The Terror of the Coast. Chris Arnett
village of his mother. 46 Tzouhalem maintained his association with Quamichan. An 1853 Hwunitum census identified him as the preeminent “chief,” and it seems likely that Tzouhalem’s fighting prowess helped to establish Quamichan as the largest and wealthiest of the Cowichan villages with a reputation for opposition to Hwunitum encroachment. 47
Hwulmuhw military ascendency culminated in the battle of Hwtlupnets (c. 1840), when an unprecedented alliance of Hul’qumi’num First Nations, Nanaimo, Saanich, Songhees, Esquimalt, Musqueam and Squamish warriors gathered to defeat an invading armada of Kwakwaka’wakw-speaking Lekwiltok and their Comox allies. 48 The mobilization occurred when word reached the south that an invasion by a large force of northerners was imminent. After entering the territories of Hul’qumi’num First Nations, the northerners reached Hwtlupnets (Maple Bay) where they made camp on the beach. Under the leadership of Tzouhalem and Tsosieten, the Hwulmuhw army divided into two divisions, one on either side of the bay. A third party, dressed to appear as women, canoed into the bay where they were sighted by the northerners who set off in pursuit only to be caught as the Hwulmuhw allies, following a system of pre-arranged signals, closed in to slaughter them. 49 It was the first and last time such a diverse group of First Nations united to defeat a common enemy. The battle of Hwtlupnets ended large-scale raids by northern peoples into the south, although smaller raids and violent encounters with Hul’qumi’num First Nations continued for another three decades.
Worried by the pending American annexation of the Columbia River region, where Fort Vancouver was the Pacific Ocean depot for the Hudson’s Bay Company, George Simpson, the company’s governor, directed that another fort be established on the southern end of Vancouver Island. Acting on these instructions, Chief Factor James Douglas in March of 1843 left Fort Vancouver in the Hudson’s Bay Company steamer Beaver and proceeded to Vancouver Island. Born in 1803, in British Guiana of a Scottish father and an Afro-American mother, Douglas had been in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Pacific Northwest since 1821. As a result of his long tenure with the country, he understood intimately many aspects of aboriginal culture. Over six feet tall, this “stout powerful man of good conduct and respectable abilities” who was “furiously violent when aroused” loomed larger than any other over the early history of British Columbia. 50
Upon his arrival on southern Vancouver Island on March 14, 1843, the thirty-nine-year-old Douglas selected land owned by Lekwungaynung-speaking people adjacent to a protected harbour for what was to be the site of Fort Victoria. The first meeting between the British and the owners of the land involved a degree of confrontation and uncertainty. As one member of the expedition observed:
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when we arrived there. At first we saw only two canoes; but, having discharged two cannon shot, the aborigines left their retreats and surrounded the steamboat. The following day canoes arrived from all sides. 51
A mutual understanding was soon reached. Douglas “informed them of our intention of building in this place which appeared to please them very much.” 52 With their co-operation and assistance, a log stockade was soon erected and the fort’s buildings were under way. On the evening of March 17, a “luminous column” appeared in an arc across the sky. 53 Having heard about the Hwunitum and attracted by the celestial event, some 1,200 Cowichan, Clallam, and Saanich people converged on the site where they were greeted by the first Roman Catholic priest to set foot on Vancouver Island, Father Jean Baptiste Bolduc. He conducted mass on Sunday the eighteenth, and proceeded to a nearby village where he performed 102 baptisms. A young man told Bolduc that his arrival had been prophesied many years earlier. 54
Hwulmuhw welcomed the presence of the new Hwunitum fort on Vancouver Island because it meant increased access to Hwunitum merchandise, particularly firearms, ammunition, blankets, hardware and liquor. Within a year, however, a dispute arose over jurisdiction which threatened to erupt in violence and all-out war between the Hwunitum traders and the coalition of warriors who had recently defeated the northern raiders at Hwtlupnets. To provide meat for a feast, a Hwulmuhw hunting party shot what a Hudson’s Bay Company employee claimed were “some of our best working oxen & horses.” The animals were not in the fort, which the Hwulmuhw seemed to acknowledge as Hwunitum property, but were “left feeding on the surrounding grounds”: fair game, as it were, for the Hwulmuhw owners of the land outside the Hudson’s Bay Company establishment. Roderick Finlayson, who had recently assumed the position of Chief Trader, responded by suspending trade and issuing ultimatums: “I then sent a message to the chiefs demanding the delivery of the perpetrators of this unprovoked deed, or payment to be made for the animals killed which they declined doing—I then suspended trade or any dealing with them until this matter was settled—Whereupon they sent word to some of the neigbouring tribes—to come to their assistance, as they intended to attack the Fort.” 55 The Hwulmuhw in the vicinity of Fort Victoria called for a gathering of the same alliance of warriors who had recently defeated the Kwakwaka’wakw and their allies at Hwtlupnets.
The Hwulmuhw soon received these reinforcements, including a contingent of Cowichan warriors under Tzouhalem, who assumed command of the military operation. After two days of negotiations, the warriors of the alliance “opened fire on the Fort riddling the stockade & roofs of the House with their musket balls.” The fusillade was intense and according to Finlayson, “it was with the greatest difficulty I could prevail on our men not then to return the Fire, but wait for my orders.” The Chief Trader knew that any response on the part of the Fort would plunge the Hudson’s Bay Company into a disastrous war against a numerically superior and well-armed foe. Finlayson decided on a display of force to intimidate the attackers, without harming them, in order to re-open negotiations. He loaded a cannon with grape shot and fired it at a nearby empty Hwulmuhw house, completely demolishing it. The firing ceased and the two sides agreed to a parley. The dispute was settled according to Hwulmuhw law, whereby compensation was accepted for alleged wrong. Finlayson later wrote that he “was determined to have the offenders punished, or payment made for the animals killed—They preferred the latter, and before that day closed furs to the full amount were delivered at the gate. After which we smoked the pipe of peace.” 56
On June 15, 1846, in the face of increasing militancy by American squatters in the Oregon and Washington Territories, the Treaty of Washington was signed by the United States and Great Britain, conceding to the Americans the 49th parallel as the boundary from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, but leaving Vancouver Island within the British sphere of influence. In that same year the Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Sir John Pelly, wrote to Earl Grey, the Colonial Secretary of Great Britain, informing him that:
The Hudson’s Bay Company having formed an establishment on the southern point of Vancouver’s Island, which they are annually enlarging, are anxious to know whether they will be confirmed in the possession of such lands, as they may find it expedient to add to those which they already possess. 57
Earl Grey agreed that the interests of Great Britain in the region would best be served by an active policy of British immigration and colonization to check American settlement. Despite controversy over the plan, on January 13, 1849, Queen Victoria signed the grant making the Hudson’s Bay Company “the true and absolute lords and Proprietors” of Vancouver Island, “together with all royalties of the seas upon these coasts within the limits aforesaid, and all mines royal thereto belonging.” 58
The days of the fur trade were coming to an end as the Hudson’s Bay Company operations diversified to include farming, salmon-curing, logging and now colonization. The company was to assume responsibility for all civil and military affairs in the new colony, the costs of which were to be borne by land sales. The grant would be reviewed every five years and, if cancelled, the imperial government “might repurchase the Island, provided it reimbursed the Company for its expenditures and for its establishments and property.” 59
The only reference to the island’s aboriginal owners in the letters patent was a statement that British colonization under the auspices of the Hudson’s Bay Company “would induce greatly … to the protection and welfare of the native Indians residing within that portion of Our territories,” presumably in contrast to the state of war then existing