with reality, I offer you the following details. Most troublingly, I think you can discard any 10 or even 20 of these points and still find yourself with a whole set of very significant problems if you're trying to sustain the popular history. I’m convinced the favoured version of events demands you reject:

Endemicity

This illness, smallpox, is traced back to Egypt thousands of years prior to the 1862 epidemic here in BC. It is documented all around Africa, Asia, and Europe from the Middle Ages on. As a result, smallpox was almost certainly brought to North America at least by the 16th century, more than two centuries prior to this outbreak of concern. Far closer still, “the Spanish” were venturing from present-day Mexico into what is today California and Oregon by the 1500s and more regularly from the 1600s on. That means the virus could have easily shown up in the northwest coast of North America any time after that, from the east and/or south. The first “Russians” to arrive from the north in the mid 1700s only increased the odds. And they did so dramatically. There were many other opportunities for introduction and reintroduction throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and we actually know of several significant outbreaks and epidemics all up and down the coast as well as. So it’s hard to believe smallpox wasn’t endemic here long before 1862, especially anywhere a sailing ship could easily access, like Haida Gwaii (which we all agree was among the first places in BC contacted by outsiders). We also know, for example, the Haida were extremely active in the world, traversing and intimately engaging with communities impacted by Old World illnesses for centuries.

Miasma

For most Europeans and others going back eons, miasma was considered the causal agent responsible for illness. Nothing like a scientific theory of disease, miasma theory was a set of diverse and shifting ideas about toxic air or odors or, as I have encountered it in modern times, “the bad wind”. Miasma is also found bound up with notions of malevolent spirits and witchcraft. The more recent version of the idea, the evolved theory arriving after the Scientific Revolution and the one at play in BC in the 1800s, typically held that illness was spontaneously generated in the environment from waste and decay. Basically: gross = more gross. Seems pretty rational. Key to this system of beliefs was that transmission was by way of the odors generated from rot and filth that, once inhaled, caused human illness. There was no concept of microorganisms, bacteria, or viruses and so, of course, no sense for or how those arose, survived, or were disbursed. Right. So, all across the globe, folks deemed it more important to remove foul smells (by opening a window, say, or otherwise overwhelming them with fragrant spices, perfumes, or smoke) than having clean hands or bedding or sources of food and water that weren’t soiled with biological waste. Florence Nightingale, for example, the mother of modern nursing and public health, in her Notes on Nursing, from 1860 (note the date), tells us just this. She explains how scarlet fever, measles, and, yes, smallpox was arising in London due to people foolishly building houses near drain pipes: those places where foul odours may escape and make the inhabitants unwell. This was the learned opinion taught at top medical schools at the time and not a backward conjecture from an illiterate class of deckhands and adventurers. As a result, folks were still shitting in the communal water supply and wondering why cholera and typhoid were spreading to those drinking from and washing from said source. Without knowing this you cannot make sense of people’s actions in 1860s Victoria. You certainly cannot impose your present beliefs on those people and impute motives they could not have had.

Humors, bloodletting, and other confusion

Along with miasma, physicians of the day were preoccupied with “balancing the body’s humors”. Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, Prince Consort, died in December of 1861 (note the date) from a bout of typhoid fever (or, as currently speculated, any number of other things that could not be diagnosed at that time). So the British royal family, the most prominent family in the whole empire, at home in London, with a whole team of the finest doctors to be found, was not immune to the worst health information and thus was unable to prevent illness or avoid an early death that would be perfectly avoidable today. Worse, at just 42, it is likely Albert died prematurely at the hands of his attending physicians. In fact, the man, terribly ill and weakened, was set upon by a medical team (Sir James Clark, Dr William Jenner, and Dr Thomas Watson) seeking to restore his prince’s balance of humors. To do so they would have conducted bloodletting or applied leaches to drain his blood, both of which were just as popular at that time as they had been for 3,000 years. While draining him of his blood, those same physicians likely gifted him, as they did other royals and presidents and prime ministers at that time, any number of the other conventional remedies for typhoid or anything including a fever: such as opiates for pain, brandy as needed as a stimulant, and a variety of purgatives (my favourite being the Persian miracle cure: calomel, popular at this time for everything from teething to ingrown toenails, syphilis to cancer but which contained mercury…) Right. So what does this mean? And what does this have to do with Victoria, BC in 1862? Well, the popular narrative wants you to believe that what the Queen and her family lacked was somehow available to the most impoverished in the most remote corner of the planet — but then being denied to a class of people based on their skin colour or lack of Christian faith or their having the wrong nationality or something. That’s a lot to swallow.

