THIS ONE SETTLEMENT
- 4 days ago
- 26 min read
Eight centuries after the first known European settlement in present-day Canada, well over 200 years after the first permanent French settlement on the continent, more than 150 years after the first Hudson's Bay Company construction, 80 years after the first Eurasian mapping and settlements in the northwest coast, and 50 years after the first direct traders of provisions and illnesses to and from Asia, Africa, and Europe, the premier fur-trading fort was built in the lands what would become known as British Columbia. The fort, named as 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, upon whom the fort relied for pelts and food and to whom it typically traded firearms, steel tools, and blankets. To avoid flooding, the fort was relocated a few kilometres upstream in 1839. 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 became prominent when, in 1843, the land Victoria now sits on was selected as a site of the new Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters for all the territory west of the Rockies.
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. The HBC commonly employed Hawaiians, those impressively skilled navigators and sailors, all up and down the Pacific coast and they may have been involved here in the establishment of the fort. I like to think so. Regardless, those folks under HBC employ didn’t do all or even most of the work. They didn’t even procure the materials. Nearly all of the lumber and labour was volunteered by the locals, the Songhees, several hundred of them it is said. Some modern commentators propose that the community committed the resources and labour to sincerely establish through sweat equity their rightful co-ownership of this new structure and its future operations. Many also note how, just as with all their other trading posts and forts, the locals were integral to HBC operations, the whole of the fur trade, as well as the villages and economies that would spring up around this and other sites. 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." 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.
Not long ago I was deep in the Rockies in the amazing Field, BC. 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 town was named Field for no other reason than an attempt to lure investment from Cyrus West Field, the American businessman and investor involved in the construction of 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 thing.
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. Though the buildings are all gone, the original mooring rings may still be found, painted in white, down by the water. Nearby the mooring rings, a marker explains that the primary export destinations for natural products acquired in this part of the world were not Asia or Europe as you might suspect but the US, specifically Alaska, California, and Hawaii.
On the note of who was here and what they were up to, some mention has to be made of this character James Douglas. He was born in Guyana to a mother of Barbadian-Creole ancestry and a father from Scotland. Of course, this means in modern thinking and parlance, as in the gross racial theory of old, Douglas’ ancestry made him Black. 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 race-based thinking, motivations, and biases 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, Douglas joined a fur trading operation and quickly climbed the ranks. Eventually he was married to Amelia Connoly, whose mother was Cree and whose father, also an HBC Chief Factor, was of Irish descent but born in Quebec. I’m not going to walk you through Scottish and Irish history and their relations with the English, but I am 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 and national heritage from the Crown and the Empire as is conceivable, almost laughably 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 the British Crown, on this side of the Rockies.
In that 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 kilometres of land on Vancouver Island, around modern-day Victoria, Nanaimo, and Port Hardy. 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 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.
Whatever was agreed to, Fort Victoria was established as the official seat of government in 1849 when the colony of Vancouver Island was formally inaugurated. As Douglas went about attempting to procure land for future farms and housing, his surveyors were instructed to determine and preserve all the locals’ wishes with regard to location and size of reserves of land not to be used by settlers, and to include all “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, in addition to whatever land and resources communities required, any individuals also remained free to acquire any other land they wished at any time “on precisely the same terms and considerations in all respects, as other classes of Her Majesty’s subjects.” Which, obviously, is exactly why past and present wishes to deviate from what was agreed to is so offensive — doubly so when you consider how reliant this impoverished minority of foreigners, and everything that would come, was upon a willing partnership with locals.
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. And that was the overwhelming majority of newcomers in the region. There were virtually no non-Indigenous on the rest of Vancouver Island and this island’s population of outsiders exceeded all of those on the mainland in these parts. 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 that the pre-contact population was reduced by alien illness to maybe as little as 100,000.
