Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class [1 ed.] 9780773570405, 9780773524026

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002 isbn 0-7735-2402-9 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2002 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of grants from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University College of the Cariboo. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its publishing activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The author gratefully acknowledges the permission of the editors of Labour/Le Travail, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, bc Studies, and the British Journal of Canadian Studies to reproduce material which has already appeared in print.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Belshaw, John Douglas Colonization and community: the Vancouver Island coalfield and the making of the British Columbian working class / John Douglas Belshaw. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the ethnic history) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2402-9 1. Working class – British Columbia – Vancouver Island – History. 2. Coal miners – British Columbia – Vancouver Island – History. 3. British – British Columbia – Vancouver Island – History. 4. Coal mines and mining – Social aspects – British Columbia – Vancouver Island – History. 5. Ethnology – British Columbia – Vancouver Island. 6. Vancouver Island (B.C.) – History. I. Title. II. Series. fc3844.8.b7b44 2002 971.1′203 c2002-901191-4 f1089.v3b44 2002

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Sabon.

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Colonization and Community

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mcgill-queen's studies in ethnic history series one: donald harman akenson, editor 1 Irish Migrants in the Canadas A New Approach Bruce S. Elliott 2 Critical Years in Immigration Canada and Australia Compared Freda Hawkins (Second edition, 1991) 3 Italians in Toronto Development of a National Identity, 1875–1935 John E. Zucchi 4 Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folk Songs Essays in Honour of the Sesquicentennial of the Birth of Kr. Barons Vaira Vikis-Freibergs 5 Johan Schroder's Travels in Canada, 1863 Orm Øverland 6 Class, Ethnicity, and Social Inequality Christopher McAll 7 The Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict The Maori, the British, and the New Zealand Wars James Belich 8 White Canada Forever Popular Attitudes and Public Policy toward Orientals in British Columbia W. Peter Ward (Third edition, 2002) 9 The People of Glengarry Highlanders in Transition, 1745–1820 Marianne McLean 10 Vancouver's Chinatown Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 Kay J. Anderson

11 Best Left as Indians Native-White Relations in the Yukon Territory, 1840–1973 Ken Coates 12 Such Hardworking People Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto Franca Iacovetta 13 The Little Slaves of the Harp Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York John E. Zucchi 14 The Light of Nature and the Law of God Antislavery in Ontario, 1833–1877 Allen P. Stouffer 15 Drum Songs Glimpses of Dene History Kerry Abel 16 Louis Rosenberg Canada's Jews (Reprint of 1939 original) Edited by Morton Weinfeld 17 A New Lease on Life Landlords, Tenants, and Immigrants in Ireland and Canada Catharine Anne Wilson 18 In Search of Paradise The Odyssey of an Italian Family Susan Gabori 19 Ethnicity in the Mainstream Three Studies of English Canadian Culture in Ontario Pauline Greenhill 20 Patriots and Proletarians The Politicization of Hungarian Immigrants in Canada, 1923–1939 Carmela Patrias 21 The Four Quarters of the Night The Life-Journey of an Emigrant Sikh Tara Singh Bains and Hugh Johnston

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22 Cultural Power, Resistance and Pluralism Colonial Guyana, 1838–1900 Brian L. Moore

24 The Development of Elites in Acadian New Brunswick, 1861–1881 Sheila M. Andrew

23 Search Out the Land The Jews and the Growth of Equality in British Colonial America, 1740–1867 Sheldon J. Godfrey and Judith C. Godfrey

25 Journey to Vaja Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family Elaine Kalman Naves

mcgill-queen's studies in ethnic history series two: john zucchi, editor 1 Inside Ethnic Families Three Generations of PortugueseCanadians Edite Noivo

9 Demography, State and Society Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971 Enda Delaney

2 A House of Words Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory Norman Ravvin

10 The West Indians of Costa Rica Race, Class, and the Integration of an Ethnic Minority Ronald N. Harpelle

3 Oatmeal and the Catechism Scottish Gaelic Settlers in Quebec Margaret Bennett

11 Canada and the Ukrainian Question, 1939–1945 Bohdan S. Kordan

4 With Scarcely a Ripple Anglo-Canadian Migration into the United States and Western Canada, 1880–1920 Randy William Widdis

12 Tortillas and Tomatoes Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada Tanya Basok

5 Creating Societies Immigrant Lives in Canada Dirk Hoerder 6 Social Discredit Anti-Semitism, Social Credit, and the Jewish Response Janine Stingel 7 Coalescence of Styles The Ethnic Heritage of St John River Valley Regional Furniture, 1763–1851 Jane L. Cook 8 Brigh an Òrain/A Story in Every Song The Songs and Tales of Lauchie MacLellan Translated and edited by John Shaw

13 Old and New World Highland Piping John G. Gibson 14 Nationalism from the Margins The Negotiation of Nationalism and Ethnic Identities among Italian Immigrants in Alberta and British Columbia Patricia Wood 15 Colonization and Community The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbia Working Class John Douglas Belshaw

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Colonization and Community The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class j o h n d o u g l a s b e l s h aw

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002 isbn 0-7735-2402-9 (cloth) isbn 0-7735-2403-7 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2002 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of grants from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University College of the Cariboo. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its publishing activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. The author gratefully acknowledges the permission of the editors of Labour/Le Travail, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, bc Studies, and the British Journal of Canadian Studies to reproduce material which has already appeared in print.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Belshaw, John Douglas Colonization and community: the Vancouver Island coalfield and the making of the British Columbian working class / John Douglas Belshaw. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the ethnic history) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2402-9 (bound). – isbn 0-7735-2403-7 (pbk.) 1. Working class – British Columbia – Vancouver Island – History. 2. Coal miners – British Columbia – Vancouver Island – History. 3. British – British Columbia – Vancouver Island – History. 4. Coal mines and mining – Social aspects – British Columbia – Vancouver Island – History. 5. Ethnology – British Columbia – Vancouver Island. 6. Vancouver Island (B.C.) – History. I. Title. II. Series. fc3844.8.b7b44 2002 971.1′203 c2002-901191-4 f1089.v3b44 2002

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Sabon.

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To Robert Douglas Belshaw, 1907–1995

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Contents

Tables and Figures

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Illustrations xvi 1 Introduction

3

2 Mining Coal on the Edge of the Empire

21

3 The Emigrant British Miners and Their Kin 4 The Immigrant British Miners and Their Kin 5 Work and Wages

75

6 Conflicts in the Colonial Setting 115 7 Mobility and Identity 8 Building a Culture Conclusions Notes

217

Bibliography Index

213

309

267

150

175

35 58

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Tables and Figures

tables 1 Vancouver District Residents, by Birthplace

61

2 National Origins of Nanaimo-Area Miners, 1881, 1891 62 3 Age Cohorts, Vancouver Island Colliers, 1881, by Place of Birth, Numbers 64 4 Age Cohorts, Vancouver Island Colliers, 1881, by Place of Birth, Percentage Distribution 64 5 Boys and Girls on the Coalfield

65

6 Family Size by Father’s Birthplace (Miners Only), Vancouver District, 1881 70 7 Family Size by Father’s Birthplace (Nonminers Only), Vancouver District, 1881 71 8 Mining Fatalities, Vancouver Island, United Kingdom, and South Wales 79 9 Mining Methods in Vancouver Island Collieries, 1875–91 84 10 Vancouver Island Mine Employees, 1875–97 90 11 Estimated Net Wages in the Vancouver Island Coal Industry, White Adults, 1853–97 94

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xii

Tables and Figures

12 Wages in the Vancouver Island Coalfield, by Race or Age, 1875–97 97 13 Food Prices in British Columbia, for Selected Years 100 14 Beef Prices in British Columbia and the Black Country, for Selected Years 102 15 Approximate Household Budgets, Northumberland (1875) and Nanaimo (1870s) 108 16 Coal Production and Asian Employment, Vancouver Island 1875–99 132 17 Persistence Rates in the Nanaimo Area, 1877–1901, General Population 153 18 Persistence Rates among Coal Miners in the Nanaimo Area, 1877–1901 153 19 Persistence Rates among Coal Miners in the Nanaimo Area, 1877–1901, Adjusted for Average Mortality 153 20 Geographical Mobility and Place of Birth of Miners from the Census of 1880–81 155 21 Residential Mobility between Nanaimo and Wellington, from 1880–81 to 1899 157 22 Intergenerational and Intragenerational Occupational Changes, Vancouver Census District, 1880–81 Cohort, 1877–99 166 23 Marriages Recorded in the Nanaimo Area, 1874–99

186

figures 1 The Pacific Northwest

4

2 The emigrants’ calculus 37 3 Principal British coalfields in the nineteenth century 4 Extended household forms, Nanaimo, c. 1881 5 Mining fatalities, 1881–84, 1886–99

80

6 Nonfatal workplace incidents, 1880–94 80 7 The Central Vancouver Island coalfield 158

67

38

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Acknowledgments

As I write, a diesel-powered coal-train rumbles through the heart of my city only a few blocks away, its entire load bound for Japan. British Columbia remains a major producer of coal, but, ironically, the smell of burning coal is as unlikely here as the sight of dray-horses. In Canada it is an endangered scent preserved almost exclusively at living-museum blacksmith forges, an unmistakable odour that I suspect few of my neighbours would recognize. Nor could they easily conceive of working lives spent deep in the bowels of the earth, wrestling with slabs of coal in a near-total blackness, counting on a truce with the forces of combustion and gravity in order to survive to the end of another shift. Enduring six months at sea for the privilege of living in a kind of exile on the edge of the world, for the sake of earning a few shillings more each month in especially dangerous mines, this too is now almost beyond belief. This study began in an effort to come to grips with that almost unimaginable past. Mining history is a rich vein, but combining it with immigration – not to mention emigration – history constitutes something rather different. By the late twentieth century, British Columbia had become such an attractive place to live and work that many in the region had lost sight of the fact that it was something of a hardship posting in the nineteenth century. So I started with the question of why anyone would emigrate from the burgeoning British coalfields and head for the industrial and imperial backwater of Vancouver Island. Doing so took me deeper into the literature on coalmining and colliery society in Britain until finally I resurfaced on my own side of the

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xiv

Acknowledgments

planet. My motivations included a desire to see my home province as it might have been perceived by its earliest settlers. I like to think that I approached the subject dispassionately. If the ghosts of coalmining ancestors buried in the valleys of South Wales, interred at Hillcrest, or obliterated beneath Turtle Mountain had any influence on the conclusions I have reached, it is not something of which I am consciously aware. Requiescat in pace. Colonization and Community is a direct descendant of the doctoral dissertation I produced at the London School of Economics in the 1980s. Accordingly, I recognize the contributions of my supervisors, Jim Potter and E.H. Hunt. I thank Mr Potter in particular for introducing me to demographic history. With generous funding from the Rotary Foundation I was able to augment my experiences in London with a year at the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick. In the late 1980s my interest in the British colliers of Vancouver Island was supported by the British Association for Canadian Studies and, in particular, by the sometimes-president of the bacs, sometimes-editor of the British Journal of Canadian Studies, Ged Martin. Also in those years, Stephen Hornsby of the University of Maine (Orono) and Del Muise of Carleton University were tremendous resources on miners, mining, and emigration. Colleagues and friends who subsequently read and commented on various parts and on the whole include Andrew Yarmie, Elizabeth Asner, Kevin Enns, Mark Leier, Robert Mackinnon, and Allen Seager. Suggestions (along with moral support – always especially valued) came from the individuals named above and from John Fudge, Jean Barman, Ruth Sandwell, Bob McDonald, Robert Rutherdale, Jeremy Mouat, and Robin Fisher. John Benson of Wolverhampton University began encouraging me to write the history of British miners in British Columbia way back in 1984; he has never stopped doing so, for which I cannot thank him enough. My many students in the University College of the Cariboo history program also provided encouragement and inspiration. At the proverbial coalface of research I owe a debt of gratitude to archivists George Brandak at the University of British Columbia, Bob Stewart at the United Church Archives in Vancouver, and the staff at both the British Columbia Archives in Victoria and the Nanaimo Community Archives. The final stages of the book were nursed along by Philip Cercone and Joan McGilvray of McGill-Queen’s University Press and by Ron Curtis. I thank them all, individually and together. I owe special thanks to Lynne Bowen, who has an intimate understanding and appreciation of the Vancouver Island coalfield that is unmatched. Her two books on the subject, Three Dollar Dreams and

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xv

Acknowledgments

Boss Whistle, are well researched, brightly executed, and happily recommended. There have been many others who have made large and small contributions: I thank them all while taking responsibility for the errors and shortcomings that follow. I am grateful as well to Ron Shearer of the University of British Columbia, who generously administered a fund to support research among scholars at the University College of the Cariboo. Likewise, in 1991 funds were made available for a reconnaissance of newly discovered demographic and legal documents held in Victoria. This support came from the office of the Vice-President (Academic) of my institution, Neil Russell. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. And for that I am especially grateful. I close this section with three special acknowledgments. First, I cannot conceive that this book could have been completed without Diane Purvey’s involvement. It’s as simple as that. Thanks. Second, my children and step-children have been patient, unflinching supporters of this exercise: thanks Natalie, Ben, Ian, Simone, Gabriel, and Andrew. Finally, as a student and early in my career as a professional historian I received cheerful encouragement and strength from my father. I would be remiss if I did not recognize here his affection and what a great and positive effect it continues to have on my life. I cradle his memory in my heart, and it is to his wonderful life that this book is dedicated.

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Nanaimo Panorama. By the late 1860s, when this photograph was taken, Nanaimo was one of the largest settlements in British Columbia. It was, as well, the only settlement in which industrial wage labour predominated. From the left, miners’ homes descend from the ravine to the harbour, over which towers the Hudson’s Bay Company bastion. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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A company town run by the Dunsmuir family, Wellington (its main street shown here in the early 1890s) nevertheless included several independent businesses. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

Fort Rupert, established by the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1830s and 1840s. The fort walls served to keep out the Kwakiutl and to keep in the Scottish coalminers imported in 1848. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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George Robinson, who was instrumental in recruiting the first cohort of miners and their families from Brierley Hill, Staffordshire. Attracted by promises of high wages and good living conditions, the Hudson’s Bay Company servants sailed from London in 1854 and reached Vancouver Island nearly six months later. Robinson was one of very few island miners who returned to Britain. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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Like George Robinson, Lavinia and John Malpass were also part of the initial Brierley Hill migration, but they had a longer tenure on the coalfield. Their journey to the island was marred by the loss of an eight-year-old child, a fairly typical experience in the long sea passage between the eastern Atlantic and the Pacific northwest. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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The Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company dominated the Nanaimo coalfield. This circa 1880 photograph shows the pithead and winding gear. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

The Nanaimo mine explosion of 1887 claimed more than 150 lives. In this photograph a crowd gathers at the pithead. First Nations women can be seen on the left and Chinese men, in an otherwise white crowd, in the centre. While finger-pointing invariably followed disasters, they were also occasions when racial barriers lowered. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, BC Archives

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Many photographs of island pit-heads, such as this one from the 1870s, which shows the entrance to the Nanaimo mine, include children. Their labour in the mines was a critical part of the mining household’s economy. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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Voluntary associations, fraternal lodges, and benevolent, or friendly, societies anticipated unions. They also insured miners against the cost of a funeral and provided widows’ pensions in many cases. This 1880s photo shows the Nanaimo Oddfellows’ Hall, located above a general store. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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The Nanaimo whaling station, circa 1890. The notion of the single-industry town belies occupational alternatives. On the Vancouver Island coalfield opportunities existed on both the land and the sea. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives.

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St Paul’s Anglican Church, Nanaimo. From 1862 to 1879 over half the weddings at this church (shown here in the 1860s) involved women under eighteen years of age. Two brides were as young as fifteen years. Early marriages were a common feature for coalfield women, regardless of denomination. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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Nanaimo’s paternalistic industrial order produced several venues for the moral and aesthetic improvement of the miners, including this splendid opera house, seen here in 1890. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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Union Brewery, Nanaimo. This substantial structure provided employment alternatives to miners and their sons and supplied the demand for ales in the coalfield’s many saloons. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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Miner’s Exchange, circa 1890, one of many drinking establishments in Nanaimo. The ubiquitous taverns provided a popular social environment but competed with calls for temperance and respectability. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

This photograph (circa 1886) captures some of the contradictions of respectability: the top-hatted hotel owner, the Nanaimo Volunteer Fire Department, and the saloon combine elements of entrepreneurship, community-mindedness and the opportunity for intemperance. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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Cumberland School. While young, single males played an indisputably important role in the coalfield communities, families were also an integral element. The Dunsmuirs’ mine at Cumberland was hardly open before demands arose for a school. This photo, taken circa 1891, shows a class consisting mostly of girls and younger boys. Older school-age boys were probably at work in the mines. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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From the 1870s the miners engaged in a growing variety of leisure activities. The Nanaimo Junior Brass Band, shown here in this 1880s photograph, was one of several activities in which miners participated. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives.

Sporting activities were yet another glue in community formation. The Ladysmith Football Team invariably included miners and competed with clubs in Nanaimo and others in towns along the Esquimalt-Nanaimo Railway line. Courtesy of Province of British Columbia, bc Archives

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Colonization and Community

I fear [the British miners] will turn out to be a troublesome set. George Blenkinsop, Fort Rupert Journals, 1849

Fifty years ago practically all of us were born under the Union Jack. Even in Nanaimo, where I had lived for a year – 1891–1892 – the great majority of the coal miners had been either North Country English, Staffordshise [sic], Cornish, Scottish, or Welsh. This unity of nationality tended towards much greater cooperation and public-spiritedness than at present. S. Bird, Tse-ees-tah (1921)

Stealing a boat from the dock in Coal Harbour [in Vancouver], he had headed for Nanaimo with the idea of getting a job in the coal mines, half-hoping that he might be lucky enough to drown along the way. Stephen Guppy, Another Sad Day at the Edge of the Empire

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1 Introduction

Over the second half of the nineteenth century, coal mined on Vancouver Island became the leading export of the Canadian province of British Columbia. Because the local population was never large enough to meet the industry’s needs, the mining of island coal depended on attracting a workforce from elsewhere. From 1850 to 1900 hundreds of miners and their families were drawn to Vancouver Island from places as distant and dissimilar as Yorkshire in England, Pennsylvania, in the United States, and Canton, in China. In 1881, Nanaimo (figure 1), the main centre of mining, had a population of 2,803, of which about 820 were miners; twenty years later there were 3,300 miners in the community, which had grown to 12,715.1 And the rate of expansion at Nanaimo’s satellite communities – Wellington, Extension, and Ladysmith – was very rapid, as was also the case further north at Union, subsequently renamed Cumberland. The area encompassed by the Vancouver Island coalfield was small, relatively speaking, but compared to British collieries of the same period the individual pits employed impressive numbers.2 In the space of a few decades, the social structure of these Pacific Coast communities changed and developed in ways that can only be described as dramatic. First Nations villages dominated by longhouses and towering carved poles of yellow cedar all but disappeared, superceded mostly by muddy fields of stumps and roughly made cottages inhabited by newcomers from thousands of miles away.3 The history of mining on Vancouver Island is thus also the history of depopulation and repopulation; it is the history not merely of economic and political

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Figure 1

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5 Introduction

changes but of the formation of essentially new communities fashioned from foreign human resources. Some of the newcomers, however, were viewed as less foreign than others. The largest number of miners on Vancouver Island in the nineteenth century came from Britain. While demographic changes on the coalfield over the last half of the century were sweeping, the British population remained the core of the mining villages, and its members dominated almost every political, social, and economic activity, including pitwork. British primacy in the Vancouver Island towns was a product of Britain’s industrial revolution. The industrial processes and transportation technologies of the nineteenth century depended ultimately on a kind of fossil fuel that, as it happened, occurred in abundance beneath the rich soils of Britain. However, as the empire stretched out to its full, global extent, supply lines from Britain weakened and began to fray. By mid-century local supplies of coal were feeding various transplanted colonial manufacturing processes and settlements while fuelling the steam-powered trading and military vessels that linked the whole. This was a result of cold-blooded economic logistics of capitalism, but it had a human dimension as well, for labour had to be secured to raise the coal to the surface of the earth. And around the planet much of that labour would be British. To all these new coalfields emigrant British miners took with them many traditions and cultural features of colliery communities in the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, institutions, organizations, and attitudes transplanted by the British workers provided a common currency of ideas and problems that invite comparative studies of the emergent new industrial societies.4 This book examines communities of miners and their families in one of the most remote and isolated of Britain’s colonies. Specifically, it focusses on the British immigrants who formed the core of the colliery towns of Nanaimo, Wellington, Extension, and Cumberland, exploring their aspirations, motivations, and experiences. In a young outpost of Empire, one that was economically peripheral, strategically a liability, and politically tempestuous, these men, women, and children comprised an important fraction of society and the body politic, not least because they constituted the region’s first industrial working class. Much has been attributed to them by British Columbian historians, political scientists, and provincial myth-makers, but very little has been said about the forces that brought them to a misty, densely forested island in the North Pacific. Nor has this prototypical British Columbian proletariat been examined holistically in terms of its demographic features and behaviour, its resourceful day-to-day responses to life under industrial capitalism, and its cultural development. The British immigrants to the Nanaimo area have been perceived almost exclusively

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6 Colonization and Community

through the lens of coal mining, which has placed the adult male miners in the foreground, but only when they were doing the sorts of things that miners are wont to do: mine coal, go on strike, die horribly in workplace accidents. This heavily gendered tradition is most clearly evident in those parts of the historical literature that address coalfield trade unionism and politics. A great deal of the Vancouver Island coalfield story has thus been neglected and, more importantly, the emphasis has been placed on only one part of the British miners’ tale. British working class immigrants in British Columbia are commonly regarded as a historic conduit for radical labour behaviour. The archetype of the British proletarian as a carrier of militant cultural baggage, in point of fact, extends to histories of New England textile mills, Appalachian and Australian mining towns, the hard-rock camps of the American cordillera, and the homesteads of Saskatchewan.5 One study of the West Virginian coalfield, for example, describes the British miners as “instrumental in stimulating union activity.”6 Another historian takes the view that British miners in Iowa brought “their zeal for trade unions, and soon many became involved in attempts to form miners’ unions.”7 These essentialist ethnic qualities of labour militance and radicalism echo in the history of Vancouver Island’s coalfield. A distinct cultural and political heritage – ranging from palpable class tensions to full-blown Marxism – has been pointed to as the main contribution of these early arrivals on the Canadian West Coast in particular. Thus a local historian attributes a strike in 1913 to “the unique character of the miners of British extraction who lived in the valley above the mine.”8 One political scientist has described the British worker in British Columbia as “an inveterate unionist,” while a prominent labour historian has claimed that “Welsh, British and Cornish [sic] miners” gave the early provincial working-class movement its political orientation.9 A survey of British Columbian political themes renewed the shelf-life of this caricature in the 1980s when it concluded that “[s]ocialism has been a visible alternative in provincial politics almost since the first miners from Great Britain reached the Vancouver Island coalfields over one hundred years ago.”10 It is true that from the 1850s on, English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish immigrant miners were at the forefront of labour disputes and at the helm of the miners’ movements and unions. Similarly, campaigns against Asian mineworkers involved British miners, though never to the exclusion of other whites. By the time of the Great War the miners’ record in politics and in labour disputes was widely known. Increasingly confrontational, their activities attracted national attention. While the Vancouver Island miners’ goals would have been familiar to miners still toiling in Old Country pits, the attitudes of their masters

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7 Introduction

would have struck a familiar chord too. The Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company of Nanaimo (with head offices in London) was by turns intransigent and conciliatory. Nearby to Nanaimo, the dour Scot Robert Dunsmuir – aided and then succeeded by his sons James and Alexander – was the very model of a modern major capitalist: autocratic and completely resistant to demands for union recognition. The Vancouver Island characters were so well drawn that John Galsworthy lent them a measure of immortality in his play Strife.11 Out of this crucible of British colliers and British operators, then, arose a “tradition” that has been perpetuated in legend and literature ever since. The theme of British labour militance as the fountainhead of British Columbian labour unrest and durable left-wing politics has become axiomatic. British Columbia’s early coalmining communities were similar to those of other settler society mining towns in many respects: capital came from Britain, as did labourers and equipment; there was much industrial unrest; and the trajectory of organizational efforts was largely consistent with what has been recorded elsewhere. Nevertheless, the Vancouver Island community of miners – and, very importantly, their families and other hangers-on – was more “British” than any other in nineteenth-century North America. Although that very Britishness has been repeatedly invoked as a shorthand for understanding labour militance in the westernmost Canadian province, it evidently counts for little else: historians in British Columbia have not, on the whole, explored the other “ethnic” qualities of the British mining towns. This is easily explained. The British are the “charter,” or “context,” group in most of Canada; as an ethnic group they are, perforce, invisible. They have become the stable benchmark against which all other groups’ ethnic qualities have been gauged. That having been said, the miners of Vancouver Island have been subjected to at least as much scrutiny as any other group of workers in the province. There have been several local and purely narrative studies that lack any explicit analytical framework, although those by Eric Newsome and Lynne Bowen are excellent products of diligent research.12 The focus of most academic studies of the miners, however, has been on their putative radicalism. Historians have been drawn to the island colliers mainly as the embodiment of what has been called “Western exceptionalism”: a radical, socialistic streak in the Canadian proletariat that was most fully expressed in Western Canada, particularly in British Columbia. Scholars whose concern was chiefly labour conflict concluded that the West was out of step with the rest of Canada. Militant unions, a plethora of industrial disputes, and successful socialist candidates drew their attention, often in an effort to explain the unrest of the 1960s and 1970s in the lumber or mining sectors of

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8 Colonization and Community

the province or the election of a New Democratic Party government in 1972. British Columbia was unusual in the 1970s, in short, because it had been exceptional in the past. Several unpublished dissertations from the 1960s and earlier – including those by Ronald Grantham, Brian Smith, and Thomas Loosmore, which dealt heavily with the Vancouver Island coalfield – belong to the school of “old” labour history, which is to say they address the organization of working-class males and the campaigns of their industrial and political representatives, implicitly if not explicitly doing so within the paradigm of “exceptionalism.”13 Paul Phillips’ No Power Greater: A Century of Labour in British Columbia appeared in 1967 and made a contribution along similar lines. In the 1970s the province’s claim to exceptional class relations became axiomatic through the works of Ross McCormack, David Bercuson, and others.14 Subsequently, British Columbian labour historians began to wrestle with whether the region’s workers really were outstandingly radical and/or militant and in some cases found the Pacific Coast proletariat wanting: studies of working people in Vancouver, for example, have revealed a tendency toward reformism and a persistent theme of “getting ahead.” While the British Columbia working-class was being declawed in this way, historians of Canadian labour generally revealed the hidden tale of working-class militance elsewhere in the Dominion and argued that the picture painted by Phillips, Bercuson, and others of the British Columbian working class (and of Far West miners in particular) was not as unusual as was once thought. In the 1980s Jeremy Mouat and William Burrill, in particular, attempted to move the history of mining in British Columbia more fully along New Social/Labour History directions, developing graduate theses that employed the methodologies of English Marxists like E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm but staying, nonetheless, within the conventional analytic boundaries of industrial disputes and relationships between capital and labour.15 Much the same could be said for Allen Seager and Adele Perry’s attempt in the 1990s to write women back into coalmining history on Vancouver Island.16 Over the last ten years the case for western exceptionalism has been revived, if only on the strength of recorded industrial disputes. In this incarnation, however, a greater emphasis is placed on the “failure of reformism, and the inability of miners and others to forge a distinct model of labour relations,” as is evident in the work of Mouat. This new analysis consciously shifts the focus from miners’ “growing frustration with life in mining communities” to their engagement with the larger political sphere. This conclusion has the virtue of recognizing the moderate, mainstream political elements in a Far West mining society around the turn of the century, but it does so by attributing political de-

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9 Introduction

velopments to market, workplace, and political causes alone: the social environment gets short shrift.17 As British historian Alan Tomlinson advises, “we can no longer treat ‘culture’ as some peripheral musicmaking or worship marked off from the more influential spheres of the ‘political’ or the ‘economic.’ Rather, to speak of working-class culture is to speak of the relation between these spheres, and of the ways in which these spheres are joined together to make a distinctive way of life.”18 Whether they subscribed to or rejected exceptionalism as a legitimate category of explanation, British Columbian labour historians through the last half of the twentieth century remained preoccupied with the question of relative radicalism and militance; “culture,” however defined, remained opaque. As Mark Leier has observed, the emphasis on British Columbian uniqueness in the field of labour history sent it down a blind alley from which it is only now returning.19 This book marks the return of the Vancouver Island miners who, arguably, were first and furthest into that analytical dead-end.20 My study speaks as well to the larger corpus of British Columbian historiography. Nineteenth-century British Columbia was conceptualized from the outset as Protestant, white, Imperial, patriarchal, of course, and superior to the rough and uncultured nations (i.e., the United States and China) that would plunder her rightful inheritance. On the whole, the province’s elites and historians subscribed to these tenets. Describing Britain’s historiography, James Vernon claims that “the ability to narrativize politics … as a great melodramatic epic was in a very real sense the source of power, because it created and fixed the identities of decentred subjects in ways which enabled them to make sense of the world and their historic role within it.”21 In precisely the same way the British Columbian melodrama turned on “epic” principles and concerns, including a sense of demographic urgency, a need to populate in the right sort of ways and in a hurry, that informed the colonial/provincial enterprise for much of the last 150 years. The survival of “British Columbia” – especially in the nineteenth century – has been narrativized overwhelmingly as an imperial struggle against demographic odds, geography, and economic vulnerability.22 The dominance of this form has placed the working people’s history in a peculiar perspective. Individual agency has been neglected in favour of community integrity and growth; conflicting approaches to industrialization – in the form of management strategies and workers’ organizations – have taken centre stage, while porous definitions of work, occupation, gender roles, and race have gone unexamined. A peculiar feature of these trends has been to assume that being British in this colonial-demographic environment denoted something tangible. This study problematizes the British immigrant experience with an eye to extracting it from that orthodox narrative.

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The difficulty of appreciating the role of British miners in British Columbia begins, paradoxically perhaps, in the British historiography. Although the adventures, triumphs, and disasters of British capital abroad are treated as part of the national saga, once British labour sails out of sight it is gone for good. The effect of this widespread disregard for British emigrants has been to restrict historical vision to a rather constipated geographical perspective. The tale of British labour can only be understood, it seems, if it is told within the confines of the British Isles. However politically potent, culturally vibrant, or economically dynamic the working population might appear to historians regarding it at home, overseas it becomes subordinate to other ethnicities, stripped of its ability to create and sustain ritual, and economically beholden to the brilliance of colonial capital and investors. British navies (not navvies) and capitalists may have been able at one time to impose British values and political ambitions on colonial peoples, but British women, children, and men who went abroad in search of work and wages presumably were not. Or, worse still, the British working class is assumed to carry on, business as usual, unchanged and evidently unchangeable wherever it found itself. Admittedly, far more British labouring folk stayed at home than wandered the globe at any time. Still, the numbers overseas are considerable. As Eric Hobsbawm observes, more than five million British emigrated to Canada, the United States, and Australia between 1851 and 1880.23 What became of them? Did they remain British? Did the British industrial community abroad constitute a radical fragment that quickly congealed (as per the theories of Louis Hartz) into a template of social relations that constipated history?24 Or did the proletarian emigrants dispose of their cultural baggage in a new setting and assimilate into the local population? Part of the historians’ dilemma in this respect is that colonial societies have fallen out of vogue in contemporary international historical writing. Postimperial sentiment has rendered them down from mythical bold pioneers to unwitting agents of foreign domination. Colonists (as distinct from colonial administrations) are now as alienated from fashion as they once were out of touch with their aboriginal neighbours. As feminist theories as well as postmodern approaches based on semiotics winkle out details on the unwritten history of those who were not white, not male, and not likely to salute a Union Jack, historians have turned their collective back on British newcomers. The outlines of the settlers’ tale, whether told from an Albertan or an antipodean perspective, with its demographically constructed masculinity, its implicit theme of expropriation of aboriginal lands and resources, and the dead weight of “progress” draped across its sinewy shoulders, could hardly be more calculated to drive

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Introduction

off the postmodern scholar. This ought not to be the case, for the history of colonization is surely the most pivotal moment, the transcendent episode in the confrontation between the authoritative voice of Empire and the nascence of, for example, a British Columbian identity. It is the mortar in which the indigenous, the foreign (with its pretensions, for the moment, intact), and ambition meet. Colonial policy is only a part of this enterprise; what ought to excite historians of all stripes is that drawn-out instant in which cultures in a new or unstable setting do more than synthesize. And yet the British working-class diaspora continues to be ignored. The leading labour, social, and cultural histories on Britain make scant mention of British workers abroad or even their exodus out of their respective homelands. A recent and very lucid survey of British workingclass history commented on the options available to workers who could not secure better wages, which included “petty criminality, charity or – the last resort – the workhouse.” Emigration is not an option for these more desperate workers, nor does it appear to be one for the better off, skilled labourers either. In point of fact, “emigration” does not even appear in the book’s index.25 Edward Thompson did little better in The Making of the English Working Class; his descriptions of emigrants were restricted to pamphleteers and radicals, only the outstanding personalities who made as much noise abroad as they had at home. Thus in 1817 Cobbett flees “to America,” where he is joined by other leading reform-minded figures.26 And while Hobsbawm at least recognizes the enormous importance of human global migration in the last century, he effectively closes off any discussion of the need for the British worker abroad to adapt to her/his new surroundings: “The question did not arise for those settling in their state’s colonies, who could continue to remain Englishmen or Frenchmen in New Zealand or Algeria, thinking of the old country as ‘home.›27 This presumption raises two questions of the historiography: first, if the British worker in New Zealand did not need to adapt and was insulated from indigenous influences by the Empire, is the social and/or cultural history of Britain not, in essence, being carried on in the antipodes? Second, if it is, why does it receive less attention from British social historians than, say, Cornwall? British capital abroad is a subject fit for study by British business historians, but so far as British social historians are concerned, once a shipload of emigrants disappeared across the horizon, they disappeared too from the pages of British history. Thus the potential for drawing together a history of, say, the British colliers’ diaspora has never been realized. What does this imply for writing the history of the host countries? If British immigrants carried on being British in, say, Canada, where does

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a distinctly Canadian discourse begin? Is a large chapter of EnglishCanadian labour history pre-written by the nation from which the most dominant ethnic group originated? In communities where recent British immigration dominated the population as a whole, were the minority Anglo-Canadians dancing to a British tune? As a historian of Canada, it is impossible for me to conclude that the British immigrant was not altered in some measure by the experience of moving to a new home on an alien ocean. New issues and environments came to bear on the women and men who crossed the globe, some of which would have necessitated developing wholly new perspectives. However, it is also clear that for anglophones the process of becoming Canadian was not merely matter of time or of the passing of first-generation immigrants. Flattened accents notwithstanding, there is no reason to assume that the children of British expatriates in Canada were Canadianized by a long winter and “the French fact.” The language of colonial life was often so clearly Imperial in its origins and orientation that the retention of aspects of Britishness was legitimized. British characteristics and identity were, then, influential but not immutable. This process of cultural modification can be shown by examining a particular group in a particular situation. British immigrants could be found in large numbers in various Canadian circumstances. On the whole, however, they were outnumbered and politically outgunned by homegrown Canadians. British garrisons down to the late 1860s were an exception, but social relations in the mess halls were clearly atypical of the immigrant and native experience. There were, too, areas where the proportion of British settlement was significant but where their numbers were overrepresented in the councils of authority. Nineteenthcentury Montreal, Winnipeg, and Victoria come to mind in this respect. Under such circumstances Britishness was regarded favourably. Defining “Britishness,” however, raises some problems. Patrick Joyce has probably contributed more to the new discourse on British culture than any other historian, and yet the culture he describes is evanescent. Far from nailing down a generic British popular culture, he identifies a multiplicity of cultures that worked in large measure to impede class consciousness. Even “the great coalfields, supposed bastions of ‘traditional’ working-class consciousness, did not emerge as fully coherent social and cultural entities until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.”28 With what confidence, then, can one say that mid– to late-nineteenth century British emigration took with it identifiable and consistent traits? The Englishman (and Scotsman and Welshman) abroad, especially if he was drawn from emergent industrial communities, is thus more problematic than has been acknowledged in much of the Canadian literature. An exception expresses the

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Introduction

point with conscious Canadian irony: in the nineteenth century “the British Isles were still a cultural mosaic.”29 The British, as the context-group in terms of ethnicity and language and political culture, have been largely overlooked in Canada. In many respects the Asians, Eastern Europeans, Scandinavians, and even the Americans have been more visible. Where the British appear, it is primarily in their role as members of the elite. Politicians, railway magnates, and the rest constitute their chief representation. This is narrow and inadequate. British elites at home and abroad gave a powerful and persuasive packaging to their ethnicity, one that was wrapped up in notions of empire and progressive civilization, two separate notions that can quite usefully be conflated here. But just as Westminster did not speak the same language as the Rhondda Valley miner, Canadian prime minister Alexander Mackenzie’s Scottish burr could not be mistaken for the voice of Ayrshire miners in Nova Scotia. The working-class immigrants’ experience stands apart from that of the elite, and the British workingclass immigrants’ history is no less distinctive for belonging to the context group. Historian of Canadian immigration Franca Iocavetta notes that the earliest literature on newcomers’ experiences in this country contained “a bias in favour of the British ‘stock’ and Anglo-Celtic mores,” but recent writing in this field has swung quite hard against the context, or “charter,” groups. As a consequence, we do not yet have a good sense of working-class British ethnicity in Canada. Iacovetta identifies a list of questions that command attention by Canadian historians of immigration writing as a new century begins. Primarily, these are geared toward moving the historian’s attention away from immigration policy and purely numerical studies to perspectives that emphasize agency: “[Recently] historians have made the daily stuff of immigrants’ lives the central concern of their project. Far from simply studying private matters and inconsequential lives, this approach asserts that agency is not exclusively the domain of the powerful. Subordinated and disadvantaged groups can also exercise choice, mount resistance (or alternatively, orchestrate their accommodation with the dominant ethos), and wield some power, even if it is local in scope and seriously circumscribed.” Iacovetta is, I believe, too quick to dismiss “models that catalogue push-pull factors,” insofar as these models need not be viewed from a macroeconomic perspective and they offer a useful insight into the immigrants’ motivations and expectations. Having said that, she admirably emphasizes emigration as a survival strategy: emigrants “exercised agency even in exploitative contexts by escaping worsening economic conditions or class tensions in their homeland, by greasing the palms of recruiting agents and shipping captains who profited from the overseas traffic in humans, and by joining kinfolk and

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co-nationals in low-paid occupational clusters in the new economy.” The language in this passage is evocative more of southern European newcomers than British immigrants, but the point is undoubtedly valid for both. Moving on from a deteriorating situation at home (surely a push?) to a nineteenth-century community about which only a limited amount could possibly be known but which the potential immigrant judged to be superior in some important way (surely a pull?) has to be seen as the first consideration of historians of immigration. It is the first and preeminent act of the immigrant, one that was bound to condition all subsequent experiences in the new land. This is not to say that the story of immigrants should be dressed in the hagiographic finery of “resiliency, and immigrant success”; one need not “transform immigrants into heroes,” however remarkable their accomplishments.30 We need but be curious about the motivations of our actors and how they acted in and were acted upon by their new situation. In the context of the present study this means identifying the British miners as British at the outset and running our fingers along the threads that led to their becoming Canadian or, more specifically, British Columbian.31 This study departs from conventional approaches to this history of working people in several ways. With the exception of the First Nations peoples of Vancouver Island and Georgia Strait and the small numbers of children born there to newcomers in the last half of the century, this was a community made up of immigrants. It makes sense, then, to consider the phenomenon of immigration as a fundamental feature of community-making on Vancouver Island. And this is done here in two ways: by identifying the significance of this common experience and by analyzing the demographic character of the waves of immigrants to the coalfield. Population history in Western Canada is still in a state of comparative immaturity. There are no monographs on the subject, nor is there a body of scholarly articles that might be said to constitute an historiographical consensus.32 There is, simply put, no debate. This lacuna is of fundamental importance to the present study, insofar as it attempts to place a somewhat familiar social/labour history study in a demographic context. As I have written elsewhere, British Columbia was – like so many settlement societies – principally a demographic project conceived within the language of imperialism.33 In the face of American expansionism a “loyal” population needed to be established. This meant, in the first instance, overwhelming the indigenous population by weight of numbers and, where necessary, by force of arms. It also generated a lively discourse over the sort of population that was viewed by colonial decision-makers as desirable. Clearly, the Asian component of the workforce in the mines was a problem in this respect, as economic utility collided head-on with a de-

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Introduction

mographic inconsistency. The “Asian Issue” became viewed as a demographic problem whose solution lay in legislation and a further white demographic response that coupled increased immigration with natural increase. When one encounters notions of race in British Columbia’s historical literature, it is usually in the context of the oppression of nonwhite peoples, but this approach misses the point to some extent. The white race was also being constructed in a more conscious fashion in British Columbia than in many other colonies; the British white population even more so.34 Being “British” was invoked repeatedly by colonists and colonizers, so much so that being a British miner in British Columbia came to have a special and specified meaning. In this light, this study links demographic and discursive history to produce a more consciously biological view of British Columbia’s past. Discussions of imperialism and the international diffusion of industrial capitalism invariably hinge on notions of political colonization. Issues like sovereignty and the domination of indigenous and settler societies are the overarching themes, but these themes neglect the biological aspects of colonization. To this point I have avoided the question of class, for reasons that would not surprise anyone familiar with the debates in recent years among social and cultural historians. Increasingly the utility of “class” as a means of understanding the great social transformations of the industrial era has lost its purchase on historians. The works of Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce are exemplary in this respect, in that they draw into question the validity of class as a tool for understanding societies that were, very often, divided by competing loyalties to religion, region, employer, party, and liberal democratic ideals and by the partitions of gender and race or ethnicity.35 The effect has been to drive an intellectual wedge between social structure and social culture. Whatever one’s perspective on this very vigorous debate, class (let alone class consciousness) can no longer be taken for granted. This debate has been highly divisive in Britain, but Canadian scholars can enjoy the luxury of a more liberal detachment. Here it is possible to see the agency of historical change in social structures, while acknowledging that the ‹deconstruction’ of class … has been very useful in questioning old shibboleths and recognising that there is, indeed, no automatic relationship between the social structure and political movements.”36 Moreover, the linguistic turn invites social historians to look more closely at the roles assigned to the less powerful and at how languages of oppression underwrote languages of solidarity and identity. To that end, this study attempts to marry those elements of the older, still invaluable social history to those of the new cultural history. I

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remain committed to the basically Marxist proposition common to social historians that material relationships mattered and that they are a useful point of departure for understanding social relationships beyond the narrow economic contexts of class. At the same time, the construction of subjective “experiences” is placed under the lens here. “The real experience of diverse working people in industrial capitalist societies,” one historian of immigrant miners writes, “can be understood only by viewing class through broad lenses and by focussing on the historical intersections of economics, power, politics, culture, human agency, and consciousness in its many forms.”37 The point, then, is to enhance our appreciation of the working-class experience by taking in more than just the trumpeted industrial disputes of the day. Examining occupational categories, racist discourse, and Britishness allows the adult British male immigrant to shed his skin as a miner and become simultaneously a farmer and an entrepreneur, an immigrant and an ethnic subject; the adult British female immigrant to central Vancouver Island emerges as an agent of historical change in a male-dominated industrial town; and, finally, children (whose importance as active historical players is too often ignored) take their place on the stage as well. The defining feature of this coalfield colony, I argue here, was not its political character, at least, not in the institutional sense. Power was something to vie for and something to be exercised by an assortment of individuals and groups, to be sure, but it could not and it did not inform people’s lives at a conscious level in the way that other concerns did. As Cole Harris and Robert Galois say of another region in British Columbia, these settlers had to “recalibrate” themselves to new social and spatial relations.38 But they did so from the perspective of immigrants. That is to say, they had expectations that formed the criteria by which the colony would be judged. If, for example, they expected improved living standards, then they would respond, predictably to a cut in wages; if they expected a better life for every family member, then they would question any attempt to reduce opportunities and creature comforts. This combined social and cultural analysis is built on the back of a demographic assessment, one that seeks to more clearly identify the social participants and their lives. The subtitle of this book, The Making of the British Columbian Working Class, refers to that reciprocal process, the interaction between a newcomer population and its environment that generated a distinctive historical community. The main participants in this tale, then, are outwardly a homogeneous and easily identified group drawn from a single occupational class. The British coalminers of the nineteenth century have probably endured more scrutiny than any of their contemporaries. What makes them attractive for study is their sheer weight of numbers during the in-

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Introduction

dustrial revolution, their apparent political cohesion (at least when considered coalfield by coalfield), and the peculiar conditions under which they worked. They are interesting for other reasons as well. They were seen as a race apart (even at home) from at least the late eighteenth century, and in many regions they conducted themselves accordingly. Their leadership produced some of the great political figures of the nineteenth century, and their unions were a force to be reckoned with. More than this, however, the miners lived, mostly, in communities in which family and household played an important role in reproducing social relations underground. The role of miners’ sons in the mines, their wives in the towns, and their daughters both under- and aboveground add complexity to the picture of the coalminer as a purely machismo caricature. This study seeks out that complexity in a remote coalmining community. British Columbia’s history of mining is now more than 150 years old. Almost from the outset, wisely or not, British colonial administrators and investors sought the support and expertise of British miners in their distant enterprises. However, the variety of mining enterprises forbids easy cross-province comparisons even in such a sparsely populated settlement economy. The independent productive modes of the Fraser River gold rush or the heavily capitalized silver mines of the late-nineteenth century Slocan district pose difficulties in assembling a provincewide social history of mining.39 These obstacles, however, are boons to a microhistorical approach that addresses larger questions at a smaller level, rather than leaving the locale disconnected from a greater whole. In this instance the focus is on a tiny fraction of Canada’s physical space and a population whose extent was never very great. This kind of method has, of course, yielded important results in the past and is increasingly exploited by mining historians who need to make comparisons between coalfields that are supported by local information on “such variables as the type of technology, the demographic mix, the level of earnings, the size of the collieries, the thickness of the coal seam, and the extent to which social and political power in the coalfield was monopolized by capital.”40 As a second generation British Columbian I find myself viscerally suspicious of Canadian historians who call for more synthesis at the expense of regional history; their rhetoric often has a disturbingly familiar, damnation-by-rep-by-pop ring to it. But I am also typical of so many other British Columbians in that my recent roots trail back east through prairie homesteads and Ontario cities to Maritime valleys, on the one side, and across oceans – in my case to bleak mining villages in Wales and Northumberland – on the other. I see myself and my province’s history as connected to, not isolated from, the rest of the world.

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The eminent British Columbian historical geographer, Cole Harris, has posited an innovative view of colonial settler societies that will be directly and indirectly challenged by the evidence presented and the conclusions reached here. Harris argues that in the process of colonization there is what he calls a simplification of origin culture. By this he does not mean, condescendingly, that colonial societies are less mature, robust, or complex than origin cultures. Rather, he is stating that some features of origin cultures become either irrelevant or unsustainable in new colonial settings and thus wither away. An example that will be familiar to historians of labour would be the failure of St Crispin’s Day festivals in North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when there were too few cobblers scattered between too many villages and towns to sustain the relationships necessary for such a workers’ celebration. That element of origin culture (in this instance, British) disappeared because distances and economics made its persistence more trouble than it was worth. Likewise, it would prove impossible to recreate feudal relations in North America, where land ownership remained a prospect held out more democratically. Harris argues that the British (and Chinese and Italian and even American) cultures represented in British Columbia were “simplified” in this manner.41 But, as Tina Loo has observed of the Cariboo gold miners, the newcomers were themselves conscious of and participants in the transformations of their culture.42 The context in which and the extent to which British working-class colonists on Vancouver Island similarly participated in the transformation of their homeland culture is explored in the present study, and I argue that, far from being “simplified,” their culture became more complex as it became more British Columbian. The focus here, then, is on individual people’s agency, from the point at which they consider emigration from Britain through their household, economic, and political choices. While it is mindful of the social relations of capital, this study moves beyond the confines of economism to “subjective economic rationalities.” This leads into a consideration of the meaning of work and colonialism in an industrial colony. In the 1980s New Cultural Historians problematized the idea of work, demonstrating the extent to which it could be considered a social construct. The character of minework in a colonial setting like that of Vancouver Island was bound up in a multiplex of meanings, including those associated with the genderization and racialization of labour. Yet, even though many British newcomers to the island described themselves as miners in the census, many moved frequently and extensively outside that singular definition. It is not simply that some lives fell into the cracks between conventional definitional categories; it is, rather, that a large number of lives were lived almost entirely within the cracks.

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Introduction

These issues invite broad and complex questions, most of which are inimical to narrow, straightforward answers. So it is best to begin with the simplest of queries. Who were the British miners on Vancouver Island? Why would anyone travel for as much as six months on a stomach-grinding sea voyage to Vancouver Island, a place that had only recently crept out of the mapmakers’ terra incognita? What were their mining experiences? And how were they and their families changed by it all? Chapter 2 describes the place of Vancouver Island in Britain’s industrial empire, establishing the context for the waves of immigration that took place in the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 recalls the attempts to recruit miners from the British Isles, and chapter 4 describes the population that set up shop in and around Nanaimo and its satellite centres. Chapter 5 examines the subterranean workplace and its implications for lives above ground. The collision between British (and other white) settlers and Asian newcomers is detailed in chapter 6, along with class friction and the kind of community this generated. Chapter 7 connects these developments to underlying demographic trends, including the malleability of identity. Finally, in an effort to draw together a layered picture of what might be called the cradle of modern British Columbian society, chapter 8 returns to familiar social history terrain, with a study of the various institutional expressions of life on the coalfield, including leisure time, religion, education, and the intersection of so many of these features in the public and private rituals and meanings of death on the coalfield. The text moves back and forth from the establishment of the first proletariat on Vancouver Island in 1848 to the end of the nineteenth century, by which time American and Canadian influences were challenging the prominence of the British element. Thereafter, the rise of more radical American unions like the Western Federation of Miners, the sale of the Dunsmuir properties to Canadian railway giants Mackenzie and Mann, the arrival of increasing numbers of workers from Nova Scotia, Italy, Finland, Japan, and elsewhere simultaneously homogenized island capitalism and added greater diversity to the workplace and the community.43 The story of the British miners on Vancouver Island offers insights into two national milieux, then. For Canadians, the colliers played an undeniable role in establishing a social and political culture on the West Coast, and for that reason they are worthy of examination. For British historians of miners and emigration, the islanders provide an opportunity to test the validity and desirability of certain social, economic, and political paradigms. In the diaspora of the Victorian empire the British coalminer abroad played as great a role in diffusing values and attitudes as any directive from the Colonial Office. Contrariwise,

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some elements of life in Old Country mining towns that one might have regarded as of central importance slipped silently over the railings of the emigrant ship and into the sea. The paired goals of this study are to restore the British miners of Vancouver Island to British history and to restore the making of the British Columbian working class to British Columbian history.

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2 Mining Coal on the Edge of the Empire

Vancouver Island lies just off the northwest coast of mainland North America. The largest island in the western Pacific, it is slightly greater in area than Belgium. There the similarity with any Old World nation ends: one could hardly confuse the gently rolling hardwood countryside of England for Vancouver Island’s craggy stands of gargantuan Douglas firs, edged with the ochre sinews of arbutus. On the southern tip of the island receding glaciers left behind a scarred but fertile landscape dominated by foothills and tucked-away valleys. Mid-island, a spine of towering mountains makes coast-to-coast travel tortuous, though not impossible. Long stretches of beach on the west coast are punctuated by broad meandering inlets and clutches of islets; the eastern slope, where the coal seams lay, boasts a series of fertile river valleys that drop away gently into the deep and sheltered waters of the Gulf of Georgia. In the gulf a chain of smaller islands of varying size and agricultural potential occurs within reach of the coalfields. Colonial Vancouver Island looked out into the Pacific world, but its eastcoast colliery towns were literally on a backwater. For millennia Vancouver Island has been home to a variety of peoples, including the Kwakwaka’wakw, the Sne ney mux and other Hul’qumi’num peoples, the Nuu’chah’nulth, and others.1 Their precontact societies were among the most densely populated in the Americas, sustained by an enviable resource base of abundant food from the sea and the cedar forests that also provided materials for construction of redoubtable villages, ocean-going craft, and trademark carved works of art.