Germ theory and basic hygiene

Even long after things like vaccines had been developed (like that for smallpox in 1796), germ theory was still not popular even just among the medical community. Germ theory was only formally coaxed into being through the combined studies of Semmelweis in the 1840s, Snow in the 1850s, Pasteur in the 1860s, and Koch in the 1870s and ‘80s. Even after all this substantial evidence coming over generations (for the value of cleaning surgical equipment and washing hands, for sick people and their wastes being vectors for illness and not bad smells or wind, for the value of pasteurization, identifying bacteria as the direct cause of illness, and such) the leading medical schools of Europe only really got behind these ideas around the 1890s, with older practitioners clinging to their ancient humoral and miasma models long after that. And, to be clear, wide acceptance of germ theory didn’t occur among the public in the West until the 1920s or ‘30s and was not really the dominant theory of disease elsewhere until after that. (And not only would I note that you can travel to any number of places today and find other beliefs and practices at work, or even Victoria being filled with alternative healing schools and practitioners, but I also wonder if, given what we all experienced with the pandemic, germ theory is actually understood and believed in by the majority of the population or even just medical professionals in the West? But that’s for another book.) Worse, consider that it was not until the 1980s — due to a spate of hospital-related and foodborne illnesses and the general panic around personal hygiene resulting from the unknown causes and transmission modes for HIV/AIDS in the early part of that pandemic — that the Centers for Disease Control even began formally promoting hand washing as a tool for infection reduction.

Smallpox prophylaxis

The first smallpox preventative, variolation (in the form of insufflation, where dried smallpox scabs were ground into a powder and blown up one’s nose or puss from a smallpox scab was scratched into the skin), was developed by the Chinese in either the 11th or 16th century, depending on the source you read. These techniques became popular throughout India, the Ottoman Empire, and Africa by the 1700s and a decade or two later were introduced to Europe and the Americas. As the US National Library of Medicine tells us, a Puritan clergyman in colonial New England learned of the practice from a West African slave and first employed the technique in the Americas during the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721. From there, Edward Jenner developed a more modern smallpox vaccine in 1796. Popular uptake of the vaccine and variolation in Europe was limited, however. For example, in London, England, major smallpox outbreaks were still killing many thousands there from the mid-1800s through to 1900 — both long before and after the big epidemic here in British Columbia in 1862. And, in case you’re wondering, the last lethal outbreak of smallpox in the UK, resulting in hundreds needing quarantine and vaccination, occurred in 1978. Not 1778, not 1878, but 1978.

Opposition to prophylaxis

There was always strong opposition to vaccination in Europe and the UK. Even after England’s Vaccination Acts passed, in 1853 and 1867 (note the dates) which legally required inoculation against smallpox and imposed fines for avoidance, more than 30% still refused. A very popular and prolific anti-vaccination community, with protests attracting 100,000 people in London, and eventually an Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League, founded in 1867, was eventually successful in pressuring the British government to make vaccination optional. Yes, as a result, the English in England, with multiple forms of prophylaxis available for many generations, still saw outbreaks at this same time continuing striking down significant portions of the population, especially their children. And yet, doesn’t the popular narrative around this same illness here in British Columbia demand you believe there was no such skepticism, zero, among the Indigenous community toward foreign thinking or practices, especially around healing and medicine? That’s a pretty bold (and totally unstated) assertion. I would be shocked to learn that only 20-40% of folks from remote northern communities (the same size of the antivax cohort in London) didn’t refuse vaccination or variolation. And I’d also be shocked if those or others didn’t want to be ordered around (forced to adopt Western beliefs and practices, made to isolate or go to a Western-style hospital, or to otherwise leave the region, and especially under the suspicious pretext of a sudden emergency).