On the note of population, you might think, as I mistakenly did, that the colonists or corporate or imperial authorities commissioning and endorsing the settlement were trying to rapidly infuse the whole region with settlers in these earlier years. Nope. Turns out the part of the world was so remote that it didn’t even achieve the status and population of the early settlements of New France. The sources I've found all seem to agree HBC and the British Empire were happy to maintain a monopoly on trade and with that the smallest, most efficient operation possible, just as always done elsewhere on the continent. For example, they took some effort to suppress news of gold being found on Haida Gwaii in 1850, not wanting newcomers to upset their fur trade monopoly or drive up costs by driving thousands of Americans to the area. Not only did folks 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 over lowly miners, but locals were also actively unwelcoming to those who managed to learn of the opportunity to profit and arrived in Victoria seeking passage north. Further, James Douglas officially announced: there would be civil and criminal punishments for unauthorized mineral extraction and or any abuses, no land available for miners to occupy, and that all Indigenous rights to resources, land, and liberty would be upheld. Still people came. But the locals on Haida Gwaii expelled all miners and shut down the goldrush within two years of its announcement.
It seems worth asking if these realities, of who was here and what they were actually up to, leave any doubt that if the area was deemed critical to the empire or just terribly rich in unique or essential resources, and their aim was thusly to colonize and control the entire area, the company or empire would have landed more than a single boatload of its own people here at any point in the previous centuries? How does the fact that this didn’t happen comport with what you were told or believed took place? For me, this is so far removed from my formal education and what I understand to be the common narrative.
Relatedly, and thinking about authority, communication, and remoteness: there’s a great anecdote I came across from this time giving a good sense for how different the communication environment was then and just how remote this land was. Even at this late date (almost a decade after the settlement’s founding, with ships arriving in the area from all over, and even with trains and the telegraph having been popular and spreading everywhere like metal ivy across whole continents for some time), 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...
Despite their being deterred, just a few years later, in 1858, gold was found in the Fraser River. And this time the deplorable miners simply could not be held back. Victoria, population still fewer than 1,000, quickly became a 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 goldfields, would surely result in US annexation of this low- and sparsely-populated, non-sovereign territory.
As such, a 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 region appeared on various maps. Many Americans called the territory Oregon or Columbia District while elsewhere it is named North West Georgia. George Vancouver labelled the land New Hanover. Simon Frasier, who said the central plateau of the province reminded him of his mother’s descriptions of the Scottish Highlands, called the place New Caledonia. Seeking to bring British law to a region undergoing a gold rush and rapid population growth, the Queen named the colony British Columbia to drive their claim of possession home. (Some sources suggest the name was intended to distinguish the area from the French colony, Columbia, in the South Pacific. Others point out that it was only called this to separate the American district of Columbia, named such for being all the territory drained by the Columbia River, who in turn was named after the American ship, Columbia Rediviva, itself named after a certain Genoan, that entered that river in 1792…)
Two asides:
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…
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:
* Provincy McProvince Face. Obviously, you have to give the people what they want…
* 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”
* New Genoese Australya
Moving on.
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, Shadow & Light, 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 o fthe 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. Gibbs, now a British citizen and with the end of the Civil War and ratification of the 13th Amendment officially ending slavery, 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 an autobiography the following year, titled 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 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 become “the largest city west of Chicago” and north of San Francisco, with a peak population reaching 8,000. 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 was comprised of roughly 3,000-4,000 Indigenous, around 2,900 “white” and 1,600 Chinese settlers, as well as significant numbers of Black, Hawaiian, Greek, Jewish, and other ethnic groups.
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 was there a 1781 epidemic, 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, likely as soon as the cases were apparent, 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 conflagrating. 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 (or, as described, variolated). In the same edition, the public is informed that the Assembly considered the Governor's proposal but Dr. Helmcken and others felt Douglas was being alarmist and that his hospital would be 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
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 source of genocide against the whole Indigenous population or, in some tellings, merely individual communities 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." Tom Swanky agrees, though with different numbers, of course. He claims there were 18,000 direct smallpox deaths on Haida Gwaii alone, which meant a case fatality rate of 90%. 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.
