Victoria Day, an expeditionary force.
A personal irredentism.
I’m supposed to be off work, en vacance, out of station, on holiday, and so I am. I do hope to be back in the next few days with a newsletter of the usual backstory and inside-story sort, but for the moment I’m on the road with my perfect and magnificent daughter Zoe.
Woke up this morning to rain and low clouds in the lovely town of Port Townsend, on Puget Sound, in what I still can barely bring myself to call Washington State, for reasons I’ll explain.
Headed from here to the Makah homelands at Cape Flattery, then Kalaloch and Quinault, then across the Megler Bridge into Oregon, to Tillamook and environs, and from there, we’ll see.
This being the Victoria Day weekend it is fitting to reflect on the events of the years 1859. It had been only a year since the great James Douglas unilaterally proclaimed the Crown Colony of British Columbia, an assertion of sovereignty against the savageries of heavily-armed American miners who had just arrived in their thousands in the Fraser Canyon.
An African-American man had filed charges of assault against a white American in the boomtown of Yale, nearly precipitating a Yankee insurrection. Once Governor Douglas had settled matters there in a civilized way, an event that will live in infamy occurred on San Juan Island. An American, Lyman Cutler, shot one of our pigs. I’ve been bitter about it ever since.
San Juan Island was a favoured picnicking place for Victorians. There was a substantial Hudson’s Bay Company sheep farm there. American squatters, mostly failed opportunists from the Fraser Canyon goldfields, were making a nuisance of themselves on the island, citing ambiguities of the Oregon Treaty of 1846. That treaty, I should mention, was itself a profound betrayal, the cause of our loss of the Columbia Territory. Why do think British Columbia is called British Columbia?
It is a melancholy thing to recall that 1846 was a forced abandonment of the world south of the 49th parallel, when the Kinchotch Men were instructed to give way to the Bostonmen, and so withdrew from their settlements to Vancouver Island in a northward exodus of “King George Indians,” Orkney Islanders, Hawaiians, Metis and Scots. They were warmly welcomed on Vancouver Island by the Saanich and Songhees nations, so it’s not entirely a sad story I suppose.
Anyway, on San Juan Island, on June 15, 1859, the HBC’s prized breeding boar wandered into Cutler’s newly dug potato patch, which Cutler had fenced off in a shambled fashion in the middle of the HBC’s sheep run. Cutler shot the pig. The police in Victoria were advised, and hurried to the scene. It took a couple of days, but hurrying was like that back then.
To be fair to Cutler, he offered to compensate the company with a pig of his own. Matters may have rested there had the affair not been brought to the attention of the military governor of the Oregon Territory, a certain General William Harney.
Harney was a 54-40 extremist. For those unschooled in the excesses of Yankee covetousness, 54-40 or Fight! was the rallying cry of American imperialists who lusted after the coastline all the way north to 54° 40', the border with Russian Alaska.
Harney was a horrible man. He’d distinguished himself by committing atrocities against Indians in Florida. He’d been relieved of his command for outrageous conduct in Mexico during the Spanish-American war. He’d just been transferred to Oregon after having been similarly relieved of his command in Utah, where he’d been busy badgering the Mormons and threatening to hang their prophet, Brigham Young.
Harney had visited Victoria, where he concluded that Vancouver Island was ripe for annexation, owing to the massive influx of down-at-heels Americans into the little city’s residual population, so Harney dispatched a force of U.S. soldiers to San Juan Island. British forces also made their way there.
The Americans established a camp on one side of the island. The British established a camp on the other. And there things rested until 1872, when an arbitration panel agreed upon by Britain and the United States awarded San Juan Island to the Americans, and the border was shifted from Rosario Strait to Haro Strait, causing the loss of the Southern Gulf Islands and the confection of the archipelago Americans know today as the San Juan Islands.
But will I allow the twin betrayals of 1846 and 1872 dampen my mood? I will not. Between here and the Upper Nestucca River in Oregon I will greet every American we meet with a smile, and will keep it to myself that they are really interlopers on Crown territory, and I will mind my manners.
They’re actually quite nice people, the Yanks. I mean this, by the way.
I will be revisiting certain tectonic and deliberately occluded cataclysms of history in this newsletter towards August 1, “B.C. Day,” which, we have all be persuaded to forget, originated as a civic holiday to celebrate the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.
Happy Victoria Day Holidays, one and all.
You have so much on your plate but I do absolutely love it when you have time for a BC History post. The fun we could have teaching BC history properly to college students if only we had a few extra lifetimes.
I love your deep dives into BC history. It reminds me of reading Bruce Hutchinson's The Far Side of the Street almost 50 years ago - a book about politics of course, but my lasting impression was his love of BC and his Victoria gardens. It deepened my understanding of western Canada, about which I knew very little at the time. Last year I bought and read your book the Last Great Sea as homework before a trip to Haida Gwaii. I learned so much from it, about salmon and the forests, the people and the rich history. I have shared it with some BC folk.