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Europeans first arrived in the North Pacific during the closing decades of the eighteenth century. British explorers (led by Captains Cook and Vancouver) initially came to the region in search of the elusive northwest passage. Before the hopelessness of this project was fully appreciated, the lucrative trade with Canton in sea otter pelts ensured an extension of European involvement. The island first achieved global notice during the so-called Nootka crisis in the late 1780s, when British and Spanish interests clashed over trading rights with aboriginal nations on the North Pacific Coast. The Spanish, Russian, and American competitors were eventually squeezed out of the territory between the mouth of the Columbia River and Russian Alaska by the British. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, then, the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc) – the British fur trade monopoly – came into effective possession of an enormous commercial dominion that included the whole of Vancouver Island. Until the 1830s the influence of the hbc on the coast was extensive, if not intensive. Dependent upon a fleet of vessels plying the waters from the mouth of the Columbia River to Alaska, the company was unenthusiastic about establishing settlements beyond what was necessary for the exploitation and defence of their monopoly. In the same decade, the land-based fur trade eclipsed the maritime trade. With an eye to staunching the flow of pelts from the interior, forts were established on the Nass, the Stikine, and the Fraser rivers, as well as at Bella Bella.2 In 1843 Fort Victoria was established on the southern tip of Vancouver Island and emerged as an important base of operations. The locations of the modest hbc settlements that emerged in these years owed much to the commercial activities and seasonal rounds of the local aboriginal population, a factor that was later to bear on coal mining on Vancouver Island.3 The first men and women known to wrest coal from the exposed beds along the eastern shoreline of Vancouver Island were members of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation. Seacoal – chunks of coal that had been washed ashore – was also there for the taking and can still easily be found in the region. Given the abundance of wood in the rich rain forests of the region, aboriginal interest in coal had little or nothing to do with its properties as a fuel. The Kwakwaka’wakw were mainly concerned with the utility of coal as a dye, particularly for body decoration. Like so many other aspects of aboriginal life on the Pacific, the Kwakwaka’wakw relationship with their coal resource would change profoundly with the arrival of Europeans.4 In 1835 a blacksmith at the hbc’s Fort McLoughlin was introduced to indigenous coal. For the better part of forty years what little coal had been consumed by the company’s Pacific Coast operations had

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originated in Britain, principally in South Wales. Evidently “the Indians were vastly amused” when informed that the hbc outposts depended on a resource that was six month’s sailing time away.5 The Kwakwaka’wakw traders subsequently disclosed points on the northern shoreline of Vancouver Island from which coal could be obtained. A similar revelation occurred fifteen years later when the coal measures at the village of the Coast Salish Sne ney mux were brought to the attention of hbc officers.6 In both instances the participation of aboriginal informants had tremendous significance, not least because seacoal and surface coal found close to the sea were generally loose and crumbly due to their exposure to the elements: it was of little immediate value even to the hbc’s blacksmiths. On the other hand, these foreshore outcroppings were accessible to shipping. All things considered, it seemed to the hbc’s administrators a hopeful opportunity in their attempts to diversify their enterprises on the coast.7 The chief factor of the Pacific Coast operations, James Douglas, was certainly enthusiastic. Mining of exposed seams was conducted by the Kwakiutl at Beaver Harbour from the late 1830s, when a station was established. Fort Rupert, as it was called, was the company’s first and only establishment on the coast whose primary function was neither trading furs nor growing food. In 1848, the year of the Communist Manifesto and of revolution in Europe, plans were first laid to extract island coal along industrial lines using nonnative labour. Experienced coalminers and their families were recruited from Lanarkshire in Scotland with an eye to bringing the operation into the nineteenth century.8 The miniature industrial revolution that followed did not go well.9 Fort Rupert suffered mainly from four shortcomings, the first being its poor location. Communications were primarily from the open Pacific via “a tedious navigation round Cape Scott” to the north, a route that was difficult and expensive.10 As a result, Fort Victoria became a transshipment point for both outbound coal and incoming supplies, adding unwanted costs to Fort Rupert’s accounts. Second, British vessels in mid-century were bringing large quantities of Welsh and Derbyshire coal into the Pacific as ballast. Stockpiled for the use of the Royal Navy at Valparaiso, Panama, San Francisco, and elsewhere, this inexpensive, exotic coal cut Fort Rupert out of any significant share of the market. Third, the fur trade at Fort Rupert was insufficient to subsidize early attempts at mining.11 The establishment of a coalmining settlement necessitated the construction of a permanent post, the transfer of company staff from other forts, the erection of a new subsidiary administrative structure – in short, a reallocation of scarce financial and human resources. To pay for Fort Rupert’s development, the hbc needed the buttress of a lively local trade in pelts, at least over the short

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run, and this the company could not secure. Finally, and most importantly, the coal raised by aboriginal and British miners at Beaver Harbour between 1848 and 1853 was of such low grade that further development of the mines seemed pointless. The post and the mine workings were abandoned by the hbc in the 1850s. The site was described in the Victoria Daily Colonist on 23 March 1870 as already “so overgrown with poplars, and every vestige of dwellings had been removed by Indians, that a stranger would not have discovered that coal had ever been worked there.” Growing frustration with the Fort Rupert mines in 1850 was the cue for a wholesale relocation south when promising seams were found at Fort Colville, renamed Nanaimo shortly thereafter. Like its predecessor, the new hbc station was an attempt to combine several operations. Nanaimo, however, enjoyed substantial advantages, including accessibility via the wide sheltered passages of Georgia Strait. As well, the Hul’qumi’num peoples posed fewer problems to the colliery than had the Kwakiutl at Fort Rupert, despite their equally bellicose reputation (deserved or not). Last, the balance of fur trade and mining activities at Nanaimo favoured the new post from the start. Nanaimo soon eclipsed Fort Rupert completely and in fewer than fifty years grew from an hbc camp in the shadow of a whitewashed bastion to one of the largest industrial towns in British North America. Over the short term, though, Chief Factor Douglas was to find his company’s second mining venture only slightly less confounding than its first. Under the auspices of the hbc the Nanaimo coal mines expanded slowly. The company’s Royal Licence to exclusive trade on Vancouver Island (as well as to the mainland territories opposite) was awarded by Westminster in 1849, giving the hbc effective control of all aspects of administration in the colony on the understanding that substantial permanent white settlements would be encouraged.12 The hbc did little to fulfill its settlement obligations, however. As a consequence, Vancouver Island had an elected assembly thrust upon it in 1856, the hbc’s lease was dissolved in 1859, and the island became a Crown colony. These constitutional developments, accompanied in 1858 by the first of several mainland goldrushes (which produced the separate colony of British Columbia), diminished the commercial authority of the hbc. Having lost its monopoly over trade, in December 1862 the company sold off the Nanaimo holdings to the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company (vcmlc) of London. The operations purchased by the vcmlc included a disappointing inventory of fixed capital.13 The Hudson’s Bay Company had provided spartan housing for its miners, completed a small wharf, and erected primitive winding gear at the pithead.14 Nevertheless, investors in En-

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gland perceived great potential in the untapped resources beneath the fort. Nanaimo was well situated to take advantage of Victoria’s commercial heyday during and after the Fraser River goldrush in 1858; the growing fuel needs of the Royal Navy’s Pacific Squadron were another important consideration. Expanding trade and favourable geology brought forth predictions by English observers that Nanaimo would become the “Newcastle of the Pacific” and that Vancouver Island would constitute “a Greater Britain,” one that would take advantage of established transoceanic trade links with Hawaii, China, and the Antipodes.15

the era of industrial capitalism The Nanaimo colliery was eventually very successful, despite the enormous distance separating the mines from head office. The board of directors had impeccable credentials (and, presumably, connections) that appear to have mitigated some of the difficulties attendant on managing remote investments.16 Formed in August 1862 the vcmlc was chaired by Mr Justice T.C. Haliburton, member of parliament, colonial booster, owner of Nova Scotian gypsum quarries, and author of the Sam Slick stories, which enjoyed considerable popularity during the last century. Agnes Strickland, who wrote The Lives of the Queens of England, was an important and influential shareholder. John R. Galsworthy (who was succeeded by his son, a second John R.) was another key investor and, though lacking literary accomplishments himself, was the grandfather of Thomas Galsworthy the playwright and novelist. Thomas’ father, John junior, assumed a key position on the board of the company and acquired a reputation as an innovator: he is credited with introducing diamond drillbits to North American mining in 1865.17 The vcmlc’s main competitor on Vancouver Island was Robert Dunsmuir, a Scottish mining engineer brought out from Ayrshire by the Hudson’s Bay Company in the early 1850s. Conflicting versions of the Dunsmuir story continue to circulate, but a few features seem reliable.18 Long on the lookout for a seam of coal that he could stake and mine for himself, Dunsmuir discovered what he sought near a lake just north of Nanaimo in 1869. Dunsmuir hired a small workforce and set about extracting the seam using a brutish open-pit technique that kept capital and labour costs low over the first four or five years of operation. Expansion of plant and output followed in the late 1870s and through the 1880s.19 Whereas the vcmlc tapped wealthy investors in England, Robert Dunsmuir’s enterprise had subscribers among the colonial elite.20 Two years after he made his discovery Dunsmuir entered into a shrewd

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partnership with Lieutenant W.N. Diggle of the Royal Navy base at Esquimalt. In 1873 Dunsmuir and Diggle were joined by two more navy men. These alliances were useful in lean years when contracts with Esquimalt were almost all that sustained the Wellington Colliery. In 1883 Dunsmuir set about acquiring stock in various Comox Valley mining opportunities. The Baynes Sound Coal Mining Company, the port of Union Bay, and the Union Coal Company’s workings around Coal Creek, one hundred kilometres north of Wellington, would all prove their worth under Dunsmuir’s management.21 His greatest achievement came in 1884, when the provincial and federal governments awarded Dunsmuir a massive grant of land covering about one-fifth of Vancouver Island (including most of the lower coalfield) as an incentive to construct a railroad between Nanaimo and Esquimalt. This coup guaranteed Dunsmuir’s fortune, and, already the foremost capitalist in the province, he quickly rose to become one of the wealthiest men in British North America.22 In addition to the link with the navy and his railway, Dunsmuir sought other vertical economic integrations, including the Albion Iron Works in Victoria (which he owned) and the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company (in which he held shares). With Dunsmuir’s riches came substantial power in all parts of Vancouver Island society. Both Robert and his elder son James attracted government patronage and attained political office. And it was advantageous to the Dunsmuir mines that Robert’s son-in-law was for many years the resident manager of the vcmlc’s Nanaimo operations. Forceful personalities, an aggressive attitude toward expanding output in their mines, and an antipathy to trade unionism combined to make the Dunsmuirs stereotypical robber barons and, inevitably, targets for industrial unrest and controversy.23 There were other, less significant mining operations on Vancouver Island, some of which managed to escape the predatory Dunsmuirs. Junior enterprises in the area depended mostly on family labour and the occasional worker who could be poached from Wellington, Nanaimo, and Cumberland. Mining settlements, by contrast, were entirely creations of the Dunsmuirs and the vcmlc, a tremendous advantage during an extended period of labour scarcity. By the late 1880s the mining frontier of small independent enterprises – if it ever truly existed – had been closed by monopoly capitalism. Some of the smaller undertakings failed as new mines proved to be too far from rail and harbour facilities. Others found themselves cut off from the sea by Dunsmuir’s Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway grant. Most frequently, however, secondary coal prospects turned out to be shallow and effectively worthless.24 In the early-twentieth century one local commentator observed that “the coal business has got into very powerful hands, and it would be almost impossible for an outsider to ‘cut in.›25

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Challenges to this emergent industrial order were swift in coming. Confronted by blustering managers at Fort Rupert in 1850, the Lanarkshire miners’ spokesman, Andrew Muir, replied to the effect that “Revolution was approaching, the Company’s day was gone by and … the men were beginning to hold their heads up.” Dissatisfied with their lot in what Muir described as “the lunatic asylum of the coast,” most of the Scots slipped away one evening in canoes and made their way south in search of “some Christian place since we could get neither rights nor privileges here.”26 Similar incidents followed at Fort Nanaimo but, more typically, the Nanaimo-area miners resorted to labour disputes, rather than to desertions en masse. In 1855 a strike among Scottish and Black Country pitmen focussed primarily on the preservation of the miners’ artisanal status. Four years later the question of rations paid to the miners by the hbc in lieu of money produced another strike that lasted at least a month. A five-day strike followed in 1861 over deductions and fines for dirt in the coal tubs; on two other occasions in the same decade disputes took place over tonnage rates.27 In the 1870s Nanaimo was the scene of two strikes, one of which lasted 127 days. In these cases the main issues were wage reductions (1870) and the imposition of differential pay scales (1878). More of the same followed in 1880–81. A similar pattern was witnessed at Wellington, where miners struck in 1877 and again in 1883. In the latter instance the pitworkers went out for four months over the issues of improved wages, a regular rotation of coalface places, and union recognition.28 To the north, at the mines near Comox, there was a strike in August 1889.29 The largest dispute of the nineteenth century, however, took place in 1890–91 at James Dunsmuir’s Wellington mine. The colliers’ demands included union recognition and an improvement in the wages of white unskilled support, or “oncost,” workers.30 The new century opened on a similar note. In the twelve months after July 1902 there were strikes in every one of the important Vancouver Island collieries. The prewar era closed with a two-year-long organizational dispute that affected the Nanaimo mines as well as those at Extension and Cumberland.31 The era ended as it had begun, with British miners in the forefront of industrial disputes, some agitating for contractual and political change, others simply leaving for greener pastures.

geological considerations The history of any coal industry is profoundly influenced by local geological conditions.32 The nature of the coal seam is a predetermined and fixed variable in mining; that is to say, the principal characteristics of the seams can in no way be altered through human effort. Moreover,

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the coalbed itself can be shown to have had an effect on social relations above ground. After all, Nanaimo and Wellington had little to offer apart from coal, and it was this resource that both directly and indirectly provided virtually all the local employment. It was coal that attracted settlement and coal that sustained settlement. The subterranean resources of Vancouver Island, however, were far from uniform. At Fort Rupert geological difficulties plagued the Hudson’s Bay Company and its Scottish colliers. The surface diggings were quickly exhausted by the Kwakiutl miners, and European methods of underground coal-getting met with little success. A 90-foot shaft sunk by the Scots proved too shallow; subsequently the hole was deepened to 120 feet, and at least six more shafts were dug around the fort, but none indicated coal more than six inches thick. By 1851, when an additional two dozen miners arrived from England along with “more and better coalmining machinery,” the project was already regarded as a failure.33 Only James Douglas remained optimistic. In December 1851 he wrote to Earl Grey that the operations at Fort Rupert “are proceeding with great spirits, but I am sorry to say, as yet without success, the Bore having been carried to the depth of 183 feet, without revealing a remunerative bed of Coal; there is however every reason to hope that coal will eventually be found.”34 Colonial Office officials noted in the margin of the chief factor’s communiqués that he was “too anxious to view things in a good light.” Much more skeptical reports on Fort Rupert’s prospects were provided around the same time by the first governor of the Crown colony, Richard Blanshard, but he was viewed by Westminster as “prejudiced against the Hudson’s Bay Company,” and his much cooler assessments were dismissed as unnecessarily gloomy. Blanshard had been assured by the Scottish colliers, however, that the three-foot surface seam that Douglas had reported was in reality no more than ten inches thick, “of which one half is slag.”35 The abrupt conclusion of coal mining at Fort Rupert suggests that Douglas (who was still bound to the mine-owning hbc) had delivered disingenuous reports, as the Colonial Office suspected. Fort Rupert’s meagre deposits could sustain neither a large nor a long-term industrial community. The geological prospects at Nanaimo seemed brighter from the start. Douglas hailed the discovery of coal on Wenthuysen Inlet in 1852, describing the whole region as “one vast coal field.”36 The next year, Douglas visited Nanaimo in his new capacity as governor of Vancouver Island and reported that after twelve months of work a seam averaging seven feet in thickness had been revealed only fifty feet below the surface. These were not, however, the most lucrative seams. Within a twenty-mile radius of Comox Harbour, coal from three to nine feet in thickness was examined in the 1860s and 1870s. As these

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reserves were brought into production the confidence of a generation earlier returned. In the 1880s a former chief commissioner of lands and works in British Columbia and a former president of the provincial executive council echoed Douglas when he told the Liverpool Geological Association that the island “may be called one immense coal field.”37 The variety of coal types found on Vancouver Island impressed the first professional geologists to visit the area, even if some coal types did not occur in abundance. Dr George Dawson, ubiquitous in Western Canada in the late nineteenth century, examined some of the Vancouver Island mines in 1878 and completed a geological survey of the province a decade later. At the Chase River mine he found, oddly, “very little gass [sic]” and a complete absence of safety lamps underground.38 (Elsewhere the explosive properties of the mines were much more critical.) Dawson continued to assess the island coalfield for the rest of the century. When he reported to the Royal Colonial Institute on 14 March 1893, he made some global comparisons: “The coals of British Columbia may, in fact, be said to represent, in regard to quality and composition, every stage from hard to smokeless fuels, such as anthracite, to lignites and brown coals like those of Saxony and Bohemia … None of the coal of British Columbia are so old as those worked in Great Britain; they are, in fact, all contained in cretaceous and tertiary rock.”39 Other contemporary accounts of the coal seam were less positive. As early as the 1860s a close examination of the chemical properties of island bituminous revealed a mediocre product.40 It was “soft” and consequently left a large ash residue, eleven times the volume produced by Welsh coal; this was a serious check to its use aboard steamers and in households in the early years.41 Although the Admiralty Coal Enquiry of 1845–50 had discovered ample resources for the Royal Navy in those districts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans under British control, Welsh coal’s favourable power-to-weight ratio continued to dominate naval supply calculations, and little effort was made to convert ships’ boilers so that they could take the softer coals of the Pacific Rim. “This, in turn, caused British geologists generally to underestimate the value and thus retard the exploitation of younger colonial coals.”42 Nanaimo-area mines were victims of this engineering bias. The earliest island coal to be assessed, however, was chiefly from surface seams or, at best, coal from no great depth. It was softer and prone to produce more ash than coal eventually won from deeper pits. Nevertheless, even the better coals of Vancouver Island were only as good as the coals of South Derbyshire and other central coalfields of England, and they certainly never met the high standard of South Wales coal. By the turn of the century, coal from Nanaimo and

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Cumberland still left behind more ash than Welsh coal, but as deeper mines were cut, this shortcoming diminished by about a third.43 The coal measures were almost entirely confined to a narrow and broken strip of shoreline about fifty miles long that stretched from the Cedar River area north to Union Bay and as far as ten miles inland. The Wellington seam, the largest of the three seams in the lower coalfield, stretched about twelve miles and was roughly one to one and one-half miles wide. In 1896–97 the bed was, with few exceptions, between nine and ten feet thick at Dunsmuir’s colliery at Union, comparable to the Thick Coal of Staffordshire’s Black Country, though much gassier; elsewhere it widened to twenty-five feet, comparable to the thick Barnsley Bed of South Yorkshire and the Ten Yard seam of the Black Country.44 But the Wellington seam was very uneven, a result of severe rolling and pinching in the strata. The sudden disappearance of the coalface and its rediscovery two miles away was to be an all-toocommon feature of mining on Vancouver Island. In this sense, conditions were like those in Scottish pits and some in the north of England, although the Gulf of Georgia mines proved considerably more hazardous to work.45 Compared to other, more local coals, the Vancouver Island product stood up well. In the 1890s the United States War Department made a survey of West Coast coals and found that one cord (eight feet by four feet by four feet) of “merchantable oak wood” was equivalent to eighteen hundred pounds of Nanaimo coal; the best American coal produced in the West was raised at Bellingham Bay, of which twentytwo hundred pounds was required to generate a comparable amount of energy.46 Throughout the nineteenth century Vancouver Island coal demonstrated excellent gasification qualities, and it was in this market niche that the product eclipsed its competition. In terms of regional fossil fuels Vancouver Island coal was competitive; in terms of the transoceanic supply, however, it was a second- or third-rate product. Securing markets would raise special problems for the colony, for the coal operators, and for the lives of settlers in and around Nanaimo.

markets The economic complexion of Vancouver Island changed dramatically over the last forty years of the nineteenth century.47 As the fur trade declined, gold prospecting accelerated in mainland “British Columbia,” while the trade in lumber (mainly spars and shingles) expanded slowly. Agriculture, commerce, and the exploitation of the colony’s fisheries also started to grow in the 1860s and 1870s, but coal remained Vancouver Island’s primary bulk export commodity through the second

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half of the century. Attempts at stimulating economic diversification and growth were largely unsuccessful. Vancouver Island politicians fought a bitter and protracted battle to ensure that Victoria (via Nanaimo) would become the Pacific terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, an immeasurably important asset that went instead to Burrard Inlet on the mainland in 1886. The new railway terminus city of Vancouver – founded in 1886 – picked up industries, investments, and a workforce that might otherwise have gone to Victoria, Esquimalt, or even Nanaimo. Despite the arrival of the cpr on the coast, British North American markets for Vancouver Island coal were puny. Before the completion of the railway there were only a few marginal local markets to support the Nanaimo mines. Up to 1886 these were dominated by New Westminster (a Nanaimo-size riverport on the mainland), the hbc’s establishment at Fort Langley (further up the Fraser River), a few sawmill villages along Burrard Inlet, and other settlements on Vancouver Island, of which only Victoria and Esquimalt were of any consequence. The capital city was subject to a colder climate than San Francisco, but it had a trifling population, plentiful wood fuel reserves, and few industries, so its demands were modest. Vancouver City’s growth was far more prodigious in this period, as Victoria began a long-term stagnation, but the same environmental factors dampened Lower Mainland demand for household fuel.48 Coal from Vancouver Island pits found more reliable markets with the Royal Navy. The North Pacific Squadron was established at Esquimalt in 1865, following a persistent lobby by the colonial governor and by groups in London concerned about American expansionism and the threat of renewed hostilities with Russia. The debate over sovereignty on the Pacific Coast necessitated the creation of a sizeable base that, in turn, called for the development of secure coaling stations, in this case around Nanaimo. The belief that both the Americans and the Russians coveted these very mines served to reinforce British imperial instincts. The economic bonds between Vancouver Island and California complicated a sometimes tense boundary situation along the fortyninth parallel that, in turn, underscored the need for an unambiguous British assertion of sovereignty in the region. The Dunsmuirs, in particular, were able to capitalize on these reciprocal interests by forging close ties with the Royal Navy.49 Canadian consumption of Vancouver Island coal increased after 1886. In the late 1880s the cpr initiated its shipping service to the Orient, adding in 1891 the Empress line that called at both Vancouver and Victoria, a project that increased regional demand for coal. Helpful developments were also underway in the interior of British Columbia. By

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1900 the province boasted a total of ten smelters: the huge furnaces in the Kootenay and Boundary Districts on the mainland obtained onefifth of their supply of coke from the Cumberland colliery. The concentration of Canadian manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec, however, meant that coal suppliers in eastern North America prospered far more than remote Vancouver Island mines. It remained the case in the 1890s that for every ton of island coal that remained in Canada, three still went to the United States.50 Around 1907 or 1908 (when foreign demand began to decline) Canadian purchases of island coal finally overtook exports to America. By this time, however, the embryonic manufacturing sector in Victoria – including the once-impressive Albion Iron Works – had declined sharply in the face of increased Scottish, American, and Eastern Canadian competition. The coal-based staple economy of Vancouver Island behaved in much the same way as most of Canada’s economy in this period. With a small domestic market to exploit, the industry concentrated instead on raw material exports. Export income in this case (as in so many other Canadian examples) was ploughed back into increased production of the dominant staple and into backward linkages like railways, wharves, and other local infrastructure. So from 1848 to 1900, while output frequently shot ahead to meet rising export demand, growth in the local manufacturing sector remained sluggish and incapable of significantly increasing domestic coal consumption levels.51 Throughout this period it was the San Francisco market that dominated demand. In 1848 the population of San Francisco was only about two hundred. Five years later the California goldrush had pushed the figure past thirty-five thousand; in 1860 it was almost fifty-seven thousand. Growth continued at a phenomenal rate, so that in 1880 the population stood at nearly a quarter million.52 The fact that expansion in the island collieries and population growth in California ran parallel was no accident, although the latter’s warm, dry climate meant that little fuel was needed for home heating. San Francisco was the brightest metropolis on the Pacific shore and it was “gasified” Nanaimo coal that illuminated the city’s streets. Moreover, San Francisco boasted the best harbour between Puget Sound and San Diego, and it was there, starting in 1849, that sea-going freighters disgorged their passengers and cargo, much of which was then transferred to the shallowdraft riverboats of the Sacramento.53 Virtually all the Vancouver Island coal sent to California was therefore landed at San Francisco, the epicentre of North Pacific commerce. On very few occasions did agents of the collieries encounter difficulties in selling their stock. In 1861 the Nanaimo coalfield sent over one-third of its output to California; this volume, however, constituted no more than 5.2 percent of the state’s supply. The rest of California’s coal needs were met by mines in Britain, Australia,

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Chile, Japan, the United States, and Russia (raised by hundreds of convicts on Sakhalin Island, according to Chekhov).54 By 1884 California consumed 74 percent of Vancouver Island’s total output; British Columbian coal had by this time captured a 28 percent share of the Golden State market. This fraction fluctuated between one-fifth and one-third for the next decade. In 1893 Vancouver Island coal was feeding more than 37 percent of Californian demand, a portion that the coastal Canadian mines held on to for the rest of the century.55 By the 1890s Vancouver Island coal was finding its way onto other foreign markets. As early as 1886 the management of the vcmlc initiated attempts to penetrate Asia, where they hoped the competition might prove less formidable. During the last two decades of the century contracts were also won to ship several tons of coal to the gasworks at Mazatlan on the Pacific coast of Mexico, an enterprise that encountered severe difficulties. By 1896 other minor markets included Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, Petropavlovsk, Hawaii, and Acapulco. In the 1890s, then, only one-half of the province’s coal was going to California. Nevertheless, the San Franciscan market retained pride of place. Two events in the early-twentieth century underlined the depth of the continuing relationship between the island coaltowns and northern California. First, the discovery of petroleum in California in 1900–1 forced British Columbian coal prices to tumble.56 Second, the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 reduced demand so sharply that at least one Vancouver Island mine was obliged to shut down entirely.57 California’s reliance on Vancouver Island coal was certainly no greater than Nanaimo’s dependence on the San Francisco market. To summarize, the marketing of Vancouver Island coal was oriented predominantly outside British territory. One part of the market could be described as young industries of limited capacity, small steamship operators, the mines themselves, and individuals whose household heating requirements might also be satisfied by wood. Only the gasconversion markets, coupled with the need for domestic cooking fuel, appeared steady, and the better part of these lay beyond colonial, provincial, or dominion influence. Furthermore, tariff barriers and shifting international feeling along the Pacific Rim increased the difficulties faced by the Nanaimo and Wellington mines. Against this rather unpromising background, coal production nevertheless rose steadily during the second half of the nineteenth century.

the context of settlement The peculiarities of the market were of paramount importance to the colonial communities that emerged before 1900. Coal mining was Vancouver Island’s most important industrial enterprise, and the Nanaimo-area

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collieries were the largest operations of their kind west of the Rocky Mountains until the late 1890s. Colliers were in an exceptional position there, isolated from regional and international centres and unable to move easily to alternative coalfields. They were the single largest body of wage labourers in British Columbia, they were part of the “pioneer” wave of settlement, and they were a key element in a staple economy whose entrepot was the tempestuous market of San Francisco. The first generation of British miners on Vancouver Island experienced this economic environment with alternating satisfaction and frustration. The scale and quality of the coal resources were consistently overrated, one of the earliest portents of confrontations to come. There were both social and political consequences for British miners who had travelled half-way around the planet only to find themselves on a coalfield with what proved to be modest potential. And because Nanaimo and Wellington coal was best suited for gasification and was, therefore, of greater use to civic consumers than to industrial markets, the success of island coal would hinge on urban requirements in California, while doing little to assist economic expansion and diversification in the colony itself. Alternative job opportunities in industrial wage-labour were not, therefore, easily accessible to the mining population. Additionally, the gaseous instability of the coal combined with extensive seam faulting to create working conditions that were both more dangerous and potentially less profitable than was the case in Old Country mines. Finally, the established Pacific Rim orientation of trade from Vancouver Island meant that the industry would be outward looking and dependent on sea-borne transportation conducive to the migration of working peoples from Europe and Asia. Thus, connections with Britain were endorsed by a coincidence of landscape and technology that simultaneously reduced the likelihood of any large influx from eastern Canada, even after 1886. Just as the fur trade had secured the colony for Britain in the first half of the century, the coal industry guaranteed a special role for Britain and for British labour over the fifty years that followed.

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3 The Emigrant British Miners and Their Kin

One feature of frontier communities that defines “frontierness” is an inability to grow rapidly from internal means. That is to say, population expansion is dependent primarily on continued immigration. On agricultural frontiers like the North American plains this can mean one thing, but it is something very different on industrial frontiers like Vancouver Island. As the nineteenth century matured and the dissemination of industrial technology gathered speed, demand rose worldwide for fuel in a mineral-based energy economy and the mining frontier expanded globally.1 In those years coalmining was so labour-intensive a proposition that few coalfields could meet the need for workers through natural increase. Whether drawn off the land or lured from other coalfields, labour in colliery towns throughout Europe and North America was characteristically multiethnic and multiracial. On almost every continent in the nineteenth century coalmines were tunnels of Babel, pitch-black meeting places of cultures, languages, and accents. Older North American mining districts in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Nova Scotia provided much of the human raw material for coalfields from Illinois west, but the need for additional labour was constant, and it guaranteed dependence on imported, foreign labour. On Vancouver Island it was this body of miners from abroad – from Europe and Asia – that vastly outnumbered the small homegrown contingents from 1850 through 1900. While there was much that distinguished British Columbia’s Lancastrians from its Toisanese or even from its Nova Scotians, they all shared the experience of long-distance migration. Whether it was for a

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short stint or for life, each man who set out from his native land with an eye to winning coal below Vancouver Island was likely to confront a common list of questions about the wisdom of moving such a great distance. This is no less true of the many women who emigrated to the Nanaimo area in the nineteenth century. As well – and this distinguished the Vancouver Island experience from that of many other destination coalfields – there was the unavoidable prospect of never returning home. The distances involved and the transportation systems available simply augured against it.2 And if the miner travelled with his family the uncertainties and costs multiplied. These concerns were balanced by great expectations of favourable wages, tolerable working conditions, and perhaps opportunities to get ahead. It is that moment of receptivity, of willingness to consider other, foreign options that is central to this chapter. It may be a relatively easy thing to determine what some miners – never all – concluded about their new home once they were established, but their prior impressions are far less readily revealed. How the emigrant miners viewed Britain’s North Pacific outposts once they got there would reflect the quality of the information with which they were recruited. As Maldwyn Jones observes, “Immigration … is always the history of emigration from somewhere else.”3 Determining precise details of the British miners’ preemigration lives proves impossible, but the method and character of their recruitment is less obscure. The bait to which they rose reveals much about their particular and general needs, about their priorities and their ambitions. By detailing what was known of Vancouver Island and British Columbia in Victorian Britain, how immigration was encouraged and the extent to which working-class settlers in the Pacific Northwest paid their own way, the collective mentalité of immigrants can be outlined, as well as their expectations of conditions and rewards. This chapter examines the process of recruiting British miners for the Vancouver Island mines. Recruitment was both a formal and an informal affair, relying on government and employer assistance on the one hand and, on the other, on the initiative shown by individual colonists who often produced chain migration systems of their own. Although my analysis undertakes a range of questions, this chapter begins by asking, What was the context of settlement on Vancouver Island? and What attracted British miners to Vancouver Island?

emigration in the industrial era The study of migration usually involves an examination of factors that are inelegantly referred to as pushes and pulls. Sometimes, as in the case of the famine Irish, the favourable correlation between poor eco-

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Home

Destination

Expulsive

Attractive

Retentive

Repulsive

Figure 2 The emigrants’ calculus

nomic conditions at home (push factors) and superior prospects abroad (pulls) is self-evident. Under most other circumstances, however, the connection is much less obvious. One author has suggested that push ignores the many retentive features of the community of origin, while pull conceals the repulsive aspects of a possible destination.4 These elements are incorporated into figure 2. While a declining economy at home might fuel the urge to move on, the potential emigrant’s sentimental ties could have a countervailing retentive effect. The possibility of finding better paying work through local networks is another consideration that might hold back an otherwise footloose labourer. Job opportunities abroad and the chance for adventure also had to be measured against a gruelling sea passage, an unfavourable climate, even loneliness and mal de pays, all of which would likely have been repellent. Under this schema, then, it is crucial that retentive and repulsive factors be reduced in the individual’s calculations. The British men and women who elected to move to Nanaimo and its environs were motivated by specific anxieties and aspirations. It may be the case that no two emigrants used identical criteria when deciding to leave home and when choosing Vancouver Island as their destination. Nevertheless, the history of mining in Britain during the last century suggests trends and experiences that would have been widely shared and that could have inspired British colliers to look abroad. Expulsive forces in Britain (especially in the coalfields) can be briefly summarized. By the mid–nineteenth century the British coal mining industry was moving increasingly into deeper workings that required heavier capital investment and greater attention to safety measures. The result was a widespread reduction in piece-rate earnings.5 Working conditions were generally deteriorating, and as demand and workforce size grew, the economic leverage of the independent collier was diminishing. Wage levels fluctuated across the country, and for every victory scored by the ascendant trade unions, more names were recorded on operators’ blacklists.6 In the north of England the increasing use of the clearance paper – a sort of honourable discharge reserved for tractable migrant

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Figure 3

workers – was one source of disquiet and suffering. Another was the running down of older coalfields, like those in Staffordshire and North Wales (figure 3).7 Worsening conditions in mining, however, were primarily confined phenomena. The appearance of a fault, the exhaustion of a seam, an explosion, the declining economic vitality of an individual pit – these are all fundamental crises affecting only a highly localized fraction of

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the national mining workforce. The most telling expulsive factors, therefore, were probably isolated ones. For example, the declining fortunes of lead miners in Weardale, Durham, produced a stream of emigrants in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s; it is probably no coincidence that Weardale names like Nattress, Vipond, and Hewitson could be found in the Nanaimo area in this period.8 Similarly, the Rothwell colliery near Leeds was the scene of a prolonged industrial dispute in 1858 and a paralyzing depression in 1878; six of the lives that ended in 1887 in a mine explosion beneath Nanaimo had begun in Rothwell.9 Industrialization in Britain, as elsewhere, did not proceed evenly, nor was any coalfield immune to sharp downturns. Reasons for leaving would always be available. Retentive forces would have been equally local and subjective. Friends and relations, job contacts, and a sense of belonging all fit under this heading. Family and associational bonds were progressively compromised during the mid–nineteenth century, a period of extensive migration within Britain.10 Cornish pitworkers, for example, appeared all over the country as the tin mines of Cornwall declined.11 The distances involved in these internal migrations were sometimes considerable, and of course, the traffic was not exclusively one-way. Although it is true that the eighty miles of railtrack from Dudley to Wigan cannot be casually compared with the fifteen thousand nautical miles between Bristol and Nanaimo, it is nevertheless true that Britain’s economic transformation relaxed parochial connections and devalued many retentive influences shared by miners and other labourers. And, as one study of Welsh emigration noted, “For some it appeared that even unemployment in America was better than regular employment” at home.12

recruiting miners Over the last half of the century, approaches to recruiting and keeping labour for the colony on Vancouver Island went through considerable changes, although the central issues remained roughly the same. That is, the problems associated with cost – specific to such a remote colony – and the conundrum of delivering labourers who would be satisfied to remain in the industrial sector and not move into agriculture frustrated administrators and employers alike. Between 1850 (when the first island mines opened) and 1871 (when British Columbia joined the Dominion of Canada) the recruitment of emigrants from Britain for the mines was handled by four different organizations: the Hudson’s Bay Company, the administration of the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island and its later incarnation as the colonial (and then provincial) government of British Columbia, the Colonial Office in London, and the emergent successors to the hbc in the coalmine owning and operating area.13

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Despite the establishment of a colonial regime on the island in 1849 and the appointment of a colonial governor, the hbc continued to exert a powerful influence as an employer and as a de facto administration in the decade that followed. Under the hbc, assisted emigration to Vancouver Island reached its apogee. The company’s Wakefieldian charter dictated that Vancouver Island be populated to the satisfaction of Whitehall. Nonetheless, Vancouver Island administrators shied away from matching inducements like free or cheap land offered by the United States, the Canadas, various of the Australian colonies, and the Maritime provinces. Company officials had observed how homesteading in the Oregon Territory dramatically raised the cost of free labour.14 The governor of the hbc, Sir Henry Pelly, and Chief Factor James Douglas maintained that the coalmining enterprise, to take one example, could not succeed if it existed side by side with a generous agricultural development policy.15 That being said, the hbc’s few recruitment and delivery projects were sorry in the extreme.16 Through the work of an agent working the Scottish coalfields, the hbc secured its first contingent of British miners from Lanarkshire for the early (and abortive) Fort Rupert mine, but this group totalled fewer than two dozen men, women, and children.17 The hbc had endorsed family migration as a means of stabilizing the colony, but to no avail: the majority of the Scots deserted the settlement in 1850.18 Another body of Scottish colliers were brought out from Ayrshire by the company in 1850–51, but the most ambitious group migration of this period ended prematurely when a shipload of British miners and their families bound for Vancouver Island stopped at Valparaiso, Chile, where they elected to remain.19 The first cohort of English miners arrived in 1854: a Black Country man, George Robinson, was hired as the company agent, and he recruited 23 South Staffordshire colliers from Brierley Hill, along with their families. Six of their number died in transit around Cape Horn.20 In total, the hbc sent out only 435 settlers between 1848 and 1854, of whom 84 were children.21 The meagre immigration assistance and incentives instituted by the hbc were due in part to the company’s continuing dependence on the fur trade. Both Pelly and Douglas realized that the aboriginal communities would resist accelerated white settlement and that fur resources would be affected by the arrival of agriculturally minded Europeans.22 Where labourers were needed specifically, as at Nanaimo, the company attempted a different approach. By establishing a junior company to operate the mines, one that would “subsidize emigration from the profits of the coal trade,” the hbc itself would be able to retain the bulk of its fur-trade profits and build a second settlement north of Victoria that would not extensively alter the human and animal ecologies.23 What-

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ever the virtues of this strategy, the mining subsidiary’s profits were insufficient to support more than a token amount of assisted immigration.24 The effect would be to depend more on the self-funded immigration attracted by colonial promotion in Britain.

visions of the colonial Most of the recruitment material published before 1871 reflected the aristocratic (or at least plutocratic) pretensions of Vancouver Island’s early administrators, many of whom were veterans of the fur trade.25 Most of these preindustrial settlers wished to attract agricultural labourers who would work their farms. As well, they sought to tempt British investment. The Hudson’s Bay Company’s employees and former agents secured for themselves most of the accessible arable land around Victoria in an effort to dominate economically and to command authority based on prior occupation.26 It was not their intention that Vancouver Island should become a freewheeling frontier society with unbounded opportunities for social mobility. The hbc’s Wakefieldian philosophy in this regard was set out nicely by the company’s secretary in 1849: “The object of every sound system of colonization should be, not to re-organize Society on a new basis, which is simply absurd, but to transfer to the new country whatever is most valuable, and most approved in the institutions of the old, so that Society may, as far as possible, consist of the same classes, united together by the same ties, and have the same relative duties to perform in the one country as in the other.”27 What was most valuable to the administrators of Vancouver Island, however, was little akin to the burgeoning industrial society they had left behind in Britain. The recruitment literature for many years did not encourage tradesmen and artisans unless their skills were adaptable and marketable in Vancouver Island’s specific circumstances. Likewise men (and women) on the make were told bluntly to seek their fortunes elsewhere for the time being: “Clerks, poor gentlemen of education and breeding in quest of Government appointments, governesses, schoolmasters, adventurers without funds and trained to no particular employment – all such classes are cautioned not to come. Openings even for them, however, will, in the course events, arise when the development of the country is more advanced.” The hbc seemed genuinely reluctant to mislead prospective settlers of slender means, but the social prejudices of the company administrators also loomed large. It was typical – and revealing – that retired navy and army men equipped with “a few thousand pounds” were keenly sought by emigrant recruiters throughout the century.28 Pensioned officers, after all, would threaten

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few administrative incumbents; at the same time they would enhance the social and economic milieu in a commendable fashion. Those responsible for population recruitment were equally discriminating about workers. Agricultural labourers, especially single farmers under forty years of age and married farm workers with children, were favourite targets of promotional information. Unmarried females willing to pursue careers as domestic servants were also solicited.29 Otherwise, only “skilled labourers and shopmen … if possessed on landing of from £100 to £500 and resolved to exercise for a few years a moderate amount of patience, discretion and application” were encouraged to take the plunge.30 The list of preferred immigrants was kept short for straightforward reasons. Preoccupied with the development of an independent agricultural base and the threat of American annexation, the colony’s administrators believed that an advance in the size of the farming sector would most strengthen British territorial claims.31 As well, young, single, female domestic servants were regarded as necessary to retain an itinerant single male population in the face of temptations (economic and sexual) across the border.32 Industrial workers did not fit these narrow preoccupations. Nonetheless, British miners would have found some encouragement to emigrate in the promotional material beginning to be distributed in the United Kingdom during the Crown colony period. The material took two forms. Articles and letters espousing British Columbia and Vancouver Island appeared sporadically in British newspapers, although, for the most part, they addressed mainly the prospects for investment, agriculture, and trade. Typical – if excessively glowing – was this description in the Times in 1858: “Productive fisheries, prolific whaling waters, extensive coal-fields, a country well timbered in some parts, susceptible of every agricultural improvement in others, with rich goldfields on the very borders – these are some of the many advantages enjoyed by the colony of Vancouver’s Island and its possessors. When I add that the island boasts a climate of great salubrity, with a winter temperature resembling that of England, and a summer temperature resembling that of Paris, I need say no more lest my picture be suspected of sharing too deeply of couleur de rose.”33 Similar reports appeared in books and pamphlets published by the colonial administrators or, less often, by independent promoters.34 Although effusive descriptions of the coalfield were a regular feature of promotional literature at midcentury, pitmen were never singled out as a sought-after group. Before Confederation this is explained by the small labour requirements of local industry. Additionally, the colonial administration did not fully appreciate the kind of labour needed at Nanaimo. After the mainland gold rushes, semiskilled mine labour was

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in relative abundance, and many concluded that this surplus would suffice. But independent prospectors were not always appropriate material for the collieries. Although there were noteworthy exceptions, the individualistic ethos of placer gold mining attracted many who had eschewed industrial time-work discipline and who were essentially entrepreneurial risk-takers, hardly the stuff of a tractable colliery workforce.35 Additionally, there were concerns that unemployed labourers on Vancouver Island would create an economic and social burden with which local government was unequipped to deal. Welfare amenities were very basic at this stage, and industrial labourers who did not bring their own safety net could find themselves in a desperate situation whenever trade turned bad. The colonial administration, lacking so much as a poorhouse, sought to recruit a population that was likely to be both permanent and economically self-sufficient.36 In short, officials were torn between competing and evidently conflicting needs to build up a colonial proletariat and a stable farming community and the desire to cut their own losses. Toward the end of the hbc’s influence British officials came to appreciate the dilemma of a settlement agency whose commercial interests were perhaps best served by limiting population growth.37 In fact, a share of the blame for the paucity of early settlement could be laid at the door of the Colonial Office. A colonization and improvement fund was set up by Whitehall in conjunction with the hbc in the early 1850s, but this fund proved to be an abject failure. Westminster backed away from anything more ambitious, primarily because of the staggering expense involved. The Emigration Office estimated that sea passages around Cape Horn to Vancouver Island would cost the British Government twenty-five pounds per “statute adult”; to send a thousand working men with an estimated complement of three thousand women and children would entail an outlay of about seventy-five thousand pounds. Added to these expenses would be the cost of the essential provisions that four thousand settlers would require over the short term once they arrived in the colony. Travel across the Isthmus of Panama was quicker but still more expensive: as much as forty-five pounds per person would be necessary to make it a workable proposition. Before 1858 there was nothing to suggest that the Colonial Office’s investment in assisted emigration to the island would pay any kind of dividend.38 The gold rush on the Fraser River forced Westminster’s hand. Mainland “British Columbia” was transformed overnight from a huge, inaccessible country occupied almost exclusively by diverse aboriginal communities and a handful of white fur traders into one of the fastestgrowing components of the empire. This had at least two relevant

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consequences: first, the size of the local community of miners from Britain was rapidly inflated, and many remained behind in the hope that they would have a head start in the event of a subsequent goldrush;39 second, the thousands of prospectors streaming through Victoria, the main port of entry, had the effect of invigorating the island’s commercial economy. Colonial Office satisfaction was tempered by the knowledge that the two Pacific Coast colonies were once again prime targets for u.s. expansionists. In November 1859 Westminster resolved to establish in the region “a population firmly attached to the British Crown, who might serve as a counterpoise to the influx of American Citizens into that part of the British Territory.”40 The objective of loyal Pacific colonies, however, was not easily achieved. Apart from the gamble of prospecting for gold, Vancouver Island and British Columbia had little to offer the average immigrant. Other British colonies and the United States of America provided superior inducements to stable, “well affected and respectable Settlers,” of whom the British North Pacific required a large number to meet the objectives of the Colonial Office.41 The widely publicized dispute between Vancouver Island and the United States over the San Juan Islands only made matters worse.42 The permanent undersecretary of the Colonial Office was advised that “the possibility of a collision with the Americans would be a great discouragement” to Imperial ambitions in the Pacific Northwest and to the recruitment of settlers.43 The prevailing view was that a campaign to send enormous numbers of British emigrants to the colony in the midst of a gold rush and to expect them then to labour for modest wages in the belly of the earth or to farm secondrate farmland was doomed to failure. Emigration from the British Isles was, in any case, in decline overall by 1859; the likelihood of Imperial government assistance to stimulate settlement was faint. The years between 1858 and 1871 were marked by an increased anxiety over, and an emphasis on, the preservation of British sovereignty in the region. In an effort to retain the colony, the hardest edges of laissez-faire colonialism were somewhat softened. Relations with the United States were “never notable for their cordiality,” and British North American administrators continued to regard their southern neighbour as a real threat.44 Entrepreneurs like Halifax shipping magnate Samuel Cunard took a personal interest in the disposition of the region and wrote at length to the Imperial government regarding what they perceived as dangerous American ambitions.45 The gold crusades attracted thousands of American prospectors and merchants to Victoria and the mainland colony from 1858 on, leaving colonial officials on both sides of the globe uneasy about British claims to the region.

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During the mid-1860s the existing disquiet was aggravated by the American purchase of Alaska, the u.s. secretary of state’s provocative proclamation of a Manifest Destiny, which included a claim to everything north to 54°40′ and the presence of a pro-American annexationist movement centred in Victoria.46 The entrenchment of British interests on Vancouver Island was assisted by the expectation of a North Pacific base for the Royal Navy, which was finally established in 1865 at Esquimalt, with an eye to guarding the coalfield against possible Russian or American (or even Fenian) aggression. It was, moreover, the stated aim of the colonial regime to cede no more territory to the United States, a fact that gave a peculiar impetus to official policy and settlement programmes for the rest of the century.47 What most profoundly influenced these efforts was the knowledge that the colonial and regional economy was unspectacular and, indeed, often grim throughout and beyond the 1860s. In 1866, for example, Governor James Douglas wrote to the colonial secretary that “Vancouver Island and British Columbia are in a most critical and alarming state; not a mere casual depression, but a condition that threatens their very existence as self-supporting colonies.”48 This particular alarm was sounded when the rest of North America was experiencing little more than an economic hiccough (civil wars notwithstanding). Similar cries of desperation would be heard from Douglas’ successors, who faced identical problems associated with a minute and scattered settler population reliant upon a prohibitive infrastructure. Holding on to a gold colony was one kind of proposition; retaining one whose economy was haemorrhaging was quite another. Briefly it appeared as though the colonial administration might change its policy on land allocations, largely with an eye to stabilizing and promoting the growth of the local economy through increased immigration. “If our Legislators in Victoria would only institute a more liberal land system,” wrote one reader of the Nanaimo Gazette, “I have no doubt that population would come to our shores at a much more rapid rate than it is at present leaving them.”49 From 1860 to about 1870 there was a preemption policy (which effectively translated into homesteading), but in practice it was not well promoted, and the policy probably had little impact on labour recruitment for the island.50 More explicit homesteading legislation was produced in 1867, but its main accomplishment, according to Governor Frederick Seymour, was to retain, rather than attract, a small number of colonists.51 On the eve of Confederation a critic of emigrant recruitment programs for Vancouver Island noted that without land inducements and some financial assistance to British emigrants “it will be in vain for the Colony to bid successfully for immigration; and even when the railway through

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from Canada is completed (which cannot be accomplished for many years), British Columbia cannot expect a larger share of attention until the Red River country [of Manitoba] is settled up, and an overflow sets in from that extensive and fertile region.” Even the Emigration Office considered the use of land as a magnet to be inappropriate in the case of Vancouver Island: “The drawback to the investment of Capital in the Island is the want of Labour, and that drawback would be increased instead of diminished by a scheme which would convert any Labourers who might reach the Island into Landowners.”52 Accordingly, the company and the colonial administration discouraged one British immigrant from purchasing about two hundred acres of farmland north of Victoria in the 1860s.53 In the decade before Confederation the possibility of officially assisted emigration to the colony was receding.54 During the first three years of the 1860s there was no emigration assistance whatsoever to North America, although programs were in operation for New Zealand, the Cape Colony, Natal, and Australia.55 Britain’s slow response to the colony’s requests for support in establishing settlements was widely and publicly condemned. In a letter that was reprinted in Canadian newspapers in 1867, an hbc official complained of “the gross neglect & misgovernment which the British Possessions here have received at the hands of the Imperial authorities.”56 An emigration officer in London in the same year revealed through his notes and memos that active opposition had lately grown out of dispassionate skepticism. “I do not know why,” he wrote,”we should go out of our way to lead settlers to make an erroneous choice … I by no means agree that it is good general policy to try to swell the English population in B.Columbia. The fewer Englishmen that are committed to the place, the better it may prove to be in no distant times. As to hoping that we can by Emigrants round Cape Horn outnumber the natural flow of Emigrants from California and the United States, one might as well make the old experiment of keeping out the Ocean with a mop.”57 The Colonial Office toyed with several alternatives, none of which were ever implemented. These included recruiting Germans, introducing Scottish Crofters, establishing a penal colony, and making Vancouver Island a refuge for British Mormons and Welsh speakers.58 Instead, a more orthodox approach was affirmed. Despite Whitehall’s misgivings, government-assisted emigration was briefly reintroduced in the 1860s (albeit only for females) under the auspices of the colony’s Anglican bishop.59 Thereafter, individual initiative was to dominate, as Imperial involvement retreated: “The recruiting, transport, reception and settlement of British emigrants became henceforth primarily the responsibility of the emigrants themselves, or of trade unions, phil-

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anthropic bodies, overseas land companies and shipping agents, or especially of overseas governments.”60 During the pre-Confederation period, part of the confusion about immigration and settlement policy stemmed from the priorities of Westminster. Vancouver Island was both very far away and of relatively little importance so far as the Colonial Office was concerned. There was, understandably, more official interest in the prospects of Canada, the Maritime provinces, and Newfoundland and in tropical colonies than there was in the north Pacific. Furthermore, possessions in eastern British North America and the Atlantic held pride of place in Imperial naval and military strategies. For these reasons Vancouver Island, with unproven resources and demonstrable liabilities, could hardly demand favourable treatment from Westminster during the 1840s and 1850s, especially insofar as Little Englanders had the whip hand. Indeed, some critics of emigration promotion claimed that Vancouver Island was one of the most overrated places in the Empire. A “poor, struggling, bankrupt colony off on the edge of things,” it was unlikely to win Imperial favour.61 The colonial administration, by necessity, had to take a more direct role from the 1860s on. When Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works Joseph Trutch visited London in 1870, one of his goals was to encourage emigration from Britain to British Columbia. He called on the Emigration and Colonists’ Aid Corporation Ltd., with an eye to fostering some organized relocation of British subjects, but the costs per family proved exorbitant.62 The laissez-faire position (best articulated in 1885 by the historian J.R. Seeley: “[e]migration is in itself only a private affair, it does not, as such, concern Governments”) then became orthodoxy.63 This having been said British Columbia still offered unofficial but powerful inducements to prospective British emigrants. Romantic stories of independent prospectors drawn from every social class were regular fare in British newspapers. Gold miners – even the handful on Vancouver Island – were said by the Times to be “leading a jolly sort of life; and no doubt even among those who are the least energetic about actual mining there is a great deal of pleasure derived from the change from city toil to the free and picturesque life in the woods.”64 British Columbia’s relationship with newcomers remained ambivalent, and it was another source of the problems involved in drawing and keeping settlers. One legacy of the hbc regime and the goldrush era was a suspicion of the loyalties of immigrants. An irate settler claimed that officials were “so Pregudice that they take us all for yankys.”65 Around the same time, Charles Nicol, the vcmlc’s manager at Nanaimo, suggested to the colonial administration that the

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solution to settlement stagnation would be a generous land grant system. He argued that his firm should be entrusted with three-hundredacre land grants (mostly on nearby Valdes and Gabriola Islands) with which to entice miners; the governor and his council demurred.66 Victoria, it would appear, was not zealous about expanding colonial farmlands at the expense of demands for free labour and the slight returns to be had from auctioning off Crown lands. At any rate, the prospect of a five- or six-month spell at sea in order to obtain twenty-four heavily forested acres in an obscure imperial enclave was not likely to be very appealing to settlers, especially when for the same initial outlay and in far shorter time they could acquire arable and cleared land elsewhere in North America. When the reunified colony (after 1866 known entirely as British Columbia) entered Confederation in 1871, the business of establishing permanent settlements on either side of the Strait of Georgia ought to have become the responsibility of the Dominion government. The new country’s administration, however, was more anxious to populate the freshly annexed Prairies. The Dominion’s recruitment of immigrants for British Columbia was every bit as uneven and limited as what had gone before. It is, however, noteworthy for its employment of a vocabulary that was in keeping with Imperial rhetoric and that would have been consumed by miners as well as hopeful British farmers. One of Ottawa’s post-Confederation advertisements provides something of the flavour of this campaign: “those who go to Canada, ready and willing to aid in the development of the country, may be assured of a cordial welcome. They will not find themselves in a strange land but among a loyal and prosperous people, as proud of being subjects of the Queen as if their destiny had led them to reside in the United Kingdom.”67 Predictably, the inhospitable Canadian winters were downplayed: warnings in the British press against travel to the Dominion during December and January certainly told only part of the story. Even such temperate cautionary advice had little relevance to Vancouver Island, where the winters were much milder than in the East (an advantage that was seldom identified) and the ports were ice-free.68 While some small measure of federal promotion may have been consequential, this period of recruitment was dominated by private and provincial efforts. The National Colonial Emigration League, for example, provided assistance in disseminating information from their London office in the years following 1871.69 This was, however, the exception that proved the rule. Regardless of Confederation and a continuing Imperial involvement, the chore of promoting and populating British Columbia realistically fell to the provincial government (whose treasury was neither willing nor able to pick up the full burden of a