An article in MacLean’s Magazine, titled “How a smallpox epidemic forged modern British Columbia,” agrees, noting that at least 30,000 Indigenous people died from smallpox during this epidemic, representing a decline of 60% of that population. They also highlighting a Victoria-based anthropology PhD and artist, Marianne Nicholson, from the Dzawada’enuxw Nation of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, who 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. They tell us the population of Nicholson’s nation dropped from 10,000 to 1,500, a decline from which it has never recovered.
Given this, what do you understand the modern narrative to be? Roughly what I was taught and always believed was 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 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 stove). And they (non-native travellers and settlers) were able to pull off their intended genocide because they had privileged, intimate knowledge of the virus and how to prevent it or at least limit its spread, whereas the Haida were not only ignorant of the illness but systematically denied the knowledge and tools to avoid or treat it. More, 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. And, as a result, this one-time effort was extraordinarily successful and yielded a mortality rate of between 80% and 99% among an immunologically naive population on Haida Gwaii.
I was always basically onboard with most of that. Then I started seeking out some specifics. Now I'm 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 assessment is the abundance of freely available, well-understood and accepted, and truly uncontroversial details — all of which must be systematically ignored to take this narrative on. 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 you cannot look up the history of Victoria without encountering this particular epidemic and its repercussions, which is how I arrived at this place.
To give you a sense of how poorly the narrative makes meaningful contact with reality, you may freely discard any 10 or even 15 of the following 19 points and you still have a whole set of very significant problems if you wish to sustain the running narrative. I’m convinced the popular version of events demands you reject:
The state of medicine, public health, and sanitation (anywhere on Earth) at that time, especially the lack of awareness of germ theory, bacteria or viruses or how those arise, persist, and transmit
That long after the smallpox preventatives were developed (variolation in 1721 and then Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine in 1796), widespread usage was limited even in Europe. Even London, England, saw major smallpox outbreaks killing many thousands a century later in the 1830s through the 1890s. And even after inoculation against smallpox was made compulsory by law, outbreaks continued to wipe out the English in England — because they didn’t know about viruses or how they work
The population’s previous exposure not less than five major smallpox epidemics and likely many smaller outbreaks in every generation across the previous century, in the 1770s and ‘80s, in 1801-03, 1836-38, and 1852-53 — exposure to any one of which would have conferred either death or life-long immunity
The complete awareness and proactive response of other Indigenous communities, such as the Songhees, who sought both prophylaxis and self-quarantine and were, as a result, virtually unimpacted
The fact that the Hudson’s Bay Company doctor at Victoria, Dr Helmckin, was sent out explicitly to vaccinate First Nations
The fact of there being precedent for vaccinating the local Indigenous populations at other HBC forts in the area, as with Dr Tolmie, as well as in Alaska by the Russians, and all around North America during this and previous outbreaks of illness
The medical aid and nursing care explicitly given to the ill in Victoria and within the Indigenous encampments in the immediate area and far beyond by doctors and priests alike
That the outbreak was said to be an elaborate conspiracy; yet suspicion that the epidemic threatened Native rights and lives was widely rumoured and even published in the paper, along with being well-known and shared among local First Nations. This suspicion cause the locals to send a delegation to meet with Douglas in person for his assurance their lives and rights would be preserved — which they are said to have been satisfied with
That the local paper, which was certainly full of stupid and terrible things in the 1800s, also continually expressed concerns such as “the disease, we fear, will make sad havoc among the Indian population”, which, along with the printing of conspiracy theories about a Native purge, pleading with everyone for better cleanliness, and imploring folks to vaccinate and quarantine, doesn’t suggest the broader population (few of whom were British or European) were eagerly trying to exterminate the Haida or any other population
Most of the current popular and publicly available recountings of the epidemic make use of heavily cherry-picked reporting from one extremely limited, single-column daily paper that was founded and edited by a crackpot who was trying to get himself in power and continually expressed his fervent opposition to James Douglas and the HBC from its very first edition onward