Acceptance of prophylaxis and harm reduction

As far as I can tell, everyone agrees people were fully aware of “European” tools and techniques for dealing with this particular disease. The Songhees, for example, were proactive and sought out or accepted, it’s unclear which, vaccination and self-quarantine on Discovery Island, a traditional seasonal hunting ground just east of Oak Bay. As a result, this population was virtually unimpacted by the 1862 smallpox epidemic. Does this support the story we’re told or punch a hole right through it? And why is this detail left out of most tellings? How does this fit with Tom Swanky’s offerings?

A long precedent for vaccination campaigns

James Douglas sent the Hudson’s Bay Company doctor, Dr John Helmcken, explicitly to vaccinate local First Nations at the outset of this epidemic. It is said that the doctor successfully inoculated hundreds of Songhees against smallpox at that time. Prior to the 1862 vaccination program in Victoria, there was precedent of the same at other HBC forts in the area. According to present-day Haida journalism on smallpox, Dr William Tolmie (whose wife was Spokane), worked out of Fort Vancouver in modern-day Washington, and went around inoculating communities and helping quarantine those who could not or would not be vaccinated all over the region to protect them from smallpox during the epidemics of 1837 and 1853. We also know the Russians in Alaska also inoculated the locals against introduced disease, and more of this took place all around North America during this and previous outbreaks of illness. Knowing all this, Swanky and others still put to paper insisting that Douglas deliberately imported smallpox while keeping preventatives, treatments, and basic medical "care" from the population. I suppose their sense is that vaccination didn’t actually happen or maybe that there wasn't enough mercury, opioids, and leeches to go around?

More than prevention

Similarly well documented are the efforts to treat and comfort the ill. Medical aid and nursing care were not just given out to those living in Victoria, or to people of a certain skin colour or only those who spoke English, but were provided to the Indigenous encampments in the immediate area as well as villages far beyond by medical practitioners and missionaries of all stripes, as was the norm everywhere and at other times. This behaviour was witnessed and documented in people’s journals as occurring up-island as well as on the mainland during this epidemic and in prior generations. Dr Helmcken is also said to have continued checking up on and tending to the Songhees during their self-quarantine throughout the epidemic. You might also note that vaccines and nursing were in short supply here in Victoria in 2020 during COVID and that we still don’t know how to respond to an airborne illness, either… That seems relevant, given the narrative demands knowledge and capacity we don’t have today were prevalent in the 1860s and that fatalities among the Indigenous population occurred due only to an egregious race-based neglect or intent to harm or, far worse, a planned and executed mass extermination campaign.

Who was the genocide directed at?

The popular narrative would have you believe the above information, vaccination, and medical care came alongside an extermination campaign. This is asserted despite everyone agreeing: A) most of the total population was Native, B) a significant amount of the new settler population was Indigenous, or their wives and children were, and identified as Iroquois, Métis, Cree, Spokane, Hawaiian, and more, C) the whole of the fur trade and the settlement relied upon this same population for local knowledge, trade relationships and commerce, trade goods and basic foodstuffs, their skills and labour, and more, and D) the Songhees had the information and help they needed during the epidemic. What room, then, is there for an institutional racism reaching the level of a genocidal program directed at Indigenous peoples (or merely those born on this side of the Rockies or maybe just those from the islands in the northern half of present-day British Columbia)? Who was enacting that and to what ends? Can you see how loved this narrative is? It’s unquestioningly repeated everywhere all the time despite being incoherent to its core.