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large-scale assisted immigration program) and to local employers. One example of provincial material distributed in the last quarter of the century was entitled b.c. as a Field for Emigration and Investment. What distinguished this document was its appeal to the domestic and family concerns of British workers. “In the new towns of the Far West,” the anonymous author boasted, poverty “is quite unknown … There are no ‘poor people’ in the sense in which that term is used in the United Kingdom.”70 Wages were said to be sufficient to support a family, although the author made no comparisons with contemporary British wages, nor did he mention the cost of living. Education, it was pointed out, was provided free to all, and “the climate is a singularly favourable one for children.” Perhaps most important of all, the career prospects for the offspring of immigrants were said to be very good, regardless of social class: intergenerational social mobility was thus introduced to attract settlers to the island. Finally, the tenor of the document was thoroughly pro-Empire and somewhat anti-American. The impact of the nationalistic message is perhaps the easiest to underestimate, but it was ubiquitous in the recruitment literature and in correspondences. Official boosters were, of course, much more consistent and wellfunded in their efforts to draw workers from the British Isles. By the end of 1883 British Columbia’s representatives in Britain had distributed two thousand copies of a recruitment handbook called West Shore and several hundred copies of a promotional essay on the province.71 By 1886 the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway to the coast had dramatically invigorated the provincial economy while opening up new lands throughout Western Canada, a fact that was widely promoted throughout Britain. Shortly thereafter, in 1888, attractive information on wages in Canada’s coalfields appeared on post office circulars distributed around Britain by the Canadian high commissioner. These circulars drew particular attention to prospects in British Columbia: “There are coal mines in Nova Scotia, where wages range from $1 to $2.30 a day; at Lethbridge, near Medicine Hat (n.w.t.), wages $1.50 to $3; and at Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, wages $3 to $4.”72 Although the cpr made travel to the North Pacific easier, that route remained costly, and miners continued to find their way to Vancouver Island overland across the United States and by sea, an alternative that involved about a month of travel.73 Promotional material, then, was aimed primarily at people who had savings or individuals who were willing to toil for rewards that would accrue over time. By the last decade of the century vertical occupational mobility was proffered as an inducement, and throughout the entire period the objective of continued British sovereignty in the north

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Pacific figured in recruitment campaigns. An outstanding resource base promised security, though little of the grand-scale frontier opportunities advertised elsewhere. The combination was enough to catch the interest of hundreds of miners and their families, but there were some who responded to direct entreaties from colonial employers.

t h e e m p l oy e r s s t e p i n With the well-connected hbc out of the picture by the 1860s, only a small private sector was left to offer assistance. Individual mining companies made sporadic attempts to recruit labour directly. From the first hbc mine at Fort Rupert to the development of Union/Cumberland late in the century, local operators sought to handpick experienced labour in British coalfields. For the most part, these efforts failed. The flight of Lanarkshire miners from Fort Rupert has already been mentioned, as has the loss of colliers who abbreviated their migration to Vancouver Island at Chile. For its part, the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company may have assisted a few miners from Britain, but there is no evidence to suggest that any large-scale group migrations were sponsored. Rather, the Nanaimo mine operators advertised more broadly than did the Dunsmuirs and depended very heavily on the ability of their existing employees to encourage relatives to join them on Vancouver Island. The direct recruitment experience of the Dunsmuirs late in the century indicates that this strategy was never fully discounted, but it also highlighted the problems entailed throughout the period in bringing large numbers of mining folk halfway around the world. In 1898 James Dunsmuir was preparing to expand production at his Union mine. The thick coal could be won satisfactorily enough by semiskilled whites and Asians, but legislation in 1898–99 excluded all Japanese labourers from underground work.74 In February 1899 Dunsmuir requested that his Italian employees send for more of their friends and relatives for jobs as runners in the mines, but this request did not address his need for more skilled workers (the Italians being regarded – rightly or wrongly – as unskilled).75 Thinking perhaps that the high wages paid to skilled colliers could be recouped by a rapid increase in output, Dunsmuir agreed to pay about fifteen thousand dollars to acquire the services of two hundred “practical Scottish miners.”76 This was the boldest effort to directly recruit labour for the Vancouver Island mines in the nineteenth century. On their arrival at Cumberland the Scots were provided with tied housing and credit at the company store. As well, they were told to pay back the cost of their passages within seven months.77 Dissatisfaction flared almost immedi-

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ately. Not only were Dunsmuir’s terms offensive, so too was the colony. Cumberland was a dreary place, the mushy earth between the miners’ cottages punctuated with incompletely incinerated cedar stumps of immense proportions. The nearest neighbouring community was more than ten miles away along an undulating roadway inexpertly carved out of the dark forest. Below the white miners’ village, the Chinese community was huddled in an extensive shantytown at the edge of a swamp that regularly emitted disease-carrying clouds of mosquitos.78 In the pits the independently minded Scots found themselves working under close supervision in longwall seams alongside Italians, Chinese, Germans, African-Americans, native Indians, and still a few Japanese labourers, an arrangement they despised. After eight months all but a handful of the Scots had abandoned the Dunsmuir workings.79 Some made their way to Nanaimo (a more substantial town), while others headed further south and on to the United States. Francis Deans Little, the general manager of the Wellington Colliery Company at the turn of the century, complained bitterly about the whole episode: “We brought out two hundred Scotch miners, and they were no good. We have twenty left. I do not know where they went to and I do not care. I do not think one-third of them ever dug coal in their life. Very few paid their passage. Many of them went to Seattle at once. They never came here at all. Mr Dunsmuir spent $15,000 on them. I do not think he got $3,000 back. I paid $3 a day for $1 work to some of them. I was longing for the Chinamen.” Little was equally aggrieved by the lacklustre performance of”sixty-five niggers [sic] from Pittsburgh and Ohio.”80 James Dunsmuir’s frustration was also palpable, and he resolved not to bother in future with Scottish miners or with assisted immigration. Effective immigration assistance programs to the colony for British women were negligible, despite the pious pronouncements of colonial governors and administrators. In 1868 Anthony Musgrave reported the implications of a sex ratio of 2.77 to 1 among the white settlers of Vancouver Island: “It is impossible to lay too much stress on this evil, one which does more to retard the advance of the Colony than any other; and this while thousands of decent women who could find happy homes here, either as servants or wives, are perhaps starving at home, their energies over-taxed and their bodies wasted by too much work and too little food, and no opportunity occurs to them to reach this faroff shore.”81 Eight years later the local Methodist clergyman agonized over the dangers of an overwhelmingly male population, presumably most concerned about the likelihood of young newcomers being led down the path to alcohol abuse and moral turpitude.82 The United Englishwomen’s Emigration Association and the United British Women’s Emigration Association attempted to address these issues in the late

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1880s and early 1890s, but their efforts were largely unrewarded. Under the auspices of the latter organization a number of families were sent to the colony.83 One such family included three brothers (of whom two were colliers), two sisters, and at least one aged parent.84 (The family took up residence in the coalfield, although the young women were encouraged to find domestic work in Victoria.) Unfortunately, there is no indication of how much money was involved in individual cases of Emigration Society support or of how broadly their programs extended.85 Female-led migration to coalfields, where economic opportunities were limited for women, was a rarity in Britain and can safely be assumed to be even less likely in the case of Vancouver Island.

miners’ initiative and chain migration There were, however, signs that immigration to the coalfield was being managed by the settlers themselves. There is a great deal of evidence of chain migration to the Vancouver Island coalfield, some of which may have been sustained by correspondence home. Mary Ann Gough, the sister of one of the Staffordshire miners who arrived in Nanaimo in 1854, was married to the owner of the Pensnett Pit Mine in the Black Country; subsequent emigration from South Staffordshire included a large number of miners who received intelligence on Vancouver Island from Mary Ann and whose departure was facilitated by her husband, their employer.86 The diary of Francis Garrard reveals that he was enticed into emigrating to Nanaimo by the letters home of a close friend who was a labourer in the coalfield.87 In 1877 a strike leader on the island coalfield referred to Bridgeport, Illinois, as a place well known to many of the miners, confirming the existence of a migration chain from an earlier date.88 The Rothwell and Weardale cases mentioned earlier also support the conclusion that personal information sources played an important role in recruitment. Similarly, all eight of the Cumbrian miners killed in the Nanaimo disaster of 1887 were from villages no more than fifteen miles apart, while four from Wales were born within ten miles of each other near Denbigh. Charlotte Erickson’s studies of British and European emigration to the United States in the last century suggest that “contacts with workmates were fully as important as family connections.”89 Contemporary observers would have agreed: in November 1859 the Stirling Journal described contacts with friends and relatives already in British colonies as the main cause of emigration; thirteen years later the Tamworth Examiner, which took an unfavourable view of working-class emigration from Britain, cautioned its readers that the only reliable sources of in-

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formation on colonial prospects were, in fact, kith and kin who had gone ahead.90 Nonetheless, a caveat is in order. As an author of a study of settlement on the Canadian Prairies observed, “After the upheaval of departure, few were disposed to admit that emigration was painful, far less a mistake. Letters home tended to be justifications of the new life, and if, as sometimes happened, they found their way in to the hands of skilled editors, they were easily translated into near-pangyrics of life in the new land.”91 A letter of 1878 from a Vancouver Island miner to his family on the Isle of Man provides an example of an account that required little editorial inflation. Painting a promising picture of apparently abundant resources, the collier wrote, “this island has got … gould and silver Copper iron … Coals in every quantity and the finest timber in the world.”92 Against this example must be placed the effects of far more negative intelligence originating in the Pacific Northwest. Exaggerated versions of the Fort Rupert turmoil served to sour Scottish interest in Vancouver Island in 1850.93 Against the odds, one example of a damning letter home survives. In 1867 a Nanaimo miner wrote to his family in Stromness, “you may think the Orkne[y]s his a poor place but i bleive it his a better place for a man to settle into what this is.”94 There must have been others who shared this view, for around the same time the Nanaimo Gazette’s columns bemoaned the “disparaging statements continually published and sent forth to the world, parading our poverty. These circumstances have a tendency to destroy all confidence in the colony abroad, and not only prevent intending emigrants from coming among us, but drive many valuable colonists from our shores.”95 As for the weather, while Scots in the 1850s and 1860s were said to find the mild and moist conditions attractive (certainly compared to bitter Prairie winters), a Canadian who wintered on Vancouver Island in 1865 complained in the Times that the climate was “execrable – cold – raw, damp, chilly cold and excessively wet. It sometimes rains every day for two months.”96 It could not have helped that Shetlanders referred to Vancouver Island as “the backside of America.”97 Making matters worse was the stigma attached to Vancouver Island’s appalling accident record in the mines. Coalmining on the island began with an industrial dispute and the century closed with yet another underground catastrophe, the response to which speaks to continuing difficulties encountered in recruiting and retaining industrial settlers. When the lives of more than a hundred mineworkers were claimed in a disaster at the northern community of Union, the city fathers changed the community’s name to Cumberland, a small cosmetic change meant to hide an ugly truth from potential settlers.98 Perhaps potential British emigrants brushed the fatalities aside, assuming that lightning would not strike the same place thrice. In the

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same period some Vancouver Island employers became more aggressive about the need to import and utilize Chinese labour, a practice that appalled British colliers wherever they were.99 Repulsive though Asian competition and the mining deaths must have been, arrivals from Britain actually increased in their wake. The influx of British (and Canadian and American) miners in these years was so great that Vancouver Island mine owners mostly turned their backs on direct recruiting. Were the British emigrants less “attracted” to the colony and more “expelled” from their homeland? To the evidence above one might add British economic performance as a factor. The economy in the Old Country seems to correlate most clearly with emigration in the 1880s and 1890s. The half-decade of greatest population growth on the island coalfield took place from 1887 to 1892. This expansion occurred on the heels of the severe depression of 1886 in Britain and continued until a new downturn began in 1895–96.100 British economic stagnation in the mid-1890s coincided with a downturn in mining revenues on Vancouver Island mines and the news, conveyed in England through the Imperial Institute Journal, that production around Nanaimo was slack and that “many of the miners have been thrown out of employment.”101 As one century ended and another began, the profile of Vancouver Island in Britain remained negligible or worse. Even readers of the Times were thought to be deficient in their knowledge of Britain’s Pacific outpost: “to the average untravelled man, sitting perhaps at home in comfort either retired from business on a comfortable income or still trying to attain that end, little is known with any geographical exactitude of such portions of our great Empire as British Columbia. Even the better informed seem to have an idea that British Columbia is still a separate colony and not a part of the Dominion of Canada.”102 British Columbia had gold on its side – was there an emigrant British miner who did not nurse a desire to get rich quick in this time-honoured way? – but high-risk stakes as prospectors would not appeal to all, and in any event, goldrushes on the coast were sporadic affairs, hardly the basis for sustained settlement.103 What is more, the publicized attractions of the West Coast had to compete with negative personal experiences. Given the miserly emigration assistance offered by successive British, colonial, and Dominion governments, the fitful efforts of the mining companies themselves, the lack of any evidence at all of trade union involvement in funding passages to the island, and the ineffectual contributions from private emigration funds, not to mention the superior opportunities elsewhere in the Empire, it is remarkable that the British working classes provided such an important section of the labour supply to island collieries.104 Ultimately, emigrant coalminers – and other

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labourers heading for the Nanaimo area – would have had to rely on their personal resources. Though many could afford a passage to New York, few miners would have had on hand the money needed to reach the west coast of North America. Nevertheless, funds were teased from savings, auctions of possessions, and from relatives already living abroad.105 Not only was the financial risk a large (and largely personal) one, it was nearly irretrievable. Unlike their countrymen touring the coalfields of the eastern United States, British colliers in British Columbia were implicitly accepting a greater, longer-term commitment. The peripatetic Scottish miners’ leader, Alexander Macdonald, may have found it possible to work periodically in the eastern United States to pay for his education in Scotland, but the prospect of sojourning in the British Pacific North West was blunted by travel costs and travel time. Some miners and their families, of course, did not proceed directly to Vancouver Island, though it is impossible to say how many “worked their passage.” The experience of David Moffat, a Scottish miner born around 1847, offers an example of one extreme. Moffat started mining in his native Scotland at eight years of age. He left for the United States twenty-two years later and reached Vancouver Island in 1882 or 1883 via mines in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Wyoming, Washington, and Idaho. Likewise, Samuel Roberts departed Wales in 1859 for New York; he worked his way through thirteen states, spent time in the Cariboo from 1862, and began working the Nanaimo coal mines shortly thereafter.106 Other miners travelled via the goldfields of Natal, Australia, New Zealand, and California on their way to Vancouver Island. Nevertheless, the many colliers who sailed directly to the island from Britain must have done so without the assistance of any official emigration programme.107 Incurring debt must have been unavoidable, and on their arrival the British colliers would have sought sufficient wages to cover their expenses. As a South Staffordshire newspaper observed more than a century after the Brierley Hill miners left for Nanaimo, “Few had previously travelled more than a few miles from their native parish and whilst the long sea voyage … was viewed with some trepidation, the rewards which awaited them at journey’s end outweighed such fears.”108 The desire to swap Atlantic vistas for Pacific horizons, however, had to be matched by an ability to do so. The distances involved and the extremely high costs entailed in, say, a family move, would have discouraged all but very few. In an effort to mitigate some – if not all – of the expenses, individuals and households looked to purses other than their own for subsidies and emigration assistance. As with many aspects of Vancouver Island’s western promise, assurances of financial aid proved

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disappointing. Assistance was rarely available to emigrants wishing to move to British Columbia. In this respect the colony/province measured very poorly against other lands of new settlement. There was nothing like the subsidized travel on offer to British emigrants bound for the Antipodes, nor was there a free land program to match that of the United States.109 Nevertheless, the situation was not static. The transition from an hbc stronghold to a Crown colony heralded a shift in the official position vis-à-vis emigration assistance, as did the entry of British Columbia into Confederation in 1871. In each period – pregoldrush, pre-Confederation, post-Confederation – schemes for populating the region with Europeans were partly determined by the dominant economic activity of the time. Miners, like other types of settlers, were affected by these changes.

the muffled call of the west In British Columbia’s colonial era, populating the colony was, arguably, the principal challenge and the major issue. To an area that was difficult to reach before the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway and hardly less remote thereafter, attracting settlers was an imperative that bedevilled administrators and employers alike. Hard on the heels of the question of how settlement was to be achieved came the question of the character of that settlement. An economy based on resource extraction produced a male-dominated demography that perpetuated reliance on external sources for growth, especially as labour and agricultural demands grew rapidly.110 This “Man’s Country” was hardly a true biological colony, therefore, insofar as it could not grow from its own human resources at a satisfactory rate.111 Moreover, the combination of races present in the nineteenth century was perceived as a problem in and of itself. Numbers and the kind of population thus moved quickly to the fore of the British Columbian colonial equation. Recruitment propaganda published by the colonial, provincial, or Dominion authorities contained little that aimed specifically to attract industrial labour of any kind, let alone coalminers. Nevertheless, no item of nineteenth-century promotional material on British Columbia and Vancouver Island was complete without a mention of the coal resources and the untold mineral wealth of the territory. What was known in Britain, then, was this: nominal wages were good in British Columbia after Confederation and especially in the 1880s and 1890s, and farmland was available (if relatively expensive). Proximity to the lucrative San Francisco market may well have been influential with some and as the century drew to a close the published recruitment literature laid increasing emphasis on the opportunities open to individual

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immigrants and their children, regardless of social class. Finally, chauvinistic appeals to national or Imperial loyalties were made so frequently that they must be taken into account – the colony was, “after all, British-pink on the map.”112 Even before the first British colliers had set sail to Fort Rupert, they were being touted by Imperial officials as a component in Britain’s global security: “The coal-miners … will add very much to the future value of the British possessions on the north-west coast and contribute the means to extend their commerce, and to facilitate their defence, as California and the neighbouring countries become of more consequence, and acquire additional population.”113 While some emigrants, like a group of British settlers in Peru in 1849, sought to take advantage of the buoyant San Francisco economy, they were also eager to avoid the “lawless population and unhealthy climate” in the United States and for these reasons sought out opportunities on Vancouver Island.114 A representative of a party of British emigrants wrote to an early governor of Vancouver Island that “The Americans offer many inducements to settlers in California but our friends [the emigrants] would prefer the protection of the British flag.”115 Whether as part of a project to expand the industrial power of the British Empire or as a participant in an effort to recreate British society on the North Pacific or as a bulwark against America’s claim to a Manifest Destiny, the potential emigrant was encouraged to consider the move to Vancouver Island an act of patriotism. The absence of long-term and large-scale emigration assistance schemes, however, put migration beyond the financial reach of most labourers. In short, British colliers on Vancouver Island – especially those who took their families – were willing and able to make a large financial commitment that, they expected, would be repaid in high wages, security under the Union Jack, and vertical occupational mobility within a generation or two. What remains to be seen is who responded to this siren song and the extent to which their expectations were satisfied or frustrated.

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4 The Immigrant British Miners and Their Kin

The demographic structure of Vancouver Island’s coalfield is largely unexplored. While it has been frequently observed that large numbers of the colony’s miners were British and that another block was Chinese, these characteristics are almost as often treated with troubling and overconfident certainty, and little has been written about age, marital status, family size, or households.1 Newsome, for example, notes that the early Fort Rupert community had “a maturity and balance seldom found in a pioneer settlement on a distant frontier,” but he does not consider the implications of that demographic pattern or how it changed.2 An examination of the chief demographic characteristics of this corner of the Victorian British diaspora discloses surprising complexities. For example, Nanaimo and its satellite communities were demographically exempt from the “unstable conditions of the mining frontier” described by labour historians Paul Phillips and Martin Robin and sociologist S.D. Clark.3 Phillips, for example, insists that one feature of British Columbia’s early industrial economy was “a high proportion of single transient workers” and “limited opportunity for families.”4 This is still the unchallenged orthodoxy in most quarters, one that implies that single young men turned their surplus heterosexual energies to labour radicalism.5 As this chapter reveals, there was far more diversity even within the British mining community. The main characteristics of the immigrant population and its demographic behaviour are distilled here from published and manuscript census information, voters’ lists, and local directories.6 The picture that emerges is one of a population

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with many distinctive features that stretch well beyond caricatures of overwhelming maleness, youth, and a persistent racial bipolarization.

th e va nc o u ve r isl an d mining community Although the coalfields of Vancouver Island were first worked by men drawn directly from Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, and the Black Country, the whole of the British Isles was soon represented in and around Nanaimo. Cornish miners (some no doubt returning empty-handed from the Cariboo goldfields) were to be found in abundance, as were Welshmen (northern and southern), Scots from the lowlands and the islands, and English miners from almost every county. With little exaggeration it could be said that the list of mineworkers killed in the explosions of 1884, 1887, 1888, and 1901 recalled birthplaces from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, including a half dozen whose first breaths were taken in the great urban expanse of nineteenth-century London. Beyond the question of origin, a demographic examination of the coalfield reveals among the mining community a significant female cohort, high numbers of children per household (despite relatively low fertility levels), evidence of family migration to the region, integrated household strategies, high levels of marital endogamy, and youthful nuptiality. British Columbia became a province too late to be included in the Dominion census of 1871. Nevertheless, a local survey taken in that year revealed that the Nanaimo area contained 601 whites, 92 “coloured” people, and 36 Chinese (excluding, for the time being, the native population). Of these 729 individuals, 161 (22.1 percent of the total, or 33.96 percent of the males) were employed in mining. The “coloured” population was made up largely of former Afro-American slaves who had sought sanctuary on Vancouver Island before the Civil War.7 This was the only group in which there was actually a female surplus: viz., 44 men and 48 women. By contrast the Chinese community contained only one female, an extreme sex ratio that hardly improved through the century.8 Among the whites there were 395 men and 206 women, a ratio of 1.9 to 1. Although the large male surplus among the communities of Canadians, Americans, and Europeans was a persistent feature over the next thirty years, the greater novelty on Vancouver Island would doubtless have been the ethnic or racial mix. In 1880, about thirty years after the first colliery had been opened by the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Rupert, the primary mining companies employed 837 men, the vast majority of whom were immigrants.9 According to the Dominion census of 1881 the enumeration area covering the coalfields (Vancouver District) had a population of

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9,991. This figure grew at a super-Malthusian rate over the next two decades, reaching 18,229 in 1891 and 27,198 in 1901 (table 1). Allowing for a continuous decline in the size of the aboriginal community, the net growth of population in the district due to white immigration and natural increase was even more marked than these figures might at first suggest. The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 coincided with and probably stimulated a significant spurt in growth. Indeed, the number of colliery employees increased by more than a third from 1887 to the end of 1888; in the same period the number of adult white miners more than doubled, from 777 to 1,614.10 In the twenty years from 1881 to 1901, when immigration into the coalfield reached its peak, the British-born population always retained a place of proportional prominence. In 1881, 1891, and 1901 the British represented 47, 50, and 56 percent of the white population in the census district enclosing the main coalmining area. The British proportion of the adult population was greater still. In and around the main mining town of Nanaimo the British colliers represented 79 percent of the non-Asian workforce in 1881 and 61 percent in 1891, as is shown in table 2. This pattern of British dominance on the Vancouver Island coalfield contrasts sharply with what was recorded in mining towns elsewhere. For example, native Nova Scotians accounted for about 73 percent of the population in Cape Breton coal districts in 1871.11 In California, from the gold rush of 1849 to about 1854 the majority of the population – about twothirds in the 1850 census report – were born in the United States and its territories. In the hard-rock camps of Idaho in 1881, 51.8 percent were native-born Americans. On the Comstock Lode of the 1860s and 1870s the mining population was mostly foreign-born, although not particularly British.12 Never more than a fraction of the workforce in most other contemporary mining areas in North America, British immigrants on the Vancouver Island coalfield ruled the roost.13 The surplus of men revealed by early surveys proved extremely resistant to change. Male numerical dominance continued to be a fact of life on the coalfield well into the twentieth century. As a growing body of literature on the subject has revealed, “settlement occurs in the context of ongoing gender relations,” which in the British Columbian context has meant that “definitions of femininity and masculinity have been tightly woven into the constraints of limited employment opportunities.”14 This was as true in industrializing Europe as it was in British Columbia; in those parts of Britain dominated by coalmining and heavy industry in the nineteenth century, economic opportunities for women were shrinking or simply had never been abundant. Westminster’s exclusion of women from underground work in 1842, along with restrictions on the use of children in the pits, reinforced the adult-male composition of mine

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Table 1 Vancouver District Residents, by Birthplace Place of Birth

1880–81

1890–91

1900–1 5,432

England and Wales

920

3,077

Scotland

348

974

401

Ireland

142

348

1,345

1,410

4,399

7,178

Total, British Isles Prince Edward Island

1

28

69

Nova Scotia

95

510

696

New Brunswick

89

211

217

Quebec

41

134

200

Ontario

146

743

1,188

Manitoba

1

12

64

North West Territories

0

6

54

British Columbia

1

1

8,417

12,070

7,358

10,061

14,558

Newfoundland

1

18

28

Channel Isles

1

11

22

Australia

0

0

67

Total, Canada

6,985

New Zealand

0

0

2

“Other British possessions”

2

22

2

43

92

13

1,858

372

1,307

France

13

54

59

Germany

37

172

159

Italy

16

245

279

2

145

276

u.s.

Russia/Poland Spain/Portugal

1

6

10

30

157

289

China

0

1,103

2,558

Greece

0

0

3

Switzerland

0

0

15

Syria

0

0

5

West Indies

0

0

4

Other

324

482

38

Not given

382

3

4

1

2

13

9,991

18,257

27,470

Scandinavia

At sea Total

Source: Canada, Census of Canada, passim. 1 Primarily Native Indians 2 May include Australia, New Zealand and India.

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Table 2 National Origins of Nanaimo-Area Miners, 1881, 1891

1880–81

%

1890–91

%

140

44.7

360

41.8

Scotland

59

18.9

105

12.2

Wales

37

11.8

42

4.9

Ireland

12

3.8

20

2.3

248

79.2

527

61.2

British Columbia1

13

4.2

19

2.2

Nova Scotia

11

3.5

85

9.9

2

0.6

16

1.9

13

4.2

69

8.0

Australia

3

1.0

1

0.1

New Zealand

0

0.0

2

0.2

13

4.2

22

2.6

Germany

3

1.0

14

1.6

Holland

2

0.0

11

1.3

Switzerland

1

0.3

1

0.1

Austria

1

0.3

8

0.9

Denmark

1

0.3

5

0.6

Finland

0

0.0

61

7.1

Belgium

0

0.0

10

1.2

Norway

0

0.0

2

0.2

France

0

0.0

7

0.8

Russia

0

0.0

1

0.1

Poland

0

0.0

1

0.1

Spain

0

0.0

1

0.1

Iceland

0

0.0

1

0.1

313

100

861

100

Place of Birth England

Total, Great Britain

Other provinces and Newfoundland u.s.

Italy

Total

Source: Canada, Census of Canada, 1881 and Census of Canada, 1891, mss. The author is grateful to Professor Allen Seager for figures from 1891. Note: The figures are for non-Asians only. 1 Includes some aboriginal miners.

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labour. The number of other occupational opportunities open to young females in mining communities was limited and in some locales was shrinking. One consequence was that women left the older coalfields, and they avoided the newer ones. In the Rhondda Valleys of South Wales in 1891, for example, there were about 64 women to every 100 men.15 It was equally difficult to attract women to colliery villages on the Pacific Coast of British North America. The ratio of men to women in 1881 was 1.20 to 1, but by 1891 the gap had widened to 1.98, and in 1901 it was wider still at 2.07. Among the adult white population the sex ratio was even more badly skewed. In 1881 – when the imbalance was least pronounced – there were 589 men and 279 women between 15 and 49 years of age: a ratio of 2.11 to 1. Relatively speaking, this was not as depressing a situation as it might at first glance appear, and it was much less an “evil” than Governor Musgrave believed. In the goldfields of California around 1850 the ratio of males to females was 9 to 1; twenty years later in Montana’s hard-rock mining camps it was about 4 to 1.16 Put another way, only one in four of the cordilleran miners might have wives and children, whereas on Vancouver Island in 1881 it was statistically possible for every second miner to be married. Even in 1891 – by which time the maleness of the district had increased – nearly a third of the mineworkers were living with co-resident spouses.17 For the British miners in particular, the experience of conventional family relationships was a possibility on the coalfield, if not always a probability.

age structure As well as being overwhelmingly male, frontier mining communities are also assumed to contain a particularly young population. This age distribution is attributed to various factors, including the arduous nature of work underground (for which older men would often be unsuited) and to the abbreviated life expectancy of colliers. Among the miners of Vancouver District in 1881 age averages vary considerably between national groups. British miners in the Nanaimo-Wellington area averaged 36.7 years, the lowest being the Scots at 34.0 and the Irish being most senior at 39.9 years. The other trans-Atlantic cohort, a small body of Italians, had a comparable average age of 33.2 years. By contrast, miners born in British North America averaged 24.1 years, Americans 27.3. The oldest British miner was 72; officially the youngest were 16 years old but the covert use of under-age boys was a fact of life in these pits.18 What is most important to note here is the large proportion of miners who were over thirty, a fact that persisted into the 1890s.19 Among the British miners only a fraction had not yet passed their thirtieth birthday by 1881 (tables 3 and 4). Evidence on the

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Table 3 Age Cohorts, Vancouver Island Colliers, 1881, by Place of Birth, Numbers British Isles

Under 20 years 20–29 years 30–39 years 40–49 years 50+ years

England

Scotland

Ireland

Wales

British North America

5 30 37 33 16

3 19 24 14 5

1 2 5 1 2

0 5 11 13 3

6 13 6 0 0

United States

Other

3 5 3 0 0

3 8 10 2 0

United States

Other

27.3 45.5 27.3 0.0 0.0

13.0 34.8 43.5 8.7 0.0

Source: National Archives of Canada, Nominal Census Returns, 1880–81.

Table 4 Age Cohorts, Vancouver Island Colliers, 1881, by Place of Birth, Percentage Distribution British Isles

Under 20 years 20–29 years 30–39 years 40–49 years 50+ years

England

Scotland

Ireland

Wales

British North America

4.1 24.8 30.6 27.3 13.2

4.6 29.2 36.9 21.5 7.7

9.1 18.2 45.5 9.1 18.2

0.0 15.6 34.3 40.6 9.4

24 52 24 0 0

Source: National Archives of Canada, Nominal Census Returns, 1880–81.

Vancouver Island coalfield population as a whole indicates an age distribution consistent with patterns observed elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.20 Continued, indeed increased, immigration during the 1890s brought new infusions of 20-to-40-year-olds. The large youngadult cohorts of 1881 and 1891 were thus unable to move steadily up the profile to dominate from the senior tiers. Also worth noting with respect to the age of the population is the number of children present from the earliest days of the community. Given the male bias in the immigrant group, the fact that the Asian population produced virtually no offspring locally, and the impact of smallpox and other exotic diseases on the aboriginal population, the size of the component under 15 in 1881 might come as something of a surprise. The large number of children on the coalfield had, in fact, been observed twenty-five years earlier as a peculiarity of the mining

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Table 5 Boys and Girls on the Coalfield, Selected Years

18551

1881

1891

1901

Boys

41

1,755

2,739

4,130

Girls

25

1,712

2,614

3,966

1

1855 figures for Nanaimo only. Other figures for Vancouver District.

district. In 1855 James Douglas reported to the Colonial Office that there were 29 school students in Nanaimo, 3 more than in Victoria; these figures represented 19 and 11 percent of the respective town populations.21 Children continued to be a very large segment of coalfield society in the years that followed. In 1863 the Victoria newspaper commented that the age structure in Nanaimo – 49 women, 198 men, and 156 children – was highly unusual in the context of the whole Anglo-American coast.22 The census of 1881 shows that individuals under 15 made up 34.7 percent of the total population around Nanaimo, a proportion that was slightly higher than the provincial figure. From 1881 to 1901 the children under 15 increased in number from 2,332 to 8,096, although, proportionally, there was a slight decline from 29.4 percent to 25 percent of the total. The existence of a large dependent population in these mining towns is of considerable importance. Children under 15 and men and women over 60 together comprised almost 40 percent of the total in 1881. The level of dependency was comparable to the figure of 45 percent found in the Black Country mining town of Madeley in the same year.23 Dependence rates dropped over the next twenty years, but in 1901 the level was still higher than 35 percent. The persistently high proportion of children in the coalfield region permits two hypotheses about the Nanaimo-area population. First, children – especially boys – had an economic value in the local economy that compensated for their initial years of dependence. In a study entitled “The Value of Children during Industrialization,” Hammell, Johansson, and Ginsberg found a correlation between sex ratios among populations under 15 and local economic activity that suggested two possible and contentious hypotheses on settlement and family patterns. Either parents selected”a region of residence and an occupation that would take advantage of their boys and girls,” or parents provided resources “differentially in sufficient degree to influence childhood mortality patterns.”24 Indeed, in Nanaimo from 1855 to 1901 the number of boys was always greater than the number of girls, regardless of age cohort (table 5).

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Second, the large number of dependents in the mining district suggests that the periods of most dramatic increases in population and coal output were typically years of family migration into the region. During the 1890s there was a total population growth of 50 percent, but only one-quarter of this expansion occurred in the male group between 20 and 40 years of age; 30 percent of the expansion occurred in the cohort under 15. The families already in the area were incapable of producing enough children to keep the proportions stable from 1880 to 1900, let alone advancing that cohort any further. It follows that the immigration waves of the late 1880s and mid-1890s continued to involve large numbers of young families, as well as young married couples who would add more children to the total population. This observation contrasts with the discovery that European emigrants to the eastern United States in the 1880s “travelled more often as individuals than in families” and that emigration of children under 15 to u.s. ports declined to as little as 13 percent of the English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish traffic in the years between 1873 and 1898.25

nu p ti a l i ty a nd f e rt i li t y patt e rn s While it can be conceded that young men formed a considerable proportion of the population around the colliery village of Nanaimo, the complete picture was more complex. In 1880–81 and again in 1891, half the British miners were well over 30 years of age, and the balance between men and women around Nanaimo was comparatively close. The early coalmining communities of Vancouver Island were not simply havens for transient males; they were also home to women, children, and old people. The area was also remarkably foreign, more akin to colonial New England in this respect than to contemporary California.26 Industrial society on the “frontier” begins to look in this respect somewhat less demographically lopsided. It was statistically possible for as many as half the nineteenth-century Vancouver Island miners to be married. In fact, almost 40 percent of the miners found in the 1880– 81 manuscript census were married; in 1891 the share had risen to 42.5 percent. A further 66 in 1881 (21 percent of the total) were living in family households, either as sons or siblings of other miners, farmers, or widows. Some of these households were extended in structure, typically revolving around a miner’s daughter and her spouse (also usually a miner). The Malpass/Blundell and Ross/Bell households, schematized in figure 4, offer examples. Conjugal patterns can reveal more about this community, especially when the figures for the mining and non-mining white populations are disaggregated. It was anticipated that the frontier social environment

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59

=

Female

=

Male, miner

=

Male, non-miner

=

Age

Malpass 27

59

Blundell Deceased

62

Bell 36 Ross Figure 4

Extended household forms, Nanaimo, c. 1881

(with its preponderance of recent immigrants) would produce diminishing opportunities and pressures for marriage between people who hailed from the same province, county, or state, even from the same country. Marriage across national, denominational, and racial lines became more likely on the island colony, where the combination of peoples was more cosmopolitan than in, say, the contemporary mining villages of Durham or Lancashire. In a study of marriage patterns in nineteenth-century Canterbury, New Zealand, exogamic marriages were found to be far more common than was the case in Britain during the same years.27 In Cape Breton mines, by contrast, exogamy – whether “from a religious or an ethnic point of view” – was almost unheard of. On the Vancouver Island coalfield the pattern was more comparable to that found in New Zealand, though it was not identical. There was, in fact, a growing trend in the last quarter of the century away from interdenominational marriages. While this pattern in marital unions might be expected, it is remarkable that same-denomination marriages occurred so frequently throughout the period. More outstanding still is the incidence of ethnically or nationally endogamous marriage unions.28 Measured in terms of nation of birth, endogamy occurred in 50.5 percent of the 309 non-aboriginal marriages in the census district in 1880–81.29 In each cohort British nationals in the district were even

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more endogamous than the average, never falling below 69 percent. The mining population, however, was more endogamous than the nonmining population (62 percent against 46.3 percent). Also, married women over 45 years of age in 1881 were, with few exceptions, married to conationals, regardless of the husband’s occupation. British women as a whole were more endogamous than British men, which suggests that the former were married before they arrived in the coalfield, perhaps accompanying their husbands from the northeast Atlantic to the northeast Pacific. This proposition is borne out in the few figures for married British women over 45 years of age whose husbands were miners in 1881: fully 94 percent of these marriages were endogamous, 100 percent among the English (both male and female). Information on the couples’ offspring is also supportive. The married English miners with wives under 45 years of age in 1881 had a total of 131 co-resident children; fifteen (40.5 percent) of the first-born children were natives of the British Isles.30 Put another way, it appears that two-fifths of the marriages were consummated in Britain. Among the households headed by English-born husbands who were not employed in the mines in Vancouver District in 1881, only 19.6 percent of the first-borns were delivered in Britain. This sets apart the British West Coast from what is known of unmarried British emigrants who went to American centres: family units established before setting sail were clearly an important feature in British Columbia’s first coalmining district. The high levels of endogamy may also indicate a propensity for British immigrants in the region to stick to their own, although this possibility can at present be neither demonstrated nor disproved. Other examples of domestic cultural baggage from the Old Country can, however, be traced. The fertility of nineteenth-century British miners has received much comment. While self-imposed family-size limitation affected most of the British working-class in the second half of the century, miners continued to produce large families.31 Estimates vary widely, but there is a consensus that miners on average fathered one more child than did husbands in other occupational categories, although colliers were not the only “notoriously prolific section of the population.” Explanations are nearly as abundant. Nuptiality among miners was characteristically high, and colliers tended to marry younger than other working-class males because of relatively high earning power at an early age.32 A nineteenth-century Lancastrian miners’ song boasted of both qualities: Collier lads get gold and silver, Factory lads get nowt but brass. Who’d be bother’d with a spindle bobber When there are plenty of collier lads?33

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Likewise, coalfield women in Britain were usually married before their counterparts in other industrial and nonindustrial areas, and there was a high incidence of marriage overall.34 A greater proportion of women in mining areas therefore experienced marital fertility and were able to take advantage of more of their fertile years.35 Another important consideration was the economic utility of children, especially boys, in mining communities. “There was always room down the pit … for all the sons of mining families.”36 Women in British colliery towns after 1842 could contribute relatively little to household incomes; this economic impotence increased the desirability of marrying young and (ideally) having more sons whose wage-earning capacity was not so badly constrained. “Early marriages increased the likelihood that a family could have a son earner to supplement their income at a stage when father’s income could be expected to shrink” due to declining health or to outright disappearance through death in the mines.37 The mining industry itself, then, encouraged large families by providing work for the sons of miners and, through them, a means of achieving some measure of economic security. Finally, miners achieved their maximum earning power while young, often before they turned 30, so there was less to be gained in delaying family-building than there was for prospective fathers in other trades. Nanaimo’s British miners and their wives looked likely to match Old Country fecundity. The Victoria Colonist reported in 1870 that the “ladies of Nanaimo are determined to hold the foremost rank in reproductiveness and are furnishing more leige subjects for Her Majesty than any other locality in the Colony of equal population. By rapid home production we may be at last independent of immigration.”38 Attitudes towards fertility and family size around Nanaimo in the nineteenth century doubtless grew out of pre-emigration experiences. For example, in 1881 the ratio of children under 5 years of age to nonaboriginal/non-Asian women from 15 to 50 years of age who were married to miners was 830 children per 1000.39 The figure for Victoria at the turn of the century was much lower, a mere 348 per 1000 women; likewise, figures from elsewere in North America were significantly lower.40 On Vancouver Island the largest families, generally speaking, belonged to couples who had been in the coalfield for the longest time.41 This variable – term of residence – appears to be more important than the age of either spouse. Among the white population as a whole in Vancouver District in 1881 and among the miners specifically, the average number of co-resident children per married couple (wife under 45 years of age) was approximately 2.75. Among the miners (as can be seen in table 6), English and Scottish colliers in 1881 fathered a larger average number of co-resident children than did their North American workmates, 2.82 and 2.96,

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Table 6 Family Size by Father’s Birthplace (Miners Only), Vancouver District, 1881 Number of Children per Married Couple

0

1

2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9

12

6

9

9

6

5

1

2

4

0

2.82

Scotland

6

3

6

5

1

2

3

1

1

1

2.96

Wales

1

2

2

1

1

1

0

0

1

0

2.89

Ireland

0

0

0

2

1

0

0

0

0

0

3.53

United States

0

3

3

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

2.00

Nova Scotia

1

0

1

0

2

0

0

0

0

0

2.50

British Columbia

2

0

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

1.00

Other

1

0

1

2

0

0

0

0

0

0

2.00

23

14

22

20

11

9

4

3

6

1

2.74

Father’s Birthplace England

Total

Average

Source: National Archives of Canada, Nominal Census Returns, 1880–81.

compared with 1.93 (i.e., the American, Nova Scotian, and British Columbian figures combined).42 This was in part due to the greater maturity of the British cohort, as indicated earlier. Among the district’s nonmining population (table 7), family sizes were similarly largest among the English and Scots (3.20 and 2.79 respectively). The British miners, then, did not lead the pack in prolificacy at the time of the census of 1880–81. It is difficult to say, however, precisely how many of the farmers and merchants, for example, had once been pitworkers themselves, occupational mobility of this kind being very common among the nineteenth-century Vancouver Island miners, as will be shown in chapter 5. A possible cause of these regional performance levels may have been early marriages. Marriage records maintained by St Paul’s Anglican Church at Nanaimo from 1862 to 1879 – for many years the only Protestant church in the area – reveal that coalfield women were marrying very young. Of seventeen weddings for which the bride’s age is given, only ten brides were 18 years of age or older. Two brides are listed as 15 at the time of their weddings. Two of the British women on the marriage register indicate the social norms: a 16-year-old from Dudley was the first woman to be married in the church, and her footsteps to the altar were traced a few months later by a 17-year-old girl from the same Black Country town. Apart from one exceptionally mature case – a 42-year-old miner who married a 42-year-old teacher from Norfolk in 1878 – the oldest bride in the record is 22. Marriage registers for Ladysmith’s Presbyterian Church in the early twentieth century reflect a similar pattern.43

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Table 7 Family Size by Father’s Birthplace (Nonminers Only), Vancouver District, 1881 Number of Children per Married Couple Father’s Birthplace England

0

1

2

3

4

5

6 7 8 9+

Average

18

6

13

12

7

3

8

6

4

2

3.20

Scotland

9

5

8

5

3

8

1

1

2

0

2.79

Wales

0

1

1

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

2.33

Ireland

2

1

0

3

1

0

0

1

1

0

3.22

United States

5

1

3

1

3

1

0

0

0

0

1.93

Nova Scotia

2

2

2

0

1

0

1

0

0

0

2.00

Ontario

2

5

0

2

2

1

1

0

0

0

2.31

New Brunswick

0

1

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

2.50

British Columbia

1

1

1

1

1

0

0

0

0

0

2.00

Other

5

2

1

2

1

0

1

1

0

0

2.15

44

25

30

27

21

13

12

9

7

2

2.77

Total

Source: National Archives of Canada, Nominal Census Returns, 1880–81.

Further evidence of early marriages can be gleaned from the census enumerators’ books of 1880–81. Although the census manuscripts do not provide specific information on age at marriage, enough data is given to permit some assessment of nuptiality. By taking the age of married white mothers under 35 in 1881 and subtracting the age of their eldest co-resident child, an estimate can be made of probable age at marriage or, more cautiously, the woman’s age at the time of her first surviving live birth. This approach is flawed insofar as it cannot take into account early miscarried pregnancies, nor can it include the death of offspring through accidental causes or childhood illnesses before the census. Having said that, these difficulties would tend only to overestimate the age of local women at the time of marriage, something that actually reinforces the conclusions reached here. Also, the caveats apply with equal force to the nonmining population as well as to the colliery workers, so this method can at the very least yield some idea of relative age at first marriage.44 In 1880–81 there were 119 married women under 36 in the coalfield area who had co-resident children.45 Of these women, 47 were married to miners, and 72 were not. The average age at first birth for the wives of miners was 20.7 years, while for the wives of nonminers it was 21.3 years. Given the surplus male population, it is worthwhile to make the

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same calculation using Euro-American men with wives under 36 years of age. The average age of nonmining males at the birth of their eldest child was 29.9; for miners the average age was 27.5. If the average is reduced by a further nine months (to cover gestation), the average age at conception would be around 26.75. A further reduction could be justified on the very straightforward principle that conception is neither an automatic nor an instantaneous consequence of marriage and on the grounds that stillbirths and infant deaths would have artificially inflated the final estimate of age at marriage under these circumstances. There is also the possibility that some of these miners were in their second marriages, thereby driving up the average slightly. The Anglican Church records (which, unfortunately, do not distinguish between first or subsequent marriages) deliver an average age among miners of 27.4 years at marriage, 29.6 years for British miners, and a median of 25 years for all miners, figures that are not inconsistent with calculations based on the census.46 The age of married Vancouver Island miners at first birth/marriage is probably slightly high by British standards. One study shows that the average age at first marriage of miners in late-nineteenth-century England was 24.06 years; among the better-paid pitmen of the Northeast the age was somewhat lower.47 There are compelling reasons for believing that the colonial miners married later in life than their Old World counterparts. For example, the age of Vancouver Island miners’ wives at the time of their first-known surviving delivery – 20.7 years – is well below the average age for first marriage among colliers’ wives in Britain (22.46 years); it is even more noticeably below what is known to have been the average age of Black Country miners’ wives at the birth of the oldest co-resident child in 1851 (25.84 years). If British collierytown women experienced a 3.38-year-long period of childless grace after their wedding day, why not assume a similar phenomenon among Nanaimo-area women?48 Age at first marriage for wives of miners in the colony thereby comes to 17.26 years, at which point the Anglican teen-brides of the 1860s no longer seem so implausibly young. The social norms of marriage on the island, then, included miners taking wives who were not yet twenty and miners who themselves married late by British standards.49 The period between the beginning of female fertility (around 15 years) and the average age at first pregnancy for miners’ wives was shorter than for women who married nonminers. For both female cohorts, then, early marriages were the general rule and no doubt a significant cause of high fertility levels. Men in the district, however, married later in life and were nearly 30 years old before they saw their first child. This pattern suggests that the selection process for emigrants

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from the British mining towns may have produced an overrepresentation of older husbands, men who stayed single longer and saved the money necessary to emigrate. Although the British miners on Vancouver Island were especially prolific compared to their neighbours in the colony, their fertility looks remarkably restrained compared with what occurred in Old Country mining towns. The absence of accurate statistical information on family size in British coalfields in the nineteenth century means that precise comparisons are impossible; nonetheless, the assumption can be made – with reference to a substantial body of secondary literature on the subject – that not only were British families headed by miners not increasing in size after about 1875, they were actually decreasing.50 It is known as well (and with some certitude) that in 1911 British miners had an average of 4.11 children. The conclusion must be that the average number of (surviving) children born to Vancouver Island miners in the nineteenth century – 2.75 – was comparatively low. If Nanaimo women married younger but over the long run produced comparatively smaller families, something must have been preventing greater fertility. What explanations can be suggested? Women were probably little more – though hardly less – economically productive in nineteenthcentury British Columbia’s coalfield than their contemporaries in English, Scottish, and Welsh mining districts, so this was most likely not a consideration in making small families more viable or desirable.51 Perhaps the greater availability of “alternative pleasures and distractions” was a factor.52 More important, certainly, was the nature of work in Vancouver Island mines and the kind of remuneration received, two factors that would influence the viability of large families. Where opportunities for boys survived – as at Nanaimo – the presence of a substantial family population was apparently assured.

colony and community Who, then, were the colliers of nineteenth-century Vancouver Island? Unlike their neighbours in American colliery towns they were primarily British. They were more mature: miners from England, Scotland, and Wales were on average a full decade older than North American coalminers on Vancouver Island. They were almost as likely to be “family men” as not. Among the cohort of 1881, probably no fewer than twofifths had brought their wives and kin out from Britain. The persistence of large numbers of children in the region over the next twenty years indicates that family migration continued to be an important demographic element. The long-standing impression that the coalfield population was simply young, male, and single must be discarded.

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With these facts in mind, the orthodoxy about labour’s frontier militance must also be reassessed. The presence, rather than the absence, of families must be integrated into explanations for the efflorescence of organizations like the Knights of Labor or the Western Federation of Miners.53 First, however, it is necessary to show how these demographic conditions were experienced in the pits.

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5 Work and Wages

At the turn of the century a British coalminer testified to William Lyon Mackenzie King’s roving investigation into labour relations that working conditions on Vancouver Island were quite unlike anything he had encountered before emigrating. The coal seams in Britain, he maintained, “are more uniform. It is not the same here at all. It is all jumbled up here. To-day it may be favourable and to-morrow unfavourable. The coal seams are more uniform in the old country.”1 The implications of this observation are considerable. Geological conditions affected wages earned, profits secured, the character of the workforce, and the level of danger underground. Nevertheless, as an ostensibly British coalfield, the approaches taken to mining the coal were typically derived from British models. So too were the cues taken by the miners in their responses to mining conditions. During the nineteenth century, coal mining techniques were very similar throughout the Western industrializing world. Methods used by the men and women who fostered industrialization in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bell-pits survived to 1900 in Europe and North America. Nevertheless, geology and materials could vary from place to place, and combined with locally evolved mining methods, these factors helped establish the trademark characteristics of individual coalfields. In the case of Vancouver Island, geology certainly influenced coalfield life, as the frustration expressed by miners and mine managers alike attests. Various geological considerations went far towards determining the kind of mining techniques selected and the technologies that were most appropriate. The thickness of the seams, the strength of the

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roof, the amount of dirt in the coal – these all had a bearing on how the colliery would be worked. And each alternative method of mining carried with it organizational implications; by choosing one system or machine over another, management and colliers determined (knowingly or not) a consequent demarcation of the workforce. Not only was the task in this way determined and assigned, but so too was the relationship between hewer and labourer in the mine. And if they functioned as superior and subordinate or master and apprentice underground, that relationship would provide a point of reference on the surface as well, one that was manifested in relative socioeconomic status and physical settlement patterns. The ways in which coal was won and the factors that largely determined those methods thus had a bearing on social relations in the mining community as a whole.2 And, of course, it affected miners’ earning power in a profound way. One would, therefore, expect to discern different experiences even from town to town, let alone from country to country. Just as the recruitment of labour for the coalfield attracted a heterogeneous population, as the previous chapter showed, the experience of coalmining on Vancouver Island was one of diversity. Whether measured in terms of the kind of work undertaken, rates of pay, or divisions based on race, gender, and age, the evidence points to a workingclass experience from which it is difficult – and perhaps imprudent – to generalize. When these differences and inequities are marshalled, one must wonder not at how incompletely the workforce was organized along class lines but that organization took place at all. The categories that separated these peoples, even within the boundaries of their small communities, were considerable and no doubt functioned as obstacles to greater unity of purpose. The plurality of experiences is also an indicator of working-class flexibility and adaptability, as well as a barometer of dissatisfaction with what immigrant miners found on Vancouver Island. If there is a general lesson here, it is that there is nothing simple in this history of mining. The British immigrants in particular charted an erratic course as an emergent working class, elusive in terms of a singular consciousness (as we shall see in subsequent chapters) but even more so in terms of an archetypal experience.

geology and the workplace Despite the optimistic pronouncements of colonial governors and other interested parties, Vancouver Island fell short of being “one vast coalfield.”3 Moreover, the irregular thickness of the seams ensured that it would never be an easy resource to tap. The coal lay in three seams, the largest and most important being the Wellington seam that oc-

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curred around Nanaimo and to the west of Comox. As much as twenty-five feet thick in places, the coalbed was more usually between nine and ten feet thick, but in the 1880s and 1890s the most profitable working areas on the Wellington seams were only four to five feet thick. That having been said the seam could pinch from its full size to a few mean inches abruptly. Overlying the Wellington seam were the less extensive Douglas and Newcastle coalbeds. But even at Nanaimo, where these two seams come closest to the surface, they could be reached only in slopes and shafts considerably deeper than were necessary to tap the Wellington seam at Union/Cumberland or at Wellington itself. By 1900 the Wellington seam was being mined at a depth of only 165 feet at Cumberland, while at Nanaimo the same coal was reached in slopes over 650 feet deep.4 There were narrower seams closer to the surface, but the cost of their removal was excessive.”Labor is much too dear,” claimed an early Nanaimo newspaper, “to make profitable the working a seam of coal which does not considerably exceed fifteen inches in thickness.”5 Several geological difficulties faced mine operators and their colliers on Vancouver Island. One problem was the inclination of the southernmost measures towards the sea. A great deal of the mining around Nanaimo was undertaken beneath the harbour and both Newcastle and Protection Islands at a huge expense to the company and at great cost to the miners.6 In 1873 flooding in the Nanaimo mines of the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company absorbed a full year’s dividends.7 With time the expanding network of tunnels began to collide under the harbour, and in the 1890s flooding became an even more regular occurrence. On a positive note, the cover, or “burden,” over the island coal seams was primarily sandstone, providing in many places – though not all – a roof sufficiently strong to obviate the need for extensive (and expensive) timbering underground.8 There were, however, other complications with which to contend. Dramatic variations in the coalbed frequently caused serious setbacks. In Nanaimoarea pits in the early twentieth century the severity of the faults and rolls meant that hardly 20 percent of the material removed was actually coal; few British mines were comparable in this respect and in many nineteenth-century coalfields the proportion of rock and small pieces of coal (or “slack”) to saleable coal was reversed.9 When the two hundred Scots recruited by James Dunsmuir for his Cumberland mine in 1899 deserted the town, one mine manager blamed the geology: “The work here was different and they did not like it.”10 These were also dangerous pits. The high content of hydrogen and oxygen that made Vancouver Island coal so marketable also made pitwork extremely risky, by both British and North American standards.

