The Terror of the Coast. Chris Arnett
the “Eastern Districts,” including a large portion of the Cowichan Valley, had been selected and sold to nineteen purchasers. 20 The ownership of these lots was for a time purely symbolic, for none of the purchasers could occupy their claims. Cowichan families rightly resented Hwunitum trespass on and occupation of their potato fields, food gathering resources and burial sites and they removed the surveying stakes placed by Wells. 21 Lieutenant Richard Mayne, who had a downpayment of £25 on his own section, visited the area in the summer of 1859, and wrote:
[The Cowichan] have shown no favour to those settlers who have visited their valley. Although it has been surveyed it cannot yet be settled as the Indians are unwilling to sell, still less to be ousted from their land. 22
Meanwhile, events in the Colony of British Columbia put extra pressure on the Vancouver Island colony to alienate Hwulmuhw land for Hwunitum settlers. Within months of the initial rush to the gold-bearing bars of the Fraser Canyon, most of the Hwunitum returned to the Colony of Vancouver Island. By the fall of 1858, the majority of them booked passage south, leaving behind their less fortunate comrades. As one observer explained:
The tens of thousands that had pressed into the city in ’58, were diminished to not more than 1,500, embracing “the waifs and strays” of every nationality, not excepting a good many whose antecedents were not above suspicion. 23
To deal with this influx of potentially troublesome unemployed, Douglas ordered the construction in Victoria of a Police Court and Barracks, “the most expensive government building in the Colony,” and gave authority to Augustus Frederick Pemberton, a Protestant Irish immigrant, and uncle of the Surveyor General, to raise the first police force in western Canada. 24 Clothed in blue uniforms trimmed with brass buttons, the colonial police were organized “on the London Metropolitan model” which, in addition to Pemberton as Commissioner of Police, included an inspector, two sergeants, and eleven constables. 25 Their salaries were to be paid, Douglas informed the Colonial Secretary, “by the Hudson’s Bay Company out of the proceeds of Land Sales effected in Vancouver’s Island.” 26 The Victoria colonial police had the daunting task of enforcing British law on the ground in the colony and in the unceded territories. The new Commissioner of Police soon gained “a reputation for fearlessness and determination” and it was claimed “that next to Governor Douglas there is no man to whom the country is more greatly indebted for the establishment of a law-abiding course than to Mr. Pemberton.” 27 Unfortunately, long hours and low wages “caused senior officers to succumb all too frequently to graft or bribery.” 28
During the winter of 1858–59 the unemployed miners, who far outnumbered resident Hwunitum in the colony, eked out a living as best they could. Jonathan Begg of Scotland, who arrived in the colony from California, worked at odd jobs and grew cabbages on vacant city lots. 29 Other industrious men, such as William Brady of the United States, turned to hunting elk and deer to supply the demand for fresh venison. 30 Those less scrupulous turned to the lucrative and illegal business of selling alcohol to Hwulmuhw customers.
Others had had enough of gold mining and wished to take up farms and make a living from the land. It seemed to many, however, that arable land was accessible only to those associated with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Unemployed Hwunitum began to organize into committees to pressure the government for access to the agricultural land in the Cowichan Valley which had been surveyed and sold but not opened to settlement because the government had yet to extinguish Hwulmuhw title. A petition of July 2, 1859, called for the creation of a preemption system, whereby individuals (and not “capitalists”) could select land for a nominal fee and, over time, as the land was developed or “improved,” acquire title. 31
Douglas informed the petitioners “that if there are a hundred farmers ready to settle in the Cowitchen valley, let them present themselves, and facilities will be afforded them, the Indian title extinguished as soon as practicable; that no immediate payment will be required for the land.” 32 Douglas, however, was still unable to negotiate a land sale agreement with Hul’qumi’num First Nations.
The unemployed found support in the columns of the British Colonist, a Victoria newspaper founded in 1858 by an eccentric Nova Scotian immigrant and future premier of British Columbia named Amor De Cosmos. In an article published on the fourth of July, 1859, De Cosmos exclaimed:
Why is Indian title to Cowichan not extinguished at once? This [demand] is repeated over and over again, and yet no response is heard from the government. It may require judicious management, but it has to be done. The country expects it without delay. We want farmers,—and the best way to get them is to open the lands of Cowitchen to actual settlers by extinguishing the Indian title.
A committee of “Messrs. Copeland, Sparrow, and Manly” was appointed at a July 11 meeting in Victoria “to present a petition to the Governor to permit them to settle in Cowichan,” but the committee was informed “that it could not be done at present.” 33 No explanation was given but, aside from opposition by Hul’qumi’num First Nations to settlement in their territories, the revocation of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s grant placed the colonial government in an awkward position, legally, to grant title. 34
The British Colonist of July 13, 1859, had no sympathy for the plight of the Hudson’s Bay Company and berated the government for its inability to open the Cowichan Valley to Hwunitum settlement. It echoed the cry of land-hungry Hwunitum frustrated at the government’s delay in providing agricultural land for settlers:
All are convinced that if the Company had last year fulfilled the conditions of the grant, or the government done its duty, the Cowichan Valley would today have been filled with thrifty farmers … the united voice of this community advocates the claim of the hardy pioneers who wish to settle in Cowichan.
Douglas saw in the petitioners an opportunity to concentrate them in a settlement within unceded Hul’qumi’num First Nations territories, and he began to formulate a plan. The Surveyor General had advised Douglas not to permit Hwunitum settlers into the Cowichan Valley until suitable arrangements, such as a land sale agreement, could be made with the Cowichan. 35 However, Douglas writes in a letter to Newcastle that:
[I do not] feel disposed to adopt Mr. Pemberton’s suggestion respecting the Cowitchen Country. It has for good reasons been the invariable policy of the Government to concentrate as much as possible the white population when forming settlements in Districts inhabited by powerful tribes of Indians, but that object is attainable now as fully as at any former period in the history of the Colony, and I therefore do not consider it expedient or adviseable to close, for some time, the Cowitchen valley against the settlement of Whites, as Mr. Pemberton suggests. To adopt such a course would naturally give rise to much clamour and dissatisfaction among the people, and in effect retard the legitimate progress of the Colony. 36
However, Douglas did not direct settlers to the Cowichan Valley, but instead announced that the “Chemainus District,” left unsurveyed by Oliver Wells a few months previous, would be thrown open to settlement. “They were offered the Chemainus country,” the British Colonist explained, “which is unsurveyed and commences ten miles north of the southern end of Cowichan, towards Nanaimo. The land is reported good. Whether this will be accepted [by the petitioners] has not been decided.” 37 The Hwunitum were unfamiliar with the “Chemainus District,” which included the Chemainus Valley and Salt Spring Island, and on July 18, thirty prospective settlers left Victoria, “for the purpose of exploring the unsurveyed Chemainus lands.” 38 One of them, Jonathan Begg, a principal organizer of the land reform movement, described their impression of Salt Spring Island:
The band of adventurers … including myself finding the island beautifully situated in the midst of an archipelago more beautiful than the 1000 islands of the St. Lawrence we determined to form a settlement here this being the most convenient to Victoria. 39
The exploring party may also have visited the mouth of the Chemainus River where they would have noticed the flourishing potato fields of Hwulmuhw farmers.
The Hwunitum returned to Victoria on July 24 to announce that