The ends

By some accounts, if not to exterminate the whole Indigenous population, the 1862 outbreak was at the very least manufactured to create public panic and justify the removal of locals off priceless land and thereby enabling “the British” to steal the territory and all of the priceless resources therein. And the narrative demands this genocide was unbelievably successful. So then, is the fact that Haida, Tlingit, and Tshimshin territory were not parted into property for British corporations or industrial projects, transformed into global shipping and naval hubs, or evolved into sites of major metropolises by way of the importation of millions of migrants from the UK (just as the Spanish did three centuries prior in New Spain) an argument for or against this narrative? How about the case of the Songhees? Were their lands and resources worthless and useless? Were they not considered Native? I thought “they”, “the British”, wanted to kill all non-Europeans? Regardless, widespread rumours of a Native purge, which were also reproduced in the local paper, resulted in the Indigenous communities in and around Victoria sending a delegation to confront Douglas. Hearing their concerns, he assured them all their lives and rights would be preserved — in accord with all his written and verbal pronouncements to that point. The delegation is said to have left their meeting with Douglas satisfied that he (and as such the HBC and empire) had no evil intentions. This outcome was also spelled out and reproduced in the local paper. So how does all this work?

Popular and published concern

That the local paper, a prolific source of ignorance and stupidity during the 1800s and since, published many dumb things at this time. Still, the owner and editor paired his bigotry with expressions of concern such as “the disease, we fear, will make sad havoc among the Indian population…” If the community, or just some of them, or even just this one editor, were genocidally racist against this one population, why go with “fear” rather than “hope”? You think other génocidaires don't plainly and enthusiastically spell out their intent to exterminate? If that’s what was actually and obviously intended and what all of this terribly racist community was actually thinking why would he shy away from spelling it out? Further, statements of this sort — along with his pleading for folks to vaccinate and voluntarily quarantine themselves, insisting upon better personal hygiene and general cleanliness, along with publishing conspiracy theories about an intentional purge — don’t support that the editor or broader population (few of whom were English, British, or European) were eagerly trying to conceal information from or wipe out the Haida or any other population. Or, it’s hard for my simple mind to see how all these facts cohere into a sensible narrative. What explains all the significant forewarning of catastrophe, publicly stated health and wellbeing concerns, and abundant efforts to prevent illness and aid the sick? Maybe all this makes sense somehow. All I know is that no one seems to try and spell it out.

Unreliable sources

From my reading, nearly all of the research and reporting on the 1862 smallpox epidemic almost exclusively references The Daily British Colonist for their understanding of what was happening on the ground. In 2025 there is not a paper on the planet that I would direct you to as either a reliable and comprehensive source of good information or just a robust survey of public opinion. Journalism going back more than a century was not more rigorous while offering broader, better informed perspectives. Sorry. No. Worse than that, effectively all those modern documents offer heavily cherry-picked quotes from this one extremely limited, single-column daily paper — a paper founded and edited by an avowed racist and crackpot known for his public bawling and brawling, who was eventually determined to be of unsound mind. The man, born Bill Smith but who went by Amor De Cosmos (Love of the Universe), was also trying to get himself into positions of power and continually published his opposition to James Douglas and the Hudson’s Bay Company right from the paper’s first edition. Love, so-called, was very keen to see people forced against their will, if need be, to vaccinate and quarantine and was especially enthusiastic to contribute to the fall of what he felt was an illegitimate government. He was not endorsing Douglas, company or government policy, or trying to uncover and share popular opinion. It’s far more sensible to think of The Daily British Colonist as this one man’s Twitter page than as it is currently being presented: as something like objective journalism or just a serious account of daily events. Too, it should be repeated, as this cherry-picking is happening, modern readers of these primary sources are also fraudulently importing modern concepts, motivations, beliefs, and sensibilities into the minds of people so unlike ourselves on so many fronts they may as well be considered a different species — or, at least, I don’t know how else to think about all this.