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The tensions wrought in the strata by dramatic slippages in a region that was subject to earth tremors meant that miners were exposed to special threats. Even in the second decade of the twentieth century – by which time ventilation and safety legislation had been introduced in British Columbia – the death rate per thousand mine employees was more than twice the figure for Nova Scotian mines and those in the United States.11 Through the 1890s the average number of deaths per thousand employees in West Virginia was 3.34 per year, in Pennsylvania it was 2.10, and in Maryland only 1.51.12 But in 1912 the British Columbian minister of mines was still reporting levels running as high as 12.72 per thousand employees in Vancouver Island mines. (Even in the coalmines of Northumberland and Durham, probably the most hazardous in Britain, the number of deaths by mining accident in the last century did not rise much above 10 per thousand employed per year.) Table 8 compares the annual number of deaths per thousand workers in Vancouver Island mines with those in South Wales and in the United Kingdom as a whole. The pattern for Vancouver Island is as erratic as the local geology, but it is terrifying when placed next to that of Britain. Nor was this just a consequence of explosions. Put aside the dramatic catastrophes in 1884, 1887, 1888, and 1901 and what is most outstanding is the toll of lives taken in Vancouver Island mines by falling roofs and collapsing timbers (figure 5). (Ironically, in 1877 the inspector of mines attributed this pattern to “the fact that the coal in these collieries does not fall easily after being holed” and to the fact that the miners as a consequence “trust so much to it that they get, in many instances, very careless of themselves and run fearful risks.”)13 And the worry of flooding was nowhere greater than it was in Vancouver Island mines.14 The magnitude of Vancouver Island disasters was also on a similar scale to what one finds in the much larger contemporary British mines. The Nanaimo explosion of 1887 claimed 157 lives; the most telling disasters in Britain during this period were High Blantyre in 1877 (200 dead), Haydock in 1878 (189 dead), Ebbw Vale in the same year (268 dead), and Risca, Seaham, and Pen-y-Craig in 1880 (120, 164, and 101 dead, respectively).15 It was not, however, the monumental calamities that claimed the most lives in British mining, nor would redefining “disaster” to include every incident resulting in more than four deaths do much to alter this fact. It was instead the “steady drip-drip of death” among surface workers and faceworkers in Britain’s mines that was numerically and socially most devastating.16 Hidden behind the cataclysmic pit disasters on Vancouver Island as well was a constant attrition rate and a horrendous record of serious, permanently debilitating inju-

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Table 8 Mining Fatalities, Vancouver Island, United Kingdom, and South Wales (selected years) Number of Deaths per 1,000 Employed

Year

Number of Vancouver Island Mining Fatalities

Vancouver Island

United Kingdom

South Wales

2.01

2.16

1875

4

6.42

1877

5

10.31

1.93

2.34

1878

3

4.53

1.93

2.88

1879

12

16.39

1.86

2.98

1881

1

1.22

1.88

2.84

1882

5

5.65

1.95

2.66

1883

4

3.87

1.95

2.71

1884

12

10.44

1.85

2.67

1885

10

8.70

1.73

2.33 2.31

1 1

1886

3

2.36

1.73

1887

157

107.24

1.79

2.51

1888

82

40.76

1.72

2.10

1889

4

1.79

1.79

2.12

1890

4

1.45

1.51

1.84

1891

15

5.34

1.55

1.95

1892

6

2.10

1.42

2.05

1893

16

5.63

1.42

2.42

1894

4

1.37

1.23

1.52

1895

10

3.42

1.54

1.95

1896

9

3.73

1.31

1.85

1897

6

2.49

1.46

1.82

1898

7

2.46

1.33

1.26

1899

11

3.32

1.28

1.60

1

Sources: bcsp, Minister of Mines Reports, passim, British Columbia Economic Council, Statistics of Industry in British Columbia; T. Boyns, “Work and Death,” 537. 1 Estimates.

ries (figure 6), an ominous backdrop to work in mining villages where safety regulations were poorly enforced. High methane levels meant that the “inhalation of noxious gas” was both a short-term and longterm hazard. Gases claimed 90 lives across Canada in 1901, 67 of them in British Columbia, and most of those in mine accidents that could not accurately be described as disasters.17

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160

Explosions

Misc.

Rock Falls

140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1881 1882 1883 1884 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899

Figure 5 Mining fatalities, 1881–84, 1886–99

Explosions

Misc.

Rock Falls

20

15

10

5

0 1881 1882 1883 1884 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895

Figure 6 Nonfatal workplace incidents, 1880–94

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Geological factors determined the location of mines and the kinds of perils involved in work below the surface, and it also influenced the ways in which the coal would be mined. In Britain in the last century bord-and-pillar, pillar-and-stall, and longwall were the methods of mining used in large collieries, but in most coalfields one of these techniques was preferred to the near-total exclusion of the other two. Coal-seam thickness and angle were most often determining factors in selecting an appropriate method of extraction. While other criteria may have had an influence, on the whole a thinner seam was best worked by longwall and a thicker one by pillar-and-stall.18 More importantly, these “particular methods of production and operational structures were of considerable moment for the nature of society” in each coalmining district.19 In Britain the peculiar requirements of each method of mining had observable consequences for labour and the community, including distinct divisions of labour, hierarchical work relations, attempts to “deskill” the workforce, mechanization drives, possibilities (or not) for occupational mobility in the mines, and social stratification among mineworkers, both above and below ground. Social relationships that are sometimes considered characteristic or typical of specific mining areas are thus partly explained by the ways in which the resource is extracted in local mines. In pillar-and-stall mines, colliers work in small groups composed of one or two hewers and two or three unskilled support (or “oncost”) workers, the focus of their efforts being a designated “room” or “stall” of coal.20 Having dug away the main body of coal in their room, the hewers back out, in the process removing some or all of the massive pillars of coal that had supported the roof while they worked. Pillarand-stall faceworkers are thus physically separated in the mine from other hewers and their oncost workers. And because it is impossible for mine foremen, or “overmen,” to be in every stall at once, pillar-and-stall generates supervisory challenges. On the whole it is thought that this situation worked to the benefit of the faceworkers, allowing them to retain some independence and control over the pace of production, “the most important component of the miners’ freedom.”21 As one British historian writes, “A man in his stall with a boy to fill and haul was, up to a point, his own master. If he felt like taking it easy one day, he could do so, and hope to make it up to himself later in the week.”22 Moreover, hewers in these pits had to be able to perform a variety of tasks and to respond independently to each situation as it arose, without direction from the foreman; hewers were, therefore, the most skilled members of the working unit, the representatives of an artisanal tradition in the underground workforce.23 Given that the hewer was central to the winning of the group’s wages, he assumed a proportionately larger share of

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responsibility in the mining process. This paved the way for a hierarchical structure in the workplace, manifested very often in British mines in apprenticeships and a gradation of jobs through a fairly rigid career pattern. Important demarcations that emphasized degrees of experience and skill produced natural leaders at the coalface.24 Nevertheless, the stall was viewed by hewers and oncost workers alike as a kind of “joint undertaking,” one in which a cooperative attitude was more successful than a competitive one. While the stall provided colliers with some degree of independence and autonomy in their work, longwall emphasized supervision and discipline.25 The advantages of longwall were considerable. The coalface was exposed and undercut in a line, so that pillars were not left behind and less coal was wasted in the mining process. Large numbers of miners were deployed at the coalface, and it was easier to impose tight supervision. This enabled management to regulate production rates in a manner that was impossible under pillar-and-stall. As well, fewer skilled miners and labourers were needed: overmen could supply (and control) knowledge underground as a means of reducing labour costs and the colliers’ ability to threaten the mine operators with a withdrawal of their labour. Moreover, safety concerns demanded a more attentive managerial role, given the combination of an absence of reinforcing pillars and an unskilled workforce. “Stricter work discipline, and a greater uniformity of pace and attendance” were hallmarks of longwall mining. Moreover, mines that are amenable to longwall are also more easily mechanized than pillar-and-stall mines, as coal-cutting machinery and automatic coal haulage gear are most effective on an extended coalface where the seams are not necessarily very thick.26 On Vancouver Island before 1871 the methods by which coal was won were primitive. At the early Fort Rupert mines surface outcroppings of coal were excavated by ill-equipped Kwakiutl men and women and, from 1850, by colliers brought out from Lanarkshire specifically for the job. The Scots attempted to open shafts, but they were unsuccessful, so surface digging continued to be the rule when operations were transferred south in 1851 to what became Nanaimo. By the end of the 1850s shafts were successfully sunk near the Hudson’s Bay Company bastion, and these pits were worked by small groups of men by pillar-and-stall until the 1870s.27 In the post-Confederation period mine managers began experimenting with longwall. Thereafter the methods used to extract coal changed from year to year and from pit to pit. Most of the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company’s pits had switched over to longwall by

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1875, the method of operations recommended by the manager, John Bryden, as the best suited for the geology at Nanaimo. Nevertheless Bryden himself preferred pillar-and-stall as a working arrangement, and, whether due to geological factors or to the manager’s influence, by 1882 this was again the only system used in the mines at Nanaimo, Wellington, Chase River, and Douglas.28 In 1887, however, the East Wellington Colliery reported that its coalface was being worked longwall style, and in the following two years longwall spread to the Northfield mine of the vcmlc, the No. 4 and No. 5 pits at Wellington, and the Union Colliery.29 In some of these mines both longwall and pillarand-stall were being used.30 By the end of the ’90s the pattern had reversed again and virtually all the island’s coal was coming out of stalls, the exceptions being Wellington No. 5 and Protection Island (which used both methods), Wellington No. 1, and – an important exception – the Union mines to the north.31 Coincidentally, these narrow-seam, longwall pits (apart from the Protection Island mine) all belonged to the Dunsmuir family (table 9). It cannot be said that the history of mining on the island in the last century is marked by a steady evolution towards one system at the expense of the other. Extensive coalbed faulting produced abrupt fluctuations in the thickness and lie of seams, resulting in equally sudden changes in the ways in which coal was won. As a general rule on this coalfield, however, seams that were less than five feet thick were worked on longwall and thicker seams by pillarand-stall. The alternative methods of mining required different skills and different styles of supervision. The experience of mining in predominantly longwall pits would contrast considerably with what was found in pillar-and-stall mines. These distinctions were far from trivial. Mechanization of pit labour was not to have a significant impact on the work process in these mines before 1900. Again, the nature of the seams dictated where money would be spent. Subterranean hazards were so great that capital that might have gone into mechanizing the coal-cutting process was diverted into improving ventilation.32 Fear of explosions caused by fire-damp brought huge fans underground in these mines, especially after the disasters of 1887 and 1888 at Nanaimo and Wellington. By the turn of the century there were no fewer than five Guibal fans on the coalfield, expensive ware obtained in an effort to match standards in British mines. They were, nonetheless, largely inadequate to the task and, far more tragically, the early Guibal, Weddle, and Schiel fans aggravated the coal dust problem underground: one kind of disaster may have been mitigated, but the potential for a dust explosion or for a rise in lung diseases related to silica inhalation was thereby worsened.33

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Table 9 Mining Methods in Vancouver Island Collieries, 1875–1891

Year

Pillar and Stall

1875

Nanaimo

1882

Douglas (vcmlc )

Longwall

4–11

Chase River

4–6

Wellington No. 1

6–10

Wellington No. 3

8–11

Wellington Adit

6

Wellington No. 4 1886 1887

10

Nanaimo No. 5 Nanaimo No. 1

7–15

Chase River

8–9

Wellington No. 3

6–11 East Wellington

1890

Thickness of Seam (in feet)

Nanaimo No. 1

5–7 7

Chase River Northfield

7 maximum

Wellington No. 4 Wellington No. 5 Wellington No. 6

8 East Wellington

“thin”

East Wellington No. 2 Union 1891

3

Chase River Southfield

18 maximum Northfield

3–6

Wellington No. 3 Wellington No. 6

6–8 East Wellington

Union

3–6

The two areas in which mechanical improvement was to proceed most rapidly in nineteenth-century Vancouver Island mines were pumping and haulage. The hbc introduced an engine to drain mines in the early 1850s.34 By the mid-1880s pumps were being augmented and regularly replaced. Mechanized haulage appeared around 1875, when the first steam-driven line of coal cars chugged out of the Nanaimo mines.35 The

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movement away from human and pit-pony power was, however, uneven. Advances were limited until 1890, when electric haulage equipment capable of pulling sixty tons of coal at once was installed at No. 1 Esplanade; before the end of the decade the load capacity of electric haulage gear in the vcmlc mines had expanded to ninety-six fifteen-ton cars. Many of the mules in the Nanaimo pits (and many of the mule skinners as well) were finally made redundant, then, not by steam but by electricity.36 Geological considerations beneath the surface played an important role in slowing the pace of mechanization in the various mines. Rapid and unpredictable changes in seam thickness prejudiced owners against the expense of introducing mechanized coal-cutting systems. And where the seams were likely to remain narrow, options other than expensive mechanization presented themselves. At Northfield, Wellington, and Union/Cumberland seams were much narrower, some no more than three feet thick, making it impossible for the miners to cut the coal while standing upright. In these pits – that is, the Dunsmuir pits – longwall mining was common, and an adequate supply of heavily supervised, low-wage unskilled labour obviated the immediate need for machinery. The shallower Dunsmuir mines enjoyed a similar advantage in terms of winding gear. In 1887, for example, the East Wellington coal was being won at a depth of only eighty feet, while at nearby Nanaimo the shafts worked their way seven hundred feet into the earth. The depth of the Nanaimo mines called for the introduction of mechanical haulage gear, and the thickness of the seams – between seven and fifteen feet – justified and somewhat offset the high cost of this kind of mechanization, as well as the recruitment and use of relatively skilled mine labour.

working i n coal The division of labour in coalmines reflects both the kind of mining being conducted and the distinctive characteristics of the workforce itself. The earliest white colliers on Vancouver Island – the Scots at Fort Rupert – were accustomed to performing well-defined tasks in coal mines, and they were loath to undertake any other description of work, no matter how closely related to mining it might have been. Andrew Muir, one of the Lanarkshire miners at the fort, complained in his diary, “we are put to the sinking of a Pit to look for coal a thing we never agreed to as we came out here to work coal not to look for it and do all manner of work.”37 In the mines of Lanarkshire and Ayrshire (as in many English coalfields) Irish immigrants and Highland Scots were often exclusively responsible for the sinking of shafts, while the Lowland Scots

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monopolized the actual winning of the coal. It is likely that the Fort Rupert miners interpreted their assignment as a reduction in status, if not an outright insult.38 In any event, the expatriate Lanarkshire miners were singularly unsuccessful in their attempts to find coal, and subsequent efforts on the part of the company to make them dig sewerage ditches resulted first in a strike and then in mass desertion.39 These unhappy pioneers were only slightly more stubborn in this respect than other British miners who came to Vancouver Island over the next twenty years. The Scots’ declaration that they would not perform certain kinds of work was to be echoed at other coal mines all over the world. As well as winning the coal, there were, of course, other tasks to be performed in the mines. Timbering the roof and roadways was the responsibility of oncost workers, although in stalls the hewers also participated. Duties of this kind were a regular source of complaint among the miners. In the No. 1 and No. 2 Pits at Wellington, timbering was of exceptional importance because of the friability of the coal (that is, the tendency of the overburden to squeeze down as the stalls were worked). But, as far as faceworkers were concerned, the time spent shoring up the roof was time lost on hewing. Since most miners on Vancouver Island were paid on the quantity of coal sent to the surface, any assignment not directly related to output goals was an unwelcome distraction. Removing dirt and unmarketably small pieces of coal from the tonnage produced was another important pit activity. At the vcmlc mines, some separation of coal from slack was carried out underground from about 1855 to 1871. This was done so that the large amounts of “black rock” found in the Nanaimo pits could be extracted and only large chunks of good quality coal raised to the pithead. The method used before 1872 to separate coal from slack and dirt involved handling the coal with forks or “screens” (also called “riddles”), a practice whose origins could be traced to South Staffordshire, the source of Nanaimo’s earliest English miners.40 As in Black Country mines, the slack produced by screening underground on Vancouver Island found its way into the mines’ ventilation furnaces.41 Alternatively – and increasingly – the slack was stowed in the worked-out stalls underground, and despite demands from striking miners in 1870–71 to have the sorting process brought to the surface, this practice survived in most island mines until about 1891.42 Problems arose when these tailings became too extensive. In 1877, for example, ventilation airways in the vcmlc’s Douglas Pit were becoming blocked with slack, creating a dangerous situation.43 Worse still, the explosion at Wellington No. 5 in 1888 was believed to have been caused by the accumula-

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tion of gasses seeping out from screened slack.44 It is likely that the explosion at Nanaimo in 1887 had similar causes. The badly needed transition from underground to pithead sorting, then, was postponed until disaster made further delays unthinkable. The riddles used for separating coal from slack and large coal from small coal were brought to the surface in 1891; thereafter, mineworkers’ wages were docked at the pithead for excessive slack and dirt in the tubs.45 Supervision varied critically in both type and degree. “Overmen” in the Dunsmuir pits were active in the daily running of the colliery and exercised a wide range of powers, including the arbitrary assignment of places at the coalface. The extent of supervisory authority in pits at Wellington, Extension, and Union derived from the use of longwall. Regular seams enabled regular supervision, and that permitted the presence of a large number of unskilled (specifically, Asian) miners in these collieries, who in turn required active management. In the pillarand-stall mines there was not the opportunity or the need to maintain such supervision. Nonetheless, one means of enforcing the company’s will was retained and exploited across the coalfield. The system of cavilling – essentially a lottery to allocate places at the coalface – was eschewed in favour of discretionary assignments.46 At Nanaimo in 1880, for example, wage reductions were enforced by refusing access to the best places in the mines to miners who were unprepared to accept the company’s terms.47 Supervisory staff flexed similar muscles in the Dunsmuir mines at Wellington in 1890–91.48 The manager at Nanaimo, Samuel Robins, urged an end to arbitrary coalface assignment as part of an effort to restore a degree of industrial harmony. His overtures were welcomed, but the absence of cavilling was to remain a fact of life in Vancouver Island mines for the rest of the century.49 What, then, were the main divisions of labour in the island mines? In British collieries, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, work was demarcated by age, often by gender and, in some areas, by origin or race. Oncost and surface labour was performed most frequently by young boys, sometimes by women and girls. In addition, unskilled and semiskilled jobs in Scottish mines and in some English collieries often fell to Irish immigrants, so there was also an ethnic division of labour.50 The situation on Vancouver Island was dramatically different. Although white women were never a component of mine labour in the colony, white children, aboriginal men and women, and Asians were all to play important and clearly demarcated roles. Timbering the tunnels and hewing the coal was almost exclusively the preserve of white adults in the Vancouver Island collieries. These chores required specific and specified skills. The only accepted way of obtaining those skills was through a long period of apprenticeship

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underground, a socially constructed arrangement that excluded women and favoured boys and men who had been raised to the task.51 These better-paid positions were, therefore, open only to a few. As well, it was understood that timbering and hewing required substantial physical strength, a consideration that partly determined who might become a hewer or a timberman and further gendered perceptions of the job. The backbreaking work of pushing or “driving,” the tubs, or “cars,” of coal through the mines was first given over to aboriginal men and women. An early Nanaimo mine manager recollected that in the 1850s and 1860s the white hewers chopped the coal away from the seam in slabs that were then loaded onto sleds by Sne ney mux pushers and taken to the surface. There the coal was piled into “woven cedar baskets attached to fir-framed, wheeled carts” called “skiveys” and then “hauled to tidewater” by native workers who also loaded the freight onto waiting ships. Another contemporary observer wrote, “it was a curious sight to see the string of natives of both sexes working like Ants in one continuous line over the trail to where they deposited their loads.”52 (It is likely, as well, that the baskets themselves were the products of female aboriginal labour.) Aboriginal dominance in these areas was quickly eclipsed, however, by the growing involvement of white boys and Chinese labourers. For the boys, these responsibilities were part and parcel of the mining apprenticeship as it was framed in British pits and elsewhere.53 Miners’ younger brothers, sons, and nephews dominated the ranks of pushers and drivers when they were available, but when they were not – as during the early days of resource exploitation in the colony or during the rapid expansion of the industry in the 1880s – then the oncost positions were taken by aboriginal workers or Asian immigrants. A watershed was reached in 1888 when Chinese labour was withdrawn from subsurface work and white adults took their place. This development followed two underground explosions in as many years, both of which were blamed on the unskilled Asian workers. Some of the post1888 hauliers had formerly held positions in the much more lucrative facework, and so probably regarded their new positions as something of a demotion. James Dunsmuir, on whom these arrangements were imposed, was quick to reintroduce Chinese drivers and pushers in the ’90s because, as he claimed with some justification, they were more efficient and worked for half as much as white adults.54 Cleaning coal – removing dirt and stones from the tub-loads – for many years took place below ground. Aboriginal workers played an important role in this respect. Due to the use of subcontracts at Wellington, Scottish and Lancastrian miners sought out and hired Kwakiutl

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or Hul’qumi’num men to perform cleaning tasks.55 In later years this work too became a stronghold of Asian labour. A related chore was the important business of separating the contents of the tubs into “tipples for coal for city sales, for locomotives, for rock and for manure hoisted from the mines.” This branch of surface work was one in which Chinese labour was employed extensively.56 These divisions of labour were much the same in both pillar-and-stall and longwall mines, although where the latter system was more regularly in use, nonwhite unskilled labour appeared in larger numbers in every position. It is apparent that the age-based hierarchical structure found in British mines was largely irrelevant on Vancouver Island, where there was frequently a ready supply of low-wage unskilled adult labour (table 10). Initially, from 1848 to the 1870s, the labour force requirements of the industry were expanding much more rapidly than the rate of natural population increase in the coalfield. And the shortfall in the number of white boys was not being made up by an infusion of immigrants under the age of sixteen. The adult white miners seem to have gone with the flow in this respect. In 1877 provincial legislation was introduced that restricted boys to no more than six hours labour per day, and the many single adult white men in the coalfield viewed this as increasing their own employment opportunities. At the same time the mine owners were largely unaffected and simply turned to the growing pool of Asian workers to make up the shortfall.57 Up to 1878 the number of white boys (i.e., youths under twenty years of age) at work in the colonial collieries was easily exceeded by the number of aboriginal mineworkers.58 In ensuing years the ethnic mix underground alternated, reflecting and amplifying demographic change in the community as a whole. The proportion of youths below ground peaked in the last decade of the century at around 5 percent of the workforce.59 As in the collieries of England, most of the boys in the Georgia Strait pits were related to other miners and frequently worked as apprentices to their fathers or older brothers. As well, the Provincial Select Committee of 1890–91 enquiring into the Wellington colliery strike disclosed that some “under-age” boys (i.e., under sixteen years) were finding their way into the mines with the connivance of their parents.60 Although there is at least one known case of a nine-year-old working in these pits, the evidence for under-age labour is, regrettably, hard to come by.61 Sadder still, it most often crops up in the roll-call of colliery deaths, as was the case in 1879, when Reuben Gough, a fourteen-year-old, was listed among the fatalities in an explosion.62 The work performed by boys in these mines, however, was always secondary to that of non-European races.

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Table 10 Vancouver Island Mine Employees, 1875–97, by Race or Age Year

Whites

1875

Chinese

Aboriginals

Boys

Japanese

396

176

51

0

0

1876

393

115

47

18

0

1877

289

143

33

20

0

1878

419

200

25

23

0

1879

503

206

6

17

0

1881

451

351

17

0

0

1882

503

353

18

0

0

1883

618

405

8

0

0

1886

721

530

16

2

0

1887

777

674

2

10

0

1888

1,614

340

16

42

0

1889

1,754

456

0

31

0

1890

2,109

490

2

58

0

1892

2,209

483

0

92

70

1

2

1893

2,282

402

0

148

12

1894

2,208

539

0

137

45

1895

2,202

532

0

140

50

1896

1,976

500

0

143

132

1897

1,747

435

0

151

80

3

Source: bcsp, Minister of Mines Reports, passim. Note: These figures were usually collected on the last day of each year. While they conceal seasonal variations they provide reliable evidence of growth in employment and changes in the ethnic and age composition of the workforce. 1 In this year native Indians were “occasionally” used at Harewood. 2 Averages from incomplete official reports. 3 No figures available for East Wellington.

The lines of demarcation were not impermeable: white miners occasionally took work on the wharves alongside the Sne ney mux and Kwakiutl or as hauliers, especially during the period of Chinese exclusion. Similarly, the Dunsmuirs experimented with Chinese hewers at No. 2 Pit Wellington. But as a general rule, certain jobs were monopolized by specific, identifiable groups: hewers in the vcmlc mines were, with very few exceptions, white adults. Boys could find employment underground on a limited basis through family connections. They thereby entered mining apprenticeships that resembled patterns common in British coalfields. The situation varied between pillar-and-stall

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mines and those using longwall, where unskilled workers could be employed in greater numbers and to greater effect. The history of Asian mineworkers on Vancouver Island is, in fact, closely related to the development of longwall pits north of Nanaimo, especially after 1888. But even in the pits where they were not permitted below ground, the Chinese retained a place of numerical prominence among the unskilled. A British-style hierarchy of labour predicated primarily on age was never completely reproduced on Vancouver Island. This fact was to have profound implications for miners’ earnings.

wa g e r a t e s The British miners who came to Vancouver Island in the nineteenth century were no doubt responding primarily to assurances of high wages. The shortage of industrial labour on the coast, coupled with the demands of the San Francisco coal market, kept pay rates buoyant. Nonetheless, virtually every labour dispute on the coalfield was partly fuelled by money issues. There is an evident contradiction here, the resolution of which lies in immigrant miners’ expectations of life and labour on Vancouver Island and their perceptions of the reality. Was the pay as high as promised? Were the wage expectations of immigrant miners dashed? Or were superficially high wages negated by some other consideration? British miners’ experiences at home are invoked here as a point of departure, because conditions prevailing in contemporary mining communities in the United Kingdom offer a useful benchmark. Making comparisons of this order is a difficult task. Conditions on Vancouver Island’s coalfield – small though it was – were seldom, if ever, homogeneous: wage rates could vary from year to year and from pit to pit, depending on the market for coal, geological conditions, employers’ policies on wages, and the response of miners’ organizations. The same is only more true of the situation in Britain. Nonetheless, overall patterns can be detected. Secondly, it is crucial to get beyond real wages to living standards and beyond living standards to household incomes.63 For what appeared to the miners as an excellent wage-earning proposition becomes much more problematic when considered in the context of family or household income. The first difficulty facing any historian interested in living standards is the reliability of sources. The reports of the minister of mines registered general statements of wage rates set by each colliery from 1875.64 These figures fluctuate only slightly over nearly thirty years and must be treated as generalized averages. Nevertheless, supplementary sources (local newspapers, mine managers’ records, and miners’ accounts) reveal that the government’s reports were reasonable approximations and

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that they provide a serviceable projection of how wages differed according to age, race, and employer. The use of piece-rates and daily wages provide further complications, but by focussing on the pay packets of a particular group – the British – some of the most dramatic differentials that might distort the average-wage figures have been avoided. Observations can be made on the real incomes of colliers by juxtaposing wage figures against reports arising from pay negotiations during disputes, against accounts of the cost of living on Vancouver Island, and against information on retail prices found elsewhere. With this information it is possible to build up a model of income movements through most of this period. The identification of household income levels, on the other hand, is complicated by the shortage of good material on the wages of boys. Lads under sixteen were being employed underground by their fathers, their uncles, or their older brothers, but the illegality of this practice – especially in the last two decades of the century – ensured that it was usually concealed from official eyes. This almost clandestine activity was most often revealed during disputes between miners and their employers. Such information permits some generalizations about household incomes. Nominal wages put against cost factors – food and rent – produce an indication of the cost of living and of real wages. These estimates are compared with the results of similar enquiries into living standards among colliers in Britain in the same period. Because the objective here is to demonstrate how wages were experienced and perceived by miners who had been recruited from Britain with promises of high incomes and good prospects for their children, qualitative evidence has been utilized to flesh out the quantitative findings.65 Fluctuations in market demand led to important changes in the rate of pay for island miners, but more fundamental were the numerous alterations in the methods by which wages were calculated. The greatest changes in the wage environment occurred when the Hudson’s Bay Company ceased to play a role in the coalfield, although notable developments were also recorded with the growth of the Dunsmuir enterprise. The first miners to make their landfall at Fort Rupert found that the promise of high wages was illusory and that the method of payment was unsatisfactory. The agreement between the Lanarkshire miners and the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Rupert contained elements of the Scottish “darg” (that is, fixed pay for fixed output). The miners were engaged for five-year terms and were to be paid partly on a piece-rate basis.66 While other labourers under contract to the Hudson’s Bay Company in these years could expect to earn only about £17 per annum, miners were employed in 1854 at £78 per annum plus 2s. 6d. for

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“each ton of the weight of twenty-one hundred weight” won from the mine above a target of forty-five tons per month.67 Assistant miners earned roughly half as much as hewers and complained bitterly about it too.68 Each miner was expected to work 310 days each year, performing whatever tasks were essential to the smooth running of the fort community and accepting company store credits or blankets instead of cash when necessary.69 The company, for its part, endeavoured to “furnish the rest of the [miner’s] family with food at reasonable prices” and free “double-screened” coal from the pithead.70 The wage system was restructured in 1856 so that miners were paid as much as 4s. 2d. per ton by the hbc and were provided with free housing, tools and medicine.71 Wages improved again around the start of the 1860s. In 1861 company hewers were reportedly receiving $1.50 (6s.) per day, although in 1862 another source asserts that the colliers were paid 5s. 2d. per ton or 10s. 3d. per day on shift work, in addition to a 1s. 4d. per diem for food rations (similarly high rates prevailed in 1865).72 The hbc considered paying its miners an annual salary, but supplements based on additional coal outputs indicate that the company expected to reward productivity. This was partly a response to the disheartened state of the Fort Rupert miners, who had agreed to a system of fixed pay for fixed output but found that the seams around the fort were essentially unremunerative. As table 11 indicates, wages tended to stabilize during the 1870s, although some erosion of earnings – as much as 12.5 percent – occurred in 1876.73 In these years a hewer in a good place at Nanaimo or Wellington might expect to be paid about $3.50 per day. It was general practice at Nanaimo to switch from piecework (which the miners normally preferred) to daily rates when the mine encountered a shrinking seam. The field manager of the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company wrote in 1879 that the geology changed so frequently “that it constantly leads to agitation about the rates”; a flexible wage system allowed the company to stabilize earnings in a badly faulted coalfield and to thereby deflect industrial disputes.74 At Wellington until July 1876 Robert Dunsmuir was paying his miners a prevailing rate of $1.20 per ton, but this rate (and conditions underground) deteriorated thereafter.75 It was also during this decade that Chinese miners began to make inroads into the workforce at Nanaimo and Wellington. Where piece-rates applied in 1880, they were said to be between 80¢ and $1 per ton, depending on seam thickness. Severe geological obstacles at Nanaimo in 1881 and the effects of a fire at the Chase River Mine that broke out in January and smouldered on for over a month resulted in a 39 percent loss in production over the previous year, with obvious implications for a workforce paid by tonnage.76 Partly as a

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Table 11 Estimated Net Wages in the Vancouver Island Coal Industry, White Adults, 1853–97 Net Wages per Day Year

Cents

1848–51 1853

1

1853

1

1

Sterling

56

2s. 3d.

250–300

10s. 1d.

2

77

3s. 1d.

1854

121

5s.

1860s

300

12s.

150

6s.

1

1861 1862

289

11s. 7d.

1871

200–300

8s.–12s.

1872

400

16s.

1875

200–500

8s.–£1

1876

200–400

8s.–16s.

1878

200–375

8s.–16s.

1879

200–375

8s.–15s.

1881

200–375

8s.–15s.

1882

200–400

8s.–16s.

1883

200–375

8s.–15s.

1885

200–400

8s.–16s.

1886

200–375

8s.–15s.

1887

200–375

8s.–15s.

1888

200–500

8s.–£1

1889

225–500

9s.–£1

1890

250–600

10s.–£1 4s.

1892

250–500

10s.–£1

1893

350–425

14s.–17s.

1894

200–350

8s.–14s.

1895

225–350

9s.–14s.

1896

225–350

8s.–14s.

Sources: bcsp, Minister of Mines Reports, 1877–1900, passim; McKelvie, “The Founding of Nanaimo”, 176–7; Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 185–6; csp, 1872, no. 10, Report of the Hon. H.L. Langevin, 13; Nanaimo Free Press, 5 September 1883; Audain, From Coalmine to Castle 19–20; Begg, History of British Columbia, 461; Harvey, A Statistical Survey, 18; Daily Colonist, 10 June 1862; British Columbia (Agriculture), Province of British Columbia, 55. 1 Gross wages where no estimate of other costs or bonuses can be made. 2 Seventy-seven cents for each day in a 310-day contract, production bonuses not included.

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consequence of this incident, wages did not increase noticeably again until the late 1880s when the top end of the pay scale rose to about $5 per day, peaking at $6 in 1890. The trend over the long term was towards modest increases in earnings. If one takes 1878 and 1890 – a poorish year and an outstanding year for wages respectively – top earnings climbed from $3.75 per day to $6. This represents an average annual increase in earnings of 5 percent. The figures for 1853–82 are far less spectacular, indicating an approximate 1.14 percent increase each year in a period when miners in France, for example, were averaging a 2.3 percent lift annually.77 The 1890s witnessed additional changes in pay rates. The West Coast depression of 1890–93 played havoc with demand for Vancouver Island coal, and the Wellington strike of 1891 also affected earnings. During these years, as James Dunsmuir consolidated his late father’s empire, net wages for white employees at Wellington, Extension, and Union were rolled back to between $2.25 and $3.50 per day. At times Nanaimo’s white miners earned less than the best-paid Wellington miners, but their average was usually higher. In 1899 the wages for white Nanaimo hewers had crept back up to $3 to $4.50, while white adult labourers earned between $2.50 and $3 per day, and boys could expect to be paid between $1 and $2 per day. At the same time Dunsmuir’s miners were earning 75¢ per ton (2,500 pounds) or between $3 and $3.50 – “some as high as $5” – per day.78 These variations reflected hugely different yields at the coalface and the effect that geological ruptures could have on working conditions. The ways in which pay was calculated and dispensed influenced the miners’ perception of their financial situation. In 1850 wage rates provoked the Lanarkshire miners at Fort Rupert into a strike and then desertion.79 Hired on a basis that recognized conventional arrangements of fixed wages for fixed output, the Scots were dismayed when they encountered serious problems in sinking a shaft to the coal seams. The resultant delay in reaching and raising the coal meant that the miners were not in fact entitled to be paid. The company’s fort manager maintained throughout 1850 that if the men desired wages at all, they could either raise coal or perform manual tasks connected with the fur trade. Contracted and shipped around the globe to dig coal, yet unable to do so, the Scots refused to do any other kind of labour. Subsequently, piecework, the customary arrangement in most British coalfields throughout the century, was adopted for the hbc’s Nanaimo mines.80 The advent of piecework was also accompanied by wage deductions levied on hewers who left too much dirt or rock in the coal trucks. If an excessive amount of slack was found, the car would be confiscated by the company; in particularly bad cases the miner could face dismissal.

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Seam thickness could be more to blame than negligent mining for too much dirt in the tubs, a fact that the vcmlc recognized in 1880. In that year the company announced a plan to eliminate the economic consequences of working different quality seams. A three-tier system of wages was introduced that took into account whether miners were working coalfaces less than five feet thick, between five and six feet, or more than six feet. Also related to the question of clean coal was the practice of sorting coal underground, something for which the miners had little enthusiasm. Geological characteristics of the Vancouver Island coalfield were influential in determining a miner’s wage on the piece-rate system. So irregular were the seams that competition for well-paying places at the coalface was frequently a source of conflict between miners and management and among miners themselves. In many parts of Britain the practice of cavilling protected miners against arbitrary mine deputies who could otherwise reward loyal friends with more remunerative stalls. On Vancouver Island, however, this even-handed arrangement was not instituted. Management’s power to assign places was retained throughout the century as an important disciplinary weapon. This process of assignment had serious implications for miners’ incomes. One English collier, John Greenwell, told a legislative enquiry in 1891 that in an “average good place” he could earn as much as six dollars in a day, but in an “average fair place” he might make no more than half that amount.81 As in Britain, unskilled labourers in Vancouver Island mines were frequently paid by hewers. Sometimes this work relationship also involved a familial bond, an older male taking on a son or nephew or younger brother as a “putter,” or “driver” – an oncost worker – to improve the household economy. On Vancouver Island, however, oncost workers were very often Native Indians or Chinese who subcontracted to white hewers. Chinese colliers could expect to earn only about $1 per day, a rate that was typically about half the amount paid to adult white miners and also below the wage paid to adult Native Indian miners and white boys throughout the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s (table 12).82 Because these subcontracts were private arrangements, it is impossible to say how well or how poorly oncost labour was paid, although testimony to the royal commission enquiry of 1902 into Chinese and Japanese immigration contended that the white miners generally gave their Chinese labourers “a little more” than the $1.25 per day offered by the mining company.83 The situation for boys was said to be better. Edmund Wilmer, a Belgian miner at Wellington, confessed to employing his underage son in the mine where he worked but denied cheating the boy on wages. “After paying him $2.50, I was always

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Table 12 Wages in the Vancouver Island Coalfield, by Race or Age, 1875–97 Daily Wages (in cents) Year

Whites

Chinese

Aboriginals

Boys

Japanese

1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1881 1882 1883 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1892 1893 1894 1895 1897

200–500 200–400 200–400 200–375 200–375 200–375 200–400 200–400 200–400 200–375 200–500 200–500 250–600 240–350 200–350 200–350 225–350 225–350

121–125 100–125 100–125 100–125 100–125 100–125 100–150 100–150 100–150 100–125 100–175 100–137 100–200 100–150 100–150 100–150 100–150 100–150

100–150 100–150 100–150 100–150 100–150 100–150 125–250 125–250 200 200 200 0 100–250 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100–175 100–200 100–200 100–200 100–200 100–200 100–200

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100–125 100–125 100–125 100–125 100–125

Source: bcsp, Minister of Mines Reports, passim.

making $3 or $4 myself – after paying the boy company wages,” he claimed.84 In any event it cannot be determined whether wages went into the boys’ pockets or directly into the family accounts. Although daily wages give some indication of relative earnings, it was by no means certain that a miner would be able to work, say, the full 310 days required in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s contract in the 1850s. And much later in the century there was a gulf between what the companies advertised as possible wages and what was actually paid. A report issued in a promotional travel book of 1898 on British Columbia and Vancouver Island estimated that when they were in “full work” the miners of the vcmlc earned “as much as $90 a month, the working shift being eight hours; but there are slack times, when the wages fall considerably.”85 Cold weather did not usually have a direct effect on the operation of the mines, although Cumberland suffered slightly more severe winters than did Nanaimo or Wellington. More

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important was the fact that the coal seams tended to angle off under the Strait of Georgia, making the pits more vulnerable to flooding during gale storms.86 Seasonal rhythms were also imposed by the local and international market for Vancouver Island coal. During the spring and summer months, for example, the level of sales to Victoria – small at the best of times – declined far enough to produce extensive unemployment in the coalfield towns. The case of Robert Jarvies, a Wellington hewer, is instructive in this matter. In February 1890 Jarvies worked 19 days; he worked the same number of days in March of the same year; in April 1890 he recorded 24 days of work; in May the number of days worked dropped to only 12.87 The average for these four months (two of winter and two of spring) is 18.5 days, from which we can extrapolate an approximate work-year of 222 days. This estimate coincides with what is known of the work-year in the Black Country in the 1870s, in British coalmines generally in the period 1850–1900, and in Slocan Valley mining camps around the turn of the century.88 The length of the workday could also affect perceptions of earnings. Throughout the second half of the century, hours of work in Vancouver Island pits were being reduced. Under the hbc the workday was set at no more than ten hours and in 1855 eight-hour shifts were recorded.89 In 1869 the Edinburgh Geological Society heard that Vancouver Island miners “rarely” worked “a full day,” so that they could maintain some control over output levels.90 The workday was shortened officially at Wellington as a consequence of the strike of 1890–91 to about eight and a half hours. As Vancouver and Victoria workers began lobbying in earnest for a ninehour day, the Nanaimo miners were initiating their campaign for a formally entrenched eight-hour day.91 By the turn of the century that target had been achieved, while in Nova Scotia colliers were still working as much as eleven hours per day.92 Shortly thereafter the Industrial Disputes Commission heard that Cumberland miners were clocking only seven and a half hours daily.93 Comparisons with British wage scales can be usefully made at this point. Challinor and Ripley have argued that in the 1840s regional wage differences from coalfield to coalfield were great. They found it “impossible to state, with accuracy, what wages and hours actually were.”94 Nevertheless, it is known that at mid-century the miners of Lanarkshire were among the best paid colliers in the British Isles, and it is equally certain that the Black Country miners, degraded by the “truck” system (payment in credits at the company store), did not fare nearly so well.95 Miners in other parts of Scotland and in South Wales improved their wage standing noticeably in the third quarter of the century, while earnings in the older industrial areas of Staffordshire de-

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clined.96 In 1869 miners at Motherwell in Lanarkshire were paid as much as 10s. a day on the strength of the demand for steel spurred by the Franco-Prussian War. This was, however, something of a zenith. Alexander MacDonald’s answer to the subsequent decline in Scottish wages in the early 1870s was to propose a minimum daily wage of 3s. 6d. (about 88¢ cents), well below the pay level of Vancouver Island’s Chinese oncost workers.97 The subcontracting, or “butty,” system of the Black Country, coupled with that region’s notorious truck system meant that colliers in villages like Brierley Hill received much lower wages than their former neighbours and relations in Nanaimo.98 In South Wales, where money wages almost doubled between 1869 and 1873, hewers’ earnings peaked at an average weekly rate of 48s. 9d. and tonnage rates of 4s. 10d. in the Rhondda.99 J.W.F. Rowe estimated that the average wages of putters across Britain in 1888 were about 3s. 7d. per day; in the same year Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire colliers, whose wages ranged between 3s. 5d. and 5s. 4d., were the highest paid in Britain.100 These last figures represent about 75 percent of the wages earned contemporaneously by Vancouver Island hewers working on piece rates.101 During most of this period, then, Vancouver Island miners received considerably more money each month than their opposites in British coalfields. Even the California gold fields, with the widespread introduction of hydraulic technology after about 1856, offered wages of only around $3 per day.102 In the 1860s Vancouver Island miners were said to receive four times the wage paid to Pennsylvanian colliers.103 In 1870 wages in Ontario and New Brunswick for bricklayers and masons were relatively high for working-class earnings but still below the average paid to hewers at Nanaimo.104 A British parliamentary report claimed in 1892 that miners’ nominal wages on Vancouver Island were as high as or higher than anywhere else in the British Empire.105 So, whether measured against colliers in Auld or Nova Scotia, South Wales or New South Wales, or against gold miners south of the border, the Vancouver Island miners’ wages appear to have been superior, at least in money terms, throughout all but the very earliest years of the period under study. But was this nominal advantage a real advantage?

the cost of living The real wage of Vancouver Island colliers and their families was probably never calculated in the nineteenth century. Money wages, losses through fines, and gains through perquisites and bonuses were at issue in industrial disputes, but little concern was given (publicly at least) to changes in the cost of essential items. Workers everywhere were “used

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Table 13 Food Prices in British Columbia for Selected Years (in cents) Item

1853

Beef

1865

1870

1872

1887

1888

1891

12–13

18

20

18

–

8–15

Wheat

–

4

3

–

–

–

12.5–15 –

Sugar

–

16

14

–

20

8–10

9

Coffee

–

44

38

–

50

–

25

Tea

–

60

75

–

190

37–125

50

Beer

–

130–95

50

–

–

–

40

Butter

–

–

50

63

75

30–50

35–40

Sources: pro, co305(6), Letter from George P. Martin to Commodore Frederick, 16 October 1854; M. Macfie, Vancouver Island, 500–1; csp, 1872, Report of Langevin, 134–5; bca, Manson’s Store (Ledgers), Add Mss 806, vol. 2; Scottish Records Office, Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland: Emigration Files, af 51/90, Emigration Circular and Poster, October 1888; British Columbia, British Columbia as a Field for Emigration, 53. Note: All goods measured in pounds, except for wheat (bushels) and beer (gallons).

to evaluating their welfare according to the amount of money, of coins, they kept in hand, more than by the quantity of goods they could buy.”106 The quality of information about prices on Vancouver Island in this period varies, but average prices for goods sold in the coalfield and all over the province can be obtained. Provincial figures were almost certainly weighted towards the situation in nearby Victoria and (later) Vancouver, where price lists could be more easily and accurately compiled. These figures have nonetheless proven useful. The price of a small selection of goods for several sample years appears in table 13. The price of beef in 1853 is also available and has been included. Vancouver Islanders probably witnessed a general decline in food prices from 1865. Sugar provides a good example, almost halving in price from 1865 to 1891. A similar observation could be made of coffee prices, which fell somewhat less precipitously. A group of foodstuffs – a “basket” containing a pound each of beef, sugar, coffee, and tea and one gallon of beer – cost approximately $2.90 in 1865, $2 in 1870 and $1.38 in 1891. On the face of it, the cost of living on the island was coming down while wages were, on the whole, stable. On the coalfield proper, however, there was a lack of homogeneity in prices, which derived largely from differences in the retailing arrangements of each mining town.107 These conditions tended to affect real wages in a negative way. Before 1864 the hbc was able to profit not only from the trade in furs and fuels but also from food sales, first by paying its employees

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partly in rations then by providing a company store or “truck shop.”108 One Englishman who arrived on Vancouver Island in 1852 complained soon afterwards that “two dollars in that Store of the Companys’ at the Fort don’t go half as far as two shillings at home.” Around this time it was also observed that the quantity and quality of food available to miners in the colony was frequently poor. (It was claimed, by way of an explanation, that there were too many native men employed in the coal trade and too few left to the important business of fishing and hunting.)109 The sale of the Nanaimo mines to the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company weakened the truck system. Having lost their trading monopoly and ownership of the coalmines, the hbc store closed down and was sold off within three years of the takeover.110 The vcmlc was uninterested in establishing a new truck shop, and Nanaimo miners soon benefitted from competition between a number of small independent retailers. As for the Dunsmuirs, they could not completely exclude independent shopkeepers from opening businesses in and around Wellington, Extension, and Union. Nevertheless, Robert Dunsmuir, his wife Joan, and their son James retained sufficient control over their towns to be able to put even independent shops to effective use during strikes.111 The 1880s and 1890s saw an extension of Vancouver Island’s agricultural sector, which helped stabilize food prices.112 Wheat and flour were still imported from Oregon and California, but dairy, poultry, orchard, and garden vegetable enterprises did very well around Saanich and in the coalfield area. Nonetheless, the difficulties experienced by mine operators in attracting and retaining skilled labour were periodically shared by farm owners. Wages for local farmworkers were said to be twice the level paid on eastern Canadian farms.113 On the other hand, the wildfowl and fish stocks of Vancouver Island ensured that at least one source of food during this period would remain relatively indifferent to labour costs.114 Likewise, the abundance of wild fruits and berries could help keep household food costs low, at least in the warmer summer months.115 These resources were of particular importance during strikes. One mine labourer recalled that during a dispute in 1870–71 that “Young men … could go fishing, or clam digging” to bide their time and “thus eke out a living.”116 These alternatives were especially welcome, given that in 1888 the overall cost of store-bought food in British Columbia was higher than anywhere else in Canada. Progress in the local dairy industry notwithstanding, a pound of butter sold for almost twice as much on the Pacific coast as it did east of the Rockies.117 Objections continued to be made, as in 1900, when the Nanaimo colliers’ union reported that an improvement

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Table 14 Beef Prices in British Columbia and the Black Country, for Selected Years (in cents per pound)

British Columbia South Staffordshire

1853

1865

1870

1888

1891

13 10

18 12

20 14

8–15 11

12–15 10

in the industry’s fortunes and in wages had been matched and negated by an increase in the cost of living.118 How do these costs compare with the situation in contemporary British coalfields? George Barnsby’s detailed study of the cost of living in the Black Country indicates that prices there were consistently lower than on Vancouver Island in the second half of the nineteenth century. South Staffordshire beef prices, for example, fluctuated between 4d. per pound in 1850 and a peak of slightly more than 7d. in 1882–83, whereas prices on Vancouver Island climbed as high as 8d. per pound and never dipped below 4½d. Barnsby also found that the cost of basic commodities in the Black Country was rising from 1850 until the mid-1880s, when the index reversed and slipped back to the mid-century mark.119 Colonial costs therefore were staying above those in an inflationary English market. The prices for beef in these two coalfields for 1853, 1865, 1870, 1888, and 1891 are reproduced in table 14. In some years (1865 and possibly 1891) the difference in prices was as great as 50 percent. New settlers from the Black Country at almost any time in the period under study would have been struck by price differentials of this magnitude. Housing expenses are another important factor in estimating the cost of living. What accommodation existed from 1849 to 1863 was provided to the miners at the employer’s expense, although at Nanaimo sometimes only the lumber and nails were supplied.120 After the vcmlc arrived, the old company housing was sold off, but new construction remained inadequate. The vcmlc’s 600-square-foot, threeroom woodframe houses were being let to miners by the vcmlc at £4 to £5 per month during the 1860s. By British Columbian standards these were very low rents.121 Subsequently, the vcmlc operated a system of five-acre lot properties on which employees took a twenty-oneyear lease with an option to purchase outright after ten years. Costs for the five-acre lots were calculated to be $2.50 per annum in rental for the first five years and $12.50 per annum over the following six years, with a purchase price of $125 to $250 per acre thereafter.122 The lots were designed as crofts (small producing farms) and management believed that, even after eight to ten hours of work underground, the min-

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ers would still have sufficient energy to put in an average of two hours per day on their small holdings.123 These properties were part of the vcmlc’s “wise and humane” strategy for attracting and retaining miners, one that deftly avoided the creation of a high-density, closely packed radical hothouse environment in the town core.124 By any British standard it was exceptional that for an average rental of $7.50 per year for the first ten years a Nanaimo miner could provide himself and his family with shelter, a piece of property that was very large by Old Country colliery-town standards, and a considerable chunk of equity.125 In the 1880s and 1890s other rented accommodation – both company-owned and independently owned – was being let out at the much higher rate of about $5 per month, rising to $7 per month for better locations and facilities.126 Although the vcmlc played an important role in housing its miners, the company was almost as uninterested in profiting from the sale or rental of homes (or using accomodations as a strike tool) as it had been about continuing the hbc’s truck system. The contrast between Nanaimo and the Dunsmuir towns was marked. While Nanaimo’s outward appearance improved, descriptions of the Dunsmuirs’ villages were consistently grim.127 Both Robert and James Dunsmuir pursued policies of controlled housing for their workers, primarily so that they could turn accommodations into an instrument for breaking strikes. For example, in the dispute of 1877 Robert Dunsmuir (with the assistance of the navy) evicted striking employees from the large number of company houses at Wellington.128 Twenty years later, James added a new twist to his father’s use of tied accommodations as a disciplinary tool. Several hundred of the Wellington miners and their families had begun building their homes at a new townsite about two miles from the Extension pithead. Expressing fears over the contagion of labour militance at nearby Nanaimo, Dunsmuir ordered the relocation of his employees to the more completely organized company town of Ladysmith. In the new village, the few colliers who were not living in tied housing were probably tenants on Dunsmuir property. With few exceptions, land at Ladysmith could be obtained only from Dunsmuir’s Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway Company at $1 per foot for a 100-foot lot or about $500 for a small house on a 100-foot lot. Dismantling and relocating houses from Extension to the new village took as long as two months in some instances. The cost of doing so, borne entirely by the miner’s household, could prove ruinous. The two hundred families involved stood to lose between $150 and $300 each, and in the end many did find themselves financially degraded by the transfer. Joseph Fontana, for example, had built his family a house at Extension and was unable to meet the costs

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of physically transferring the building the twelve miles to Ladysmith. Instead, he rented a room in the new company town and commuted back to Extension in order to keep both his job and his home.129 Whether they were being disingenuous or not, both Robert and James Dunsmuir insisted that they had the best interests of their colliers at heart. They explained their aversion to freehold miners’ housing with the argument that when pits were eventually worked out and the mining towns folded, the landowning colliers would be unable to sell their property. Stung by press criticism during the Wellington strike of 1891 James attempted to prove his point by putting up for sale to the miners what he called “so many lots.” By 1903 he felt his father’s original tied-housing policy had been vindicated: “Now as soon as the mines work out they lose everything.”130 As at Wellington and Extension, so too at Union/Cumberland, where orderly rows of identical company cottages provided ample testimony to the active role played by the Dunsmuirs in housing their white miners. The Chinese and Japanese at Cumberland, in contrast, could purchase only land, not houses, and they were expected to perform their own construction. Similar conditions prevailed for the Chinese at Nanaimo.131 The resultant conglomerations of shanties were a distinctive feature of Vancouver Island’s industrial and social landscape well into the twentieth century. To summarize the housing situation for colonial coalminers, they were either living rent-free in tied housing, putting aside an average of about $3 weekly toward the eventual purchase of semirural land from the vcmlc or renting at between $5 and $7 per week. Any comparison between the more senior hewers who bought five-acre farmsteads and those who rented (either in Britain or on Vancouver Island) reveals that the former were paying out a far lower proportion of their earnings on accommodations.132 This cost factor mitigated food price rises and was a key feature in what might be generously described as the vcmlc’s social policy or town plan. The hardships suffered by the Dunsmuir’s employees in tied accommodation underlines the variability of living standards among Vancouver Island settlers. Along with the basic costs of food and shelter were expenses associated directly with mining. Wages were cut by penalties assessed against mineworkers (typically by the checkweighman on account of having too much slack in the tubs).133 Miners also had to bear the cost of lamps, explosive powder, and boots and very often tools as well, including the expensive “patent ratchet drills – for the sum of 4 cents 25 mills for each 100 lbs. of coal.”134 Insurance against industrial accidents was another bill to be paid monthly. One of Nanaimo’s most important insurance programs was provided by the Ancient Order of Foresters. Premiums in the late 1880s ran from $10 for 20-year-old

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subscribers to a maximum of $45 for 40-year-olds. But these expenses were all too frequently justified by events. When a member of the local lodge suffered burns from an explosion in one of the collieries in 1885, the aof agreed to pick up his nursing bill: twenty-one days of attention and support cost the order $52.50, the equivalent of at least half a month’s wages. A single fatality two years later cost the aof $1,000 in benefits paid to a miner’s widow.135 Offsetting some of these costs were the small privileges enjoyed by colliers. Although there is nothing to suggest that outside of Christmas and New Year’s the colliers ever received free pints of ale (a common payment in kind in the Black Country), the white miners were entitled to the common perquisite of about one ton of free coal per month.136 Free housing, as indicated above, became increasingly rare at Nanaimo as the century progressed, although the Dunsmuirs did provide this “service” for many of their miners. Whatever bonuses of this kind were available, their continuance was jealously guarded by the miners. It is clear that miners’ cash incomes were only part of the equation. For those living with their families there were other considerations.

t h e h o u s e h o l d wag e It has already been noted that the ability of British miners to take their sons into pitwork constituted one of the chief advantages of employment underground and an important source of additional household income.137 It was, indeed, assumed by the hbc miners in the 1850s that the immigrant Scottish colliers’ wages were based on father-son teamwork.138 This did not last. Increasingly, demographic factors intruded on these older workplace connexions. White youths were in competition with low-wage Chinese labourers for places in the mines throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century and were virtually eliminated from underground work from 1870 to 1877 and 1882 to 1888. Boys were not always hired on subcontracts but were sometimes paid directly by the company, a system that tended to work to the disadvantage of the household incomes of white miners. The role of women in bolstering the household economy must also be factored in.139 Positions in the mines were closed to women from the outset, although native women did work in and around the pithead through much of the nineteenth century. A more fulsome role for women generally in the mining industry was unlikely in an age when legislation in Britain was drawing the last female miners out of pits in Lancashire. Legislation to formalize the same arrangement on Vancouver Island was introduced in 1877, following on the British example, and was, therefore, effectively “an automatic reflex of culture and tradition.”140

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Women nonetheless contributed to their family’s income by producing a share of their household’s “basic consumption needs” and freeing up male labour for wage work or commodity production.141 As one British historian explains, “Working-class males needed a large input from wives in order to maintain a respectable position. Even if a wife did not undertake paid labour, the amount of domestic labour she did and the quality of her child rearing methods were crucial – a man could hardly maintain the status of a labour aristocrat if his wife pawned the household goods, neglected the children or abused the neighbours.”142 On Vancouver Island women certainly endeavoured to cut food costs by raising small numbers of pigs, chickens, and cows, particularly on the five-acre lots.143 Women also played a key role in the diversification of household income sources. The initiative of a miner’s wife in her thirties could be the family’s only guarantee of security when the husband’s working days came to an end. Like Zola’s publican, Rasseneur, many a Vancouver Island collier was indebted to the industrious spouse who kept a bar.144 There were other successful strategies. Amanda (Gough) Norris, one of the charter English immigrants to Nanaimo, worked in the print shop owned by her husband until their sons were old enough to take her place.145 Seamstressing, taking in laundry and boarders, shopkeeping, and the managerial tasks on family farms were other avenues that women pursued, particularly miners’ widows with families to support. While this undoubtedly meant also that the greater share of household and parenting responsibilities fell to women – though workingclass men in Britain and British Columbia “were never excluded entirely from ideologies of domesticity” – it also translated into considerable female responsibility for finances and other planning, which one author describes as especially desirable in a sector where wives sought to preserve their husbands from concerns that might fatally distract them while working in dangerous conditions underground.146 Coalfield women’s ability to exploit the service sector (which is explored further in chapter 7) was limited by social and demographic factors. “The underlying social ideology of the Victorian era” had some influence in restricting women’s contribution to the household economy: according to the Western Federation of Miners in 1903, man was “the noblest work of God,” but woman (less divine than royal) was “the queen of the home.”147 While labour shortages were current in the coalfield and while opportunities existed in the service and farming sectors particularly, women were able to exercise some social and economic leverage. Female participation rates in the public economy were, in some measure, comparable with what was recorded in British mining towns. In Larkhall and Coatbridge, for example, the number of miners’ wives who had their own jobs accounted for 10.3 percent and

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0.34 percent of the adult female total, respectively, in 1861. Twenty years later around Nanaimo the employment figure for miners’ wives fell in between, at 3.4 percent.148 But white women on Vancouver Island faced unusual competition in occupations that in Europe were considered female preserves. At Nanaimo in 1885, for example, there were 168 Chinese, of whom 6 were merchants, 18 cooks and servants, 6 storekeepers, 4 barbers, 13 farm labourers, and 8 “washermen.”149 Were it not for the Chinese, probably more of the cooking, domestic service, and laundry jobs would have been seized upon by white women or girls.150 This was the feeling of the Knights of Labor on the coalfield: “Our girls … cannot find remunerative employment, from the fact that the Chinese are largely employed as domestics.”151 The shortage of reliable and detailed information on the economic activities of coalfield women in both Britain and British Columbia makes it difficult to proceed beyond the most cursory observations, but it is clear that there was”an absolute shortage within the economic structure of paid work available to women” and that there were only narrow opportunities for entrepreneurial endeavours on the island.152 Perhaps even the mining companies recognized this situation, given the fact that in the 1870s married men (or single men with dependents) were the first hired back after strikes.153 In short, colonial mining families remained heavily dependent on male earnings. Sometimes these were just not enough. An instructive comparison might be made with a budget drawn up by John Burnett for a Northumberland miner and his family for 1875. The figures for Vancouver Island whites are approximations based on daily earnings calculated over a 222-day work-year and adjusted to an 11-day working fortnight. As can be seen in table 15, the adult Vancouver Island miner earned a great deal more than his Geordie counterpart in 1875. Some Nanaimo miners boasted around this time that they were even able to save money – and considerable sums at that. One Scotsman wrote to kin in Stromness in 1872 that he had squirrelled away £200 and was planning to visit his homeland shortly.154 The earnings of secondary or auxiliary breadwinners in Vancouver Island and Northumberland mines, however, were a compromising feature. Unable to find work for sons under fourteen years of age in the local mines, the Nanaimo family could nevertheless earn, in nominal terms, about 134 percent more than the Northumberland family. However, colonial miners’ families sometimes could not secure work of any kind underground for older teenage boys either. In such cases the Vancouver Island miner with either completely dependent or lower-paid teenage sons would have to budget with a household income that was much closer to that of the Northumberland family.

