British Columbia’s American Invasion

In British Columbia, today is a statutory holiday called BC Day, previously known as a civic holiday.  Up until now, it did not have any particular importance to me other than to celebrate British Columbia, the province where I now live.  But that changed for me a few days ago when I read the following article.

From Maclean’s — There was an American invasion, a war that claimed perhaps hundreds of lives, and a shaky truce that eventually invited the breadth of Canada to extend from Atlantic to Pacific. That should count for some special place in Canada’s collective memory, you might think.  …

The first Monday in August is British Columbia Day, a holiday that recalls the Westminster Parliament’s proclamation of the Crown Colony of British Columbia on August 2, 1858. The proclamation itself was a direct response to the uproar set off by the discovery of immense gold deposits in the Fraser Canyon, a frenzy that led to that summer’s invasion by at least 30,000 American miners who immediately organized themselves into several heavily-armed militias to make war on the Fraser Canyon’s Indigenous people. 

Another difficulty is that the Fraser Canyon War doesn’t align with the conventional telling of Canadian history as an east-to-west epic. British Columbia’s story runs on a north-south axis, with a forward view out on the Pacific rather than a backward view across the Atlantic. On the Pacific coast, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trade in tierces and hogsheads of salmon had always been far and away more voluminous and profitable than trade in furs. A third of the HBC’s workers on the Pacific side of the Rockies were Hawaiians. The handful of treaties concluded on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s took no Canadian treaty as a model, but instead replicated the Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and New Zealand’s Maoris.

The first significant wave of settlers to arrive on the Pacific coast north of the 49th parallel did not come from the East. They were the vanguard of a northward-bound exodus of “King George men” from the HBC settlements on the Columbia River, in what is now the state of Oregon. Dispossessed by American interests under the terms of the Anglo-American Oregon Treaty of 1846, and led by the HBC veteran James Douglas, they were mainly Indigenous people, Orkney Islanders, Hawaiians, Metis and Scots. They were welcomed on Vancouver Island by the Saanich and Songhees tribes among whom they first settled. In London, Douglas was appointed Vancouver Island’s colonial governor.

Meanwhile, backed by the U.S. Army, American miners poured into the old Oregon territory that Douglas and his people had been forced to vacate, and the result was carnage. There was the Cayuse War, the Nisqually War, the Yakima War and the Klamath and Salmon River War. By the early months of 1858, word had spread from California to New York that the Fraser and Thompson canyons were glistening with gold, and the miners began pouring north into what was then the HBC district of New Caledonia, the unceded territories of several confident, populous indigenous tribes.

The fighting in the Fraser Canyon was merciless. The miners burned villages and shot women and children. The Nlaka’pamux fought back, sending headless corpses down the river. As the HBC’s senior officer on the Pacific, and Vancouver Island’s colonial governor, Douglas was the British Crown’s senior figure in the conflict, and he refused American entreaties to take their side against the tribes. Instead, he assured the Indigenous leadership that the Crown would take pains to defend their rights as British subjects.

I hope you will continue reading about this interesting piece of history.

When I read this article, my first thought was of Trump getting his history wrong about the burning of the White House.  He blamed it on Canada in 1812.  First of all, it was Britain that did the burning as Canada was not yet established.  Second, it was in 1814 during the War of 1812, not 1812.  Third, although he did not mention this (why tell the truth?), the burning was in retaliation for the American sacking of York (modern Toronto).  I suppose Ottawa can thank the US for its position as the capital of Canada.  Then known as Bytown, the Fathers of Confederation felt the capital should be away from the threat of American incursions across the border so they moved it from Kingston, Ontario on the St Lawrence River to Bytown.  But didn’t Trump get his knickers in a twist!  So, Trump’s business dealings and little tantrums with PM Justin Trudeau, nor indeed the American sacking of York in 1812, are not the first American invasions of what we now know as Canada.

Another, I think interesting point about the west coast of Canada and the US, is that there has been talk in the past about BC, Washington, Oregon and California becoming one nation separate from the US and Canada ostensibly to be called Cascadia.  Although the article does not mention this, it does talk about the migration of people’s from California and Oregon because of the racist laws that were prevailing in the 1800’s.  I say migration, but there was a clear invitation from Douglas to come to what is now BC.

I am quite proud of this part of our history now I know about it.  For me, my values reflect Douglas’ values, as do Canada’s.  What I do not like is that Douglas’ vision faded and BC has had since Douglas and continues to have racially charged problems.  I hope that BC and Canada can be the nation Douglas envisioned, a land where all are equal.  My community is racially diverse with Caucasians, Persians, East Asians, Blacks (not African Americans because they are not American in any way), Arabs, Chinese and Koreans — and those are just the people in my church community.  The wider community is even more diverse and includes Indigenous peoples among others.

Posted to Care2 HERE.