That the local police are said to have been the sole evil, racist force doing the dirty work of displacing the Haida and delivering the infected home to kill the population there. Up until this point law enforcement in Victoria had been a Métis militia, the Victoria Voltigeurs (composed of Hawaiians, Iroquois, Métis, and French Canadians). When the first police force was commissioned, Douglas recruited an all-Jamaican unit from the US. (They had to be relieved of duty within only a few months due to the transient miners from the US, the bulk of the folks causing problems, refusing to take orders from them. Of course the US Civil War had just kicked off and slavery was still going strong down there…) Those guys were replaced by a dozen men, of unstated background, most likely from the earlier militia; but those fellows only carried batons and lacked even a horse-drawn wagon (the first of which arrived in 1905.) Beyond them was the local military unit, called the Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps, also known as the “African Rifles” on account of all of them being Black. So this was the practice and precedent in Victoria and who the Hudson’s Bay Company and James Douglas were handing guns to and entrusting with keeping the peace in town, defending the trade monopoly, and protecting the entire regional colony. None of this suggests a broad institutional xenophobia nor a narrow local bigotry against Indigenous people (or non-Europeans); though it could, in fact, imply a strong institutional bias in their favour
“The police,” who at this time totalled 12 constables, are said to have been the ones who forcefully displaced the Haida back to Haida Gwaii using the only ships in the area. As such, the narrative requires us to believe Douglas left the town with no law enforcement or defences for an entire month or more while it was being inundated by tens of thousands of foreign transient miners and even the Queen expressing concern of the area, island, all of British Columbia, and continent being overrun and annexed by the US. And, no, the Royal Navy didn’t show up in their absence
That the Haida, those renowned warriors, at Victoria numbered 300-500 and had with them not less than 26 canoes. They were also well-armed including having their own guns
That the Haida were not the only ones asked to disburse but with them were folks from other northern nations, such as the Tlingit (a further 100-300) and Tsimshian (another 500-1,000). All of whom were armed, competent, and knew what they were doing
21st century policing scenarios involving hostile groups, an angry protest-turned-riot with unarmed folks, say, would see cops well-armed and with body armour and shields, horses and vehicles, deployed at a ratio of 1:10 or maybe 1:5. None of that was even possible for “the police” in Victoria at this time. Too, the Haida (like the Tlingit and Tsimshian) were armed and, so we’re told, were also unwilling to leave. And yet not only is there no account I can find of anyone being shot but a mere dozen men with guns (or even 200 who were also not wanting to interact with folks with smallpox) would not have been able to move an armed and unwilling party of hundreds or thousands — who were by this time said to have dispersed across Esquimalt, Victoria, Cadboro Bay, as well as way over on San Juan Island
Haida Gwaii — known to be the fortress home, with cannons and guns, to the most formidable naval power in North America, a feared culture oriented around warmaking and slave-raiding, that was said, by the Haida, to have 20,000 residents (which by most estimates would have outnumbered everyone this side of the Rockies combined) — would have easily repelled any number of men or ships with whatever firepower could have mustered. Well-documented are much smaller and less capable and equipped communities having done so throughout the history of this region and all across the Pacific at this time and for centuries prior. (Go look into the Rapa Nui repelling slave raiders from 1815 through 1825; consider Cook and his 200 men in two ships, with 24 cannons, several swivel-mounted guns, and full of muskets, pistols, and cutlasses, failing to have their way with Hawaiians, who were largely armed with rocks; or recall how several hundred Quinault easily turned away Pérez and Bodega in the Santiago and Sonora at present-day Washington…)
That 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 vast resources of men and supplies. (You’ll recall the one-ship one-month voyage across the Atlantic by Columbus and others were commissioned by monarchs commanding empires.) 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
That it's 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, nor were they shot and tossed into the sea, which would make sense if the police were just trying to kill them off. No, 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 all of the rest of the other passengers and crew
All the MDs, medical journals, and public health-related sites I can find insist that smallpox in this place at this time had a case fatality rate between 1% and 30% depending on the type. There were no diagnostic tools to establish which variety was present then but, presuming it was the more virulent Variola major, that virus alone (as is the claim) could not have killed 50%, 80%, 95%, or 99.9% of any population. And, of course, it would have killed far fewer than 30% if folks were relatively healthy and anyone among them had prior exposure
Of course, I have no idea what did or did not take place and can only review the resources made available. But I can easily come up with all kinds of descriptions and explanations of this situation, or of anything in the past — without requiring the determined unknowing of absolutely everything we can be sure of (the aforementioned and all-pervasive erasure of all of history, anthropology, sociology, psychology, medicine, biology, physics…) Someone better situated and smarter than me (which is everyone) should give this a try...