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Table 15 Approximate Household Budgets, Northumberland (1875) and Nanaimo (1870s), in dollars Fortnightly Earnings

Father

Northumberland

Nanaimo

11.00

33.00

Son, putter (17–18)

9.16

16.50

Son, labourer (14–16)

3.41

11.00

Son, labourer (10–14) Total Income

2.29

0.00

25.86

60.50

Fortnightly Food Expenditures (sample) Northumberland

Nanaimo

Flour (5 stone)

3.25

3.50

Butter (2 lb.)

0.66

1.00

Mutton (14 lbs.)

2.30

3.00

Milk (14 quarts)

0.84

1.25

Bacon (14 lbs.)

2.34

3.40

Coffee (1.25 lb.)

0.75

0.48

Tea (0.25 lb.) Food Budget Rent Balance

0.38

0.20

10.32

12.83

0.00

2.50

15.34

45.17

Sources: Burnett, Plenty and Want, 191–2; bcsp, passim; Public Archives of Canada, Canada Census 1880–81, nominal returns; csp, 1872, Report of Langevin, 134–5; Nanaimo Free Press, 28 April 1877. Note: For Nanaimo, incomes have been calculated for 1877 and expenditures for 1870. The cost of blasting powder and lamp oil has been deducted.

Reduced household income could be tolerable for the well-paid adult miner if nominal wages were enhanced by low costs. Also in table 15 a comparison of food prices and rents for the Northumberland family and a similar Nanaimo family indicates that although a basket of selected goods cost more in the colony, the gap was not as pronounced as the wage differential. It should be noted that some food prices were subject to violent fluctuations over time on Vancouver Island, especially imported items like raisins, nuts, and some meats. Against this must be placed the knowledge that a miner or another member of his household might augment the family’s protein consumption through

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hunting and fishing around Nanaimo to an extent unavailable to colliers in most parts of Britain. Nonetheless, if work was not available for teenage sons or the miner’s wife (and no more than a half-dozen girls are recorded as having “occupations” in Nanaimo or Wellington in 1880–81), then the adult white miner’s total family income proved to be not much greater than that of his Northumberland counterpart. The Vancouver Island miner’s income under these circumstances would cover the cost of his basket of goods, with only $1.79 more left over than his contemporary from the Northeast.155 When the expense of insuring the life of the hewer is added the differential is reduced further. Benefit societies on Vancouver Island charged $2 to $4 per month for premiums in the 1890s, while British miners might pay as little as 20¢ monthly towards accident policies.156 The important feature here must be underlined: although nominal wage rates for white miners were in some cases as much as treble what was earned in British coalfields, the difficulty of finding employment for more than one breadwinner per household in certain years and the slightly higher cost of living reduced and could even eliminate this advantage.

th e q ua li t y o f l i fe If real wages alone were sufficient criteria by which to judge the coalfield, then one would have to conclude that Vancouver Island was at best a marginally better place to be than, say, the colliery towns of Derbyshire. It would be a mistake, however, to ignore the various measures of material satisfaction or psychic income that would have had an influence on the miners’ assessment of living standards on Vancouver Island. The calibre of essential goods offers one point of departure. In Britain in the nineteenth century, food was increasingly packed and processed to supply massive urban industrial populations, often with consequent deteriorations in quality.157 “Food adulteration,” claims an historian of diet, “is essentially a phenomenon of urban life”; it follows that in the absence of a large regional urban centre with food processing/ adulterating enterprises and with fresh foods available most of the year, the quality of the islanders’ diet probably did not suffer any parallel decline.158 The Cedar River valley to the south was an early and reliable source of market vegetables and dairy products, while mutton and lamb came to the mining towns from farms closer to Victoria. Grains were obtained either from Puget Sound, Oregon, or northern California. Produce and a small amount of livestock (in particular poultry, swine, and goats) could even be accommodated on the miners’ fiveacre lots in Nanaimo: one newspaper report commented on how, attached to each of the small miners’ cottages “with their neat gardens in

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the rear,” one could find “cow-houses and piggeries, etc., and nearly every man can boast of having his cow.”159 In addition, as stated, wild food resources could be tapped. The foothills and forests flanking the colliery towns supported an important supply of fresh fruit (most notably berries) and meat for the miners’ families. Although the Fort Rupert miners may have grumbled that wild game was intolerable without lashings of “beer, spirits and new wine” to wash it down, the abundance of deer, bears, rabbits, and wildfowl meant that hunting and trapping could provide welcome variations.160 Fishing, too, particularly for salmon, was a source of both food and relaxation for settlers all along Georgia Strait.161 Nanaimo residents also took advantage of the wide variety of shellfish and crayfish that could be gathered nearby, as well as the annual harvest of oolichans brought south from the Nass River, generally during the week of the Queen’s birthday celebrations.162 A menu for Sunday, 1896 from Nanaimo’s Central Hotel (a haunt of local colliers) illustrates how regional foods were utilized: Soup: St Julian Choice of: Stuffed Salmon Baked Ham with Champagne Sauce Lobster Salad and Celery Entrée Oyster Patties Chicken Giblet Pie Breaded Pork Chops Spanish Style With Choice of Vegetables: Boiled or Sweet Potatoes Stewed Tomatoes Green Peas Sirloin of Beef with Yorkshire Pudding Venison with Cranberry Sauce Roast Chicken with Dressing Dessert: English Plum Pudding, Green Apple Pie, or Lemon Pie

Along with coffee, tea, or milk this meal cost only 25¢, roughly the equivalent of one hour’s work in a local pit.163 Day-to-day fare at home was no doubt more quotidian, but even so, in many instances

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the colonial diet meant a considerable departure from pre-emigration norms. Settlers seem to have accepted the changes. One British sailor who jumped ship in Burrard Inlet in the 1870s wrote to his family that he no longer turned his nose up at foods held in low regard back home; “in fact I take kindly to a good many things which were not dainty enough some 20 years ago.”164 At Nanaimo itself a family of shipowners who had settled there initially as miners recalled that in their native Shetlands meat once a week was considered a luxury, whereas in the colony meat twice a day was not uncommon in the 1870s and 1880s.165 By all appearances the diets of Vancouver Island miners contained larger proportions of protein-rich lean meats and seafoods, fewer fatty or starchy foods, and more variety throughout the year than did those of their British counterparts.166 As regards housing, the diversity of British miners’ dwellings and their costs makes a comparison of satisfaction levels difficult. Although the vast majority of colliers in England, Scotland, and Wales did not reside in company housing, it was the form of accommodation familiar to as much as one-third of the mines’ workforce in the last half of the century.167 In South Staffordshire and Scotland miners were sometimes able to buy houses, although it is impossible to say how broadly this practice extended or how early in the nineteenth century it first occurred. The sentiments of British mine operators on the subject of home ownership among their workforce are unknown, although it is true that in the 1870s Alexander Macdonald’s Scottish miners’ union encouraged colliers to acquire their own homes, and one suspects that this ran counter to management’s preferences. It was widely believed that the areas with the worst housing standards overall were to be found in Scotland, where in 1844 the Commissioner of Mines described what he found as “rather a hovel than a cottage, having nothing but a ground floor.”168 Sanitation may have improved in many parts of working-class Britain by the 1870s, but in colliery towns it was still common to find high levels of over-crowding and poor water supplies.169 One study of accommodations in Britain during the last century claimed that miners’ household furnishings were “usually sparse” and that the “line between such houses and those of the poor was a thin one.”170 On Vancouver Island accommodations for miners were seldom ideal, particularly under the hbc regime. One feature of tensions at Fort Rupert had been the low standard of shelter provided for the Lanarkshire miners and their families; in 1854 it was still the case that the colony badly needed a carpenter and an efficient sawmill for producing building materials.171 In 1860 the hbc began selling lots to its miners, and two years later it was reported that the eighty-four

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dwellings of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Nanaimo gave the place “an air of substantial comfort” with their whitewashed squared timbers. Around the same time, however, the Daily Colonist observed that the growing number of cabins in Nanaimo were so loosely built “that the wind would whistle through the logs with a shriek of triumph, their chimnies bulged and tottered and here and there a cask [was] fitted on the top as a substitute for a chimney pipe.”172 Unsatisfactory housing contributed to a strike in 1865, and in 1866 the Nanaimo Gazette described the village as “still in its primitive state.” Housing was said to be “poor” and “uncomfortable,” while the interiors were “dark dingy cribs … with furniture and utensils so few and so rude as barely sufficient to minister to the animal wants.”173 It is likely that housing quality on Vancouver Island varied with fluctuations in the coal trade. Given the swingeing criticisms levelled by the white miners regarding the inadequacies of Chinese labourers’ living conditions, one could speculate that housing for the whites was improving in the last quarter of the century. There are, indeed, signs that the British miners were by this stage becoming manifestly houseproud and that Nanaimo had grown into a relatively tolerable village, a pleasant enough place in which to live. Health conditions in the mining communities, however, tell a different tale of living standards. Working in coal carried its own risks, but there was more to death than underground disasters. The inhalation of coaldust and the constant and penetrating saturation of clothing and flesh by the wet subterranean environment inevitably wore down miners’ bodies (see chapter 8, below). Throughout the second half of the century other complaints were registered also regarding sanitary conditions in the towns and the purity of the water supply. In the 1860s, apparently, waste was being dumped directly into the streets of Nanaimo; forty years later, fears that lakes in the foothills east of the mining towns were breeding grounds for typhoid were reawakened.174 This was hardly a pristine frontier. Local threats to public health, of course, extended well beyond the mining population. Infant mortality rates, for example, remained acute to at least 1900, a sign of both the continuing hardships faced by the aboriginal communities and the shortcomings of the mining villages. Genealogies of the coalfield pioneers point to a pattern of heavy losses: although the earliest arrivals from Britain had upwards of a dozen live births per household, typically no fewer than a third appear to have died before reaching adulthood.175 Infant deaths in Britain ran at 153 per thousand live births in the 1870s, slightly more than the 129 recorded for the Nanaimo area in the same decade. In the 1880s, how-

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ever, the Vancouver Island infant mortality rate rose to 250 per thousand live births and to 229 in the 1890s. There was no comparable rise in the British figures.176 Nor were the American Pacific states witness to such a death toll.177 What could have caused the Nanaimo-area infant mortality rate to become so horrifically high? In British mining communities, as everywhere, the averages often disguise exceptional local mortality rates. John Benson has noted that in some colliery towns as many as one in four infants died before their fifth birthday. Contemporary observers usually attributed these losses to “‘uncleanly habits,’ improper feeding and a general disregard to the elementary laws of health of the mothers,” but Benson concludes that, instead, “closely packed insanitary colliery terraces” provided an ideal environment for the spread of zymotic diseases.178 On Vancouver Island overcrowding was certainly a growing concern in the last fourteen years of the century, when the population expanded more rapidly than the housing stock. The preponderance of infant deaths from measles, meningitis, whooping cough, influenza, and pneumonia provides further evidence that increasing population densities contributed to rising mortality. The effects of diarrhoea and enteritis – perhaps related to problems repeatedly identified with the water supply – were also extremely telling on the cohort under one year of age.179 Insofar as infant mortality rates can be used as a barometer of nutrition, environmental conditions, and the general standard of living, the evidence here points to a real decay in the experiences of miners and their families.180 From the 1880s the rising mortality rate for children – parallelled by a high rate of death among women during childbirth – points to conditions that could not be compensated for by fat pay packets.181 The living continued to do well, but many failed to go on living.

conclusion British miners were attracted to Vancouver Island by the promise of high wages. In large part this promise was kept. Nominal wage rates were as much as three times as great as those awarded to miners in British coalfields. The work-year was comparable, and the prices of necessities were comparable. But white household incomes in the colony fluctuated with the use of Chinese miners underground and the consequent reduction in jobs for white teenagers. In the 1870s, for example, one of Nanaimo’s British mining households with two employable boys could have earned as little as $15 per week or as much as $30 per week. Female members of miners’ households could not, evidently, always offset these fluctuations. Nonetheless, British miners on

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Vancouver Island would have had more cash in hand than their cousins back home, and they would have enjoyed an improved diet and less expensive housing of at least comparable quality. Work and wages had brought these archetypal proletarians from Britain to Vancouver Island; the reality they discovered provoked various responses that included putting up a fight or moving on.

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6 Conflicts in the Colonial Setting

Studies of class conflict in any setting involve cataloguing and describing working-class organizations, the tenor of industrial conflict, and the rise of left-wing political movements. But in British Columbia they also include the overarching theme of imperial identities in a colonial context. Being white (and a British subject) in nineteenth-century British Columbia acquired a particular meaning in the context of racial confrontations between Aboriginals, Europeans, and Asians. The Asian presence in British Columbia in the late-nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth century is, in fact, the sine qua non of the province’s historiography. Nowhere else in the Dominion, or even in California, are Asians such a significant historical force. Taking a broader view of Imperial history, this was the only jurisdiction in which the ethos of settlement colonialism combined with an industrial capitalism that required such large numbers of Chinese workers, and certainly nowhere else did Asians live and work in such close proximity to whites and in comparable numbers and in the face of so much tension. Even more than the Irish Catholics of Glasgow, Merseyside, and London, the Chinese and aboriginal peoples of Vancouver Island were not regarded as part of “the people.” In fact, as in many colonies, definitions of belonging to the Vancouver Island white community depended on the simultaneous exclusion of these other two “races.” But in what other British colonies were British settlers working cheek by jowl with the indigenous population in mines or with imported Asian manual labour? Race was, very clearly, pivotal in shaping social attitudes and in directing social conflict along certain channels. Was it moreso than class?

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British Columbian historians and sociologists have for many years wrestled with the relative merits of a view of the province’s past that privileges racial conflict as opposed to class conflict.1 It has been argued that anti-Asian sentiments produced “the major cleavages in British Columbia’s social structure, at least until World War II.”2 The corollary of this hypothesis is that class division and conflict – whether manifest in culture or in industrial disputes – was of less importance. Certainly the tensions that did exist between races were nowhere more apparent than in the mining communities where the Chinese were concentrated in large numbers, but it does not necessarily follow that conventional, class-based labour-management strife was therefore eclipsed. No doubt class struggle existed side-by-side with racial prejudice; the two are not mutually exclusive. It was, as Rennie Warburton suggests, the “intersectionality” of race and class (along with gender) that gave social conflict in Victorian British Columbia its particular flavour.3 In this chapter the growth of working-class organizations among British miners is examined from the perspective of the colonial immigrant experience. It was overwhelmingly as immigrants that the British population understood their situation, but it was as British Columbians that they devised their response to problems that were very often distinctly British Columbian. For the British miners on Vancouver Island these challenges were bound up principally with industrial disharmony and racial tension. These elements were, however, only a part of the discourse on class-based identities in the coalfield. The recruitment of workers drawn from what was probably the most class-conscious element of the British labouring population has suggested to historians that class was ready made and imported intact to the West Coast. The emphasis in the literature has been on unequal shares of power within both the economy and the political sphere and on how miners came to respond to that problem as a collectivity, principally through the mechanisms of organization and industrial action.4 But what sort of working-class experiences occurred on the coalfield? Were they likely to promote or sustain or undermine class as a conceptual vision of society that was embraced by the mining communities?

racialized experiences If there was one area where the interests of workers and employers or the state were not synonymous, it was over the issue of Asian labour. With few exceptions, non-Asian miners resented the introduction of Asian labour into their communities. They did so for various reasons, including cultural, economic, and workplace safety concerns. Employers, for their part, tended to support Asian immigration to British

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Columbia, because it provided them with a cheap labour pool. The political elite of the province, embodied in the provincial legislature in Victoria, was divided by its loyalty to both industrial employers and white merchants. Many in the latter group found Chinese competition in commerce offensive. As well, the political elite – engaged as they were in the project of forming a colonial community – had misgivings about introducing large numbers of nonwhites whose culture they regarded as alien and incompatible with their own. The Vancouver Island coalfield was groundzero in this conflict, and the British miners were pre-eminent players in terms of articulating the nuanced complexities of race and class divisions in the province. This process began with the arrival of the first British colliers and their families at Fort Rupert in 1848. Well before the arrival of the first Chinese mineworkers on Vancouver Island the native population was a source of unskilled labour. From 1836 until 1849, the hbc made use of Kwakiutl labour, and the company believed that “The natives being so numerous and labour so cheap, for us to attempt to work the coal [with imported British workers] would have been madness.”5 The company’s later determination to take coal out of the category of trade goods and to introduce elements of industrial wage labour was not met with equanimity.6 Competition between native and immigrant miners in the early 1850s was fierce, although the character of Kwakiutl assaults on the Scots was limited, for the most part, to petty thievery, vandalism, and an aggressive demeanor. At the lowest ebb in this relationship, a party of Kwakiutl surrounded the mouth of the small shaft dug by the Scots, vowing to “kill all below unless compensation was given them for their land rights.”7 The hbc’s trade, however, was worth too much to the Beaver Harbour villages to permit the slaughter of interloping colliers. The Scots were well aware that the Kwakiutl were capable of making their lives much worse. The Lanarkshire miners observed ongoing intertribal conflicts with stunned disbelief, leading one of the horrified colliers to record in his diary that “men that people sees with their own eyes go out and in 5 minutes return with 2 of their neighbours’ heads in their hands.”8 Certainly the reception mounted on the arrival of the Scots – more than a dozen pikes planted along the beach, each supporting a severed head – left the white colliers with few illusions about the capacities of their indigenous rivals.9 Relations between the large Kwakiutl villages at and around Fort Rupert and the handful of white colliers improved in 1849, at least temporarily. The Scots were not particularly skilled at actually finding coal, and they experienced difficulties in their attempts to sink a shaft to remunerative seams.10 The aboriginal miners, however, were still picking

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coal from outcroppings about a hundred yards from the fort gates, gathering seacoal, and loading it all onto the hbc’s ships for four shillings a ton.11 The less productive Scots could not for long be regarded as a terrible threat to the livelihood of the Kwakiutl coal harvesters. Moreover, the preindustrial and industrial workforces at Fort Rupert found common ground on the issue of provisions: the local people traded timber to the Lanarkshire miners, and when the absence of clay slowed the Scots’ shaft-building efforts, a lucrative side trade in this essential commodity was also instituted. As well, the Kwakiutl found a niche in wage labour associated with the mine, men and women alike packing the coal down to the harbour, where they hoisted it onto waiting boats. Kwakiutl women were also hired to do housework and laundry for the miners and their families.12 Hudson’s Bay Company spokesmen believed that aboriginal peoples could, with time, be fashioned into reliable mineworkers, but in this respect officials shared a prejudice with the Scots colliers: the Europeans were all convinced that natives would be best employed in an ancillary role in the mines and that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make them into hewers.13 Throughout the century this attitude proved unshakeable.14 From about 1850 members of the Sne ney mux confederacy were taking canoe loads of coal to hbc buyers in Victoria. It was this trade that attracted the hbc’s attention to what became Nanaimo. Subsequently, when the Fort Rupert operations were moved south, aboriginal people were employed as hauliers, as coaltrimmers on the wharfs, and, at Wellington, as coal cleaners underground.15 Aboriginal women in the neighbourhood were hired throughout the 1850s to carry bricks and clay to the mines.16 The size of the native workforce fluctuated quite dramatically from year to year, as often as not due to aboriginal priorities and interests outside industrial labour.17 Nevertheless, coal company needs frequently produced recruitment efforts among the Sne ney mux. In August 1864, for example, a strike among the white colliers – precipitated by the discovery of a seventy-dollar gold nugget at Sooke and an instant shortage of labour – motivated the vcmlc to hire as many First Nations workers as they could obtain, not least because they remained a very cheap source of labour. When Robert Brown’s Vancouver Island Expedition passed through the coaltown that summer, he complained that “all the Indians that can be got [are] all engaged by the Coal Company.”18 It may be that aboriginal labour in the mines was for the most part casual, providing in later years a small auxiliary source of workers (about five percent of the total mines workforce).19 In 1888, however, native men replaced Chinese men during a ban on Asian workers underground.20 Very soon thereafter, the Chinese effectively displaced all the aboriginal labourers, and in the

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mid-1890s the Department of Indian Affairs was complaining that “owing to Chinese labour, many channels heretofore open to the Indians, are now closed.”21 Like the Kwakiutl and the Sne ney mux, the Asians were engaged mainly at unskilled and semiskilled work in and around the mines. The arrival of the first Chinese on the coalfield was announced in the pages of the Victoria Daily Colonist in 1867, and unlike aboriginal miners, the Asian share of the workforce grew steadily from the 1870s. Almost immediately after their introduction Chinese mineworkers constituted nearly half the workforce of the mines, and in individual mines at the end of selected years – Harewood in 1877, Wellington in 1881 and 1887, and Union/Cumberland in 1888, 1889, and 1890 – Chinese mineworkers outnumbered whites. By the mid-1880s almost half the workforce of the island mines had come from the peasant population around Toi-san, 150 miles west of Macau.22 And roughly half of these belonged to a single farming clan.23 The Toi-sanese had little, if any, experience of mining; the Japanese who arrived in the coalfield in the 1890s were no different in this respect.24 The main attraction of Asian labour was that it could be obtained for considerably less than aboriginal labour and at as little as a third of the price of white labour. Low wages were acceptable to the Chinese because (it was believed by many whites) they could exist at “a bare subsistence level.” As well, the Chinese were said to be easier to discipline than white or native labourers (the vcmlc manager, Samuel Robins, even considered the Chinese “a little too servile”), and their unofficial holidays were fewer than those taken by the British.25 In addition, Chinese workers could be employed in potentially more profitable longwall operations, making Asian labour very appealing to Vancouver Island mineowners. It was not always clear, however, that the Chinese could realistically compete with the Euro-Canadians. The manager at Nanaimo sent a crew of Chinese to sink a bore following a fault line, but, as his diary revealed, he had little confidence in their abilities: “Chinamen are, as a rule, but little skilled in sinking through ground of this kind, and I am afraid that the present lot is no exception to the rule, so that I will not be surprised if they allow the hole to close with them.”26 Typically, the Chinese were relegated to the kind of manual mine labour that was “looked upon as humiliating by the white population.”27 Just the same, many white miners viewed Asian labour as a real threat to their jobs, and they were vocally opposed to the emergence of a split labour market in and around the mines. Despite a promising start – 13 Chinese mineworkers joined 580 white miners in a strike at Nanaimo in 1867 – the belief that Asians were unlikely to support

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industrial action to raise wages or improve conditions took root among the British workers.28 The Nanaimo Free Press concurred, stating in 1883 that Robert Dunsmuir used the Chinese miners “to screw down wages and thus become a millionaire.”29 Efforts were repeatedly made to exclude Asian labour, and most often this objective was sought through provincial legislation. The exclusionists’ goal was at least temporarily achieved in the late 1880s, following explosions in Nanaimo’s No. 1 Esplanade Pit and in Wellington No. 5, which claimed a total of 230 lives, many of them Chinese. The consensus was that the Chinese were responsible for both disasters, and the Dunsmuirs and the vcmlc soon reached agreements with their white employees to cease using Chinese labourers below the surface.30 Following their exclusion the Chinese found employment at the pithead screening and sorting coal, something they had been doing in gangs since at least 1878.31 Although the number and scale of underground disasters declined sharply after 1889, this decline was probably due chiefly to material improvements in mine ventilation made during the early ’90s and the consequent reduction in accumulated gasses and explosive dust. What seemed most clearly evident to the white population, however, was that working conditions had improved while the Chinese were excluded. In the press and in the minds of many local non-Asian labour leaders the former was thought to have sprung from the latter. Despite anti-Asian sanctions, the Chinese remained a critical section of the collieries’ workforce into the twentieth century, both above and below ground.32 Robert Dunsmuir’s assurances that Asians would not be employed to dig his coal were sustained only until the Ayrshire-born magnate died in 1889. By 1895 the Chinese were performing – if not monopolizing – every aspect of mining at Wellington except for hewing and running the machinery. No provincial legislation barred the Chinese from any “position of trust in the coal mines” until 1897; even then the legislation was toothless and could be safely ignored by mineowners, much to the disgust of white colliers.33 At Nanaimo, in sharp contrast, the exclusion of Chinese from underground work was virtually absolute from 1887. Robins was no doubt exaggerating when he claimed in 1902 that “we would rather suffer ruin first” than reintroduce Chinese labour into the pits, but his record on this issue, unlike that of the Dunsmuirs, was at least consistent.34 The most significant division of labour in Vancouver Island mines was, therefore, drawn along ethnic or racial lines. Native peoples played a major role in the handling of coal on the docks and at the pithead, while Chinese labourers for years provided the muscle needed throughout the mine roadways to move coal from the face to the surface. There were several other ethnic groups represented as well. The

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Japanese were never as large a body as the Chinese, but in the late 1890s their numbers began to increase.35 Finns also found work underground between 1880 and 1900, although it is known that conditions at Nanaimo, Wellington, Extension, and Ladysmith were not to their liking. Many of the Finns eventually deserted the colliery towns to establish a utopian settlement on Malcolm Island in Georgia Strait.36 Belgians, too, appeared in concentrated numbers around 1891.37 AfroAmericans were another group employed in the mines, but their position was more akin to that of the whites than to any other group. The black colonists appear to have shared the anti-Asian prejudices of the white colliers, which, when coupled to the skills exhibited by black colliers who arrived from Pennsylvania in the 1890s, earned them a degree of respect that eluded the Chinese.38 Asian mine labour was a response to a twofold problem facing coal operators.39 Held back by a persistent labour shortage, management had to take care not to drive away skilled workers with heavy-handed discipline; conversely, no scheme for restraining production costs would succeed so long as a relatively small number of skilled white colliers controlled key positions underground. An obvious solution would be to procure additional workers, but the remoteness of Vancouver Island made tactical recruitment almost impossible. In the first twenty years of mining in the colony unskilled labourers could be obtained among the aboriginal population, and from the 1860s, small numbers of strikebreakers were brought in from San Francisco or Washington Territory.40 The few other adult white males in British Columbia were either too settled in agricultural pursuits or, as was thought to be the case among former goldminers, too independently minded for colliery employment. Although frequently useful in the short term, none of these groups could satisfy the collieries’ greater workforce requirements. Colonial capitalists, therefore, peered out of “Britain’s little window towards the Orient,” where they found an ample supply of semiskilled and unskilled workers with which to invigorate the sluggish industrial expansion.41 Asian labour, like aboriginal miners and Californian strikebreakers, had three primary attractions. First, and most simply, it addressed the persistent scarcity of labour in British Columbia. Second, because of “historically lower subsistence levels” and “the fact that the reproduction costs of Asian labour were borne in Asia rather than Canada” (as well as the prevailing system of contract labour and the “political inferiority accorded Asian immigrants”), Asian workers would accept lower pay, theoretically reducing the cost per ton of coal mined.42 This was the raison d’être for British Columbia’s split labour market. Third, the low-wage adult Asian workforce obviated the need for white

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youths underground. This, of itself, was not particularly significant to mine operators, but insofar as the displacement of white boys also diminished the hold that white miners’ families exercised on jobs in the pits, the introduction of Chinese labour was critically important.43 The deployment of Chinese varied from pit to pit according to methods of winning the coal and the disposition of the managers. In the vcmlc’s pillar-and-stall mines, where supervision was not extensive, Chinese labour could be employed only to a limited degree (and not underground at all after 1888). The Dunsmuirs operated mainly longwall mines in which the Chinese could be deployed more generally. At Wellington No. 2 Colliery in 1887, for example, an overman and two firemen were the only non-Asians in an otherwise wholly Chinese mine. James Dunsmuir had less success at his Alexandria mine, where only white miners were employed (at double the usual wage paid to Chinese). Alexandria’s general manager contended that Dunsmuir “appeared to think he could run as cheaply without [Chinese labourers] as with them; not a very good result financially. The expense was increased. It cost nearly double in track-laying, pushing, and that kind of work generally. I have failed to find a single white man that will do the work of two Chinamen at this class of work, and some Chinamen will do at that work as much as white men.”44 Working at half the wage paid to white miners, the Chinese were apparently a tremendous boon in longwall pits and soon ceased to be just a temporary expedient. Following the Wellington disaster of 1888, however, Robert Dunsmuir felt bound to remove Chinese employees from subterranean work, despite objections from his son and son-in-law. They remained convinced that the success of the family business hinged on the continued use of Oriental labour in all parts of the mines. As one of James Dunsmuir’s managers commented some years later, “The coal industry would be at a standstill, and many a one would have to go without breakfast if the Chinese were completely excluded from the mines.”45

coalfield racism Tensions existed between white and aboriginal miners, but the pre-eminent conflict was between Asians and Europeans. White miners had three main objections to the use of Chinese labour: the assumed unassimilability of the Chinese, the danger that Asians workers were thought to create underground, and the threat to white incomes represented by a large pool of cheap labour.46 Anti-Asian protest in the coalfield was comparatively restrained until about 1883. At that time the Knights of Labor took up the twin cudgels of exclusion and repatriation. The Knights complained that Asians were too prone to infectious

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diseases and moral failings for the good of the white population: the Chinese “live, generally, in wretched hovels, dark, ill-ventilated, filthy, and unwholesome, and crowded together in such numbers as must utterly preclude all ideas of comfort, morality, or even decency, while from the total absence of all sanitary arrangements, their quarters are an abomination to the eyes and nostrils and a constant source of damage to the health and life of the community … All history proves that a free, manly, intelligent and contented laboring population is the foundation and the source of the prosperity of any and every nation, and essential to the stability of free, popular institutions.”47 Chinese diets, the typically ramshackle Chinatowns in each colliery village, and concerns for the greater public health were easily invoked elements of otherness. These were themes that remained at the forefront of anti-Asian sentiment into the next century. Differential expectations of living conditions were implicit in testimony given to a Royal Commission in 1902. A white mine-union leader’s graphic description and critique of Chinese housing reveals the standards that his membership had set for themselves: “You will find seven or eight [Chinese men living together] and sometimes more, where three white men in the same space would feel they were overcrowded. In fact one white man would consider he had hardly enough space in the room to dress properly. The Chinese live in small wooden shacks, barely high enough to get into, and very ill-smelling in many cases. So many in such a small room cannot be good for health.”48 Nation-building concerns by this time (and probably earlier) extended from behavioural/cultural differences to fallacious biological/ genetic rhetoric: “I object to them because they can never become a part of the nation. We should not admit any people to our shore with whom we cannot intermarry and who will not become a part of the nation.”49 Additionally, one of James Dunsmuir’s Lancastrian miners maintained in the same year that Asian immigration retarded general population growth because “the presence of Chinese keeps out white immigrants.” He offered by way of an example the recent desertion of more than one hundred Scottish colliers who would not work with Chinese.50 Likewise, some years earlier the British secretary of the Alexandria Miners’ Protective Union had drawn attention to this perceived obstacle to settlement: “Two or three of my acquaintances came out with the intention of taking farms in the country, and as soon as they found Chinese here they went off. They did not like Chinese. They preferred to quit British Columbia because of the Chinese.”51 In short, not only were the Chinese held to be irredeemably foreign, not only could they not contribute to the emergence of a British-Canadian “race,” but their presence on the coalfield was considered deleterious to immigration from what was perceived as more suitable sources.

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The references to deficient “morality” and “decency” as well as manliness may suggest something more. It may be coded language for homosexual practices. Allusions to unmanly and immoral behaviour among the Chinese in 1885 were in keeping with the tone of Empirewide sinophobia; explicit allegations of “widespread homosexuality” among Chinese labourers erupted on the Rand a few years later, provoking the ire of nonconformist Liberals and parliamentary debate in Westminster.52 This particular aspect of anti-Chinese rhetoric on the West Coast points to the perceived tenuousness of the mining colony; in a predominantly male community that was difficult to reach, white miners looked to imperial connections and symbols to sustain their confidence, while wanting to purge their community of whatever seemed to speak of their own personal or community weaknesses.53 In any event, the Knights concluded that the Chinese were “most undesirable” and “a positively dangerous class to any country having free popular institutions.” Whether or not the Knights were motivated by homophobia matters little in the end: the white miners had enough other grievances to sustain their anti-Asian position. The second allegation that Chinese miners, unfamiliar with the techniques of European heavy industry, increased the dangers of underground work, was meant to appeal to the interests of mineowners. Regardless of other possible and plausible explanations for the disasters of 1887 and 1888, the view that Chinese labour made mining more hazardous was entrenched. Samuel Robins was one among many who felt that an inability to communicate in written and spoken English, a perceived tendency to panic, and an apparent disinterest in safety measures made the Chinese unsuitable for work underground.54 White firemen in the mines complained, moreover, that the Chinese disregarded efforts to reduce mine hazards. One argued in 1902 that “If safety lamps are furnished and kept closed there would be no danger from the lamp alone. I have locked the lamp and given it to a Chinaman and going on shortly afterwards I have found it opened. I would like to see a lamp a Chinaman could not open.”55 The Ministry of Mines had, in fact, already officially endorsed the view that the Chinese miners were “an ignorant and therefore a dangerous class of workmen,” a perspective that was shared by large numbers of white colliers on the Island. Finally, it was argued that the Chinese posed a threat to the incomes of colonial miners. The Euro-Canadian miners’ protest in this respect had two main elements. First, the Chinese were prepared to work for roughly half the wages normally paid to white miners; this drew into question the immediate job security of unskilled white oncost workers and the long-term prospects for skilled hewers, whose talents the

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Chinese might someday acquire. During industrial disputes the Chinese had been available to act as strikebreakers, and this was, of course, antagonistic to the interests of Euro-Canadian labour. Second, Asian males were very often to be found in particular areas of minework that would otherwise have been the sphere of Euro-Canadian boys. Robert Dunsmuir suggested in 1883 that he would replace his Chinese workers with white boys if the minimum working age was lowered from sixteen to fourteen years; evidently miners and mineowners alike shared the view that white boys and Chinese adults competed for the same niche in the workplace.56 For most of the period under study, however, there were not enough boys to meet the demands of the local market, the minimum working age was not lowered to permit the recruitment of more local lads, and Vancouver Island mine operators exploited large numbers of Chinese newcomers. The use of Chinese labour had serious implications for British miners’ families on the island, or at least that was the conviction of the hewers themselves. The British expatriate collier’s household wage, it was widely believed, was being reduced. As well, white miners working with Chinese oncost labour were unable to “exert at the same time familial, workplace and economic discipline over family members” underground as they had in Britain.57 Convenient patriarchal relationships had to be sacrificed to more blatantly exploitive subcontracts based on racial difference. As well, the very presence of Asian labour reduced the likelihood that miners’ sons would learn their fathers’ trade. In 1885 the Knights of Labor complained that as a result of Chinese workers in the pits, “our boys grow up to near manhood without an opportunity to earn any part of their living such as they might have were there no Chinese, and such as boys have in other parts of the world.” It was alleged by white colliers that under these circumstances “a race of practical miners, trained from their childhood to the difficulties and dangers of mining, can hardly even arise.”58 The manager of the vcmlc’s Nanaimo operations tended to agree. He noted in the same year that “where Chinese labor is easily procured white youths from fifteen years of age and upwards do not find such ready employment as elsewhere, and consequently are not so well trained in habits of industry. [T]here is growing up amongst us a class of idlers who will not conduce to the well-being of the state.”59 By 1900 white opinion had not changed noticeably. On the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway – another employer of semiskilled and young labour – a parallel situation prevailed. The firemen and brakemen were all Chinese by the end of the century, a development that reduced further the local job prospects for colliers’ sons. One mine employee from England, perhaps reflecting on the forces that carried him to Pacific Canada, believed that it was “a national weakness

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to bring about conditions which compel our youth to emigrate” and at the top of his list of expulsive factors on the island he placed the use of Chinese labour.60 Economically, then, the Chinese constituted a challenge to British miners on the island; in terms of workplace power struggles, however, their presence posed a more serious problem. In most of the Old Country coalfields, hewers had customarily been able to exercise some control over the size and character of the workforce, a capacity that they repeatedly fought to preserve. On Vancouver Island the use of Asian labour compromised that authority. Employers like the Dunsmuirs perceived in the Chinese a means of loosening the grip of colliers’ organizations on the labour supply and, implicitly, on the cost of production. For a community of miners who had travelled with their families from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific in the pursuit of an improved household wage, the Asian issue was a major complaint. The racism of Vancouver Island miners has to be placed in its context before it can be fully understood. To an extent that has not been recognized in the literature on British Columbia’s labour history, British settlers were steeped in economic racial prejudice before they even departed the Old Country. Among British colliers, in particular, racial (or at least ethnic) division was nothing new. In British coalfields in the last century, the crux of conflict was principally the relationship between Irish Catholic immigrants, on the one hand, and native Scottish or English Protestants, on the other (although the linguistic rift in Welsh mining towns counted for something as well). Like the Chinese, the Irish were recruited as strikebreakers and as a means of spurring on the local workforce.61 Living in ghettoes that cropped up in many British mining towns, Irish miners and their families were viewed as completely alien by their indigenous mainland co-workers and neighbours. Attention was drawn to physical distinctions, while religious and moral differences were presented as insurmountable.62 The extent of ethnic segregation, however, was not uniform across Britain or even within individual coalfields. Alan Campbell has described how in some Lanarkshire mining towns the Irish were segregated from the local majority in every way possible, whereas in nearby villages intermarriage between Scots and (Protestant) Irish was relatively commonplace.63 As a general rule, wherever competition for jobs was direct or where its intensity could not be reduced, immigrant Irish and native Scots were at loggerheads. These occasionally permeable “racial” barriers were erected early in the nineteenth century and reinforced repeatedly to the twentieth: the British miners who emigrated to Vancouver Island would not have been strangers to prejudice, its uses, and some of its limitations. Even anti-Asian sentiment was not unknown in Britain. In 1874 the

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Middlesbrough Miners’ Advocate sounded a warning to English miners that “The typical Chinaman will bear any amount of oppression without dreaming of retaliation; an absolute despotism at home has thus modelled his mind for the purposes of capitalists abroad; and he will work many hours a day for wretchedly small remuneration.”64 The United States produced other influences. One American historian has argued that – irony of ironies – Irish immigrants sought legislation to hold back African-American and Asian competitors. The same author maintains that Samuel Gompers’ chief motivation in forming the American Federation of Labor was “the Chinese threat.”65 An important source of Asian labour in late-nineteenth century British Columbia was the mining hinterland of California and Nevada, the origin as well of many white Americans who came to the coalmines and goldfields north of the forty-ninth parallel. The legacy of racial conflict in the United States was part of the cultural, or at least the attitudinal, baggage of these miners, and it stretched well beyond anti-Asianism.66 In the American mining districts other non-Anglo-Saxon groups like the Italians were described as “clannish,” “treacherous,” and unassimilable. Similarly, an influx of British “foreigners” into the Nova Scotian coalfields had the effect of stirring a nativist response among locally born miners and their kin.67 In fact, ethnic (or racial) division was virtually endemic to nineteenthcentury mining communities. It was a product of global capitalism’s need to replenish and expand the supply of unskilled labour in a sector where the speed of economic growth outstripped the ability of natural population increase to furnish youths in adequate numbers.68 Mining communities typically appeared in remote areas: the valleys of South Wales and Appalachia, Cape Breton and South Africa. Under these circumstances labour had to be imported, and that labour was, of course, male, leading to significantly imbalanced sex ratios. More immigrants from further afield would necessarily have to be sought out because of the inability of local populations to grow on their own. This was as true in Ayrshire and Illinois as it was on Vancouver Island. In addition, the gradual maturation of a coalfield brought other factors into play: deeper pits and the acquisition of greater skills by faceworkers generated aggressive wage demands; the prospect of rising costs could be partly overcome by importing unskilled workers, characteristically peasants. The flashpoint was, therefore, between a mainstream skilled elite and unskilled “alien” labour. Vancouver Island’s miners were as subject to prejudicial feeling as were miners in many other coalfields. But this West Coast variant of sinophobia evinced interesting contradictions and compromises. The argument that Chinese labourers would never assimilate was

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disingenuous and so must be disposed of first. At issue was not the willingness or capacity of the Chinese to fit in but their opportunities to do so. The Chinese Benevolent Association that sponsored young Chinese males in their voyages across the Pacific provided virtual guarantees that most of their clients would return eventually to their native land.69 Unlike the colonial British miners, the Chinese contingent on Vancouver Island contained a high proportion of sojourners whose period of residence would be too brief to require or allow any degree of assimilation.70 It may have been a “white man’s province,” but it was on an Asian sea: the ability of the Chinese to come and go was not matched by their British neighbours on Vancouver Island. Moreover, the number of women and girls in the Chinese community was negligible throughout this period; given the high male-female ratio among the whites the likelihood of intermarriage was therefore effectively nil. The inherently “alien” character of Asians did not make intermarriage impossible, as the Knights of Labor believed. Fundamental demographic laws did. Nevertheless, while Chinese immigrants might not find their way into marriages with whites, they were often subject to pressures as domestic servants to adapt socially. And the very common acceptance of Chinese men into white miners’ households as servants (especially in the case of miners who let rooms) illustrates how the gulf between the two groups was sometimes bridged. Moreover, the racism of white miners and mineowners must be described as selective. Black settlers, for example, assumed respected positions within the commercial, mining, and agricultural communities of Vancouver Island.71 The Victoria Daily Colonist was probably stating what amounted to an axiom when it blustered in 1875 that “To couple Chinamen and the coloured man … is not only in the worst possible taste but it betrays ignorance of the principal ground upon which the question rests. Coloured persons differ only from the white in point of colour. In language, religion, habits of life and thought, they are the same. They are not less intelligent enterprising, industrious, orderly, benevolent. They own as much property, pay as much taxes. In a word, they are no less citizens and no less capable of making good use of the electoral franchise on account of their colour. But in all these respects the Chinese are essentially different and are likely to remain so.”72 These distinctions, though favourable for Afro-Canadians, were clearly no less racist for all that. But it is worthwhile to note that in at least one case a small union delegation to see James Dunsmuir included an Afro-Canadian miner. (It was to be many years before black miners in southern West Virginia, for example, were to hold office in union locals.)73 Dunsmuir stated later that the man in question was treated as equal with the others in all respects, although the discovery that the

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group represented a union ensured that the hospitality would be cut short.74 Furthermore, racial barriers were being fudged in other respects as miscegenation between white males and native women occurred often enough to demonstrate that race in and of itself was not an insurmountable social obstacle, certainly not on the coalfield.75 Sectarian division, too, was muted. In other parts of British North America the pugnaciously anti-Catholic Orange Order made its presence unmistakable; on the coalfields of Vancouver Island the Order was conspicuous by its absence. The question of racial barriers became less important to Vancouver Island’s trade unions around the turn of the century. By about 1902 white unionists at Cumberland were attempting to organize Chinese miners. Likewise William “Big Bill” Haywood urged the Western Federation of Miners at Nanaimo in the same year to “organize Japanese and Chinamen, if possible.”76 Certainly the Asian mineworkers had cause for dissatisfaction with their employers, and as early as 1878 mine managers complained that the Chinese were far from entirely passive, despite the popular stereotype. Some Chinese workers disappeared across Georgia Strait, making their way to the goldfields of the Interior Plateau, while others moved to the thriving Chinatowns in Victoria or Vancouver, on occasion motivated to do so by an unwillingness to cross a picket line.77 And as sojourning habits slowed and Asian families established themselves, the white workers’ chorus of unassimilability gradually died down. The “danger” of employing Chinese workers underground had a special resonance for miners, but the basis of this disquietude was consistently exaggerated. Paul Phillips writes of the Chinese that “It is difficult to document whether in fact their lack of English literacy and their fear of deportation if they complained did contribute to the deplorable safety record in the Vancouver Island mines,” but most contemporaries bought into the vexed notion of a causal link between Chinese miners and accidents underground.78 Some did not. In the 1880s the Dunsmuirs credibly asserted that all the responsible Chinese in their mines spoke adequate English and were unlikely to panic in an emergency. In the same vein, an anonymous correspondent to the Victoria Colonist argued in 1888 that the reports of the Ministry of Mines showed that Chinese mineworkers could be held responsible for fewer than 10 percent of the coalfield explosions and fires since their arrival.79 The way in which pitwork was organized would also have reduced the substance of the charge of incompetence. The Chinese did work underground at Nanaimo before 1887, but their utility was limited (and their numbers constrained) by a method of mining that could not furnish effective and affordable supervision over unskilled labourers who spoke a different

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language. Of the 168 Chinese living in Nanaimo in 1885 only 64 were categorized as “cooks and miners”; 620 of the 685 Chinese in longwall mines at Wellington in the same year were “miners.”80 This suggestion of a responsible presence in the mines – which would have fuelled white miners’ antipathy – can be offset by the knowledge that most Chinese “miners” worked at the pithead. A British Columbian member of parliament observed that although there were about 300 Chinese mine employees in the Nanaimo area, “The Chinese do not go underneath the ground. They are afraid to go beneath the surface of the earth, and they work altogether on top. They screen coal and do such like work, and they shift cars about.”81 Fears of underground danger posed by Chinese labour were overstated: the fact that the all-Chinese South Wellington pit had one of the best accident records of any island mine in the 1890s was simply ignored, as was the availability of Cantonese-English mining manuals that were developed on the coalfield.82 Capable in the mines, the Chinese were nevertheless relegated mostly to work on the surface, where they could not possibly contribute to subterranean hazards.83 These facts did not, of course, stop the myth of the accident-prone Chinese from finding a receptive white audience, but they do provide evidence of a counter-discourse on the subject of Asian immigrants in early British Columbia. When and where Chinese labour began entering collieries in large numbers, the conflict that arose was essentially over the relationship between safety and skill. The extent to which colliers were skilled was (and is) contentious, but the most widely recognized benchmark of the white hewers’ aptitude was their ability to detect potentially dangerous geological changes.84 The Miners’ Committee, which organized to lobby for Chinese exclusion in 1888, admitted that an unskilled white miner was no less dangerous underground than Asian labour; they agreed that it would be irresponsible to take some “hard working tramp, or a deserting sailor, who has never seen a coal mine in his life” and put him “in a working place alone with all the powder he wishes to take in, and no knowledge of the dangers of gases, and other dangers lurking all round.”85 But unskilled whites were not a factor: unskilled Chinese were. The primary challenge posed by Asian labour in the view of white miners was that it highlighted the disregard some mine operators held for the life-preserving knowledge of veteran colliers. Race could become equated with skill, but skill concerns were preeminent. This was no less true in the coalfields of the United States, where effectively identical arguments were directed at Eastern and Southern Europeans.86 The impact of Chinese labour on white miners’ wages should not be overstated either. Even the Knights were aware that unskilled Chinese