“The police”

Every source I can find suggests not that a militia or army was conscripted to forcefully move people but that it was “the Victoria police” who did it. So, I asked myself, what was the police force in Victoria at that time? Well, when the settlement began, law enforcement in Victoria was a militia called the Victoria Voltigeurs, composed of Hawaiians, Iroquois, Métis, and French Canadians. When the first police force was eventually commissioned, in 1858, Douglas recruited an all-Jamaican unit of ten men from the United States. As I understand, those guys were relieved of duty within months as the transient miner population (those who reliably caused much of the problems around town) were commonly from the US and places therein still under slavery and who too often refused to comply with the Jamaican authorities, making their job impossible. The all-Black crew was quickly replaced by a dozen men, whose backgrounds I cannot find spelled out anywhere, but seems likely to have been, at least in part, the earlier militia members who all had this experience and folks in the area knew. Though no source claims as much, the other force available to be mustered was the local military unit. They were called the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps. They were also known as the “African Rifles” on account of the whole unit being Black. To me, all this paints a pretty clear picture of who the settlement, the company, its local administrators, as well as the whole trade monopoly and broader colony [sic] and, thus, empire, were entrusting with and relying upon for defence and to uphold the peace. (No, the British Navy was not going to go to war to preserve Victoria or Vancouver Island, which everyone agreed, in writing, was too remote, of no broader global strategic importance, and had no resources of value to speak of…) But, notice, this — largely Africans, Natives from all over, and people of mixed ancestry — is who we are told was compelled by their evil race-based bigotry against non-Whites to commit a genocide of local and less-local Indigenous populations. And, of course, they were doing all this on behalf of folks like Douglas and Tolmie and their families, who were Indigenous. I’ll leave you to explain how all these details are mysteriously left out of the narrative or, of course, as ever, how they jive with it.

With what force?

Okay, that’s who we’re talking (the police) about but how many were they? Are we talking about a battalion? Like, 500 or 1,000 men in units of 25 or 50? And how many were deployed for this mass displacement? As far as I can tell,  “the police” at this time in Victoria totalled only 12 constables. You read that right, not 1,200 but twelve, one-two. And two of them were effectively administrators and not beat cops. This creates a whole set of logistic problems for the narrative. Obviously. Though no mention of logistics is ever spelled out, of course, at the very least it seems with such small numbers theq entire police force (a dozen) must have been employed moving hundreds of people. It's hard to imagine the job was done by just 12, but arguing that only four or eight did the job is silly and no source I can find offers anything else. Not only does this seem unlikely in itself but then, of course, this requires us to believe that at the same time the fledgling town was being overrun by many thousands of unruly transient miners administrators saw fit to leave the town with no law enforcement for weeks or an entire month or more. Alternatively, if you insist the African Rifles assisted, say, you have to believe that — while everyone here and across the company and empire were expressing concerns the town, island colony, all of British Columbia, and the whole of present-day Canada were surely going to get overrun and annexed by the US — officials sent all their police and some or all of their armed forces in one or more of the only ships around on a 700 nautical mile voyage to the far north. (Of course, this was also to no discernable benefit, which was said to be theft of local and/or northern lands and resources which smallpox did not result in…) Right.

How was it done?

In the 21st century, policing scenarios involving even mildly hostile groups (say, unarmed kids who transformed their protest into a riot) would see a police response at a 1:10 or 1:5 ratio and include a well-armed force in helmets, body armour, gloves, steel-toed boots, and shields, with horses, motorcycles, cars, and armoured vehicles, helicopter support and overwatch from sharpshooters, and each coordinated by electronic communications. None of that was even possible for the early police force in Victoria. Not only were there just a dozen guys for the task but by the time of the 1862 epidemic “the police” only carried batons and had no real equipment or resources other than their uniforms. As the VicPD website explains, their first horse-drawn wagon arrived in 1905, more than 40 years after the epidemic. All this should highlight that the use of the term “police” in this context can only fill readers with exactly all the wrong impressions and, as such, appears (perhaps only to me) totally inappropriate. But, let’s pretend all 12 constables went and rounded everyone up in the manner described. Weren’t these people, "the Haida", also sick and dying with smallpox? And weren’t they unwilling to leave? Would that require more or less manpower and resources? Seems to me like this would take a lot more men. Also, were the Haida all huddling under one roof? No. Turns out, at the time of this forced disbursal, mid-summer, "the Haida" were distributed across all of present-day Esquimalt, Victoria, Cadboro Bay and also way over on San Juan Island (20km across the water and itself with an area of 1,600 km²). Do you think journalists, authors, and educators intend, in every single instance, to leave out all the pertinent information? Or is that just by accident? How is it even possible to assert something like the story of Victoria expulsion and Haida genocide not explain how that took place and why or without offering even some of the relevant context?