BEYOND THE EPIDEMIC
Some people survived 1862. Those folks continued on doing what they'd been doing. The city's political function as the capital of the region remained from its inception: first as the capital of the colony of Vancouver Island, then that of the amalgamated colony of British Columbia (1866), and eventually as provincial capital (1871). When the first municipal census was conducted for Victoria in 1871, though having just seen a massive influx of outsiders, the population was recorded at just 3,630. (For scale, that’s about half the seating capacity at the current local hockey arena or the total passengers and crew of one just modern cruise ship.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY - THIS ONE SETTLEMENT
University of Victoria, 2010 - The Fort Victoria Journal - 1846-1850
University of Victoria, 2020 - Colonial Despatches: The colonial despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871
Belshaw, 2009 - Becoming British Columbia: A Population History
Mackie, 1997 - Trading Beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793–1843
Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 2003 - William Fraser Tolmie
University of Victoria Library, 2012 - Chronology of Victoria's Chinatown
Maclean’s Magazine, 2020 - Human remains found on Vancouver Island have opened a door into a lost world
Capital Daily, 2020 - The forgotten graveyards under Victoria
Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 2025 - James Douglas
University of Victoria, 2024 - Vancouver Island (Douglas) Treaties
Journal of the Haida Nation, 2009 - Strange New Sickness
Digital Museums Canada, 2020 - British Columbia’s Black Pioneers: Their Industry and Character Influenced the Vision of Canada
The British Colonist Newspaper, 2008 - Digitized publications 1858-1980
Boyd, 1999 - The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence
Swanky, 2023 - The smallpox war against the Haida
BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly, 2024 - Review: The Smallpox War Against the Haida
MacLean’s Magazine, 2017 - How a smallpox epidemic forged modern British Columbia
Haida Gwaii Observer, 2017 - Haida raiders to open Nations at War TV series
https://www.haidagwaiiobserver.com/local-news/haida-raiders-to-open-nations-at-war-tv-series-6334138
Oregon Encyclopedia, 2025 - Latinos in Oregon
Oxford University Press, 2009 - Eras in Epidemiology: The Evolution of Ideas
HistoryLink, 2003 - Smallpox Epidemic of 1862 among Northwest Coast and Puget Sound Indians
Knowledge Network, 2020 - British Columbia: An Untold History - The Cariboo Gold Rush
Knowledge Network, 2020 - British Columbia: An Untold History - The 1862 Smallpox Epidemic
Peregrine Pulp, 2024 - Diamond’s in the rough
The Global Handwashing Partnership, 2017 - About Handwashing
Frontiers in Public Health, 2022 - The little-known history of cleanliness and the forgotten pioneers of handwashing
Internet Archive, 2009 - Nightingale, 1860; Notes on nursing: What it is, and what it is not
The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2014 - British Columbia and Confederation
Canadian Geographic, 2016 - First map of Canada’s West
Metis in BC, 2025 - Hidden Métis Histories in Victoria
B.C. Historical Quarterly, 1956 - The Victoria Voltigeurs
Victoria Police Department, 2023 - History
The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2022 - Victoria Pioneer Rifle Corps
Cornwallis, 1858 - The new El Dorado; or British Columbia
The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2010 - Love of the Cosmos
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