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labour did not produce the quantity or quality of coal won by skilled white miners who earned a comparable collective wage. Production records maintained by the Ministry of Mines reveal how, year by year, increases in the size of the Chinese workforce failed to generate corresponding improvements in output (table 16). In 1892 (a year for which reliable statistics are available for the individual collieries) the Wellington mines reported an output rate per man-year of 356.3 tons for mines in which Asians constituted 12 percent of the workforce; the Nanaimo mines of the New Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company produced 310.3 tons per man-year with 1 percent fewer Chinese labourers (none below ground); the East Wellington workforce was also 12 percent Chinese, but the output rate was only 221.4 tons per man-year; finally, the Union/Cumberland mines raised a mere 132.6 tons per man-year although 38 percent of the workforce was Chinese and a further 13 percent Japanese.87 In fact, it is only after 1888 – the year of the Wellington explosion and the start of underground exclusion – that output per man-year starts to advance. In other words, so long as large numbers of Asian labourers were unable to acquire the skills necessary to become successful hewers, the senior white faceworkers had little to fear. In addition, the use of a subcontract system in the Dunsmuir’s longwall mines reduced racial tension by apparently improving the incomes of senior white hewers. White colliers employed Asian labour at the low rate suggested by the company rather than hiring white or First Nations labour at a higher cost to themselves. In this manner some British miners came to hold a stake in the preservation of Asian labour underground. The manager of the Union Colliery was led to conclude that “if left to their own choice the white miners would retain the Chinese as helpers,” because it was profitable to do so.88 The Asian element in mining may have reduced household incomes and the longterm prospects of white youths, but its effects on the wages of adult white males were less definitive. The limits to a model of British Columbian labour and social history based on racial conflict become clear. To emphasize white reluctance to include Chinese labour in trade unions is to ignore a record of positive and multiplex inter-racial contacts on the coalfield. Historians who emphasize the danger reputedly caused by Chinese miners deflect attention from the poor conditions perpetuated underground by mineowners. Racial conflict was, simply stated, an integral part of economic conflict: when the Dunsmuirs increased pressure on white miners’ wages, British hewers responded with demands for legislation to deal not only with Chinese labour but also with poor ventilation, the absence of an effective checkweighman system, and a universal

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Table 16 Coal Production and Asian Employment, Vancouver Island, 1875–99

Total Output1

Year 1875

Number of Miners

Percent Asian

Tonnage Output per Man-Year

110,145

623

28.3

176.8

1876

139,192

573

20.1

242.9

1877

154,052

485

29.5

317.6

1878

170,846

662

30.2

258.1

1879

241,301

732

28.1

329.6

1881

228,357

819

42.9

278.6

1882

282,139

884

39.9

319.2

1883

213,299

1,031

39.3

241.3

1886

326,636

1,269

41.8

257.4

1887

416,360

1,464

46.0

282.3

1888

489,301

2,012

17.0

243.2

1889

579,830

2,241

20.4

258.7

1892

826,335

2,854

19.4

289.5

1893

978,294

2,844

14.6

344.0

1894

1,012,000

2,929

19.9

345.8

1895

939,654

2,924

19.9

321.4

1896

896,222

2,751

22.9

325.8

1897

882,854

2,413

21.3

265.9

1898

1,135,000

2,841

19.8

399.8

1899

1,306,000

3,317

22.5

393.8

2

Sources: British Columbia, General Review of Mining in British Columbia, Bulletin No. 19; British Columbia, Economic Council, Statistics of Industry in British Columbia; bcsp, Minister of Mines Reports, passim. 1 Output in long-tons (approximately 2,240 pounds). 2 Does not include figures for Wellington Colliery Company.

eight-hour day. “Anti-Orientalism” stands out on the miners’ agenda as a “a powerful stimulus … for increasingly radical political action” just because the other equally persistent and strongly held concerns were impossible to characterize as “anti-overworkism,” “anti-underpayism,” or “anti-death-in-the-workplace-ism.”89 Even the most vocal contemporary opponents of Asian immigration and employment were sensitive to the fact that white working-class hostility to the Chinese was being characterized as “the vaporings of a low mob” and that their larger and, on the whole, more palatable social and economic objectives were in danger of being tossed out with the racist bathwater.90

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Finally, it must be said that although tensions existed between whites and Asians, there were no race riots on the Vancouver Island coalfield. During the strike at Nanaimo in 1883, white strikers battled Chinese workers who continued to report to the mines, but this was the sort of confrontation that occurred along picket lines regardless of the race of the strikebreakers.91 And certainly there was nothing to compare with the vicious Knights-inspired attacks in Utah during the same period.92 Even boycotts of Chinese businesses – frequently proposed by the more vocally anti-Asian whites in the Nanaimo area during the 1880s – do not appear to have come off. Violence, when it did occur, was directed against mine supervisors, managers, and owners. On various occasions colliery buildings and a railway bridge were torched, white and black strikebreakers were cajoled and threatened into returning to San Francisco or joining the strikes, and in 1894, as the provincial election drew near, a small bomb was detonated at the door of a Wellington assistant manager. The Chinese quarter, however, was not besieged.93 This is not to say that ugly racist incidents never occurred. In Nanaimo’s first civic vote following incorporation, for example, local white “freemen” physically blocked the Chinese from attending the polls.94 But if race was as important as class, why did only the latter produce any mass responses? The fact that white miners who could not find the energy or interest for race riots were able to mount a succession of strikes and political campaigns against their employers highlights the primacy of nascent class conflict in the region. Like physical coercion, evictions, wage cuts, and the arbitrary assignment of places in the mine, the introduction of Chinese labour underground was a management tactic – an aspect of “explicitly racist capitalist social relations” – calculated to stimulate output in Vancouver Island mines.95 And like other components in the mineowners’ strategy to instill in a largely British workforce a sense of industrial discipline on the frontier, the use of Asian labour was protested by white miners through industrial action.

class conflict On the last day of January 1883 the Victoria Daily Colonist asserted that “the people of Nanaimo have always been very submissive, and never dabbled in political affairs.”96 This was, however, a fiction. From the time they first arrived on Vancouver Island, British colliers complained of and resisted exploitation by the local mineowners. Between 1850 and 1914 more than a dozen noteworthy strikes and lockouts occurred from Fort Rupert in the north to Extension in the south. In response to dangerous working conditions, as well as to wage fluctuations and challenges to their limited control over the workplace, the

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miners established friendly societies, benevolent associations, trade unions, and political parties. In this respect they were hardly distinguishable from miners in Britain, the United States, Australia, or Eastern Canada. There were, however, special local circumstances that made an imprint on these movements and organizations. The colonial industrial revolution was not a flawless reproduction (let alone a simple transferral) of what had occurred in Lancashire or Northumberland. And yet it is in the area of industrial conflict that the British miners on Vancouver Island step to the fore. The topography of Vancouver Island, the economic specialization of the colonial settlements, and the concentration of large numbers of mineworkers in a relatively small area ensured that the numerous, literate, and culturally well-equipped British miners could exercise considerable political influence, both locally and in the provincial capital at Victoria. To some extent the antipathies that arose between white miners and between races was encouraged – not to say provoked – by the mine operators. And consequently, historians have for the most part viewed the miners’ struggles and conflicts as progressive ones, insofar as they challenged the authority of employers or the state. Measured against the miners’ endeavours to postpone the introduction of mining machinery if it threatened skill levels and taking into account the ferocity with which the immigrant British colliers fought to preserve a kind of nepotistic apprenticeship underground, real care must be taken in defining “progressive.” In so many instances the miners found themselves fighting rear-guard actions against modernizing changes imposed, quite literally, from above. These displays of political muscle – industrial or parliamentary – did not move unilaterally in the direction of labour radicalism. Managerial power in the Vancouver Island mines passed through two easily differentiated phases during the nineteenth century. Down to 1863, while the Hudson’s Bay Company enjoyed a dominant position in colonial commerce and politics, employers’ tactics were very often heavy-handed and occasionally brutal. Like British colliery managers from the 1780s through to the mid–nineteenth century, the hbc made use of physical discipline and corporal punishment, dismissal, and fines.97 When the contingent of Lanarkshire colliers at Fort Rupert failed to improve output, a regime of stern discipline was introduced: the company’s control over the food supply was exploited, and the Scots were carelessly exposed to attacks (which, mercifully, never came) from the neighbouring Kwakiutl, and they were forced through physical coercion and threats of worse to undertake unsavory chores like digging sewage ditches underneath the Fort huts.98 Because the hbc’s Vancouver Island outposts were direct descendants of the sea-

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going trade of the period before the 1830s, their administration retained many of the characteristic elements of a maritime hierarchy.99 So when the Scots refused to undertake tasks apart from mining, George Blenkinsop, the senior clerk, assured two of the “mutineers” that they would be “shot like dogs.” In the fort journal his frustration was palpable. The miners, he scrawled angrily, “are constantly telling me the Company have broken their Agreement with them. But what is that to me [It] is no fault of mine so long as they remain here and are under my charge they must and shall do their duty if not, I shall not consider their having to pay a penalty of £50 a sufficient punishment any more, as in the case of Andrew Muir and MacGregor the other day for refusing to do their work … no I shall put them in Irons and feed them on bread and water.”100 Although they evaded capital punishment for a noncapital offence the miners were, nevertheless, chained up in the fort bastion by the chief trader, Captain William McNeill, for nearly two weeks and fed, as promised, a starvation diet.101 When the hbc moved its mining operations south to Nanaimo, it also transplanted its peculiar system of industrial relations. In 1855, for example, two miners who attempted to desert the colony while owing the company a small sum of money were captured and manacled for one day.102 The impracticality of chaining up discontented miners soon became apparent, and other forms of persuasion were introduced. Tied housing, an important feature of the hbc mining period, could be effectively used as a weapon by the company in times of disputes. Black Country miners who abandoned Fort Nanaimo while still indentured to the hbc did so knowing that the company would order remaining family members “to quit their homes and seek lodgings in other quarters,” of which there were virtually none. Determined to escape Fort Nanaimo but haunted by the fear that the company might use his family as hostages (or, worse still, that the company would leave them to the mercy of the reputedly murderous Sne ney mux), one English collier swore publicly that he would shoot his wife rather than abandon her to a crueller fate.103 Aggressive management strategies were made possible by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s dual role as mine owner and colonial administrator. This monopoly on authority was personified in James Douglas, chief factor and (with the departure of Richard Blanshard) colonial governor. Responsible to the London offices of the hbc, Douglas sought to ensure dividends for the shareholders by improving the productivity and profitability of the mines; simultaneously, he was empowered to construct the legal framework within which labour disputes and other civil cases would take place. As Douglas’ record in the fur trade would testify, he was not one to shrink from using

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physical force, as well as legislative and judicial authority, to secure the company’s interests.104 Nor was he above patronage to family members: soon after the Nanaimo mines were opened Douglas appointed his recently acquired brother-in-law to the government post of “Superintendant of the Coalmines in Vancouver’s Island”; the same man was later elevated to the colony’s Supreme Court of Civil Justice.105 The mining operators who filled the vacuum left by the hbc were no less adept at securing an extra measure of authority for themselves. The Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company’s first field manager, Charles Nicol, quickly became a justice of the peace in Nanaimo, a member of the colonial Legislative Council, and an election returns officer. Nicol was succeeded by Mark Bate and John Bryden, both of whom ensured that their employers in London were well represented at the top levels of colonial society. In 1875, a year of exceptional activity, Bate became Nanaimo’s mayor (as well as a conspicuous Oddfellow and a Mason) and Bryden was elected to the Legislative Assembly.106 The Dunsmuirs attained even higher status and broader influence. Robert Dunsmuir secured the lucrative interest of the Royal Navy in his mines by involving officers as investors from the very outset at Wellington. Even after he had bought out his partners, he was able to maintain favourable relations with Esquimalt.107 In the event of a strike it was “a ludicrously simple procedure” for Dunsmuir to call up the militia; the wealthiest man in British Columbia had no trouble finding three justices of the peace who would authorize troops to carry out evictions from tied housing.108 In 1877, 1890, and 1901 Dunsmuir, his sons, and his wife – who was described in the Victoria Colonist in 1890 as landlady to more than one hundred miners and their families – made full use of this service.109 In 1890–91 even noncompany stores (which extended credit to striking miners) were forced by the Dunsmuirs and their allies to close, and a village doctor whose loyalties were equivocal was dismissed. Blacklists were another weapon in the Dunsmuir arsenal. One collier claimed that he was “victimized for about seven years” in this fashion, while another’s experience taught that union membership was sufficent cause for both dismissal and ostracization by the mine owners.110 Victory in various provincial elections from 1882 on gave the Dunsmuirs a lofty pulpit from which they could accuse the colliers of being “unpatriotic,” a serious charge in a region reputedly coveted by American expansionists and occasionally by Fenians.111 The Dunsmuir cause in Victoria was further promoted by Robert’s sonsin-law, Henry Croft (in 1890 the chairman of the legislature’s select committee investigating disorders at Wellington attributed to miners) and the former vcmlc manager, John Bryden. Bryden’s exclamation that “rather than work the mine with a pit committee … he would dig

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clams” no doubt endeared him to his like-minded in-laws.112 Outside the family pro-Dunsmuir forces in the provincial capital by 1891 included C.E. Pooley (a cabinet minister and James Dunsmuir’s lawyer) Attorney-General Theodore Davie (formerly Robert’s lawyer), and the superintendent of Dunsmuir’s e&n Railway, Joseph Hunter, member of the legislative assembly.113 Was it any wonder that Robert and then James repeatedly affirmed their intention to run their mines exactly as they pleased? From 1848 through to the early-twentieth century the connections between mine operators and Vancouver Island’s administration were profound, and increasingly so. The ability to influence the composition of the courts (an undoubted advantage in the political arena during a period of property-based franchise) and effective command over the admittedly primitive armed might of the state were the outlines of an iniquitous distribution of authority in the new colony. This was not a frontier in which equals were hewn from the confused rubble of privilege and station; on Vancouver Island the economic, political, and social elites conscientiously preserved and enhanced their authority over immigrant miners from Britain, China, and elsewhere. Vancouver Island colliers replied in various ways to the coercion associated with tied housing, truck shops, the assignment of poor places in the mines, and the introduction of unskilled Asian labour. They also engineered a response to the political advantage enjoyed by the mine operators and their allies. “For the miners, militant strike action created what the union would later institutionalize: a collective authority to force redress of grievances by their employer.”114 This observation of labour history in France could apply with equal precision to Vancouver Island. Attempts to coordinate common concerns and to oblige the mine operators to make changes in working conditions and wages, however, spanned a great range of methods and various degrees of efficacy. At Fort Rupert, for example, the miners hardly needed a formal association. Most of the group from Lanarkshire were related by blood or marriage. In their negotiations and discussions with the hbc, the Scots were always led by a member of this extended family network. When the miners were relocated to Nanaimo, Governor Douglas endorsed this arrangement, sternly advising his subordinate that “The Miners are under the special orders of Mr Muir, and you will please to avoid all interference with them directly, giving any instructions you have to give through Mr Muir himself, but in no case to the men under his orders.”115 In the 1860s, as the population of miners and other settlers began to grow (albeit slowly), familial bonds had to be replaced with more permanent and inclusive arrangements for organizing labour. An early

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manifestation was the appearance of benevolent associations similar to those found contemporaneously in Britain. In 1862 Nanaimo miners established a Mutual Aid Society that provided allowances to injured colliers.116 Similar bodies proliferated from 1875, some of which attracted large numbers of miners and other working men.117 The subsequent emergence of trade unions on the coalfield did not threaten the benefit societies; the latter even grew in number, and some established branches for women and young people. By the turn of the century the village of Cumberland was home to the Ancient Order of Foresters, the Masons, Oddfellows, Knights of Pythias, Orangemen, Woodworkers, and Druids.118 In Britain until the mid-1880s colliers were more likely to belong to a mutual aid society than to any kind of labour union or lodge.119 The situation on Vancouver Island was not much different. Unions began the process of institutionalizing group conflict on the coalfield in the late 1870s, not long after national and near-national miners’ organizations in Britain were dusted off, following a period of atrophy and inaction.120 In 1877 an embryonic trade union was formed at Nanaimo as the Miners’ Mutual Protective Society, an evolutionary link between benevolent association and trade union. The failure of strikes in 1877 and 1881 fragmented the society, but it was still able to play a part in the strike of 1883 at Wellington. In December of that year the first local assembly of the Knights of Labor on the coalfield was established. Within fewer than seven months the Knights had attracted 241 members and were contemplating the purchase of a hall.121 The organization spread from Nanaimo to Robert Dunsmuir’s Wellington mines, where it replaced the Miners’ Mutual Protective Society. In 1888 colliery employees at North Wellington were also brought into the Order. Unionizing the unskilled “at a time when the ‘new unions’ had not yet come into existence in Britain,” the Knights of Labor paved the way for the industrial unionism and political activism that came in later years.122 By 1891 the Knights had been largely supplanted by the Miners’ and Mine Labourers’ Protective Association. The mmlpa was probably formed at Nanaimo in 1890.123 Like all other labour movements, the mmlpa met with stiff resistance from the Dunsmuirs, who refused to recognize unions. (The intransigence of James, eager to prove his mettle following the death of his father, led to the Wellington strike of 1890– 91.) The association’s aim was to organize all white mineworkers under one banner, and it swiftly attained a membership of more than a thousand – just short of the total in the area in 1890. By 1900 the mmlpa could declare that all 875 white underground employees at Nanaimo were members. Other mine-related unions in the 1890s included the Coal Trimmers’ Protective and Benevolent Association

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(dominated by Sne ney mux labourers) and the Engineers’ Protective Association. In addition, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, the Journeyman Tailors’ Union of America, and the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific had members in Nanaimo and the other colliery towns.124 The heyday of international unionism on the coalfield would have to await the arrival of the Western Federation of Miners and the United Mine Workers of America early in the twentieth century, but it would be a mistake to neglect the role played by earlier, more local organizations. In the mid-1880s the miners turned their energies to political campaigns, largely out of frustration with the mainstream politics and politicians of the preceding decade. In those years John Bryden enjoyed a dual career as mine manager and member of the legislative assembly. Despite riding to victory on colliers’ ballots in a colliery town, he achieved few positive results for the miners. When he first ran for office in 1875 Bryden won on a platform that promised mines legislation similar to that already in place in Britain.125 Draft legislation languished on the Order Paper, but when it looked likely to be enacted in 1877 Bryden moved quickly to have the act emasculated.126 This was the context for miners’ growing interest in a class-bound political strategy. From 1886 candidates sponsored by the Knights of Labor and, later, by the mmlpa ran in provincial elections. Miners and their allies continued to contest seats into the twentieth century, sometimes as members of the Working Man’s Party or as Labour candidates. In the provincial legislature – from which party lines were absent until 1903 – the miners’ politicians frequently found that they enjoyed more influence than their invariably small numbers might imply. In 1898, for example, the government party held only seventeen of thirty-six seats, allowing the single trade unionist mla (elected from Nanaimo) to exercise significant leverage. The Coal Mines Regulation Act followed; among other things, it satisfied the white colliers’ demand for the exclusion of Asian labourers from subterranean work. In fewer than fifteen years the miners’ investment in ballot box reform was starting to show dividends. Electing a miner to Ottawa as Nanaimo’s member of parliament in 1900 had fewer discernible benefits, but the fact that it was accomplished at all is noteworthy.

a divided working class It is tempting to regard political and industrial unrest in these years as suggestive of British or American antecedents. Unions grew on the island only slightly off the pace being set in British mining towns; the Knights of Labour and the Western Federation of Miners brought in

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American influences. And electoral politics in the province certainly hinted at what was being attempted by the English Trades Union Congress and its affiliate, the Labour Party. But the industrialization of British Columbia entailed more than the imposition onto a new resource setting of pretested responses to conflict. Clearly, some of the labels of British (and American) working-class organization had been borrowed for use in and around Nanaimo, but they were accessible through colonial and provincial newspapers. Coverage by the Nanaimo Free Press of the London dockworkers’ strike of 1890 was thorough and could have been influential in the development of the mmlpa. The transplanted political cultural capital of British miners did, of course, play some role in these developments, but the history of the local labour movement’s leadership suggests that a less derivative origin was more important. The peculiar division of labour observed in the mines and the ways in which wages were distributed fostered the appearance on Vancouver Island of a senior, experienced class of white hewers. These men played an important role in the miners’ political movements. As a better-paid, better-housed, and relatively skilled stratum, this body of miners constituted a workplace “labour aristocracy” whose importance needs to be recognized. Briefly, the labour aristocracy has been described by British scholars as that part of the working-class that during the nineteenth century enjoyed increasingly and substantially higher wages than less skilled workers. A further refinement of the model takes into account superior living conditions and working conditions, along with better “prospects of future advancement” for the labour aristocrat and his children. The effect of these differentiations within the working class, argues one school of labour historians, was to distance the labour aristocracy from the rest of the proletariat, to encourage embourgeoisement, and to broaden the appeal of “respectability” among workers generally, all in a manner that would weaken working class unity and resolve in the class struggle. In mining communities on either side of the globe the hewers were typically the most skilled of the colliery workers, and they received much higher wages than did their oncost assistants. The recruitment of hewers directly from British coalfields for Vancouver Island (sometimes at enormous cost to the colonial employer) was nothing less than confirmation of the hewers’ talents.127 Differences between the aristocratic hewers in British mines and those in the Nanaimo area were, nonetheless, substantial. For example, faceworkers in colonial mines were not necessarily the most seasoned members of the workforce, whereas in Britain seniority (and, implicitly, skill) was one of the hallmarks of the labour aristocracy. As well as dis-

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rupting traditions of artisanal inheritance underground, the decision to flood the mines with Chinese labour suggested that the skills of Old Country colliers were, in reality, of little consequence. If experience, knowledge, and manual skill were held no more highly than sheer force of numbers, then the British colliers were destined to face a reduction in status, security, and wages. Frustrated by their inability to fully limit entry into their trade, the British miners on Vancouver Island looked to industrial and political action for solutions. Before the 1890s the ideological component of these conflicts was ambivalent; the place of socialism in this arsenal was never clear in the nineteenth century. Around 1900–1903, according to one labour historian, “nowhere were the socialists more doctrinaire or influential” than in British Columbia. This political vitality was attributed primarily to the presence of large numbers of British settlers in the industry.128 Among Vancouver Island’s British miners, however, one finds not only a radical tradition but also a conservatism that made very stony soil for socialism. Testimony to the select committee of 1891 and to royal commissions at the turn of the century revealed the presence of active working-class opposition to unionism, a signal that working-class conservatism was another part of the cultural baggage of British miners.129 The changing complexion of the mmlpa points to significant contradictory political objectives within a working-class organization. During the 1880s, the Knights of Labor had organized the island’s white workers into mixed assemblies that included different trades. On the coalfield, however, it was inevitable that hewers would play a special role. Because of the widespread use of Chinese labour in unskilled positions underground and the exclusion of Asians from the Knights, the miners who belonged to the union represented only a fraction of the pit workforce. That is, the white, skilled part.130 This organizational bias began to change before 1890. After the mine explosions of 1887 and 1888 a growing proportion of the oncost labourers in island mines were whites; subsequently, the mmlpa could welcome a larger number and variety of colliery workers than the Knights had been inclined to. And, like the Miners’ Federation in Britain, the mmlpa attempted to go beyond parochial local assemblies of the kind advocated by the Knights. This is not to suggest that the mmlpa was necessarily more radical in its outlook, nor did it set new benchmarks for industrial militance. The politics of the mmlpa and the Nanaimo Reform Club were more concerned with class demarcations than with class conflict: their priority was the election of “workingmen” (ideally miners), regardless of ideological bent. The union survived the 1890s not by attracting a mass following to a militant platform but by being useful to the employer. As

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early as 1893 the association was on the brink of being disbanded by its members; it was preserved only by the timely intervention of the vcmlc’s manager. Samuel Robins recognized the mmlpa as the negotiating body for his miners from 1891 and encouraged the association to engage in what he regarded as more efficient and less costly collective bargaining. The vcmlc certainly seems to have benefited from its support of unionism: Robins claimed he was able to achieve even a 20 percent wage reduction without precipitating an expensive disruption in pitwork, largely because he consulted with the association’s representatives at least twice a year.131 The union executive itself seemed almost embarrassed by its role as advocate for workers against management. When asked about a two-week-long withdrawal of labour over the loss of a 25-cent safety-lamp allowance at Nanaimo, union leaders demurred: “I don’t call that a strike,” said one, “it was a misunderstanding.”132 William Stocker, the American-born president of the mmlpa at the turn of the century, certainly had little personal enthusiasm for radical programs; his position was that high wages for white miners would reward local merchants and produce a more settled family community.133 Income multipliers loomed larger on the organization’s checklist than did class solidarity. Although the mmlpa included not only hewers but also less skilled or unskilled mine labourers, leadership figures came almost exclusively from the ranks of the former.134 In this respect the mmlpa echoed the British experience, but the unique, partly racial division of labour in Vancouver Island mines gave this union hierarchy its special significance. When Asian exclusion after 1888 produced an expanded union – now comprised in part of white oncost labourers – the hewers’ monopoly on leadership became suspect. The inclusion of white labourers was necessary, because otherwise the faceworkers could be replaced during strikes by experienced white runners. However, many of the labourers were themselves former hewers now earning very junior wages. Although they belonged to the same association, distinctions between white hewers and labourers did not disappear, and their interests were sometimes at odds.135 Moreover these two groups of workers were not evenly matched. The mmlpa’s long-term priorities were tailored more to the needs of geographically persistent hewers than to those of the more transient labourers. It was particularly feared that aggressive wage demands from white oncost workers would only hasten the return of Chinese labour underground. To avoid this, the hewers more than once stifled protest among the white runners.136 In short, the nominal support of white oncost workers led the hewers (who, generally speaking, enjoyed higher wages, relative job security, and better housing) to encourage a less confrontational approach to industrial relations.

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In the age of socialism and “new unionism” the mmlpa’s leaders desired private and polite negotiations with the vcmlc, and from 1891 they avoided expensive conflicts with the Dunsmuirs. Like the Durham unions, which remained for years on the outside of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, the mmlpa followed an “inoffensive policy” of moral-force industrial relations.137 It could be that conditions were more favourable at Nanaimo than at Wellington for this kind of unionism: many miners owned their own homes, they had some choice from whom they purchased their goods, and they were not constantly under the eye of single-minded local employers like the Dunsmuirs. Overtly radical organizations made their first appearance on Vancouver Island only in the late 1890s. The Socialist Labour Party of British Columbia – an offshoot of the American Socialist Labour Party – was in the vanguard.138 Furthermore, testimony to the select committee of 1891 and to Royal Commissions in 1900 and 1903 revealed the presence of substantial working-class opposition to unionism. What is most impressive, then, is how, in the decade of rising labour militance in Britain, the British miners of Vancouver Island – the oft-cited harbingers of radicalism on the West Coast – pulled back from more radical forms of class confrontation. This situation was entirely consonant with the development of miners’ organizations in the northeast of England, where “the Liberal leadership [of the unions] resisted Socialist ideas and regarded Socialists as trouble-makers.”139 Likewise in the regions of Britain that produced Vancouver Island’s first miners. As one historian of British labour writes, “The fact of the matter is that both in the Black Country and in the rest of Great Britain those workmen who were entitled to vote tended to support, not groups like the Socialist League or the Independent Labour Party, but the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. Working-class conservatism was of particular significance.”140 Labour leadership on the island coalfield in the 1890s and 1900s testifies to the impact of British immigrants and the tradition of the “moderate” British miner. Political hopefuls and hardy perennials James Hawthornthwaite, Ralph Smith, and Thomas Keith had all come from the United Kingdom, and they were all committed to increased involvement in electoral contests, rather than direct class conflict. Hawthornthwaite has been described as “nominally a revolutionary socialist but in practice a successful parliamentary reformer,” while Smith – the miners’ member of parliament – was destined to leap from the Farmer-Labour ticket to the federal Liberal Party.141 On Vancouver Island, socialism was not the logical concomitant of growing political involvement. Testimony in British Columbia to the Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes of 1903 revealed how the

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issue of the Western Federation of Miners’ political perspective was approached by members of the rank and file: “before affiliation the question was asked distinctly whether by affiliation we would be adopting the socialist platform [of the wfm], and we were distinctly told no; that although socialism was recognized to a certain extent in the Federation, we did not necessarily become socialists by joining it.”142 In 1903 James Dunsmuir and the provincial government were concerned that workforce affiliation to a foreign union would have unfavourable and uncontrollable ramifications for the coal industry in British Columbia. They feared a wave of sympathy strikes in the coalfield that concessions made north of the border would not mollify.143 Socialism was taken to be a very secondary matter and was largely ignored by both sides in the dispute. The equanimity shown by Dunsmuir and the government regarding the ideological bent of the miners’ union was shared by the vcmlc’s management and even by some colliers. Samuel Robins disregarded the wfm “threat,” emphasizing instead the good working relationship he had enjoyed with the mmlpa in the 1890s. Blended into the miners’ lukewarm attitude towards the wfm in the early twentieth century was, as well, a nineteenth-century sense of imperialist loyalism that might well have neutralized the American influence emanating from the union’s head office in Denver. The testimony of a Scottish collier at Wellington on this subject is revealing: “I did not think I was surrendering any freedom; I thought if a union was formed I might have a little freedom to exercise the right of freedom of speech, as a freeborn British subject.”144 This kind of response can be traced back to the Knights of Labor, who, despite (or perhaps because of) their American origins, had taken pains in 1885 to buttress their calls for Chinese prohibition with a canny appeal to “that grand national sentiment which it should be the aim of all true Canadians to foster and encourage.”145 In all likelihood this strain of working-class British-Canadian patriotism was, like its counterpart in the coalfields of England, essentially on the political right. One author has attributed the increasingly conservative character of nationalism in Britain during these years to midcentury Russophobia, a factor that would have been no less potent on what was, for a time, the doorstep of Russian America.146 Internationalists only by necessity, the Vancouver Island colliers’ spokesmen from 1885 through 1900 sought to ameliorate their conditions under colonial industrial capitalism, not to overthrow it. This tendency was evident at the ballot box as well. Elections from the 1850s on were dominated by the economic elite, although they were mounted as public displays. In 1863 Charles Bayley decided to challenge Nanaimo’s incumbent legislator (the attorney-

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general, Babbington Ring) as a people’s candidate, despite the fact that there were only seven eligible voters. When the dust had settled, Bayley was triumphant, having carried three votes against Ring’s two. What is equally noteworthy is that, according to Bayley, “the usual festivities [then] commenced and being duly cheered by the people [I] was carried to my residence.”147 Because of a very narrow franchise that excluded all but a handful of adult males, due to steep property requirements, miners were probably not among the electorate of 1863. But they were no doubt part of “the people” and of Bayley’s noisy entourage. In the following decade elections were less elitist in terms of the franchise but just as democratic in terms of ritual. Pitmen enjoyed better access to the franchise, and even the Chinese were involved in these early campaigns (although they were formally stripped of the right to vote provincially in 1874).148 Coalfield democracy and political culture ought not to be romanticized, however. The issues of mine safety and hours of work may have loomed large in debate, but the mechanisms of patronage and personal loyalty were called into play on election day. It may even have been the case that votes were bought with liquor. When D.W. Gorden, a Walkemite, ran in Nanaimo in 1878, one of his supporters wound up a speech with this rhyme: All hail the power of Walkem’s name; Let miners prostrate fall; Bring forth the whiskey in a tub, And crown him lord of all.149

Unsatisfied demands for mine safety laws and the eight-hour day thereafter generated organized political protest among the miners in the last quarter of the century, but the results were uneven. From 1875 to 1900, candidates of the Workingmen’s Party, the Lib-Lab movement, and the Labour Party ran in six elections, for a possible total of thirteen seats. Only on five occasions, however, were any of the labourleft aspirants successful. In the provincial election of 1886 two candidates were sponsored by the Knights of Labor, but miners and former miners swung behind the operators’ candidates instead, delivering only 78 and 30 votes to the two Workingmen’s Party nominees and 366 to Robert Dunsmuir.150 Beginning in 1894 the newly formed Nanaimo Reform Club supported miners in their quest for office, while at roughly the same time a former miner ran under the banner of the Conservative Party in a dominion general election. In North Nanaimo in 1898, where 62 percent of the electorate were miners and mine labourers, a miners’ candidate failed to defeat John Bryden, now the operations manager at the Dunsmuir’s Wellington mine.151 Mouat has

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argued that the strike of 1890–91 at Wellington “nourished both a heightened sense of class and a radical political tradition,” yet just three years later none of the three left-labour candidates on the coalfield in the provincial election were successful.152 For their part, Robert and James Dunsmuir recorded undeniable success in election after election as ardently blue Tories; this was only possible with the support of miners. Gerrymandering (often alleged) could not account for every one of these results. The miners’ distinction as the largest single occupational group in the region was not in and of itself enough to guarantee victory for working-class candidates. By British standards there was nothing unusual in this pattern. In Britain, trade unions generated and attracted many “Conservatives and Liberals among both leaders and rank and file.” The orthodox parties of the centre-right continued to be beneficiaries of this culture of conservatism in the working-class. Nonetheless, where left-labour candidates were successful during these years, whether it was in English, Scottish, or Welsh mining constituencies, they made significant headway, despite having a lower proportion of miners’ votes with which to work than was the case on Vancouver Island.153 One explanation for the inconclusive record of the left in British Columbian coalfield towns may be that local labour was organized to address working conditions, not colonial administrations or capitalism per se. Friendly societies and unions that appeared in various forms after 1865 sought to resolve rather specific concerns, few of which dealt directly with the structure of capitalist society. In short, there was no socialist or left-wing agenda. Admittedly, in the 1880s the Knights of Labor injected radical ideas of sorts but this influence too was blunted by occupational mobility among the colliers and the loss of strikes. Thereafter the cause of the labour-left was targeted by a hostile American Federation of Labor and the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, who together sought to ‹keep down the political healers’ in British Columbia.”154 The mmlpa, in addition to related organizations like the Nanaimo Reform Club, was “populist, untheoretical and labourist” and could easily accommodate conservatism as well as socialism.155 The success of essentially antilabour politicians on the coalfield was no doubt rooted in this ideological ambiguity. The last fifteen years of the century saw a gradual polarization of interests. This polarization was not a simple demarcation along class lines: the record of industrial relations between miners and the vcmlc was never better than from 1891 to 1903. Rather, it was the role of the Dunsmuirs that was crucial. The vcmlc’s Samuel Robins could only represent the objectives of an absentee English employer; in the Dunsmuirs the colliers had flesh-and-blood opponents whose interests they

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did not share.156 As in the American Midwest in these years, the protests and actions of miners targeted mine owners rather than the government.157 But the position of monopoly capital consolidated, and working-class awareness of the indivisibility of the state and the mineowners grew. To be sure, the Dunsmuirs fought a lengthy and largely unsuccessful battle against Victoria’s anti-Asian policies, but the armed might of the Imperial government, the colonial administration, and the provincial legislature was never unavailable when invoked by mineowners. As early as 1883 anonymous critics of Robert Dunsmuir mocked his position as a captain of industry, drawing attention to the extent to which he and his kin already held a sinister influence over the local economy and provincial legislature: No suasion can stop me, neither power nor money, For the powers that be, are all ’fraid of me. And the Parliaments too, what’er they may do, Are mine so compact, that they cannot annul my Settlement Act!158

By the time of the Wellington strike of 1891 political and business power in the provincial mining sector had only become more intimate, a fact that was not lost on the island miners.159 The tenor of miners’ protests changed early in the twentieth century. These new developments were spurred by fresh debilitating labour legislation, the influence of the clamorous hard-rock mining camps of British Columbia’s southeast, a disaster underground at Union/Cumberland, and the ascent of James Dunsmuir to the premier’s office and his eventual and controversial sale of various components of his coal/rail/iron empire to Eastern Canadian interests.160 It was in the Edwardian era – not the Victorian – that the remaining distinctions between the employer and the state were so nearly obliterated and that the political and economic alternatives embodied in socialism became attractive to more of the coalfield population.

conclusions During the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century Vancouver Island miners established for themselves a reputation for militance, for racism, and eventually for political radicalism. Like miners almost

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anywhere in the English-speaking world they seemed predisposed to engage their employers in protracted conflicts that sometimes climaxed in violent confrontations between employees, operators, local citizenry, and the armed representatives of the state. By the end of this period the miners were electing sympathetic delegates to the provincial legislature in Victoria and the dominion House of Commons. Their impact on regional politics was unquestionable. Nevertheless, trade unionism on Vancouver Island was slow to consolidate its gains, attempts at organization in the Dunsmuir towns were fruitless throughout the century, and in election after election staunchly antilabour candidates were returned with huge majorities. It would be to go too far to profess, along with Ross McCormack, that “in general” the local working-class “agreed on the basic principles of Marxism; they were revolutionaries.”161 While the case may be conceded that the island’s socialist parties in some instances advocated a revolutionary path, it is impossible to sustain the illusion that the trade union leadership or the rank-and-file membership as a whole were converts. Pragmatism had its disciples as well. From the Fort Rupert experiment through a strike in 1901–1092 at Extension the causes of conflict were principally the same. The issue of wages was important but almost always secondary. When Eric Hobsbawm reviewed the debate on the British labour aristocracy, he concluded that industrial artisans, or “tradesmen,” were “doing what they had always done” in their movements and protests of the 1880s and 1890s: “defending their rights, their wages, and their now threatened conditions, stopping management from telling the lads how to do their job, and relying on the democracy of the workplace rank-and-file against the world.”162 It was much the same on Vancouver Island. Miners who had learnt their craft in England or Scotland or Wales emigrated to Vancouver Island in order to profit from those skills. This premiss, not an ideological predisposition, was the mainspring of their political militance. They defied mineowners who refused (as was the case at Fort Rupert) to recognize the skills of pitmen or who sought (as was the case at Nanaimo and at Wellington) to deskill the workforce by routinizing production on longwall lines, by introducing Asian miners who initially knew practically nothing about colliery work, and by increasing supervision. These hewers were “radicals largely because they loathed proletarianization,” a posture they held in common with other mineworkers in the cordillera.163 As one Wellington miner observed in 1891, that year’s strike was provoked by “A man coming into your place and telling you this and that, and directing you how to fix the place. The way those men were trying to use me I had to get into an organization to support myself.”164 Although the use of Chinese min-

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ers reduced opportunities for boys and challenged household incomes, what was more important was management’s unambiguous statement of contempt for what the émigré British miners valued most: their hard-earned skills.165 The particular stance adopted by the British hewers on Vancouver Island stemmed not so much from an ethnic predilection for militance as from the character of mine labour locally. British influences are evident, but they pale next to that specifically British Columbian context in which this working class was made.166

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7 Mobility and Identity

When Samuel H. Myers arrived at Nanaimo in the mid-1870s, it was to prove his last stop in a footloose career. Leaving Ireland in 1858 for the Fraser River, he chased visions of gold north into the Cariboo (1862–67), moved south to Lytton (where he worked as a ferryman until 1870), and then back north to Omineca for a final stab at prospecting. Six or seven years later he decided to forsake precious metals in favour of coal. Myers quickly acquired a reputation on Vancouver Island as a union organizer. He helped to establish British Columbia’s first Knights of Labor Assembly, and he served the movement until his abrupt death in the explosion of 1887. Myers’ ten years in the colliery town was the longest stretch he had spent in any one place since leaving home at the age of twenty; his ten years as a coalminer were likewise his longest stint in one job.1 Myers’ experience was not especially remarkable. A lifetime of movement, occupational change, and protest was in many respects the common lot of miners. In a study of coalmining communities in the United States, the alternatives available to colliers in unhappy situations are succinctly described as “voice or exit.”2 Miners could mobilize in unions or political parties and pursue changes where they were, or they could move on: vox populi, vox pedali. In chapter 6 the noisy protests mustered by the Vancouver Island miners were considered. Class struggle, however, was (and is) more complex, more diverse than the story of strikes, unionism, and political radicalism. Occupational change was one of several avenues that the early British Columbian

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working class explored in the process of its own making. What is evaluated in this chapter is the individual or household protest, the extent to which miners and their kin voted with their feet against staying in the Nanaimo area or in the island coalmines.

mobility studies Most historians have concentrated on the degree to which mobility revealed the presence or absence of opportunity. One of the more hopeful interpretations states that “A distinctive quality of man is his ability to master his movements to conform with his interests. He can satisfy a desire for self-expression by seeking new and varying experiences. Residential change is a component of this quest, and it provides a means of expressing one’s freedom.”3 Less optimistically, mobility can indicate one’s subservience to blind economic forces; it may be just as much a statement of vulnerability as an expression of freedom: “geographical mobility was both an act of faith and an act of desperation.”4 Across British Columbia the skeletons of abandoned boom-towns testify to the precarious grip resource-extraction communities have on their populations. Similarly, the mining district of Vancouver Island was buffeted by dramatic changes in the commodities market; underemployed sections of its population accordingly moved away from time to time.5 Patterns of residential instability – whether in the form of out-migration or movement between mining towns – could be motivated by differences in opportunities, working conditions, or wages or by a subjective preference for one particular village over another. Residential mobility may therefore be seen as a manifestation either of discontent or of success within a community; measurement of its occurrence provides an insight into the attitudes and impacts of the immigrant British colliers. The question of urban population mobility in North America attracted scholars throughout the 1970s and the 1980s.6 Their studies presented evidence of surprisingly high levels of geographical mobility, and, remarkably, every class appeared to have been affected to roughly the same extent. In Omaha, for example, about 97 percent of the population moved away or to a different part of town between 1880 and 1900. Similarly, coalmining communities in Appalachia have been described as being in an almost perpetual state of motion.7 This dynamic population behaviour is open to broad interpretations, including that of Thernstrom and Knights, for whom moving on was virtually synonymous with moving up.8 Indeed, the drift of miners into other occupations is the second part of the equation on mobility. Like switching towns, switching jobs was a means of improving one’s lot, of escaping the limitations of what

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one was leaving behind. Occupational mobility is another barometer of opportunity or discontent. The two phenomenon – geographical and occupational mobility – are considered here in turn.

miners in motion On nineteenth century Vancouver Island identifiable patterns of movement were never so great as they were contemporaneously in urban Nebraska. Nor, indeed, does the intensity of residential mobility appear to match that found in many other North American studies.9 Nonetheless, movement of a particular kind did occur, and it involved single men somewhat more often than families. Conversely, against a considerable number of transient miners must be placed a smaller, extremely persistent group that formed a core in these villages. The question of geographical mobility is of central importance to the social development of Western Canada. Across British North America, but especially west of the Rockies, settlements were so widely scattered, population so sparse, and transportation so irregular that even local mobility – say, from Nanaimo to Victoria – could put individuals effectively beyond the reach of the towns they left behind. Residential transience, either within or beyond the confines of the mining district, could sap the membership of associations while simultaneously introducing new attitudes and ideas. Economic bonds in a coalfield may prove highly durable, but the ethnic, familial, and religious composition was much more vulnerable to change. Geographical mobility also indicates how far the towns were achieving (or failing to achieve) stability. The persistence of certain individuals and groups went some way to determining which associations would thrive, merely survive, or disappear, and it was in this manner that the influence of British immigrants was keenly felt: the importance of English, Scottish, and Welsh miners in the social and political development of this region stems not simply from their numerical significance but from their residential persistence. Two kinds of geographical mobility are of interest here. First, there were the out-migrations from the coalfield area, which involved both individuals and groups. Second, there was movement within the coalfield, between the towns of Nanaimo, Wellington, and Union and peripheral farming communities like Comox and Cedar. The small neighbouring islands in the Gulf of Georgia also received miners throughout this period. It must be allowed at the outset that the coalmining population at Nanaimo was more persistent than at nearby Wellington, but movement between the two main colliery towns was substantial and sustained.10

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Table 17 Persistence Rates in the Nanaimo Area, 1877–1901, General Population Population Persisting to

From 1877

1877 (%)

n

388 (100)

1881

1881 (%)

n

1890 (%)

1899 (%)

n

n

266 (79.3)

239 (70.7)

117 (34.6)

539 (100).

313 (58.0)

182 (33.8)

1202 (100).

754 (62.8)

1890

Table 18 Persistence Rates among Coal Miners in the Nanaimo Area, 1877–1901 Population Persisting to

From 1877

1877 (%)

n

123 (100)

1881

1881 (%)

n

1890 (%)

1899 (%)

n

n

99 (80.5)

82 (66.7)

55 (44.7)

243 (100).

155 (63.8)

118 (48.6)

542 (100).

333 (61.4)

1890

Table 19 Persistence Rates among Coal Miners in the Nanaimo Area, 1877–1901, Adjusted for Average Mortality Percentage of Population Persisting to From

1877

1881

1890

1899

1877

100

84.9

79.4

55.2

100

72.0

61.8

100

69.3

1881 1890

Note: Average mortality is 13.32 per 1,000.

Transience off the coalfield in the last quarter of the century was steady.11 Tables 17 and 18 show mobility for, respectively, the whole community and those non-Asian individuals identified in the sources as miners. Table 19 adjusts the figures for miners to take account of mortality. Mining fatalities account for the disappearance of nineteen colliers from 1877 to 1881, 286 from 1882 to 1889, and 92 from 1890 to 1899.12 The average mortality rate over the last three

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decades of the century was about 13.32 per thousand, a fact that must be taken into account as well.13 What these figures indicate (while revealing nothing of the experience of white women and children, Chinese men, and entire aboriginal populations) is that there was an annual attrition rate of about 5 percent in the miners’ population. The movement of miners out of the colliery area was not, then, significantly different from (and it was certainly no higher than) the pattern of general out-migration of members of all occupation groups taken together. Each miners’ cohort behaved differently, however, their average attrition disguising some important peaks and troughs. On the whole, wastage slows slightly over time within each cohort, suggesting that the longer a miner stayed in the district the greater the likelihood that he would continue to stay put: nothing persists like persistence. Within each cohort there was, then, a highly mobile component that stayed in the coalfields just long enough to be noticed. Additional miners no doubt stopped briefly in the coalfield, too briefly to appear in voters lists or directories, but the same would hold true for a wide variety of itinerant labourers, artisans, merchants, and even professionals.14 Regardless, at least half the colliery workforce was residentially persistent over each of the last two decades in the century, and over the longer stretches – from 1877 to 1899 – miners were slightly less transient than the population as a whole. The information provided in the census enumerators’ books for 1880–81 permits further investigation. Of the 324 miners recorded in the census, 206 (80 percent when adjusted for mortality) had left the coalfield by 1899.15 Just under 43 percent (adjusted), however, had moved away by 1890. Marital status, one might suppose, could help to clarify these trends. Common wisdom might suggest that single men would be more footloose than married men or men with other family commitments in the coalfield. Of the 126 miners who had moved away by 1890, 53 (42 percent) were unmarried in 1881; put another way, nearly onethird of the unmarried miners around Nanaimo moved away or died between 1880–81 and 1890. Married colliers who resided in the area without their families were slightly more mobile (8 out of 18 moved away), but their total number was very small. It transpires, then, that over half the mobile miners were married or were living on the coalfield with family members; common wisdom about itinerance, in this case, would be badly wrong. Nor was age the common denominator. The total adult transient cohort was evenly divided between those under and those over thirty-one years of age. So, with the addition of widowers and family-less married men to the figures, it becomes clear that being young, single, and white were not the distinguishing marks

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Table 20 Geographical Mobility and Place of Birth of Miners from the Census of 1880–81

Population Persisting Who Exit Circa Exit or Die Exit Still Present 1880–81, by 1890 c. 1890–99 1899 Totals Average Age n (%) n (%) n (%) n (%) n (%) 1

Birthplace England

26 (20)

19 (15)

Scotland

34 (26)

51 (39)

130 (100)

37.8

10 (15)

12 (17)

15 (22)

32 (46)

69 (100)

34.1

Wales

7 (20)

9 (36)

10 (29)

9 (26)

35 (100)

37.8

United States

2 (15)

5 (39)

4 (31)

2 (15)

13 (100)

25.2

4 (14)

2 (7)

5 (17)

18 (62)

29 (100)

24.2

20 (51)

8 (21)

4 (10)

7 (18)

39 (100)

–

British North America Other 1

Mostly in mining disasters of 1887 and 1888.

of the itinerant mining population. Ethnically there is little to differentiate the mobile miners from the more persistent group, as can be seen in table 20. The English were slightly less persistent than the Scots, 39.2 percent and 46.4 percent of their respective cohorts in 1880–81 lasting through to 1899. The persistence rate of Canadians (primarily Nova Scotians and British Columbians) was considerably higher at 62 percent. The locally born cohort included a growing number of miners’ sons, who naturally held a perception of the region different from that held by immigrants. (As the character Alex Dunsmuir complains in a play from the 1990s, “I come from here … I don’t know where it is exactly – but it is not Kilmarnoch!”)16 These British Columbian pitlads who grew to play such a central role in the industry in the twentieth century, however, had to defer in the statistics to the numerically superior, residentially stable, and relatively better skilled British miners in the nineteenth century. If age is correlated with ethnicity, other patterns emerge. On average the Scottish miners enumerated in 1880–81 were almost four years younger than the English and Welsh miners. Canadian miners were ten years younger still, a fact that helps to explain exceptionally high persistence rates among the British Columbian–born colliers. One can safely speculate that the younger miners were in the prime of their working lives and had few reasons to leave remunerative work; the older English miners had either accumulated enough money to move on or needed to seek out alternative employment when their mining days seemed numbered.