Who and how many were “the Haida”? And was that all?

At the very minimum, the available information suggests the Haida residing in and around Victoria numbered 300-500. And we're told they had with them not less than 26 canoes. (You'll recall Perez noted between seven and 30 people in the Haida canoes that visited the Santiago.) It also might be noted that the Haida, renowned warriors, were also well-armed including having their own guns, commonly sold and traded to them by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Actually, if you go looking (as you must) you’ll discover that the Haida were not the only ones asked to disburse after months of ongoing epidemic. Also said to have been forcefully displaced with them (by 4 or 8 or maybe 12 police constables, all of whom may have been Indigenous) were folks from other northern nations, such as the Tlingit (a further 100-300 locally) and Tsimshian (another 500-1,000). All of those people were spread over a vast area, in town and in camps all over. Those people, we are told, were both known to be fatally infected and unwilling to leave the region. I’m now going to offer a truly radical, contrarian submission: all those people were operating under their own volition, were knowledgeable and skilled, knew what they were doing, could take care of themselves, and were also well-armed, too. The narrative seems to argue that every one of these people had no skills, tools, or resources, material or cognitive, and could only do what they were told. I don’t buy it. 

All of few?

Some tellings of what took place explain, “On June 11, 1862, the Police Commissioner and a group of policemen forced about 300 men, women, and children camped near Victoria to return to their northern homeland.” Do you see how greater specificity here only makes things worse? First, let’s suppose by “a group of policemen” they don’t mean a portion of the police force but all the city’s police; if not, we have a real problem, obviously. Second, notice that 300 would be a very significant number of people to try and move, especially if sick and/or unwilling. Third, if those forcibly displaced and returned to their homes were a few hundred and not a few thousand this would shatter the idea that there was a Native purge as it would mean only something like 10% or less of the First Nations in Victoria and its vicinity were moved. In fact, 300 may have only been 20% of the Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlingit living locally. Because it’s so corrupting of the narrative, maybe that explains why numbers are so rarely offered. Go read any related material you can find. There, do you get the impression the vast majority of these populations, like the Songhees, were not expelled by force or that there was a blanket Native purge or merely a total purge of the Haida?

Where did they go?

Haida Gwaii: known to be the fortress home to the most formidable naval power in all of North America (and long-since full of guns and even a cannon or two), a truly feared culture oriented around warmaking and slave-raiding, who terrorized populations as far south as California, and a place said, by the Haida, to have 20,000 residents at this time (which by many estimates would have outnumbered everyone else this side of the Rockies combined). That population could have easily repelled any number of men or ships with whatever firepower they had mustered. If you have any doubts, well-documented are many much smaller and less capable and equipped communities having done just so throughout the history of this region and all across the Pacific. When the Hawaiians had their way with Cook (and his 182 men aboard two ships, all sporting cannons, swivel guns, muskets, pistols, swords, axes, and daggers) they had themselves no firepower and only rocks and spears. With all their steel and guns and germs, like Cook and crews, you’ll recall Spanish ships, the Sonora and Santiago with a hundred men aboard, had no real option but to flee from a single village of a couple hundred Quinault. Or go read Maude’s Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Labour Trade in Polynesia, 1862-1864. (Note this is the same time as the BC smallpox epidemic.) Tiny remote islands throughout the Pacific, like Niue and Rapa Nui, with populations in the low thousands, had no trouble repelling large ships of Peruvian slave-raiders, who themselves had cannons and muskets and must have been anticipating violent resistance. But here, at this exact same time, the Haida were helpless over many days or weeks at sea (there’s no indication they were bound and gagged) and then also at home, too, where they were 20,000 strong, were unable to resist 12 cops? Even pretend there were an additional 1,000, undocumented and never stated anywhere, conscripted for this evil deed. With what additional navy or metaphysical superpowers? This is what the narrative requires but never explains.

