Preamble: Sensing the Past

For as long as I can remember, I have viewed British Columbia as a kind of promised land. Growing up in northwest Minnesota a few miles south of the Canadian border, I would, while waiting in the car for the school bus to arrive a half mile from my parents’ farm, listen to the weather forecast on Winnipeg radio, interspersed with my father once again musing on why, in emigrating from Sweden as a young man, he had not continued farther west to Saskatchewan or, better yet, to British Columbia. What deterred him, I came to realize, were the charms of my mother, who he had wooed during her holidays from teaching school, spent on her family’s farm, half a mile from where my father had taken up land. It would be many years later, in a twist of fate, that my father had the opportunity to live out his dream of spending time in British Columbia after my husband accepted an academic position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where I later also taught.

My father’s dream has never left me. When our children were young, I conceived the idea of a popular history of British Columbia to appeal to newcomer families like our own, only to be summarily informed, on approaching a local historian for advice, that it was best for me as an outsider not to meddle in the history of British Columbians. Despite subsequently doing so time and again, I only recently came to realize the full extent to which I had, in my writing, possibly due to that earlier admonition as to whose history it was, ignored the province’s beginnings as a non-Indigenous place. Hence, I am only now so turning my attention.

To understand the critical quarter of a century between 1846, when Great Britain acquired the land base that would become today’s British Columbia, and 1871, when that land base joined a newly formed Canadian Confederation, I not only probed known and recorded happenings but also peered beneath the surface of events. It was my good fortune to do so just as the primary source closest to the ground—namely, the private correspondence exchanged between the Colonial Office in London, which had charge of British colonies around the world (including what would become British Columbia) and those overseeing them on site—became accessible online thanks to University of Victoria historian James Hendrickson.

Reading the Colonial Office correspondence turned my attention to the formative role played by a gold rush that began on the British Columbia mainland in 1858—a time when the future Canadian province’s non-Indigenous population was almost wholly linked to a trade in animal pelts. I quickly became aware that among the reasons British Columbia became a Canadian province—rather than an American state or states, despite its proximity to an expansive United States—none was more important from the top down than the leadership of long-time fur trader James Douglas on site and of the Colonial Office in faraway London. While the gold rush as such mattered to the course of events, so did miners sticking around rather than moving on once gold lost its lustre, due very possibly to their having partnered with local Indigenous women at a time when non-Indigenous women were a rarity. Just as James Douglas and the Colonial Office affected the course of events from the top down, such unions were fundamental in the years during which the future of British Columbia hung in the balance.

Those of us who peer beneath the surface of events have our own instances of happenchance. One of my most consequential originated with the head of the Anglican Archives at the University of British Columbia having some years earlier generously offered me, while I was researching another topic, a transcribed copy of the private journal kept by George Hills, founding bishop of the Church of England in British Columbia, from the time of his arrival in the colony in 1860. There, Hills jotted down on an almost daily basis what mattered to him in the everyday, giving us a perspective from the bottom up that might otherwise have been lost from view.

Reading through the journal, my search for understanding took on a life of its own. As one example among the many that intrigued me, on May 20, 1862, Bishop Hills described a recent event in the small gold rush town of Douglas, now Port Douglas:

My response to this entry might have gone no further except for a chance encounter some years earlier. While researching another topic, I was introduced to a descendant of the child born to Humphreys and Lucy who, on learning of my interest in British Columbia’s history, and believing the time had come to do so, shared with me her family’s version of the story, which I included in Invisible Generations: Living between Indigenous and White in the Fraser Valley, published in 2019.²

Such occurrences are not ordinary but, on the other hand, not that unusual. As historians we learn from each other’s stories, from what is written down, from what we and others share, and from the happenchance in the everyday of our lives.³ We each in our own way come to sense the past, as I have had the good fortune to do thanks to both the many people who have shared stories with me and the array of fine historians who have gone before me.

Sensing the past

Our living in the present day, with all its twists and turns, does not preclude us also sensing the past. Doing so, I have come to understand to my satisfaction how it was that British Columbia, following a quarter of a century in the balance, was saved for Canada as opposed to falling into eager American hands.

The sequence of events began on June 15, 1846, when Great Britain and the United States divided between them the huge mass of the Pacific Northwest extending from the boundaries of California north to Russian America, now Alaska, and from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, which had been up to then unclaimed by any other non-Indigenous nation. Dividing the region along the forty-ninth parallel of latitude, with a jog south around Vancouver Island, the United States got the southern half and Britain the northern half, which, a quarter of a century later in 1871, would become today’s Canadian province of British Columbia.

The intervening years had several stages. In 1849 the London-based Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which had control of the fur trade, moved its headquarters from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, now in American territory, north to Vancouver Island, which was in the same year declared a British colony, to be governed from 1851 to 1864 by long-time HBC employee James Douglas.

The adjacent mainland was, for its part, largely left to its own devices until 1858, when a gold rush in the pattern of California a decade earlier transformed the territory into a destination for men from around the world hoping to get rich quick and be on their way. Named British Columbia by Queen Victoria, the mainland was, like its Vancouver Island counterpart, put under the charge of James Douglas.

Six years later, in 1864, the Colonial Office dismissed Douglas from his governorships, replacing him with two appointees, one for each colony. Two years after that, the two colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia were, for administrative efficiency, joined into a single colony named British Columbia, which was in 1871 made a province of the recently formed Dominion of Canada. So it remains to the present day.

A remarkable quarter of a century

Reflecting on this sequence of events, I have many times asked myself how such a fundamental outcome of these years during which British Columbia hung in the balance could have occurred in such a short period of time. It is not as if the province is tiny in size and easily bandied about. At 944,735 square kilometres (364,764 square miles), British Columbia is almost four times the size of its one-time mother country of Great Britain (242,495 square kilometres or 93,628 square miles).