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Even more than ethnicity and marital status, place of residence had a bearing on geographical mobility. Taking the census year of 1880–81 as a point of departure, 311 of the 324 non-Asian miners enumerated in the Vancouver District can be divided into two groups: the 189 who lived in the Nanaimo area and the 122 who made their homes in and around Wellington.17 Ninety-four of the Nanaimo miners – virtually half – were still living in the coalfield area in 1899. Among the Wellington miners, fewer than 38 percent were still in the town in 1899 (23 percent had left the district even by 1890). One quarter of the Nanaimo miners departed between 1890 and 1900, when nearly 40 percent of the Wellington miners did the same. So, although movement out of Wellington before 1890 was about on par with that from Nanaimo, a significant divergence occurred in the last decade of this period. Some explanations for these differences can be put forward. By 1880 Nanaimo was one of the largest towns in the province. Around this time there were fifty retail and twenty-four service establishments in Nanaimo, compared to only one store and one hotel at Wellington.18 Nanaimo was a more substantial community than Wellington, and it was considerably less constipated by company regulations, company housing, and managerial interference in the workplace. Wellington was a place in which the guiding hand of the Dunsmuirs was seldom idle and one that offered fewer opportunities for occupational change; the London-based directors of the vcmlc were unable to exercise the same kind of personal authority over Nanaimo, not even through their field managers. Even in terms of physical appearance Wellington was a far less appealing town, as one travelogue writer passing overland from Alberni discovered as late as 1898: “At Wellington the country changed to a coal-mining district, and very wretched and poverty stricken the place seemed. There were no gardens to the miners’ houses, far less any kind of park or open-air pleasure resort for the people. Even the churches and chapels were of a most wretched appearance.”19 The same observer considered Nanaimo infinitely preferable. Migration from Wellington occurred partly because Nanaimo had more to offer and partly because of poor conditions in the Dunsmuirs’ mines. It was also a consequence of developments in the local coal industry. The 1880s and 1890s saw the expansion of mining in Dunsmuir pits at Union (to the north) and at Extension (to the south). In both towns Wellington miners were on the scene. In 1897 James Dunsmuir thrust mobility upon many of his Wellington employees by removing company housing and stores to nearby Extension. Small wonder that a year later the place looked so bleak! Concerned that Extension’s proximity to Nanaimo’s well-organized workforce would have a

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Table 21 Residential Mobility between Nanaimo and Wellington, from 1880–81 to 1899 Miners in 1880–81 Census at

Nanaimo

Wellington

155 38 43 64 5 5

109 23 16 23 25 22

Totals1 No record after 1882–83 Last residence at Nanaimo before 1899 Still at Nanaimo in 1899 Last residence at Wellington before 1899 Still at Wellington in 1899 1

Includes only miners for whom residence information is precise.

radicalizing effect on his own labourers, Dunsmuir ordered Extension dismantled only five years later. Everyone employed by the mine was removed to the new town of Ladysmith.20 Two hundred families were included in this last transfer, which involved, as well, the relocation of whole buildings. The situation at the Wellington colliery also provides explanations for high levels of out-migration in the 1890s. This was the first of James Dunsmuir’s two decades at the helm of the family firm. The younger Dunsmuir’s debut was marked by a violent and protracted industrial dispute in 1890–91, throughout which he cemented his reputation as an implacable foe of trade unions. With the memory of the Wellington explosion of 1888 still fresh, Robert Dunsmuir’s promise to remove all the Chinese from underground work neglected, and abundant evidence that James was going to take a hard line in labour relations, conditions were ripe for accelerated out-migration. It is possible to track an identifiable corps of miners who abandoned Wellington either during or shortly after the strike of 1890–91. Of the seventy-two miners known to be working Wellington No. 5 Pit in 1890, only fifteen were still around Wellington three years later, and at least two of the men had moved into farming.21 Under James Dunsmuir disaffection ran high, and his style of management was undoubtedly one cause of out-migration. At least one-fifth of the local colliers moved between coalmining towns on Vancouver Island during these years. Table 21 shows that movement between Wellington and Nanaimo alone involved forty-nine miners from the cohort of 1880–81 (that is, 20 percent of the total).22 Another remarkable pattern is the number of miners who moved to the Gulf Islands. Very few of the islets could boast the presence of so much

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Figure 7

as a village. Texada, Cortes, and Hornby Islands were considerably more isolated from the capital city and Vancouver than were Nanaimo and Wellington, as can be seen in figure 7. Moreover, the local economic base is revealed by the names of the islets’ respective harbours: Blubber Bay, Whaletown, and Whaling Station Bay. These were, on the face of it, hardly the bucolic sanctuaries to which one might expect disaffected miners to be attracted. Still, no fewer than two-dozen miners moved to these islands (along with Gabriola, Thetis, Salt Spring, and so on) throughout the last quarter of the century, mostly to become farmers. How do these patterns of mobility compare with what has been observed elsewhere? Michael Katz reckoned that the “relatively permanent residents” of mid-century Hamilton, Ontario, accounted for between one-third and two-fifths of the total population: “fewer than half the people on census or assessment could be found listed in the city directory compiled one year and a half later.”23 David Gagan’s study of Peel County indicates that one person in four left the district between 1852 and 1861.24 Out-migration in rural Michigan in the third quarter of the nineteenth century rose from 26 percent to 31 percent per decade.25 Fewer than half the families listed in the Boston city directories of the 1880s were “residentially stable.”26 Comparative figures for miners tell a similar tale. One source estimates that “something like a

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tenth of all colliers in Britain moved house every year, a figure that rose occasionally to as high as a third in Northumberland and Durham.”27 Nearly as remarkable was the movement of about a third of southern West Virginia miners from one town to the next or out of the coalfield completely every two years.28 The single miners of Nanaimo and especially Wellington demonstrated comparably high levels of mobility, but the married miners were more stable than their peers. The overall impression, then, is of two mining populations, one that was quite permanent, the other being so highly transient as to be almost invisible. The mobile miners present a number of problems. It is difficult to assess the impact (if any) they made on local associations, institutions, social relationships, and so on. At the very least, transient mine workers were a boon to more settled miners who boasted a spare room in their house: the rapid turnover in personnel and occupants helped to keep the boardinghouse trade thriving. High levels of geographical mobility may, however, have had a negative impact on coal production and industrial development. In the early period of British Columbia’s colonial development out-migration or “desertion” was perceived by the administrations as one of their most pressing problems. The nature of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s five-year contracts with their miners limited the alternatives available to dissatisfied men at remote Fort Rupert and at early Nanaimo. To escape the provisions of his contract a miner would need to escape the colony as well.29 This was demonstrated at Fort Rupert in 1850, when most of the imported Lanarkshire colliers abandoned the post and made their way south to San Francisco.30 Likewise, in 1851 a small goldrush in the Queen Charlotte Islands created “much excitement among the labouring classes” of Vancouver Island and lured away some of the earliest mining town settlers.31 Early goldrushes that panned out prematurely – including a brief outbreak at Fort Colvile in what is now Washington State – were a cause of much fruitless movement, prompting one despairing colonial official to remark in 1854 that “the desertions and departures from the Island during the past three years have been as many as the arrivals.”32 The situation did not improve quickly. The next year saw at least eight miners (out of a total European mines workforce of fewer than a hundred) flee to the goldfields of California following an industrial dispute at Nanaimo.33 Around that time two more miners absconded, owing the company store £12 between them.34 Pursued, apprehended, and returned in irons, the men were nonetheless worth more to the company as active miners than as idle prisoners: they were freed and put to work (albeit usually at lower rates of pay under renegotiated contracts).35 In 1858 and in the 1860s the Fraser River and Cariboo goldrushes enticed a portion of the colliery workforce, although exact numbers are

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impossible to determine.36 In a survey in 1867 of the state of the colony, Governor Frederick Seymour took a pessimistic view. Despite the growing coal industry, the rich fisheries, plentiful supplies of indigenous fruit, extraordinarily high wages for domestic servants of either sex, and the government’s road-clearing programs, which offered seasonal employment, Seymour found that out-migration from Vancouver Island persisted at a high rate.37 Eleven years later it was the turn of the Chinese miners to abandon Nanaimo for prospective gold-diggings at Alberni. Finally, at the turn of the century the Klondike played its part in depleting the colliery labour force – by about fifty men.38 Although the numbers involved in these departures were sometimes small, the loss of miners was perceived as significant to the colonial economy. The difficulties of attracting and retaining labour could, however, be mitigated. As well as drawing away experienced colliers, the goldrushes introduced some skilled and semiskilled miners to the region.39 Furthermore, great increases in immigration from Britain and China after 1870 redressed much of the loss in personnel. A positive footing was established in the decade that followed, and during the 1880s and 1890s there was never again a net loss of mineworkers. Nonetheless, in an industry so highly dependent on labour inputs, regular out-migration of even as little as 5 percent per annum could not have been beneficial for growth. James Dunsmuir’s persistent efforts to recruit skilled miners from Britain and Appalachia suggests that the losses his workforce suffered in the last decade of the century had observable consequences for output and profits. Management could not afford to be sanguine about out-migration.

o cc u pati o n a l c h an g e The exit that a miner might make, however, could take other forms. He might decide that instead of leaving the single-industry town, he would take advantage of connections he had already established locally, abandon pitwork, and become an entrepreneur. Or he might attempt to satisfy that ubiquitous miners’ dream of returning to the land, tilling the soil rather than burrowing beneath it. Although the vast majority of men and women on the coalfield in the nineteenth century had migrated tremendous distances to get to Vancouver Island, few were content with a life of mining. Many colliers – perhaps all – sought out alternatives to work in the pits. Sociologists have long toyed with the meanings of mobility within one generation (intragenerational mobility) and across two or more generations (intergenerational mobility), focussing on the impact of occupational change over time on social beliefs and values. One historian

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has observed that “Sociologists have been fascinated by social mobility virtually from the outset,” but that their emphasis has been on the construction of social categories, something from which historians have become increasingly alienated.40 More lately, historians of labour have turned to social mobility questions to measure the permeability or solidity of boundaries between social classes. In brief, if mobility out of the working-class was weak, then a degree of cohesion could be assumed. A more demographically cohesive working class was likely to develop a working-class consciousness and, thereafter, working-classbased politics. “Demographic class formation” does not prove the existence of class consciousness, but it does illustrate the extent to which class consciousness was enabled or disabled by available alternative occupational identities.41 Measuring social or occupational mobility – not implicitly the same things – presents methodological difficulties. Census enumerators’ manuscripts provide the researcher with a decennial glimpse at perhaps only partly defined occupational identities; marriage records are a oneoff source that may or may not reflect accurately the overall occupational reality of the bride, groom, and their respective parents; women in particular are ill-served by all of these sources, their own occupations often reduced to “spinster” or something similarly unhelpful. Nevertheless, by combining groups of sources like these, one may test their relative merits and assess the extent to which individuals were likely to move beyond the occupational categories they inherited from their parents. Recent research in Britain reveals a working class that was extremely cohesive down to the 1890s. Social mobility from the working to the middle class was extremely rare, probably not rising much above 10 percent before 1900. As one study observes, “the odds against someone from a working-class home becoming a member of the established middle class were monumental, starting at more than 200 to one against for skilled workers’ sons, and extending by a factor of ten to more than 2,000 to one against among the unskilled.”42 Perhaps more importantly, before the end of the century, movement between the categories of skilled and unskilled workers was no better. So, while there was a working-class cohesion of one kind, opportunities for movement within the working class were limited, very likely encouraging sectoral loyalties while forestalling the development of a mature class consciousness. The experience of the British miners on Vancouver Island suggests very different trajectories. Historians have portrayed the British colliers in British Columbia as more or less monolithic and utterly steeped in the culture of mining. Moreover, their recruitment by employers and a state interested in obtaining a skilled industrial proletariat naturally reinforces the sense that

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it would be in that niche that they would remain. The fact that they did not do so is, therefore, significant. In the last century mining was strenuous and difficult work fraught with constant danger; in addition to spectacular underground disasters, the persistent hacking cough suffered by so many colliers was unmistakable evidence that the workplace brought about a gradual deterioration in health. These were reasons enough to explore occupational alternatives. Additionally, emigrant recruitment literature distributed in Britain near the end of the century that advertised the possibilities for intergenerational social mobility on Vancouver Island may have been responsible for raising expectations among first- and second-generation settlers. Indeed, a spokesman for the New Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company observed in 1903 that “the young generation are more desirous than in any other country I know of, to escape from manual employment.”43 So too were their elders. Pitwork was the means by which almost half the Vancouver Island miners would move themselves or their sons on to different occupations. The shortage of labour observed throughout most of the nineteenth century in the coalfield produced reasonably secure and lucrative wages for experienced miners whose main goal was to set up on a farm, in a small business, or in more artisanal labour. The colliers and their offspring explored many of the occupational alternatives open to them, transferring from one mine to another, prospecting on their own behalf, moving into agricultural pursuits, and even setting themselves up in business, taking advantage of the gaps they found in local industry and the provision of community amenities.44 By the same token colliers who found mining unremunerative or were casualties of seasonal fluctuations in employment also looked to other types of work in the area. That should not excuse them from this study: at the outset of this book it was argued that British miners abroad properly belong (in part at least) to British labour history; likewise British Columbian miners who moved into other occupations must not be casually dismissed from a history of the colonial colliers. Vancouver Island offered many and varied economic alternatives to mining, opportunities that were multiplying throughout the last third of the century as new natural resources were exploited. For example, whenever the coal industry expanded, so too did the little sawmills that produced pit-props. Population growth and a potentially high level of discretionary income among the miners also inflated demand for services that could not be provided by the colliery owners – services like boat-building, cheese-making, meat preparation, and baking, as well as laundries and boarding-houses. Into many of these activities moved colliers and members of their families. Examples abound.

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Alexander Hoggan was born in Scotland around 1829.45 In 1875 he and his Nova Scotian wife moved to Vancouver Island from Cape Breton Island along with six children, to whose number they soon added three more. Alexander was apparently drawn west by two brothers who appear on electoral rolls and in community directories from 1875 to 1900 as miners, merchants, publicans, and farmers in the Nanaimo area.46 This pair held farmland on Gabriola Island from the 1850s and even found the wherewithal to invest $200 each in the early development of the Union Coal Company.47 By 1890 Alexander Hoggan had evidently retired to the smaller island, where he too became a farmer. Two of his sons appeared on the voters’ list for 1894 (one as a butcher, the other as a trader), but by 1899 they had joined their aging father on Gabriola. A third remained a collier from 1880 to the end of the century and possibly beyond; at the age of 18, in 1894, a fourth son entered the electoral rolls as a miner as well and remained thus employed for the rest of the decade.48 At least two of the men in the Hoggan clan were caught up in the human tide that headed north in 1898 to the Klondike in yet another attempt to get rich quick.49 Another Scot, James Haggart, reached Vancouver Island via the United States. In 1882, no more than five years after he arrived in the colony with his family, Haggart became an underground manager in the mines. Sources for 1895 record his position as “mine foreman,” although for the rest of the century he is listed simply as a miner. His sons did somewhat better: two became machinists and, in the 1890s, two others took up carpentry and engineering.50 Positions of authority in the mines could be used as springboards for the advancement of relatives. Joseph Randle was born in England in 1830, as was his wife. In the late 1850s or early 1860s they arrived with one son in British Columbia, where they raised three more sons and three daughters. By about 1880 the eldest girl found work as a dressmaker (one of the few full-time jobs open to daughters of Vancouver Island colliers), a career she pursued until at least 1893. Randle’s second son found his calling as a tinsmith, the vocation of Joseph’s third son as well until 1894 when the younger British Columbian became a fireman in the pits of the vcmlc. In the same year Joseph junior was an overseer in the Nanaimo collieries. The improved fortunes of the younger Randles might have been a consequence of their father’s elevation in 1893 to the post of foreman in a Nanaimo mine.51 It must not be assumed that in all cases the benefits of intergenerational mobility among island miners were shared out equally among sons. One Welsh miner who appears to have left the mines in the early 1890s continued to be a labourer as he approached his seventieth birthday. His eldest son, born in England, became a teacher and a headmaster, although

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he too had worked as a collier in the late 1880s. The youngest son, also born in England, was still a coalminer in 1899, at the age of thirty-two, having made no noteworthy moves up the occupational ladder or even beyond the pitgates.52 Perhaps most representative of the general experience was the case of Scottish Unitarian collier Thomas Hardy. His two English-born sons became, respectively, an engineer and a clerk (then a butcher, then a teamster). The occupational mobility of the Hardys may not have been as outstanding as that of the Haggarts, but the intergenerational gravitation away from mining is unmistakable.53 Two extraordinary examples of vertical mobility can be used to indicate the ceiling beneath which improvements in social status in the coalfield normally occurred.54 In the 1860s Walter Akenhead, his wife Mary Ann, and their four children departed Newcastle-upon-Tyne for Nanaimo, taking the Cape Horn route. Walter and his two sons took up work in the collieries as miners, but by 1874 they had their own business at Wellington and were described as wholesale and retail dealers “in meat of all kinds.” Mary Ann and Walter opened a boarding house on the Wellington Road, sold it in 1876, and built another in Nanaimo. Before 1880 James, the eldest son, was running the family’s butcher shop on Victoria Crescent; in the meantime his brother purchased a transfer business. The amount of capital invested in these operations – individually and in total – was considerable. When fire consumed one of the boarding houses in 1878, Walter collected fifteen hundred dollars in insurance. Conflagrations notwithstanding, the family’s apparent good fortune continued, and by 1880 James was the owner of a steamship of sufficient calibre that the Royal Navy rented it for use around its Esquimalt dockyard.55 The most breathtaking case of vertical mobility on the coalfield was that of Robert Dunsmuir. The son of a coalmaster, Dunsmuir arrived at Fort Rupert from Ayrshire in 1851 as a mining engineer in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay Company.56 It has become part of the local folklore that his refusal to strike alongside other colliery workers in 1855 brought him a reward of a free miner’s licence and coal rights on a thousand acres north of Nanaimo.57 Whatever the trappings, the key details are that Dunsmuir discovered the thick Wellington seam west of Departure Bay in 1869 and laid the foundation for what was to become one of the most successful industrial empires in Canada, one that embraced coal, iron, steamships, and a railway. His elder son James also received some practical training in mine work, but he was to benefit from a superior education, much of it obtained in the eastern United States. It was, as well, James’ good fortune in 1889 to inherit much of Robert’s considerable wealth and the power that accompanied it. In 1900 James became premier of the province of British Columbia, a

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post he held for two years. In 1906 he received the further distinction of being appointed lieutenant-governor. The physical reminders left by this family – whose economic dynasty collapsed amid personal tragedies in the early twentieth century – attest to the position secured by the Dunsmuirs at the pinnacle of the province’s social pyramid: the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway, turreted Craigdarroch Castle overlooking Victoria, and Hatley Park, a stately seaside mansion near Esquimalt.58 Of course, the success of the Dunsmuirs was an exception to the general pattern. Robert Dunsmuir’s story was that of the local Carnegie, a Vancouver Island Comstock Baron with a slight headstart. There was little room for duplication. For most of the miners, occupational mobility was more usually horizontal. Of the 324 white miners who appear in the census enumerators’ books for 1880–81, 157 (48.5 percent) changed jobs at least once by 1900 while still in the coalfield. In 101 cases miners secured intragenerational mobility and 36 of these had male offspring who found work outside of the pits. There were an additional 27 cases of intergenerational mobility without intragenerational mobility. A preference was displayed for certain alternatives, most notably farming, although miners also became teamsters, barkeepers, machinists, clerks, police constables, tinsmiths, and sawmill workers/operators (table 22).59 One miner’s son found employment as a clerk sometime around 1892, and through the middle of the decade he appears on several registers as both a law clerk and a law student.60 Two other miners’ sons – both were miners themselves for some time – became school teachers. Against these cases must be placed the knowledge that a greater number of miners were not occupationally or socially mobile. Fully 45.6 percent of the colliers who appeared on the census rolls in 1880– 81 and who were still in the coalfield in 1899 had made no recorded occupational changes, and a further 14 percent returned to mining by the end of the century after attempting some other occupation. Occupational mobility on the Vancouver Island coalfield was seldom a continuous vertical progression. Each step up the social ladder was dogged by the possibility of a voluntary or involuntary return to minework. Samuel Mottishaw, for example, mined at Nanaimo for ten years from about 1884, farmed for a while in the region, then returned to mining.61 Still, miners were drawn by other occupations and two types – agriculture and small business – were especially attractive.62 For hundreds of years in Britain the mining of coal was a sideline of farming. Generations of colliers subscribed to the belief that cultivating the soil was the natural trajectory of any pitman with an option to exercise.63 British miners on Vancouver Island frequently enjoyed that

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Table 22 Intergenerational and Intragenerational Occupational Changes, Vancouver Census District, 1880–81 Cohort, 1877-99 New Occupations

Miners

Miners’ Sons

1

Blacksmith

1

3

Butcher

0

3

Carpenter

2

3

Clerk

3

1

Engineer

10

5

Farmer

30

9

Hotel-keeper

8

1

Journalist

0

1

Labourer

7

6

Machinist

0

1

Merchant

8

5

Mine foreman, etc.

7

1

Police constable

4

1

Printer

0

1

Sawmill hand

1

0

Teacher

0

2

Teamster

7

6

Tinsmith

0

1

Miscellaneous mining

8

1

Miscellaneous service

5

3

1 These figures include only miners’ sons still living at home with their parent(s) in the census year.

luxury. Two-dozen cases from the Nanaimo area, however, demonstrate that it was not consistently one-way mobility: miners-turnedfarmers very often returned to the pits, while others, like early arrival John Thompson, failed in business and took on lower-status labouring jobs.64 This ebb and flow may have stemmed from purely subjective factors, but because coal miners in the region earned wages that were high relative to those received elsewhere in the British Empire, straight economic considerations very likely played an important role. Nevertheless, the high costs of importing food from California and Oregon (especially before the development of the rich alluvial lands of the Fraser Valley) meant that farming could be approximately as profitable as – and easily healthier than – work underground. John and Jane Biggs, for example, were among the first arrivals from South Stafford-

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shire, and they were quick off the mark in their efforts to establish a successful family farm. Located across the harbour from the first Nanaimo coalpit, the Biggs cattle farm made a very comfortable living.65 There was, however, the basic problem of restricted agricultural potential in the known parts of the island colony. One descriptive work published in the 1860s painted a dismal picture, commenting specifically on the lightness of the soil and concluding that attempts at “successful competition” in Vancouver Island’s agricultural sector were “hopeless.”66 The main obstacle was the thick underbrush and Douglas fir of tremendous girth, which made clearing the land a Herculean task. This explains why aboriginal berry patches were coveted and, in many places, seized upon by the newcomers. An excellent example can be seen at North Cove on Thetis Island, where in 1891 Joseph Hunter, a Nanaimo-area coalminer, established a farm atop a former Cowichan village site, the only visible trace of which is now the extensive clam midden along the foreshore. What useful land there was came at a high price. Successive colonial administrations eschewed any free land grant or homesteading system for most of this period, arguing that high land costs could be used to regulate wages.67 Until 1884 Crown land was sold at about $1 per acre. Thereafter, a new provincial act raised the minimum sale price to $2.50 per acre. A homestead program was eventually deployed, but only between 1873 and 1879. Much of the most attractive land was granted to the Canadian Pacific Railway on the mainland and to the Dunsmuirs for the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway on Vancouver Island, erecting new obstacles to agricultural development in the 1870s and 1880s. Notwithstanding, land pre-emptions in the Nanaimo area under the ‘homestead’ system totalled 236 acres over six years, 141 preemptions being made in 1878 alone.68 The vcmlc’s five-acre “crofts” were, in part, a recognition of the appeal farming exercised over immigrants in the coalmining areas. Even in and around Wellington it was possible for ten miners in 1884–85 to claim title to 160 acres each.69 On the whole, however, viable and affordable land in the mining region remained elusive throughout the period under examination. A move into farming very often, therefore, necessitated a move out of the coaltowns. Social and geographic mobility thus became intertwined. In other sectors of the economy occupational mobility appears to have occurred most typically where the absence of a particular service demanded a response. Miners themselves noted the need for certain economic activities and were often prepared to fill the gap independently. Rapid growth in town populations and demand for a rudimentary service sector presented an opportunity for mining households. Old hands obtained jobs in the community as low-level public officials

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(for example, the Black Country miners who came out in the 1850s and later became police constables or the collier who was appointed Nanaimo’s chief of police in the 1890s).70 The first stagecoach to run regularly between Nanaimo and Wellington, for example, was established by a former miner. Many other colliers mitigated the worst effects of housing shortages by hosting boarders and opening rooming houses, some of which grew to be inns.71 For example, when James Dunsmuir herded his miners from Extension to Ladysmith at the turn of the century, one collier who found no available accommodations in the new company town built a boarding house.72 A similar response to the housing shortage throughout the last quarter of the century was registered by several miners. At least six of Nanaimo’s hotels – the Nanaimo, the Mount View, the Dew Drop Inn, the Oriental, the Central, and the Provincial – were at one time owned and operated by men who had previously been miners.73 Established to serve local demand and regional travellers, the hotel trade in Nanaimo benefited as well from the traffic northbound to the Stikine and Klondike gold fields. In one instance a Shetlander built a house on Haliburton Street, a part of which he subsequently turned into a store.74 This was by no means the only the case of a former miner moving into commerce. Laundresses, boardinghouse keepers, tobacconists, and confectioners – all these individuals executed tasks that the mining companies did not. The coal operators might provide some of the housing and perhaps a store, but they seldom established much else. The collapse of company monopolies in even these services was never long regretted by ambitious settlers. In Nanaimo in 1864, for example, the departure of the hbc crippled the existing company-store system, a sideline that the incoming Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company displayed little interest in resuscitating.75 Within the year there were six general stores in operation, two taverns, two bakeries, and two butcher shops.76 Later in the century the Dunsmuirs encountered similar manifestations of independent trade: despite the unmistakable authority the Dunsmuirs wielded in the larger economy, by 1897 Union/Cumberland boasted a “department store,” nine retail outlets, five service premises, four hotels, and two sawmills.77 Every time the mining frontier clawed its way into the forest the construction industry offered opportunities for miners to undertake some small amount of enterprise with an eye, perhaps, to something larger and more permanent. An ambitious example was the household headed in 1880–81 by Absolam Uren (a miner) but managed by his wife. At the age of 32, Anna Uren was still caring for a five-month-old, while her eldest had only just started school. As part of the family’s economic survival strategy, they took in five miners as lodgers, two of whom were widowers. A measure of the

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Urens’ financial security was the presence of two Chinese cooks, Lin Jim and Sing Fung, whose efforts were no doubt essential to the boarding house operation.78 Energetic defiance of socioeconomic boundaries was, indeed, endorsed by the miners’ unions. In their statement to the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration of 1885 the Nanaimo Lodge of the Knights of Labor contended that miners “should have had the chance, at least, of becoming ourselves employers of labour.”79 Some miners did have the opportunity to become employers above ground, never moreso than after the disasters of 1887 and 1888. Even underground, in the Dunsmuir pits at Wellington, Cumberland, and Extension, white hewers subcontracted some of the oncost work, becoming in essence employers of colliery labour.80 Because small-scale entrepreneurship – described by John Benson as “penny capitalism” – left few records, it is impossible to estimate how many miners augmented their incomes with private trade.81 As a consequence, it is also impossible to determine whether the miners who became shopkeepers experienced a gentle graduation into selfemployment or whether this transition was abrupt, sharply delimiting one career from the other. In any event, at least a dozen of the miners around Nanaimo in 1880–81 developed small businesses of some description before the end of the century. The movement of miners into small-scale capitalism has been observed elsewhere. On the gold mining frontier of Western Australia occupational mobility among the working-class was similarly broad, ranging from market gardening through hotel management.82 In the coalfields of Britain identical patterns of behaviour have been observed. Black-listed colliers and trade union activists occasionally turned to shopkeeping, if only until they could return to the mines. Still others capitalized on the groundwork laid by their wives, some of whom took in washing or boarders or set up a shop or pub in their homes.83 Occupational mobility has, in point of fact, an important gendered component. For the entrepreneurial spouse small business enterprises and farms were, as well, a hedge against widowhood, which miners’ wives in particular had cause to dread. Serious mining injuries, too, were something to be feared: Eliza Malpass, who was a child among the early Black Country cohort at Nanaimo, responded to the blinding of her collier husband by running her own business for twenty-five years and thereafter operating a farm at Comox.84 The second best way to avoid the risks entailed in marrying a pitworker, of course, was to get the mining husband into surface work of some description; the best way was to marry a surface worker. And this served as an avenue of upward social mobility for perhaps as many as half the miners’ daughters on the Vancouver Island coalfield.85 It did not do so,

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however, for the daughter of William Hoggan, whose marriage to William Sneddon ended cruelly with the explosion at Union Colliery in 1901, one day after the death of one of their four children.86 Blackcountryman Edwin Gough’s experience offers another angle. A mining accident in 1871 cost him a leg. His mining career over, in 1874 he opened the first Nanaimo Hotel with his wife, Elizabeth, and she continued to operate it after Edwin’s death the next year and until her own in 1899.87 Insurance funds and friendly societies were quite clearly inadequate to the terrible business of compensating such widows; owning one’s own shop or farm might have been a safer bet. The role of the family in achieving social mobility was vital. Over half the miners in the Nanaimo-Wellington area in 1880–81 resided in family units of one sort or another, and it was this body of workers who enjoyed the highest degree of occupational and social mobility. Of the 185 miners residing with their families in 1881, 80 (43.2 percent) secured some degree of intragenerational mobility, and there were a further 45 instances of intergenerational mobility. Among those 139 miners who did not live with families, only two dozen (17.3 percent) achieved any occupational mobility at all. Residential habits indicate further differences. Geographically mobile miners were most successful in terms of intragenerational mobility, while the more settled miners recorded higher levels of intergenerational mobility. These differences cannot be explained by a correlation between transience and bachelorhood. Out of a total of 196 transient miners in the cohort of 1880–81, 57 had families; of these, 36 miners (63.2 percent) changed jobs. By contrast, 44 residentially stable miners with families (52 percent of the cohort) achieved some occupational mobility themselves. Residentially mobile miners made their occupational progress by pursuing openings throughout the coalfield, while the residentially persistent miners achieved social mobility (for themselves or their children) by making a long-term commitment to one of the coalfield communities and taking advantage of such opportunities as arose in their immediate area. Intergenerational mobility was proportionately higher among nuclear families than among extended families but highest among nuclear families who were geographically stable. Over one-third of the residentially persistent nuclear families contain instances of occupational mobility among their children. One avenue for advancement that was frequently coupled to residential mobility was investment in land. When Joseph Bevilockway died in 1894 – less than a year after he retired from colliery work – he left a parcel of land in Nanaimo that subsequently sold for $2,000. A comparable sum was the legacy of Richard Brinn, a Welsh miner who built up a formidable family of daughters. In his sixties Brinn became a lighthousekeeper, but

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mining paid for his house and the land on which it stood. His widow and daughters inherited $2,050 between them in 1901.88 Gains were to be made by sinking down roots. Extended families had slightly different experiences. The three Bennie brothers, for example, resided and worked together at Nanaimo through the last quarter of the century. Around 1882 all three Scots moved to Cedar District to take up farming, presumably pooling their resources to obtain a single holding.89 In similar cases one member of a family would be placed on a farm or in a small business while his relative(s) continued working in the pits. Cedar District and Gabriola Island were sufficiently close to Nanaimo to permit a degree of commuting, even in the nineteenth century, and twenty-four cases are known of miners and their relatives who sought land on these fringes while other adult family members stayed behind in Nanaimo, working either in the mines or in jobs connected with the mining industry. By way of an example, Richard Haslam boarded in Nanaimo, where he was employed as a miner, but his weekends were spent on the family farm in Cedar.90 It may be the case that John and Jane Biggs’ dairy operations, described earlier, were sustained by their two sons, George and Harry, who earned their livings underground. The advantage held by extended families in this respect was that one or more adult males could tend to the early and least remunerative phases of farming while another continued to provide hard cash by labouring at the coalface. The circle was squared in five or six cases from the cohort of 1880–81, where an extended family member appeared to be running a store that retailed produce from the family farm. What explains these patterns and discrepancies? First, there is the structure of household incomes on Vancouver Island to consider. As seen in chapter 5, the widespread use of Chinese labour in the mines could have a substantial impact on the household wage of white mining families. Because mine owners made a point of replacing European boys with cheaper adult Asian labour, adult Caucasian miners were deprived of their family’s optimal economic potential and so had to consider other means of raising household income levels. In villages where Chinese labour was used extensively, boys looked to work outside of mining as a matter of course. There was great concern on the island in the last two decades of the century that one effect of Chinese labour in mines or on railways would be to reduce the appeal of these jobs; “the younger generation here seems ashamed to do the work that the Chinese do,” claimed one witness to a royal commission in 1885, while another complained (nearly twenty years later) that white youths were reluctant to perform labour that had come to be viewed “as only fit for an inferior race.”91 Partly because the mines of the vcmlc provided a

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small haven for the old British tradition of mining apprenticeships, families were more common and less transient at Nanaimo than at Wellington. Differences in occupational mobility measured against place of birth reveal that such movement occurred with much greater frequency in Scottish households than among those headed by English or Welsh miners. In part this could be explained by the earlier arrival of Ayrshire and Lanarkshire emigrants at Fort Rupert and Fort Nanaimo. These newcomers could take advantage of greater opportunities over the first twenty years of settlement in the colony. The Muir family, for example, arrived in 1849, left the Hudson’s Bay Company mine a year later under a cloud, and shortly thereafter opened a sawmill at Sooke. The success enjoyed by the Muirs in the lumber trade helped to secure a seat for John Muir Jr in the first House of Assembly on Vancouver Island from 1856 through much of 1857. Andrew Muir ended the same decade as sergeant-at-arms in the House in the 1850s, a far cry from bread, water, and iron manacles in the Fort Rupert bastion.92 Similarly, Samuel Gough, who arrived from England as a five year-old, worked in the mines for seventeen years before becoming city clerk, then city comptroller. Gough’s pioneer status in a community of pioneers may have been key to his rise.93 Scottish colliers also had the dazzling example of Robert Dunsmuir, an Ayrshireman who, luckily for them, at times showed a favourable prejudice towards his countrymen.94 Immigrant British miners could benefit from the fact that other local coal companies were managed by fellow nationals and the fact that the colonial administration too was positively disposed toward men from the Old Country, most notably in the early years of colonial development and defence.95 Conversely, there were factors that restrained mobility operating on British colliers across the region. Company housing – common in early Nanaimo and the rule at Dunsmuir towns throughout the century – and the extensive control that the companies exercised over nonindustrial land could limit opportunities for mine employees interested in, say, the construction of homes or the development of farms. Moreover, the very fact of living in company housing could be debilitating to working-class initiative. A miner whose only accommodation was fully or partially tied would have been unable to pursue full-time employment outside the mine without first sacrificing his home. Insofar as a large number of the colliers had families, the dislocation that a change of occupation would entail for dependents must be taken into account when the limits of social and occupational mobility are considered. David Bercuson has argued that Western Canadian coalmining towns at the turn of the century permitted little room for ambition.

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Company towns so rigorously centralized control over the supply of trade goods, housing, and other services that the kind of mobility that one could expect to find was only the modest shift from mine labourer to mine contractor.96 The isolation of many mining communities from sources of trade commodities further restricted mobility, making it difficult for sales-oriented penny capitalism to take root. This may have been the case in the mountain mining towns of the Kootenays and the Crowsnest Pass, but on Vancouver Island the authority exercised by the mine operators was mitigated by the relative proximity of Victoria and (later) Vancouver, as well as by the commercial links between Nanaimo and ports around the Pacific. There are instances on Vancouver Island of colliery owners (particularly the Dunsmuirs) attempting to reestablish the kind of control Bercuson describes, but even in these cases opportunities arose for some occupational experimentation. What was the significance of career changes and working-class capitalism in the coalfields of Vancouver Island? First, it is likely that without the opportunity to move from one occupation to another within the area, miners and their male progeny, in particular, would have been more itinerant as a class than they were already. Miners who turned to blacksmithing, to working as teamsters, carpenters, or general labourers – often associated directly with the mining industry – found a buffer against periods of slack employment and a means of continuing their family’s stay in towns like Nanaimo. Those who turned to innkeeping, shopkeeping, or running a boardinghouse were capitalizing on relatively high wages in mining and the speed at which the mining-town population outgrew company-sponsored amenities. Working-class capitalism, then, enhanced the economy while retaining a badly needed pool of labour. Second, small-scale entrepreneurialism and other kinds of occupational mobility blurred class boundaries. The miners who ran boardinghouses and inns and shops and market farms relied on the strength of a local economy that was, in turn, dependent on the coal trade and the continued profitability of mining in the region. It is difficult to imagine how miners who had become either full-time or casual capitalists could have completely resisted the lure of this equation. Did a change from straight wage labouring to entrepreneurialism or something in between dull the individual miner’s revolutionary fervour or lead to a less militant working-class?97 Conclusive evidence is impossible to distill, but election results for the period certainly suggest that miners and former miners took a moderate-to-conservative position. Once miners had established themselves in alternative sectors of the economy, their support of even “labourist” movements diminished. As miners moved into employer-status positions – as penny capitalists or

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as mine officials – the cutting edge of radical or class-oriented perceptions of the polity would be dulled. Recruitment of a petite bourgeoisie out of the working class thus became a means of alleviating the shortage of services while effectively undermining the dynamic of proletarian struggle. Nonetheless, it is important to recall first principles: mobility – geographic or occupational – was a working-class response to exploitation in the mines and mining towns. While it is impossible to measure clearly workers’ appreciation of trade union or political appeals, it is possible to indicate many of those occasions on which miners and their families acted.

conclusion What these occupational strategies reveal is that miners’ identities as miners were fluid, temporary, and negotiable but something that the miners themselves were engaged in fashioning. As a study of mining towns in West Virginia argues, “These may have been communities created entirely for the purpose of extracting coal, but the inhabitants clearly did not have a fixed definition of themselves as coalminers.”98 Most strikingly, there was a degree of social mobility in the Nanaimo and Wellington areas that rewarded some of those British miners who travelled to Vancouver Island in search of more than high incomes. Miners who were residentially stable and had the income security derived from a large family with more than one adult male member stood a good chance of improving their occupations or at least leaving behind work in the pit under their own terms. Here, as in Ontario and elsewhere, “the race was invariably won by those who stayed put.”99 The peculiarities of the Vancouver Island coalfield (specifically its isolation in the North Pacific and the unusual multiracial complexion of the labour force) had an important effect on the local white working class. They adopted strategies that would enable them to weather economic fluctuations and that made vertical mobility more feasible. In this context of the economic tactics of household and family we can see that the individual miners who abandoned the pitwork they had come such a great distance to perform were more home-made than self-made. Culturally, as well, they were active agents in their own making as the first British Columbian working class, a process explored in the next chapter.

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8 Building a Culture

Life in a colliery town consisted of more than squandering one’s youth in the belly of the earth. Although it was nigh to impossible to escape the reminders of the colliery – the pithead towers, the slag heaps, the dirty e&n coal cars, the masts of ships loading in the harbour, the men with their skin tattooed blue from mine dust, the women cursing blackened washing on exposed clothes lines, the colliery official-cum-politician on the hustings – nonetheless, refuge was sought in alternative activities. The colliery population found ways of entertaining itself beyond the pitgates through formal and informal means. Churches rapidly sprang up around Nanaimo and Wellington, as did institutions devoted to learning. Likewise clubs and fraternities of one kind or another enjoyed a lively following. Holidays were proclaimed arbitrarily by the miners, so that they could mount racing spectacles on Fridays or recover from weekend excesses on Monday morning. Sports and drink, church and chapel, music hall and Saint Monday were a part of the culture of the colliery on Vancouver Island. The miners’ pastimes were many and varied, ranging from the frivolous to the austere, from unabashed fun to sober self-improvement. Sometimes, much like strike action, these interests and arenas announced conflicting aspirations. It is in their complexities and ambiguous meanings that these activities are considered in this chapter. Insofar as culturalization begins at an early age, the place of institutional education is examined here as well, both as an experience shared by the bulk of the miners’ children and as a location of social and cultural change, one that was routinely monitored and modified by the state but within which children and their families were also actors.1

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A third aspect of cultural construction in a colonial setting is also explored in this chapter: mortality. Historians of labour have long recognized the severity of conditions under which miners have worked, but few have approached death beyond its statistical expression. Studies in Britain point to the growth of fraternal societies as a hedge against a miner’s early grave, but the extent to which high workplace mortality rates stimulated industrial organization and racial tension has not been widely acknowledged.2 How did this play out on Vancouver Island? A survey of the incidence and character of mining community mortalities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century – focusing on miners’ experience of omnipresent death and their response to it – highlights how British cultural baggage was powerfully conceptualized and “recalibrated” in British Columbia. Rites and rituals, public displays of mourning, and various memorializations are examined for signs of a common cultural response to premature mortality.3

leisure time and drink The issue of recreation in the social history of working-class communities demonstrates the extent to which leisure time and its uses were hotly contested in the industrializing years. As one historian of the Welsh working class puts it, “the concept of leisure was twin to the concept of work which had developed in the wake of the industrial revolution.”4 Just as industrial work contained elements of conflict between employers who sought its reorganization along lines that favoured profits and workers who sought to preserve their control over the workplace, “leisure” was also envisioned in contradictory ways. In both Britain and Canada the struggle between the gentlemanly “amateurs” and the proletarian “players” or “professionals” in sports has been well documented. The disputed ground of this dichotomy was the question of whose rules and whose values should dominate various games: deferential team play vs individualistic self-gratification. In Britain the literature points to efforts on the part of employers to eradicate unacceptable activities (public drunkenness, cockfighting, and other animal-baiting sports) and to replace them with morally sanctioned games, packaged holidays, and uplifting hobbies that, collectively, were known as “rational recreation.” The vehicles for accomplishing this agenda for social regeneration included organized religion and mass education. In Canada, especially in the East, comparable debates occurred and similar attempts to institute social controls on leisure were made, with mixed results.5 It has even been argued that relatively high fertility rates in mining communities were, in essence, the flip-side of limited “alternative pleasures.”6 In short, the terrain of “leisure time”

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was seeded with conflicts and consequences. Understanding the nonwork activities of miners and their families, therefore, depends on much more than a catalogue of ballgames and church bazaars. Just the same, the breadth of recreational interests among this community of British coalminers is remarkable, as is their active engagement in giving “culture” form. Many of these interests were not welcomed by mine owners. Opportunities for sanctioned and unsanctioned work stoppages on holidays were ample in the warmer months. Those holidays that had a public aspect very often received support in the form of cash donations from the local mine operators. The Queen’s birthday was celebrated first in 1856 and every year thereafter, perhaps in part filling the gap left by the decline of Whitsuntide.7 Somewhat later, Dominion Day and Independence Day were both added to the schedule of boisterous holidays on the coalfield.8 Dominion Day was first celebrated in 1867, which hints at the growing influence of “Canadians” on the coalfield and in the still unconfederated colony as a whole. Thanksgiving was also marked each year, sometimes twice: in October, following the Canadian calendar, and again in November, on the customary American date. Labour Day, too, appeared for the first time in 1890.9 Ethnic holidays, like the Welsh Saint David’s Day, were celebrated as open, public events, as was the feminized version of May Day.10 Likewise, work often stopped on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Treason. Guy Fawkes Night was, in fact, first recalled on the island in 1856, as “the inhabitants amused themselves with bonfires, firing guns & c.”11 Nonetheless, this was tame stuff compared with the licentiousness of the fifth of November in any number of English agrarian and industrial villages in the late nineteenth century.12 There were, as well, unofficial holidays, or “voluntary work stoppages,” most of which were rued by the mine operators. Saint, or Blue, Monday – usually taken the Monday after being paid – was a fragment of a British working-class custom that had come under siege in many English coalfields at mid-century but that was able to survive in British Columbia somewhat longer.13 It is possible that the long-standing association between Nanaimo and the Black Country, where Saint Monday traditions remained strong and violent longest in England, explains the persistence of the custom on Vancouver Island. Certainly, support seems to have been great for celebrations that reaffirmed not only the Imperial connection but also the personal and cultural link with a remote homeland. Festivals and holidays were typically an excuse to indulge in one of the most popular social activities in the mining towns: drinking. A succession of taverns appeared in Nanaimo during the 1850s, and by 1862

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the village could boast of one hotel and two taverns. At least eight additional outlets for liquor sales opened within ten years.14 A pub crawl northward along Haliburton Street around 1880 could take an ambitious drinker into the Columbus Hotel, the Dew Drop Inn, the Balmoral, the Identical, the Queen’s, the Black Diamond, the Grand, the Oriental/Britannia, the Nanaimo Saloon, the Royal Hotel, the Commercial Miners’ Exchange, the Old Flag Inn, the Lotus Inn, the Palace Hotel, the Vendôme, the Wilson, Shades, the Windsor, the Globe, and the Newcastle Inn.15 There were still more watering-holes only slightly further afield, and the roads north and south of Nanaimo were liberally supplied with taverns, half-way, and even quarter-way houses.16 Liquor could also be obtained from sources other than taverns. The legitimate end of the trade was dominated by Victoria, which was home to no fewer than four breweries and two distilleries in 1870, but by 1886 Nanaimo had three breweries of its own, as well as a cigar factory.17 Predictably, drunkenness and the trade in liquor came under heavy fire. As early as 1853 the colonial administration was troubled by the popularity of establishments that sold alcohol. James Douglas hoped to impress his Hudson’s Bay Company superiors in London with the seriousness of the situation. He reported that “We have … imposed a heavy License Duty on Inns, Beer and Ale Houses, a measure fiercely opposed by the whole body of Publicans and other blood suckers who are preying upon the vitals of the Colony, exhausting it of its wealth, and making a return of poisonous drinks ruinous to the morals of the Country, and the prolific source of poverty and crime.” The governor proposed a tax on retail and wholesale licences that, in the absence of excise or custom duties, would “at least take from the tippler a part of the means devoted to intemperance and that part will be applied to the substantial improvement of the Country, and to counteract in some measure the influence of his evil example.”18 The chief factor’s successors were never so directly involved in the curtailment of drinking, not least because some had an “inordinate craving” for liquor themselves.19 And as the century wore on, Nanaimo became something of a boozer’s oasis. Over nearly fifty years the trend was mainly towards more drinking establishments and more drunks. There remained different estimates of the magnitude of the problem. One of the town’s sheriffs was dismissive, claiming that only paydays produced unacceptable levels of public inebriation; otherwise, he said, complaints of disorderly conduct were rare. On the other hand, at one coalfield inn there were said to be nineteen deaths over about thirty months from “excessive drinking.”20 Intemperance may have been both effect and cause of domestic hardship in Britain, where, it was alleged, working people spent

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as much as one-fifth of household income on alcohol.21 It is not possible, however, to say what effect the use of alcohol had on domestic living standards in the colonial coalfield or what its implications were for domestic violence, although evidence abounds of excesses and reformminded Nanaimoites. The forces assembled against drink included employer and union, church and state. The local pastors spoke with a single voice on the subject of demon rum. Cornelius Bryant, one of the earliest preachers on the coalfield and a native of Brierley Hill, campaigned against the evils of drink among the Hul’qumi’num, delivering blistering sermons in the Chinook jargon. For Bryant the crying need for outright prohibition had overwhelmed the individualistic alternative of temperance by the 1850s. Only by banning drink altogether could the community be spared the various costs of alcohol abuse. To that end Bryant founded the Total Abstinence Society at Nanaimo.22 The battle was easily begun, though not so readily won. In his diary in 1878 Bryant was still making caustic entries: “Buried a poor man named Edwd Thompson: said to be from Northampton, Eng. & a reputed hard drinker. Buried at the expense of the city! What an argument for Prohibition!”23 Presbyterians and Methodists were especially rigorous in their attempts to cleanse their respective ranks of any such contaminants. In 1895, for example, the newly established Haliburton Street Methodist Church in Nanaimo came down hard on two of its members who were found to be insufficiently temperate. “Brother Biggs & Brother Dawson” faced “charges … for using liquors as a beverage” and an investigative committee was established to verify the allegations.24 The tone of these denunciations seems even more severe than was the case contemporaneously in Britain, and with good reason. The appalling state of affairs in the aboriginal community was apparent to anyone who cared to look, and it was clear that alcohol had bought a full measure of grief. The charge of supplying liquor to the local First Nations carried stiff court fines, though some miners took the risk in order to bring in a little extra cash.25 The problem of alcohol abuse among the native population was compounded by the dilution of whiskey and rum with potentially lethal fluids. At the best of times the liquor sold to native communities up and down the coast was only laced with water. On other occasions it had been “thinned” with substances as noxious as creosote and sulfuric acid.26 Even in its most authentic form, whiskey was bound to have a lethal impact on peoples decimated by smallpox, dislocated from their ancestral settlements, and alienated from their resources, their livelihoods, and their spirituality. Small wonder that the coalfield clergy and their white congregations kept the issue of prohibition ablaze while it flickered in the Old Country.27

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Typically, employers were also active in the crusade against drink. The vcmlc was said to take a dim view through most of these years of drunkenness on and off the job, and it was claimed that “habitual drinkers who lost time at work were dismissed.”28 Dunsmuir and Diggle complained to the inspector of mines in 1880 that the proximity to their payhouse of a licensed liquor saloon – only about 240 feet from the South Wellington mine pithead – inevitably undermined their efforts to keep their workforce sober. No doubt the nearness of the pub to the pay office meant that wages were quickly sidetracked into the hands of the publican, who before the arrival of Dunsmuir and Diggle had owned the mine as well.29 This kind of situation would have been familiar to many colliers in Britain during the early and midcentury.30 The miners themselves took some part in these campaigns. Recognizing that public drunkenness was inconsistent with the cause of the respectable working class, some advocated temperance and good behaviour as a trade union policy as early as 1883.31 Even more adamant in their devotion to temperance was the Ancient Order of Foresters, one of the leading voluntary associations in the region during the 1880s and 1890s, whose concern stemmed mostly from rising premiums and payouts. To reduce the volume and size of claims, the aof stipulated that applicants for insurance had to swear an oath of abstinence. The vcmlc manager, Mark Bate, was on the local aof executive, and clearly, it was in the interest of both the employer and the actuarial association to reduce workplace risks associated with the use of alcohol.32 The fervour of liquor reformers on the coalfield was an exception to the provincial pattern. Elsewhere, but especially in Victoria, New Westminster, and the Cariboo, promoderation Anglicans were more numerous than the combined total of dry Methodists and Presbyterians, who were strongest on the coalfield. In the successful Dominion-wide prohibition referendum of 1898 British Columbia posted the most lacklustre results in the country. The flaccid show of support for temperance might also be explained by the economic dynamism of the liquor trade in British Columbia. There was precious little regulation of either the manufacturers or the retailers. Saloons could stay open continuously, and they did so; consequently, per capita consumption of alcoholic beverages in the “west beyond the west” ran at twice the national average in the 1890s.33 Although the cause of prohibition enjoyed a credible following from the 1860s, going teatotal was anxiously avoided by many, especially the island miners. Drinking was an almost universal avocation in these very male communities, and the British miners had come from a tradition that mixed both recreational and ritualistic drinking with pitwork.

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Not only was payday incomplete without a visit to one or more saloons, work beneath the surface was punctuated with toasts to a new seam, to a job well done, and so on. And in parts of Britain, “beer was reckoned … to be essential to the work and good health of the miner, and in Staffordshire was provided … for men and boys alike.”34 In some respects these customs had received at least tacit endorsation by employers: hard drink was part of the regulation ration allotted to hbc employees in their indentures, and Robert Dunsmuir (to say nothing of his dipsomaniacal son Alexander) had a well-known and oft-observed taste for rum.35 It should be noted as well, that taverns very often served a far more complex social function than simply the point-of-sale for alcohol: as a site where hiring for various kinds of jobs took place, where entertainments of all kinds occurred, and where a room might be hired or some charity solicited, the saloon was unique in the Victorian urban landscape.36 Equally crucial to understanding workingmen’s response to attacks on drinking was the dream, nurtured by more than a few colliers in these years, of retiring from pitwork to take up the role of innkeeper. Enthusiasm for temperance on the part of the pitmanturned-publican was unquestionably muted.37 The situation in Britain during these years was in many ways analogous. At the midcentury roughly half of the more than one hundred shops in the mining town of Coatbridge offered spirits of one kind or another.38 Opening hours were not nearly so liberal as they were in the colony, but there were plenty of opportunities for drinking that did not involve a visit to the local alehouse.39 Nonetheless, these establishments were increasingly the target of the temperance and prohibition movements. To some extent the reformers in both hemispheres had misjudged their sinners. Miners welcomed a pint at the end of a shift for the most obvious of reasons: they were parched. Temperatures underground could be terrifically high; and the deeper the pit, the hotter the work. Breathing in dust and grime for eight, ten, twelve hours a day only made matters worse. Once on the surface, miners could choose to slake their thirst with water of uncertain quality, relatively expensive tea or coffee, or with alcoholic beverages – free of contaminants, warm or cool according to taste, affordable, and consumed in convivial circumstances.40 Once urban water provision improved and the prices of alternatives to liquor were reduced, a change in drinking habits was noticeable in British colliery villages. Other factors diminishing the miners’ appetite for alcohol included better housing, the intervention of employers, and a decline in leisure activities in which drinking was an integral part. The miners themselves were increasingly eager to obliterate the widely held perception that they were unable “to enjoy

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themselves except in pubs.” In British colliery towns the temperance agitators were swimming with the tide from the midcentury on.41 While elements among the miners on Vancouver Island were likeminded, still more were not.

respectability and religion Beyond prohibition and temperance, further attempts were made to elevate the moral stature of the miners, most notably by secular authorities but also by the miners themselves. What is noteworthy in this respect is the way in which miners responded to appeals to “respectability.” The Nanaimo Mechanics’ Literary Institute was the first and longestlasting of secular efforts at the improvement of the working class. Established by the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company, it was located in the company’s offices from 1862 to 1864. Funds were subsequently raised, land was donated by the company, and a new structure was built to house the institute in 1866, although the connection with the vcmlc persisted for many years.42 The directors’ tastes in reading materials betrayed their intellectual prejudices as well as their imperial connections: although thirteen journals were on order from Britain (including Blackwood’s and Punch) the institute subscribed to only five items published in North America, of which three were printed on Vancouver Island and one at New Westminster. The institute, like its counterparts in Britain, may have been conceived as a vehicle for asserting a moral agenda, but its success was far from complete. The institute became the social hub of Nanaimo, it is true, but less for its library than for its more plebeian programs, including concerts, theatrical productions, and all-night balls. The Nanaimo Amateur Minstrel Troupe had a repertoire that extended to “plantation sketches and farces, and trapeze performances,” and they often shared the institute’s stage with Swiss bell-ringers, conjurers, and on at least one occasion, a “singing comic blacksmith.” These vaudevillians were symbolic of the extent to which at least a part of the local working-class community had hijacked the ascetic project of the Literary Institute.43 By the 1870s the Mechanics’ Hall had fallen prey to music hall. Democratic entertainments plainly appealed to the miners to a greater extent than a plodding moral agenda. Yet although the arid aspects of the Nanaimo Literary Institute foundered for many years, the Wellington Debating Society easily established itself as “a complete success,” a “great deal of interest” being indicated by “the miners and others employed at and around the Wellington colliery.”44 What the wds lacked in facilities and resources it amply made up for with intellectual verve and an agenda that was dominated by the miners’ interests.

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More influential and socially pervasive than either the Literary Institute or the Debating Society were the various friendly societies and benevolent associations to which the miners belonged. These clubs sprang up in every mining town from Nanaimo to Comox. The Masons, Good Templars, and the Oddfellows had their own halls, occasionally letting them out for the use of the Ancient Order of Foresters, the Ancient Order of United Workmen, and similar fraternities.45 The Oddfellows and the aof were the largest such groups in Britain by 1870, and they quickly sunk roots on Vancouver Island. One of the earliest Black Country miners in the colony, Elijah Ganner, was instrumental in founding a Foresters’ lodge at Nanaimo. By 1894 the aof had three juvenile branches and two for women, in addition to eight mainstream all-male “courts.”46 During the last thirty years of the century these organizations provided British Columbian workers with insurance against premature death, against widowhood, against temporary unemployment, and against a pauper’s grave (see below);47 they also provided an outlet for social activities, including picnics, sports competitions, concerts, and dances.48 Despite the very maleness of most of these associations, what gave them their principal meaning was female concerns. Widowhood was a common enough occurrence (as was orphanhood), and the friendly societies existed largely to mitigate the financial trauma of suddenly losing the household breadwinner. It must be admitted that this took place within a cultural language of female dependence and male economic dominance, but that presumes the presence of couples and families. Far from being a frontier of single men, this was a biologically active colony whose cultural institutions reflected demographic needs. The spiritual needs – or demands – of the British colliers gave rise to another area of cultural conflict and compromise. In 1854 the Colonial Office instructed Governor Douglas to ascertain whether the “inhabitants” of the mining camp at Nanaimo would prefer an Anglican churchman or one from another denomination.49 In the event, the Methodists and Anglicans were the first off their marks, hastily erecting chapels in town and on the Indian Reserve.50 Despite the construction of more churches, worship was often conducted outside conventional church walls. The Reverend Bryant, for example, was still taking his Methodist prayer meetings into the homes of his mining flock in 1878.51 Nevertheless, the absence of a church structure could spell real difficulties for the less fortunate denominations. The Reverend Edward White, a Methodist whose church was an early landmark in Nanaimo, made a practice of meeting the ships from Victoria with an eye to recruiting parishioners into his flock. White’s efforts to nab the newcomers as they stepped off the boat met with positive results.