The navy

The Esquimalt Naval Base did not yet exist, nor did the HBC or the Royal Navy have a force in the area. The merchant ships employed were large, slow, not easily maneuverable, and unable to transit shallow waters. As such they were highly vulnerable. They also required tremendous labour and supplies to deploy. (You’ll recall Chris’ one-ship, one-month voyage across the Atlantic, and others like it, were extravagant operations commissioned by monarchs.) Such ships and crew would also have been vastly outnumbered by 10 or 100 times as many people in many smaller, far more agile craft both in Victoria and all along the way during the long voyage to the north. Even if you pretend there were 100 or 1,000 police aboard (and not 12) and they took a whole fleet of ships, the math the narrative demands remains incoherent on several fronts.

What about the sick?

It is known that those who became sick with smallpox during the voyage home were not kept among the returning population (exactly as you would if your aim was to use them as a vector for disease transmission at your destination), nor were they shot and tossed into the sea (which would make sense if “the police”, like Douglas, above the law as asserted, were just trying to dispose of a “problem”); instead, time was made to take individuals ashore where they were left with supplies of food, blankets, and a gun, giving them a chance to recover (and gain life-long immunity) or to pass away without infecting everyone in their company. How does that work with the narrative? Well, like everything else, it doesn’t.

How was smallpox transmitted?

Transmission of smallpox occurs by direct face-to-face contact through inhalation of airborne virus in the form of large droplets or imperceptible aerosols expressed from the oral, nasal, or pharyngeal mucosa of an infected person. Just like COVID. Also like COVID, outdoor transmission is limited due to dilution but also with wind and sunlight neutralizing the virus. Unlike COVID, there is no asymptomatic transmission phase for smallpox. If someone was sick and able to transmit they wore that fact all over their skin. Too, if you go looking, continued research throughout the 20th century, while the virus still existed, demonstrated that, though theoretically possible, fomites (clothes, bedding, utensils, and furniture) were very unlikely to be a source of smallpox transmission. (Yes, even if people at the time and today insist otherwise and wished it were so.)

What was the smallpox fatality rate?

All the MDs, medical journals, and public health-related sites I can find insist that smallpox had a case fatality rate of either 1% and below or 30% and below, depending on the type. At that time of this epidemic, there were no diagnostic tools to establish which variety was present but, presuming it was the more virulent Variola major, that virus alone (as is the claim) is unlikely to have killed, as variously asserted, 50%, 66%, 80%, 95%, or 99.9% of any population. Yes, there are many other ways a population could have rapidly declined by 90% at this time but none of those are ever suggested — only this one virus, in this one instance, and over a period of weeks. Worse than that, we all know the fatality rate for a whole population would have been far lower than 30% if the virus hit less than 100% of that population, if folks were relatively healthy, and where any population had prior exposure. Given that everyone on the coast for 2,000 km had been exposed to smallpox many times in the prior century and likely in centuries prior to that, it’s hard to see how smallpox wasn’t endemic here by the 1860s and, as in other such locations, like Sweden in the 1700s, thus had an actual fatality rate of closer to 10-20%.

Again, please reject nearly all these points on whatever grounds you like. The little you are left with will remain perfectly confounding of most publications and teachings on this subject.

Of course, I have no idea what did or did not take place and can only review the available resources; but, like you, I can easily come up with all kinds of descriptions and explanations of this situation without requiring the determined unknowing of absolutely everything we can be sure of (the aforementioned all-pervasive erasure of all of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, medicine, biology, physics that seems to happen so gleefully in so many disciplines…) Someone better situated and smarter than me — which is everyone — should try formulating a history and causal narrative that is at least plausible.

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