The rapidity of the metamorphosis is unusual. Whereas most political entities around the world have emerged relatively slowly, it took British Columbia just a quarter of a century, 1846 to 1871, to be transformed from the almost wholly Indigenous place it had been since time immemorial into a province of a newly formed Canada.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in British Columbia and Canada know the end of the story. We know that British Columbia did become a Canadian province, but we are mostly unaware, as I long had been, of precisely who was responsible for that outcome and how it was accomplished. Here I seek to explain to my own satisfaction, and I hope to that of others, what seems to be on the surface an implausible, impossibly rapid sequence of events.

Two complementary approaches

A distinct physical entity since 1846, British Columbia became a Canadian province twenty-five years later, in 1871, because people like you and me, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, made it so.

Reading and reflecting on the writing of others, I have come to realize more than ever that viewing the past from the top down, as has been most often the case, provides a perspective that is often quite different from what is seen from the bottom up, by peering beneath the surface of events as they occur. These two complementary approaches inform British Columbia in the Balance.

In going about the task, I returned time and again to accounts written by insiders. For a political and cultural perspective, I read and reread, among other sources, the published reminiscences of John Sebastian Helmcken, an English medical doctor who arrived in Victoria from England in 1850, and whose insights are heightened by his becoming James Douglas’s son-in-law.⁴ For a religious and cultural perspective, I had fortuitously shared with me, as noted above, the daily journal of George Hills, who came from England a decade later as the founding bishop of the Church of England on both Vancouver Island and the mainland.

Peering at the past from the top down, my attention almost inevitably turned to colonial fur trader and politician James Douglas, about whom I had written in snatches over the years but had never taken as seriously as I might have or probably should have. Employed across the Pacific Northwest by the Hudson’s Bay Company and then as governor of the British colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia in 1851–64 and 1858–64, respectively, James Douglas was at the centre of events, but at whose behest?

I needed to know more and had the good fortune to seek this information at the time James Douglas’s correspondence with the Colonial Office in London, responsible for British colonies around the world, became accessible online, thanks, as noted above, to the initiative of long-time University of Victoria history professor James Hendrickson and his successor, John Lutz. Reading through the voluminous transcribed correspondence, I came to see that had it not been for Douglas and the Colonial Office acting in tandem and separately, British Columbia would almost certainly not have become a Canadian province, but rather passed into the hands of the United States.

What also soon became clear to me was that the Colonial Office’s management of its myriad possessions around the world was a critical complement to the actions of Douglas on site at the time British Columbia hung in the balance. The decisions those in charge made in past time affected not only everyday life but also a colony’s long-term direction. Each time a Colonial Office official—uniformly highly educated, most likely in an elite private school followed by a private university—read a letter arrived from some faraway colony, he assessed its content in a note known as a “minute,” intended to be shared with the others who similarly read the letter on its way to a composite response by their superior. Thus was British Columbia crafted.

Turning to gold miners

The two remote British colonies that would become British Columbia were not alike in their transformations from Indigenous to non-Indigenous places. While Vancouver Island adopted the patina of a British possession early on, the sprawling mainland north of the forty-ninth parallel remained more an Indigenous place until gold finds from 1858 onward enticed there, as noted earlier, thousands of men from around the world intent on bettering themselves. Given that they almost always arrived on their own, intending to get rich quick and be on their way, and that white women were few and far between, it was almost always with an Indigenous woman that a man who tarried long enough to do so partnered.

By their everyday actions, gold miners and Indigenous women tipped the balance from the bottom up, even as James Douglas and the Colonial Office were doing so from the top down in the face of American determination to acquire the remaining hunk of the North American west coast that was not yet theirs. The two approaches, the one top down and the other bottom up, are interwoven here, just as they were during the quarter century from 1846 to 1871 that was British Columbia in the making.

Surfacing the past thanks to many others

Surfacing the past, as I do here, is possible due only to those who have gone before me. More than any other source, my perceptions, understandings, and writing are grounded in family stories generously shared with me or otherwise available. To the many descendants and others doing so, I am enormously grateful. The Colonial Office records that recently became publicly accessible validate these family stories.

We learn from each other, and I thank everyone from students to friends to fellow historians to interested others whose insights and queries have over the course of many years enriched my understanding of British Columbia. The eminent historian Margaret Ormsby early on privately validated to me the formative role played by Indigenous women and their families by non-Indigenous men, both in her principal area of research, the Okanagan Valley, and across the province for which I am especially grateful. Bruce Watson’s research and writing on early British Columbia has been fundamental to my thinking, as have conversations over many years with my husband, Roderick, and children, Rod and Emily. Harbour Publishing and Audrey McClellan anchored British Columbia in the Balance in important ways as it was being readied for press. Thanks also to Anna Comfort O’Keeffe, Luke Inglis, Rebecca MacKenney, Lynn Rafferty, Caroline Skelton, Carleton Wilson, and Coralie Worsley at Harbour for their assistance. I am especially grateful to the many historians who have painstakingly contributed biographies to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, now online and generally accessible to readers.

1 May 20, 1862, entry in “The Journal of George Hills,” 50, typescript in Anglican Church, Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia, Archives.

2 Jean Barman, Invisible Generations: Living between Indigenous and White in the Fraser Valley (Halfmoon Bay, BC: Caitlin Press, 2019). The Humphreys story is interwoven on pages 56–61, 74–79, and 101–5.

3 Two excellent examples of what was written down are Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of British Columbia (San Francisco: History Company, 1887), and Margaret Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958).

4 Dorothy Blakey Smith, ed., The Reminiscences of Doctor John Sebastian Helmcken (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1975).