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Even life-long Presbyterians remarked that the Methodist’s ardour was enough to make them change denominations at least for the time being. The fact that there was no Presbyterian pastor and that the Scottish church building was therefore closed was no doubt a material consideration.52 Still, there was a remarkable amount of intermingling of denominations, a phenomenon perhaps best explained by a popular Presbyterian minister in 1889, who said to an approving Wesleyan audience that he “came to Nanaimo to fight the devil and could not therefore afford to fight the Methodists.”53 Over the last twenty years of the century the people of Nanaimo and their neighbours were drawn primarily to three Protestant faiths in remarkably even numbers. Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, and Methodism together commanded the support of the majority of declared communicants; Catholicism, by contrast, never enjoyed more than half the patronage afforded the Anglican Church alone. What was more exceptional was the singular presence of Methodists.54 More than in any other British Columbian region the forces of Wesleyan nonconformity boasted a high profile in the mining towns. This was to be expected. In England and Wales Methodism could be described as the creed of miners.55 The same was not precisely true on Vancouver Island, but the allegiance of colliers to the church of John Wesley was conspicuous. With more than twenty-two hundred seats in its coalfield churches by 1901, the Methodists fell only slightly behind the Presbyterians, despite having fewer wealthy patrons.56 The early Nanaimo Methodists were overwhelmingly British miners and their kin. This was both the strength and the weakness of the sect locally. The mobility of some of the mining population could work against building a stable congregation.57 Nanaimo’s Wesleyan Methodist Church, for example, was financially jolted in 1863 when five of its members “removed during the Quarter.” This precariousness persisted for at least another fifteen years. As in Britain, the early capital costs of establishing a chapel might be met by a benefactor, but the day-to-day, Sabbath-to-Sabbath operating budget was a cross borne by the congregation of miners, their families, and their neighbours.58 Extended periods of slack employment and, of course, strikes could have a formidable impact on church accounts. This was the case in 1877, when a dispute at Nanaimo and a colliery accident meant that the Wesleyans were unable to meet some of their debts. More serious over the longterm was the church board’s relationship with the mining community as a whole. By all appearances the board had slipped out of the hands of the miners by the late 1880s. At that time the board decided not to offer more than moral support to the miners and families affected by the explosions of 1887 and 1888 at Nanaimo and Wellington.59

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The Presbyterians followed a different trajectory. Although the congregation included many miners, wage earners were consistently less well represented on the board governing the presbytery than was the case in the Methodist Church. This may have been a reflection of the Dunsmuirs’ strong Presbyterian convictions, their activism in the church, and the influence these prosperous Scots predictably had on a dependent local institution of this kind. Certainly the board was keen to indicate with some precision that although the manse was available for rent at ten dollars per month when a minister was unavailable, under no circumstances was it to be “used as a bording [sic] house for those working among coal.”60 One impression is, then, that institutional religion on the coalfield was a top-down affair in which the miners were believed to be as much in need of moral improvement as the First Nations population. The fact that coalfield Methodists regularly knelt to pray alongside Anglicans and that Presbyterians found the company of Wesleyans salubrious may point to a reduction in conflict between Protestants in the colony. This in itself was no small feat. Back in Britain, mining towns were the scene of serious interdenominational tensions between even the nonconformist faiths. Mitigating friction between Protestants and Catholics, however, was a different matter. On the island, rivalries between the two were most fierce in the area of missionary work among the natives, but much of the animosity spilled over into nonnative parochial duties. “Romanized Heathens” may have been the bane of Protestant clergy working among the Hul’qumi’num and the Kwakwaka’wakw, but the missionaries were hardly less suspicious of the white Catholic population in the rapidly expanding mining towns.61 Nonetheless, bridges were built across denominations by the settlers themselves, the clearest measure of which was denominational exogamy in marriage. In the census of 1880–81 there are thirty-three cases of couples (with children) in and around Nanaimo whose declared religious affiliations were not identical. Of these, seven cases involved Catholics marrying non-Catholics. These were not isolated cases, as table 23 indicates. The fact of religious tolerance among the miningtown population is difficult to deny, although it was no doubt due in part to demographic constraints rather than to a theological forbearance. What is perhaps most striking is the fact that in about one-third of these exogamous marriages the children followed the paternal creed, while the majority followed their mother’s faith. Spiritual reproduction, it would appear, was the responsibility primarily of women, although the role played by the fathers should not be discounted. Sectarian divisions might be one indication of churchly influences, but what of the spiritual message delivered to these miners? What was it,

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Table 23 Marriages Recorded in the Nanaimo Area, 1874–99 Partners’ Denomination Year

Same

Different

1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1899

3 7 8 7 2 10 14 11 18 13 11 19 16 35 22 52 75 57 55 43 34 35 38

3 5 8 5 6 9 7 7 15 15 11 14 15 23 12 25 26 26 25 32 21 23 31

Source: bc Sessional Papers, 1876–1900, passim.

and what were its consequences? The goals of Methodism in Britain evolved over the century, and these changes were reflected on Vancouver Island. The “world-rejecting ethic” that fuelled abstinence (as distinct from temperance) was certainly there, probably more so than in England; but there was also a growing interest among Wesleyans in worldly activities like team sports, music, and other respectable entertainments. Less proscriptive at the end of the nineteenth century than it had been at the start, Methodism built its local following around a community-oriented chapel, one that was at least as disposed to picnics

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as to prohibition.62 Did this mean that the chapel led the community, or the reverse? It is difficult to say conclusively. What is certain is that Methodism, like labour organizations, friendly societies, and the family, was changing throughout this period through a combination of influences, some originating overseas, others sprouting from the gritty mud of the island coalfield. The same was true of the other faiths. No doubt all denominations had to contend as well with “the late Victorian crisis of plausibility,” much of which was rooted in the negative experiences of industrial exploitation.63 A hint of that ambivalence can be found in a poem written by an island coalfield poet in the early 1880s: To be diligent on guard, And with care keep watch and ward, Traces next, a human soul, Harnessed to a car of coal; Fast a miner, bold and brave, Kin to Christ, but Mammon’s slave.64

Equally important to note here is that British miners and their families elevated their churches in the colony to a commanding role in the provision of stimulation and relaxation and that the intellectual/moral conflict between the grog shops and the prohibitionists reflected starkly the primacy of two activities (worship and drinking) in a frontier setting. The saloon held out forgetfulness and camaraderie; the church – especially the Methodist church – offered a different kind of fellowship, salvation in the next life and material improvement through “respectability” in this one.65

th e m i n ers at p lay Other interests and activities ought not be ignored. Familiar British sports were introduced by English miners in the 1860s, if not earlier. The employers were generally supportive of team sports, and an early map of Nanaimo shows a permanent cricket oval laid out by the vcmlc to the southwest of town.66 In 1865 the Douglas Pit XI played the Town XI as part of the Queen’s birthday celebrations; afterwards a banquet was hosted by the Nanaimo United Cricket Club at the Royal Hotel.67 (By contrast, only “fragmentary evidence” exists of cricket clubs in Northumberland in the mid-1860s.)68 Gradually, baseball made inroads on the coalfield, and the cricket oval rang less frequently to the sound of leather on willow, more often to horsehide on ash. Football (i.e., soccer) enjoyed its initial burst of popularity in

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symphony with rising British working-class interest in the game at home: Blackburn Olympic’s winning goal over the Old Etonians in 1883 was, evidently, a shot heard ‘round the world.69 And throughout the prewar era, touring British soccer teams often made a stop at Nanaimo where they played before large crowds.70 James Hawthornthwaite, later to gain notoriety as a labour politician, honed his organizational skills by setting up a local English football team to challenge Victoria. The squad included one “all-England” player, a pair of experienced Scots, a county-level player from Devonshire, and “two or three from well known teams in Britain.”71 It has been alleged that mine operators in Durham recruited footballers to work for the company to enhance the performance of the house team; Hawthornthwaite’s exploits suggest similar practices on Vancouver Island.72 Other games were played with comparable vigour and attracted equally substantial followings. The Nanaimo Rugby f.c. was established in 1888, and although comprised largely of nonminers, they attracted “fully three thousand spectators” to their first match against Victoria.73 Quoits (the standard game of Northumberland miners) and bowling were also regular features of sports days and weekend competitions, all of which provided an opportunity for the sparsely settled mining communities to interact socially.74 Pigeon-racing is also recorded as a popular hobby, as was gardening and, late in the century, bicycling.75 Like most English and Scottish pitmen, the Vancouver Island colliers particularly relished gambling. Competitions of any kind were the focus of attention in summer fêtes. From 1856, public holidays featured footraces along the main streets in Nanaimo, for which prize money of twenty-five dollars – easily more than a week’s wage in the mine – was to be had. The same stakes were offered in canoe races and shooting matches. Mule races were inaugurated in the late 1860s, along with wheelbarrow races and various “highland game” sports. Horse races came a little later, and the stakes for competitors rose dramatically to as much as five hundred dollars in 1888. This was enough to draw contenders and gamblers from as far afield as Portland, Oregon.76 Noncompetitive physical recreations, of which there was an abundance, were largely associated with the outdoors. Fishing, canoeing, and rowing were popular diversions, not surprising given the maritime situation of the coalfield and the functional utility of obtaining extra food from the sea and nearby lakes. For the same reason, prudent parents – usually mothers – took the precaution of teaching their children to swim at an early age.77 Similarly, hiking, hunting, and mountain climbing were extremely popular leisure activities in a community that abutted the forest and hills and that was deficient in many urban sophistications.78

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Attempts to “civilize” life on the colonial coalfield occurred from an early date. The Nanaimo Philharmonic Society was established in the first decade of settlement.79 The 1870s witnessed an explosion of interest in musical recreations, marked most significantly by the construction of an opera house.80 In the same decade, the Nanaimo Concert Band was created, and although it was dominated by the colliery company’s management, it did contain a few miners.81 Instruments were purchased from Boosy & Sons of London, England, on the strength of a £300 gift from an unnamed benefactor (although the presence of vcmlc manager Mark Bate among the organizers suggests the likely source).82 The Nanaimo Silver Cornet Band, as it became known in 1889, was comprised of players who received their tuition more or less on the spot from the Reverend James Reynard, a former York Minster choirmaster. The brass band performed locally at picnics and on the Queen’s birthday, but it was also hired out to play gigs as far afield as New Westminster.83 What unites these sporting and other recreational activities is their remarkable class context. In Britain in the same period most leisure time activities were coming more and more under the control of the middle classes. As one study describes the situation, most football club directors “were top-hatted not flat-capped – small employers, wholesalers and retailers, publicans and hoteliers.” The same might be said for the ownership of music halls. On Vancouver Island what stands out is the degree to which these entertainments existed outside the control of the middle-classes or the state. In Britain gambling – including horse-racing – was a marginal activity in the sense that it was widely practised by working people despite middle-class opprobrium. It existed because it presented opportunities for quick gain: “a well-placed wager offered hope of temporary relief from the debt-credit cycle of most working-class budgets.”84 The difficulties of getting by on workers’ wages only increased the appeal of wagering. In the same way, Nanaimo area miners supported a culture of gambling, but they also took control from the outset of their sports and other pastimes. Local travel offered another source of relief from the spartan frontier life on the coalfield. Even though it lacked a pleasure pier, Victoria was something of a summertime resort “filled with tourists,” some of whom were colonial coalminers.85 The Gulf Islands were also popular as retreats. To all these destinations the miners had regular access by means of weekly and twice-weekly boat lines. And in a few cases the miners thought so much of their holiday islands that they did not return to the coalfields when their vacations concluded (see chapter 7). One thing that was shared by all the British immigrants to Vancouver Island before 1886 and by many who followed thereafter was the sea

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passage to Nanaimo. Even from the United States, the most likely route to the coalfields was by steamer out of San Francisco harbour. The annual Queen Victoria Day boat excursions from Nanaimo have to be situated in that particular context. On board any shipload of daytrippers in the 1880s or even the 1890s, there might not be a single adult who had not experienced an ocean voyage. This alone would set them apart from the stay-at-homes back in Britain. And it would also join the islanders together. The daytrip was a re-enactment of a kind of their passage to Western Canada, a reminder that they had shared in an adventure that was, by the standards of any century, remarkable.

british settlers and british columbian cultures Not all the recreational opportunities open to the British miners came directly out of their immigrant cultural baggage. Vancouver Island offered many novel distractions, some of which were seized upon by the earliest immigrants. At Fort Rupert the Lanarkshire miners and their families were at first horrified and outraged by their Kwakwaka’wakw neighbours, who, in turn, regarded the Scots with curiousity, contempt, and suspicion.86 But the local Kwakiutl numbered about ten thousand and the whites only a few dozen: the Scots could not afford to remain snobbishly aloof. After a few months at the fort the Scots were glad of native company. On a fine April weekend in 1850, Alexander Muir and a number of his comrades went canoeing with a few of the Kwakiutl, enjoyed lengthy chats (presumably conducted with plenty of hand gestures), and then – on a Sunday, no less – visited a number of the Kwakiutl “camps”. For a group so militant in its observance of the Sabbath, the miners and their families seem to have been happy enough to include in a day of worship the hospitality of “pagan” friends. This easy rapport soon extended to gifts from the Kwakiutl of blankets and furs to compensate for allegedly stolen property.87 But the miners more than anything else needed food to augment the paltry rations provided by the company. The Scots purchased deer and salmon from the Kwakiutl, although this raised the ire of the hbc’s officials, who cited the company’s monopoly in trade.88 Relations with the Northwest Coast peoples were thereafter less favourable. The hbc’s trademark bastion at Nanaimo still stands as silent testimony to the vulnerability felt by the nonnative community. Fear of an attack, principally from the Haida, prompted the establishment in 1861 of a volunteer rifle corp, which was followed in 1866 by a volunteer militia, in both of which British miners served.89 Increasingly, European culture and aboriginal culture were coming into con-

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flict. At Nanaimo miners and their neighbours (whites and Asians alike) repeatedly allowed their pigs and goats to range freely, a liberty that they took to the detriment of Hul’qumi’num crops. According to the Nanaimo Gazette in 1865, “The Indians have lost nearly all their winter stock by [the hogs’] depredations.”90 While the settlers’ livestock undermined Sne ney mux self-sufficiency, missionaries and an ethnocentrism borne of the British Empire’s successes gnawed away at aboriginal culture. On Vancouver Island the primary interest of the clergy of all the key denominations was the saving of aboriginal souls.91 At Nanaimo the Sne ney mux were served by a string of missionaries, each of whom carved out a name for themselves on the Northwest Coast. When the young Scottish botanist, Robert Brown, visited Nanaimo in 1864, he hoped to hire native guides and packers but found (to his disgust) that the ministrations of Methodists had already made the natives “too pious to work on Sunday.”92 Face-to-face contacts between native peoples and British miners continued to occur and to inform attitudes on both sides of the racial divide. Marital relations between Nanaimo’s British men and local aboriginal women were virtually inevitable. Not only was the white population heavily male, the impact of exotic diseases and intertribal warfare on the Kwakwaka’wakw and Hul’qumi’num had ruptured indigenous demographics.93 To some extent, therefore, there was a complimentary pattern that encouraged interracial marriages until the 1870s, by which time white tolerance of intermarriage was in decline. Nonetheless, interracial marriage was a common enough phenomenon on the coalfield.94 The practice of taking native wives was not extensive among the British colliers, nor was it likely to be, given the hostility of the local press and clergy. These were dangerous liaisons, fraught with peril for European and Aboriginal alike. In the eyes of the editor of the Gazette, “intermarriage” was a grave social sin, one that cried out for interdiction: “In the first place I look upon this evil as one in which the white man is invariably lowered in the social scale – becoming in manner and habits almost on a par with the people of his sensual and ignorant companion; while the only ‘benefit’ she receives by the connection is to be found in the facility by which she can obtain whiskey.”95 The weight of community opprobrium fell mostly on the white partners in these unions, as their moral fibre was expected to be more robust. The case of the Papley brothers, two local settlers, is illuminating. In Joseph’s many letters home to Stromness, news of Alexander and his mestizo daughter was lovingly transmitted, but he never mentioned his brother’s native wife.96 Joseph’s lack of gallantry was par for the course. Rightly or wrongly, race, morality, and alcohol abuse were fused inseparably together as issues commanding the attention of

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newspapermen and ministers of the gospel on Vancouver Island for the rest of the century, and these perceptions and prejudices inevitably affected the colliery population as well. Whatever else it may have had to offer, Vancouver Island could hardly match the Old Country for sizable market towns, let alone big cities. The colliers of Brierley Hill, after all, could make the trek to Dudley or even to Wolverhampton for diversion; in the closing years of the century seaside resorts like Blackpool, with their theatres and bright lights, were accessible to northern miners; and games like rugby, football, and cricket were on the rise as favourite spectator sports for a whole class of workers. On the face of it, Nanaimo’s pitmen had nothing comparable.97 Or was it enough that Nanaimo presented “little of that sooty, opaque appearance, either physical or moral, so common to the colliery villages of England”?98 What is clear is that the cultural forms that were transplanted and those that grew directly out of the island soil were problematized contemporaneously. Perhaps this was nowhere more evident than in the history of schooling on the coalfield.

schooling and miners’ children One aspect of the Nanaimo area’s demography was a relatively large number of children from the outset.99 Their economic potential has already been discussed, but their needs – as identified by adults – have not. The state, the mine owners, and the mining-town households had different priorities and expectations for children. These agendas and understandings of “childhood” were manifested in the development of public schooling on the coalfield. Demands for educational facilities of some kind were made almost immediately in 1850, when the first miners arrived at the Hudson’s Bay Company fort. And the colonial administration at the time, which was virtually indistinguishable from the mine-owning hbc administration on the coast, saw to it that the educational needs of its employees were served.100 The provision of schools during the Crown colony phase of Vancouver Island’s history was differentiated according to socioeconomic class. In Victoria promising facilities and educators were established for the offspring of the better-off hbc employees, the local landed gentry, and colonial officials; the children of “the labouring and poorer classes,” to use Governor James Douglas’ description, would receive their education under dissimilar circumstances in specially equipped and designated schools.101 This was all well and good in Victoria, where the social structure was sufficiently complex to permit such segregation, but Nanaimo and its environs were almost monolithically industrial. As a consequence the mining town received only one

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kind of colonial school: the inferior kind where facilities, expectations, and curriculum were second-rate. The first school was built by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1853 for, as Douglas put it,”the instruction of the children of the lower classes.“102 When it opened, Nanaimo’s school had twenty-nine pupils, making the mining town the mass schooling capital of Vancouver Island, edging out Victoria and Maple Bay, with twenty-six pupils each.103 Subsequent school expansions shadowed development in the mining industry: there was hardly a new mine opening from 1855 to 1900 that did not presage the construction of another schoolhouse. By 1900 there were 57 schools in the coalfield district with a total of 91 rooms, 80 teachers, and 2,845 students.104 Although some of the nineteenth-century educational facilities in the region were devoted to the assault on First Nations’ culture, a far greater effort went into the reproduction of industrial labour. The task of educating the colonial young was not automatically a monopoly of secular authority. An additional school was built in 1862 at Nanaimo by the Episcopalian/Anglican Church, partly in response to the aggressive presence of Methodism in the district and in the classroom.105 The Anglicans discovered, to their dismay, that there was no hope of state support for their educational venture. There certainly was no guarantee that the colonial administration would have favoured the Anglicans to the exclusion of other denominations anyway. Indeed, in 1861 Bishop Hills saw virtue in keeping his Anglican schools at arm’s length from the colonial treasury. The colonial administration formally endorsed nondenominational education in the Common School Act of 1865, a position that was forcefully and colourfully reaffirmed by Governor Frederick Seymour two years later in a statement to the Legislative Council.106 Seymour asserted his belief that the community was one where complete toleration in religious opinion exists. It is not therefore, under these circumstances, for the State and its Salaried Officers to interfere with the belief of any one … It is vain to say that there are certain elementary matters in which all Christians, leaving out the Jews, must agree. It is merely calling upon a man picked up at random, allured by a trifling salary, to do what the whole religious wisdom, feeling, and affection of the world has not yet done. The paring down of all excrescences which a man on a hundred and fifty pounds a year may think disfigure the several religions, and then reducing them to a common standard, becomes a sort of Methodism which may locally be named after the School master who performs it.107

Threatening to withhold all funding to schools in which one denominational view was taught to the exclusion of any others, Seymour

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effectively neutralized the conflicts that raged between Anglicans and Methodists in British colliery villages at midcentury. Outside of Sunday schools, education on this coalfield would be a purely secular matter, although this carried with it the burden of the predominant Protestant ideologies. The first legislation dealing with education was passed by Victoria in 1865, and by Confederation the province had “the most centralized school system on record.”108 Although the first school at Nanaimo appeared after Douglas surveyed the wishes of “the miners and other married servants of the Company on the subject of opening an elementary school for their children,” there is little evidence of continuing enthusiasm among the mining households for education.109 Indeed, there are reasons to think that the miners and their families became increasingly alienated from the whole idea of schooling. Before 1865 and from 1869 to 1872 public education, however much it was funded by Victoria, generally carried with it some kind of user fee. These costs, however, were repeatedly and successfully avoided by the local miners. In 1860 attempts by the hbc to recoup £150 annually for a teacher’s salary failed miserably: the company could drum up no more than five shillings from the beneficiaries of its largesse.110 Settler disinterest can also be seen over the longer term in low enrolments and in high rates of truancy. In 1869 only 26 children between the ages of 5 and 15 years were enrolled in the Nanaimo school, out of a cohort population of 142.111 In 1875–76 nearly two-thirds of the school-age children were still not enrolled.112 In the same year mandatory school attendance legislation was introduced that covered 7- to 12-year-olds, but although some improvement in enrolments can be detected, the problem of school avoidance was far from resolved. More than 17 percent of the miners who had school-age children at home in 1881 indicated to the census enumerator that their children were working; nearly two-thirds of the English miners had at least one school-age child who should have been in school but who was either at work or simply was not enrolled.113 Whether regarded as an educational policy or as a means of restricting child labour, the mandatory enrolment legislation was far from comprehensively effective.114 Even for those who were enrolled, attendance was something of a hitand-miss affair. In January 1862, when the Nanaimo Colonial School contained 35 students (most of them miners’ daughters and sons) not one attended on all of the 22 school days in the month. The average attendance was only 14 days. Robert Dunsmuir, who had not yet become the local industrial colossus, had two sons in the school: they were absent for 8 and 6 days respectively.115 The superintendent of education reported that from 1874–75 to 1900 daily average attendance climbed no

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higher than 73 percent. The situation was even worse at Wellington and Union, where truancy rates ran as high as 57.5 percent.116 And while time-work discipline was expected of their coalmining fathers, these children found the goal of punctuality elusive. John Jessop, the province’s first superintendent of education, visited in 1872; to his disappointment, he discovered the children “dropping in throughout the day until 26 had arrived.”117 Ten years later Nanaimo’s students held the provincial record for the highest incidence of tardiness. There are many reasons why public schooling was apparently an unexciting prospect for miners and their offspring, of which four will be described here. First, the syllabus was singularly untailored to a mining community. In 1861, before Seymour’s intervention, only nine students were enrolled in the three rs, and another trio was reading grammar, geography, and history, while “about 30” pupils were recorded in “Scriptures.” By 1879 junior division history included Rome to the end of the Second Punic War.118 Through the 1870s, thanks in part to rigid nondenominationalism, there was an increasing concentration on numerical sciences, variously described and distinguished as arithmetic, bookkeeping, mensuration, algebra, and Euclid. These curricula were not devised with a mining community in mind (or, for that matter, with any other occupational group in mind). In economically diverse communities elsewhere in the province one might expect a similarly diverse response from the clientele, but in an economically monolithic mining district there was a greater likelihood of a common rejection. In any event, teaching techniques largely depended on what materials were available. In 1872 Jessop found”a large class not far enough advanced for Third Reader” obliged to make use of a more advanced text.119 Making do with scant resources was typical of the educational system on the coalfield. Second, facilities were regularly portrayed in terms like “ruinous,” and they were no doubt unattractive, if not inadequate. Jessop thought that the Nanaimo schoolroom was “of the worst possible description.”120 Five schools were constructed in Nanaimo alone during this period, but that frenzy of building should not be mistaken for qualitative progress: despite low enrolments and difficulties with truancies, overcrowding became a problem. At the turn of the century Nanaimo’s graded classrooms saw an average crowd of 51 pupils each day, a small mercy given that actual enrolments were a staggering 76 per room. What is more, the Nanaimo High School was served in 1901 by two teachers whose task it was to run no fewer than 31 classes.121 This was stretching human resources to their limits, if not beyond.122 A third repellent aspect of local education might have been the corporal punishment meted out in these schools. About one boy in two

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received some kind of beating at Nanaimo in 1883–84, slightly fewer at Wellington in 1886–87.123 If the superintendent’s reports are reliable in this respect, these were two extraordinarily nasty years, but physical violence was registered in almost every year as part of the teaching record. How much discipline went unrecorded and unremarked is impossible to calculate. Corporal punishment may have been a common practice in the nineteenth century, but no doubt the children in the Wellington classrooms would have regarded that as cold comfort. A more likely explanation for persistent truancy levels and the seeming lack of interest with which miners’ children viewed school had to do with minework and the income of mining families. In the late 1870s – and evidence suggests for more than thirty years thereafter – boys on Vancouver Island had a role to play in the labour market that was more remunerative than education. “The teachers evidently work faithfully,” wrote the provincial superintendent of education, “but are hindered in their good work by local peculiarities from which the majority of schools in the Province are exempt.” As in most mining communities, miners’ sons, in particular, were being “withdrawn from school at a much earlier age than they ought to be.”124 Opportunities for employment in the mines and in related industries (such as pit-prop making, freighting, work along the docks, and so on) remained a potent lure away from the classroom, right through the 1890s. One American sociological study of education and working-class households suggests that “immediate family need sometimes outweighed considerations about an individual child’s future benefits from schooling.”125 Population growth around Nanaimo and a potentially high level of discretionary income among the miners inflated demand for services that could not be provided by the colliery owner. Into many of these activities moved colliers and their offspring alike. Nevertheless, the main extramural attraction for boys was work underground. It was customary in most contemporary British mines for boys to follow their fathers, older brothers, or uncles underground to begin their careers as pitworkers at an early age. As was the case in Nova Scotia, “the advantages of alternatives [to work] such as schooling were not apparent” to mining families in British Columbia. The miners were unconvinced that schooling was a sufficient substitute for the knowledge their boys would acquire in the pits, nor was it likely to be as gainful. A measure of this was the extent to which “under-age” boys were hustled into the mines by their fathers. Like the superintendent of schools, the superintendent of mines was overworked and underfunded: unable to be everywhere at once, the mines inspector frequently acknowledged that the child-labour laws simply could not be enforced.126 Thus a profitable option to schooling remained open to the miners’ households.

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Girls, too, experienced the effects of this quandary over the real, palpable benefits of formal education. Girls were underenrolled and outnumbered 2 to 1 in the classroom in 1861 and continued thereafter to be underrepresented, though not by such enormous proportions.127 The census manuscripts reveal school-age girls at home, helping with laundries, small shops, boarders, and so on. Would schooling interfere with a girl’s contribution to the family economy? The Nanaimo Free Press thought so in 1874. The Press feared that educated girls too frequently grew up to be “fine ladies” who would regard the honourable task of the “help-mate” as “so much objectionable drudgery.”128 It was not until the 1890s that girls’ enrolments in Nanaimo schools caught up with and then crept slightly past that of boys, proportionately and in real terms. This was a measure of both increased opportunities for boys in the workforce and increased popular support for girls’ schooling. The president of the Miners’ and Mine Labourers’ Protective Association, for one, regarded his ability to “give my little girl education” as one of the pre-eminent tests of his standard of living.129 The equation of education with advantages for girls – and boys – is a complex one; nonetheless, there appears to have been a series of socioeconomic correlations. As Asian-exclusion legislation began to bite in the mining sector, positions opened for boys underground. Thereafter, as the number of boys in schools fell, the numbers of Chinese men in service activities grew in almost direct proportion. Increased Asian engagement in many paying tasks otherwise claimed by females had a negative effect on the economic niche of girls and young women and thus added points to the future-benefits column in favour of girls’ schooling. Asian exclusion laws, therefore, had consequences for white school children as well as for adult Chinese mineworkers. In not every case were youths of mining families simply choosing wage labour over book learning. Other factors intervened as well. Labour disputes and mine accidents, for example, disrupted children’s schooling, forcing them prematurely into the workforce. The temporary loss of the breadwinner’s source of income during a strike would have necessitated bringing all able-bodied wage-earners in a household into what was left of the labour market. Strikes, too, often involved evictions of miners and their families from company-held housing. Homelessness, however temporary, could only worsen the uncertainty of education for colliers’ children. What was more likely to remain open and reliably available to all students was what remained of nonsecular education in colliery villages: Sunday schools. These conduits for education were widely subscribed to in both Britain and the British colony. In 1857 James Douglas directed Nanaimo’s newly appointed teacher, a Methodist, to

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hold church services and to conduct a Sunday school, “which he … cheerfully agreed to do.”130 It was another two years before the first Sunday school on Vancouver Island opened, but by the turn of the century the Nanaimo-area Methodists and Presbyterians had established twenty that ministered to more than fifteen hundred Sunday “scholars.”131 The popularity of these institutions arose not least because minework halted on the Sabbath, and there was, therefore, no wage labour option at stake.132 Unfortunately, the quality of education provided at Sunday schools was suspect, to say nothing of the substance of what was taught. Frederick Engels caustically characterized the British specimens as “mere shams, the teachers worthless,” and it is not hard to imagine the same of the Sunday schools on Vancouver Island.133 Certainly, the physical poverty of the day schools was matched by that of the Sabbatarian facilities. Notwithstanding the calibre of instructors or church buildings, one would have to contend with the lowered attentiveness of boys whose small bodies had laboured long hours during the preceding six days.134 The enrolments may have appeared healthy, but there is nothing to suggest that the educational value of Sunday schools was more than marginal. The question remains of what might be called, in Gramscian shorthand, the motivations of the bourgeois sponsors of education in the coaltowns. Did they have it in mind that by funding schools and similar institutions, they could contribute to the rearing of a more passive, loyal, and nonradical workforce? That had certainly been the situation in British coalfields in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Lord Durham was the owner of a complex of coal mines in his home county and a paternalist who articulated the goals of schooling in industrializing England: “encourage amongst your fellow workmen, habits of industry, sobriety, and religion – above all, give education to your children, and make them sensible of the evils of ignorance and the blessings of knowledge.”135 One historian has described the mining town schools in Northumberland and Durham as “conscious agents of social control,” intellectually and physically beholden to the munificence of the employer, who, typically, built his schools as “squat lieutenants to the colliery winding gear which stood above them.”136 Similarly, Bruce Curtis’ study of Canada West highlights the centralization of control over schooling in the hands of the emergent state, a process that limited local input into what schooling – in the broadest sense – might encompass.137 Did the Vancouver Island mine owners and the colonial/ provincial administrations see in the schools a way to kill with kindness the miners’ penchant for industrial disputes? Did formal education’s mandate include the inculcation of deferential social attitudes? “Education,” according to one British writer, “did not exist in history

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as an immanent form or idea.”138 In its invention (or reinvention) on Vancouver Island, what were its objectives? As already indicated, the very first initiative in education in this colonial coalfield was taken by the governor, who claimed to be responding to local demand. It must be pointed out that Douglas was in a schoolbuilding mood in the 1850s and so was inclined to provide Nanaimo with some facility, regardless of the miners’ wishes. Initially, he claimed his concern was for children “who have been much neglected and are growing up in ignorance of their duties as Christians and as men.”139 The foremost oligarch in Vancouver Island society, Douglas had very clear ideas about what those “duties” entailed. It was with similar character-building ambitions that mine owners on the island endorsed public schooling and, in doing so, copied their counterparts in England. Invariably the concerns articulated by private or government officials focused on raising what they regarded as the moral turpitude of their British, American, and Canadian miners. (The Chinese and the Indians were, of course, considered to be nearly irredeemable.) The mine owners sustained not only early secular schools and Sunday schools for children but also the adult-education oriented Literary Institute described earlier. Illiterate miners were a liability below ground where warnings were signposted, and some attempt had to be made to remedy that problem. In addition, the development of mechanized and progressively automated production methods made even a little education necessary.140 Accusations that the Chinese workforce represented a danger in the mines (however wrongheaded) invariably turned on the fact that few of the Asian miners could read warning signs written in English, and they were considered incapable of running machinery, for much the same reason. Uneducated white miners were, naturally, no better. In Britain during the 1840s this argument had been developed and examined repeatedly, always with the same conclusion: a literate workforce improved pit safety.141 And, one must add, improved pit safety enhanced the profit margin. In every instance of public-schooling development from Douglas through to the end of the century, the impression is strong that these were educational efforts driven for the most part by the ambitions of elites and not the mining population. The latter, it must be recalled, valued skills earned in the workplace more highly than literacy. For the children of the early British Columbian coalfield, the history of education reveals evidence of top-heavy management, but it is also suggestive of working-class adaptation to changing circumstances. It was, in short, a complex area in which the working population sought security and improvement through seemingly contradictory strategies, although some consistencies are evident. Most of the British miners in

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the coalfield were enticed out to Vancouver Island by the promise of high wages, and many evidently believed that those rates of pay could be maximized by involving their sons in work below the surface of the earth. As the number of Chinese miners deployed in and around the mines grew, employment alternatives for young boys diminished. Consequently many mining households attempted to insulate themselves from seasonal and occasional unemployment by developing family farms or miners’ crofts. In those cases boys turned to the land as a means of assisting their families. Indeed, the most common occupational destination of miners’ sons who did not become miners themselves was farming. It became clear in the 1880s and 1890s, however, that a growing local economy, with an increasing demand for services, provided new options for local lads. A little education in this coalfield could go a long way.142 The vast majority of miners’ sons, however, went into mining and most began that process at a young age; likewise the majority of miners’ daughters at Nanaimo, Wellington, and Ladysmith married the pitbound sons of colliers. For these young people and for their parents, schooling was not a necessity and perhaps not even desirable. Colonial efforts to eradicate “the evils of ignorance,” to use Durham’s phrase, regularly fell afoul of the requirements of the local economy.143 It should be noted as well that the advent of effective compulsory education laws elsewhere has been viewed by some historians as intensifying the demarcation between men’s paid labour and women’s confinement to social reproduction. Where schooling was mandatory, women’s supervision of children – who could not, perforce, be supervised in a workplace – became more customary. Given the porous nature of the education laws on nineteenth-century Vancouver Island, one might conclude the contrary: that coalfield mothers with boys in the mines had more time to pursue (possibly remunerative) activities outside of parenting.144 National comparisons suggest other insights. The literature on education history in Canada has placed an emphasis on the role played by intellectual leaders and groups in urbanizing areas, despite the preponderance of rural dwellers.145 Chad Gaffield explains this, in part, by allowing that city-based educational reformers of the mid–nineteenth century were following the lead established in American and British cities, responding to initiatives that were consistent with the industrializing world they saw around themselves; they were, in short, “anticipating the future” as well as reacting to the present.146 The West Coast experience offers two responses to the model described and critiqued by Gaffield. First, it occurred within a town-cum-city environment in a colony/province in which farm life was the exception, not the rule. In the late 1870s the district was de-

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scribed by the local schoolmaster as a “poor apology for an Agricultural country.” In its entirety, he wrote, it “would not make a fair sized milk ranch in California.”147 Unlike the mining communities of Nova Scotia, these were not industrial blisters on an older agricultural landscape: they were purpose-built towns, created in the first flush of West Coast settlement. There was, therefore, no pre-existing agrarian tradition on which to build. Nor was there a farming population enduring economic dislocation of any kind. Nor, finally, was there a worn urban environment in which schooling, along with manufacturing, provided alternative means for alleviating lower-class hardships. The present to which coalfield schools were a response was one of isolated towns joined together by sea lanes, not country lanes. Second, the educational traditions most resonant on the coalfield originated in an explicit British colonial context (the lines of authority between London and Victoria were much more direct than those between London and York/ Toronto) and, insofar as the British miners’ concerns had an impact, were influenced by what was the norm in British colliery towns; their genesis was thus quite distinct from schooling in the Ontario farm belt. Gaffield suggests that less-well-off Ontarian families sought to guarantee their children’s “economic competency” by sending them to school; moreover, he contends that Ontarian farm women saw in education a means of retaining offspring who would care for an aging, widowed parent. On Vancouver Island less-well-off boys were destined to work in the mines and so would arguably gain little from an education beyond basic literacy; as well, high incidences of remarriage at all ages for miners’ widows obviated to some extent the force of safety-net strategies involving their children. In and around early Nanaimo the public schooling experiment failed to capture the public’s imagination. It failed because “the concept of family economy fully endured for a large segment of the population,” just as it endured in large Eastern Canadian urban environments such as Montreal.148 On the West Coast the poor showing made by mass schooling was yet another consequence of a staple economy in which jobs outside resource extraction were few and far between. Changes in attitudes towards education came gradually, but at the end of the nineteenth century the needs of the frontier family economy took precedent. This is evident in the history of schooling on the coalfield, but it can be seen as well in the experience of death.

community mortality Far from being the healthy, open frontier of myth, Canada’s Far West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed mortality

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rates that led the nation. Outstanding among environmental factors producing relatively high mortality rates in the province of British Columbia was the workplace. Dependence on resource extraction enterprises – logging, fishing, mining – placed a large population of workers in decidedly hazardous situations on a daily basis. British Columbia’s coal miners suffered dangerous and often lethal working conditions, as did colliers everywhere. “In the whole British Empire,” wrote Frederick Engels, “there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as in this one. The coal-mine is the scene of a multitude of the most terrifying calamities.”149 What Engels accurately observed in the United Kingdom in 1844 was no less true on Vancouver Island even sixty years later: roof falls, explosions, flooding, and poisonous gases, especially, took their toll on large numbers of British, Finnish, Chinese, American, and Nova Scotian miners beneath Nanaimo. Out of a workforce that never greatly exceeded 2,900 before the First World War, about 326 men died underground between 1879 and 1909 on Vancouver Island.150 This was a daily concern, one that could become a quiet obsession with powerlessness and fate. As one study of coalfield women in the United States observed, “The miners’ wives … could do little to make their husbands safer, and their helplessness created anxiety and worry. It was the miners’ wife … who waited at home for a spouse to return. [T]he men faced the dangers every day but … it was the women who ‘carried the mine in them.›151 Sickness born of coaldust, the damp and other insalubrious aspects of the working environment also took its toll. In the United Kingdom the Friendly Societies Act of 1875 defined old age as fifty plus; Engels said of coalminers, however, that “it is universally recognized that such workers enter upon old age at forty.” Even in the early twentieth century, an Alberta doctor’s report into the death of a forty-seven-year-old Crowsnest Pass collier could conclude that “A man of his years, so long working in the mine, a very slight shock would kill him.”152 Worn down by their work and vulnerable to infections of all kinds, colliers faced high probabilities of dying while still relatively young.153 The incidence of fatal illnesses on the Vancouver Island coalfield without doubt points to miners’ occupationally related weaknesses. The most-feared ailments were associated with lung diseases, particularly tuberculosis and bronchial pneumonia.154 Between the two they claimed more than half the lives lost in and around Nanaimo, according to the Dominion census of 1901.155 Tuberculosis was in retreat throughout Britain in the same period due, it is claimed, to improved living standards and public health provisions.156 But on Vancouver Island the presence of a vulnerable native population was a factor in driving up the frequency of tb, as were conditions in the collieries.

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Many played-out miners from the Nanaimo area found their way to sanatoria in the interior of the province, where most finally succumbed to their illnesses. This was, in fact, a case of exporting death statistics: things in Nanaimo were actually worse than the official records on tb suggest. There were other significant and often fatal illnesses that beset the coalfield.157 What made British Columbia’s population unusual by Canadian standards was the presence of large numbers of young adult males. By rights, this cohort should have influenced the overall mortality figures in a positive way, because a larger than usual proportion of the population was in the prime of life.158 As one version of the caricature has it, “settlers usually were healthy, they ate good, uncontaminated food; they breathed unpolluted air; and they had plenty of good exercise.”159 However, accidental deaths associated with the workplace were much more common in the first quarter of the twentieth century than they are today, and these tended to affect mostly young men.160 A youthful population thus did not necessarily preclude a high rate of deaths. Industrial society on the coalmining frontier promised high wages and bad odds in a lottery of early death.

responses to mortality The social impact of these mortality rates and the character of death is elusive. Nonetheless, tantalizing clues to the settler society’s response to abbreviated life expectancy and untimely demise can be found. If an ostensibly favourable age distribution did not produce lower levels of mortality, the youthfulness of the British Columbian settler generation created distinctive experiences of death. For one thing, the young and atomistic qualities of the frontier population guaranteed that many a British Columbian man would go to his grave unmourned. Having exchanged the Atlantic Rim for the Pacific Rim, miners did not always have the opportunity to construct from scratch a network of friends and family before being obliterated underground. In addition, the surplus of males meant that few had immediate families in the region who would share in their passing. The establishment of the first hospital on the coalfield was a consequence of a typhoid epidemic in 1876 that “left bachelor miners dying unattended in their cabins.”161 Twelve years later, the roll call of death after the Wellington mine disaster was dominated by the names of single men. The high male-tofemale ratio – which implied so much in life – was still operative in death. And, of course, the practice of employing large numbers of male Chinese labourers in mining operations ensured that many Asian sojourners died far from their homes and families, barely noticed by the

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community at large. In the aftermath of the Wellington mine explosion of 1888, fifteen of the forty-six Chinese men who died underground were identified only by numbers in the coroner’s report.162 A less widely observed phenomenon in community mortality is the role of chain migration. Family linkages drew male kin to the colony, attracted by reports of economic opportunities from siblings and cousins. One consequence was that in some cases whole families were whittled away. When Thomas Akenhead died in Nanaimo in 1889, he was the last to go of four brothers who had set out from Durham over a decade earlier; his siblings had been killed off in mining accidents or had died from other causes, and the chief beneficiary was the one brother who remained behind in England. Never married, Thomas had only his neighbours and workmates to mourn him in Nanaimo.163 Akenhead’s experience was not unusual. A photograph of a body prepared for burial and propped up in an open coffin might be all that connected the dead with the bereaved who were hundreds or thousands of miles distant.164 Such was not the case for Robert Dunsmuir. On his death in 1889 Dunsmuir was buried in Victoria. His funeral cortege was enormous, an accurate reflection of the kind of influence the man had enjoyed on Vancouver Island. Headed by a parade marshall and the c Battery Band, the first part of the procession included representatives from the St George’s Society, the Pioneer Society, the Ancient Order of Foresters, the St Andrew’s and Caledonian Society, the Victoria Fire Department, the Militia, Battery c Royal Canadian Artillery, and a contingent from the nearby Royal Navy base. Dunsmuir’s employees came next, including workers from his Albion Iron Works in Victoria, the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway, and Wellington mines. The hearse was followed by family, clergy, the lieutenant-governor, the chief justice, senators, judges, members of parliament, the provincial cabinet, the speaker of the legislature, members of the legislative assembly, foreign consuls, civic and municipal politicians, the Board of Trade, members of the Dominion and provincial civil services, civic officials and, finally, the general public.165 Like other public displays, the funeral of Robert Dunsmuir conveys important messages about the structure and values of nineteenthcentury British Columbia.166 There is something powerfully symbolic in the fact that Dunsmuir’s hearse was pulled, not by a team of horses, but by a line of his mine employees holding onto a hefty rope.167 The relationship between master and workman was literally carried to the grave with Dunsmuir. Moreover, the expansive ritual, the ostentatious display of public mourning, the vip treatment that was mustered for the death of a man whose family was scarcely impoverished by his ex-

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piration, puts the lie to the myth that in death there was any equality between men. Class and capital made a giant of Robert Dunsmuir in life and in his passing as well. Regardless of its transitory wealth and power, the Dunsmuir family was as fated as any other on the coalfield. Nevertheless, when a magnate like Robert or James Dunsmuir passed away, it was invariably above ground and as a rule in bed. The same could not be said for the hundreds of men in their employ.168 When the vcmlc’s Nanaimo mine exploded in 1887 and when the Dunsmuirs’ Wellington pit did the same in 1888, a total of 223 mine workers were effaced. There were, among their numbers, men who (like Robert Dunsmuir) had been on the coalfield since its earliest days; more, however, were in their early thirties, a reflection of the industry’s dependence on young, strong backs and of the statistical likelihood of a greater number of young men being attracted to a resource-extraction community. And because coalminers achieved their peak earning years at such an early age, many of these explosion victims were married and had young children. Jonathan Blundell, for one, left behind a wife and no fewer than five children when he died in the Nanaimo catastrophe of 1887. Again, at Cumberland in 1901 thirteen of the twenty men killed in the No. 5 shaft catastrophe were married and eight had children.169 If nothing else, these occurrences should signal an important aspect of parenthood and childhood on this settlement frontier. The abbreviated male life course (that is, one that does not complete the parenthood phase and does not, therefore, include a postparenthood or grandparenthood phase) was such a common feature on the coalfield that perspectives on life and death held by the individual and the community were considerably affected.170 Most immediately, these implications were experienced at an economic level, both public and private. As one author writes of the miners’ situation in England, “the physical reality of working oneself to death made the earnings of the chief breadwinner a thin reed on which to poise the welfare of the whole family.”171 Hospitalization and care for injured miners was woefully inadequate in the nineteenth century. In many instances whatever fighting chance an injured miner might have had was squandered by the lack of trained medical assistance. Fellow workers would do what they could, but realistically, few could offer little more than comfort. Moreover, in the 1880s hospitalization was something that the miners actively resisted, and with good reason: the hospital was viewed as a place where miners went to die, and it was even referred to in Nanaimo as the dead house. In this context the widespread involvement of women in the local economy as boardinghouse keepers acquires a more poignant significance, as it was often the landlady who nursed the injured, unmarried miner.172

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As for married miners, their families quailed at the thought of having to face the expense of a funeral, a cost that could not be postponed when it arrived. So, many colliers struggled to accumulate enough savings to pass onto their heirs.173 The Nanaimo disaster of 1887 left 146 children fatherless but not as many penniless as one might have expected. At least 56 of the miners died intestate, including 46 who were Chinese. The Asian fatalities between them left behind accounts and property valued at $1,118. Among the 10 white miners I have identified in probate records, the sums handed on to their relations were sometimes quite impressive. George Biggs heads the list, with a total worth at death of $1,850; others were valued at $1,000 apiece, while the most humble legacy was the $90 and change in the estate of pioneer unionist Samuel Myers.174 To a well-paid hewer, $1,000 represented about a year’s gross wages, a considerable amount but not sufficient to feed a family indefinitely. More reliable was the insurance provided by friendly and benevolent societies. Organizations like the Ancient Order of Foresters or the Miners’ and Mine Labourers’ Protective Association existed in part to care for the needs of widows and their children and to help with the cost of funerals.175 As the community reeled from the second underground disaster of 1884, steps were taken to collect sufficient funds to provide for seven new widows and thirty children, now fatherless. A public meeting was called, and over $5,000 was subscribed from communities elsewhere in the province and mining towns as far south as California. Three years later a larger disaster produced a dramatically larger subscription roll. In 1887 more than $100,000 was donated for widows and affected children from sources in eastern Canada, England, and the United States, although the local community also contributed hundreds if not thousands of dollars as well.176 Relief to family survivors was not, however, boundless. Children of fourteen years or more were denied or cut off relief, as were widows who remarried.177 It is perhaps a measure of the inadequacy of the miners’ association’s efforts that most Nanaimo widows preferred a living and breathing new spouse to a dead man’s pension. One Nanaimoarea register of marriages enumerated seventy-two weddings over a decade, eleven of which (i.e., 14 percent) involved women marrying for the second or third time.178 What is equally noticeable is the negligible number of widows in the census enumerators’ lists living as dependents with other relatives or with other families. Widows, in short, either got on with their lives as household heads, or they remarried, or they moved on. Some widows endeavoured, not always successfully, to become economically independent by setting up shops and other businesses.179 Other widows and their fatherless children left Nanaimo in

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such numbers after the disaster of 1887 that the Sisters of St Anne transformed their depopulated school into a hospital for a few years. High young-adult mortality rates in the coalfield produced concerns among children as well as among their widowed mothers. The percentage of the population in Nanaimo in the last twenty years of the century that was comprised of children under fifteen was never lower than 25 percent and often as high as 35 percent. Given this fact, the threat of orphanhood or at least fatherlessness loomed as a great possibility for early British Columbian settler children. Michael Anderson reckoned that about a third of children in nineteenth-century Lancashire lost a parent before they turned fifteen and 8 percent of the total would lose both their parents.180 Similarly, an American study in 1985 claimed that turn-of-the-century children had a one-in-five probability of losing both their mother and father before reaching their fifteenth birthday.181 British Columbian children, too, were at risk in this respect, especially in the mining districts. Two stories offer a means of illustrating and summarizing this material. The nineteenth century closed with another enormous funeral. At the age of eleven William McGregor arrived at Nanaimo from Scotland. Within the year his father was dead, a victim of an underground accident. Faced with the impoverishment of his family, William entered the mines and over thirty-two years of work in the pits rose to the rank of mine manager. McGregor died in 1898 after trying to subdue a subterranean blaze. Like Robert Dunsmuir, he was given a massive – though much more proletarian – send-off by thousands of coalfield men and women and children, but McGregor’s was reckoned to be the largest funeral procession in the community’s history, involving sporting clubs, dignitaries, and the union, as well as family and friends. The crowd was so large that the memorial service had to be held simultaneously in different churches.182 The headstone on the McNeil family plot at Nanaimo Cemetery presents a different perspective. The monolithic column displays names on three of its four sides, and it tells a depressing tale of a household regularly visited by the angel of death. John McNeil died at the age of thirty-seven years in 1888. He was predeceased by four of his children, a string of tragedies that began in 1882. None of these children lived past the age of seven. John McNeil’s dwindling family would have been a common enough experience in a community marked by high infant mortality rates, as well as high workplace mortalities.183 But amid this record of tragedy there is a suggestion of adjustment and survival: the fourth side of the monument is blank. That space would have been reserved for John McNeil’s wife, who disappeared into widowhood and probably into remarriage.

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These two examples point to the kinds of adaptation that were more or less forced upon miners and their families. Childhood labour; a consciousness of dangers underground that for William McGregor, at least, must have been part of his every moment at work; the presence of Death beyond the pithead and the frequency of mourning in day-today life; widowhood and remarriage; and community-wide death rites to acknowledge the fallen and to grieve. Funerals provided an opportunity for public display in an era of public displays. Unlike most British Columbian communities today, life in the Vancouver Island coalfield had an important public component: festivals and strikes, horse-races and funerals alike were conducted on the main streets in full view of the entire community. In 1884 the Knights of Labour organized a funeral for a miner killed in an explosion; one account of the event describes “a large crowd which followed the cortege to the graveyard and slowly filed by the grave, each man dropping a sprig of evergreen onto the coffin.” As well, the disaster of 1887 at Nanaimo, which claimed forty-eight lives, was marked by a mass funeral attended by hundreds of mourners.184 All too often, however, the community’s ability to work out its grief through customary mourning rituals was impeded by the fact that bodies could not always be recovered from the mines. Community vigils at the pithead could last for days on end, but they were not always rewarded with the removal of a miner’s remains. Following explosions it was sometimes too risky to venture too far into the damaged workings. But even when bodies were not recovered from the mines, a memorial service would be held in the local churches. Mourning was, in short, a public affair. Mass funerals are a feature of life in resource towns on the frontier, far less so in agricultural communities. They are an expression of shared experience and anxieties and loss, heavy with the knowledge that there will always be another public display of mourning for another mine casualty. Community rivalries and antipathies were typically set to the side during funeral marches; Catholic and Protestant, white and Chinese shared in most of these displays. I have examined a ranching frontier community in British Columbia for signs of similar events, and they simply aren’t there. Relative socioeconomic homogeneity in a comparatively dense industrial urban landscape contextualized public mourning. That having been said, miners responded to their trade’s high mortality rate with more than black crepe. Death and the fear of death in the mines encouraged colliers to explore strategies of resistance and retreat. The miners’ thrift – their use and cultivation of friendly societies, for example – was one kind of resistance against death. But funeral insurance did not deal with the issue

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of mine safety. Organizations were needed to press mine owners and the legislature to address those concerns. What we see on Vancouver Island – as on some other coalfields in the English-speaking world – is that the functions of benevolent/insurance societies and collective bargaining units were melded in the earliest unions. The Knights of Labor and the mmlpa – the foremost labour organizations on the Vancouver Island coalfield in the nineteenth century – both contained these elements of relief and reform. The directions taken by the main labour organizations in the battle to reduce mine fatalities divided on fundamental goals. For a great many miners, the problem lay with the mine owners, whose pits operated within volatile international markets and whose financial backers were noteworthy for their lack of long-term commitment and who were, consequently, keen to squeeze out the highest profits and dividends possible. Did the mine owners coldly regard mining fatalities as “acceptable losses”? I think that is highly unlikely, but – like many colliers – the owners did regard mining deaths as an unfortunate part of hard work in a hard life. By the late nineteenth century the Vancouver Island miners were able to challenge this attitude somewhat and to achieve what was already standard fare in British mines: pit committees, miner-appointed firemen for underground safety, and workplace safety legislation of a kind. Difficult to enforce, the new laws actually predate the worst disasters in the coalfield’s history. No one was, in any event, prepared to point fingers. Invariably the superintendent of mines would conclude his examination of the latest catastrophe with an unwillingness to apportion blame to anyone other than the workers. While this hardened the resolve of some miners to put some teeth into safety legislation, others addressed their grief and anxieties by making a scapegoat of the local Chinese population. The belief permeated the white workforce that the Chinese were insufficiently safety conscious and thus the cause of many avoidable injuries and deaths. Moves to exclude Chinese miners from underground work achieved some success following the disasters of 1887 and 1888. Robert Dunsmuir was criticized for his opposition to the ban on Chinese workers and James Dunsmuir for his subsequent efforts to restore Asian labour to his pits; at the same time the vcmlc was praised for its willingness to take the Chinese out of the Nanaimo mines. But the Dunsmuirs certainly had the evidence on their side: the more Chinese there were in a mine, the lower the incidence of injuries and death. It is entirely possible that the Nanaimo mine manager who quickly embraced the ban on Chinese labour did so to postpone spending further sums on ventilation underground, safer winding gear, and less treacherous coal-car systems. Regardless of the mine owners’ response, the point here is that

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racism was one vehicle used by miners to articulate their feelings about the dangers of their work. This was perhaps a wrongheaded strategy, but it was a form of resistence, an expression of unwillingness to silently tolerate the fatal status quo. There was, finally, another response to high death rates: retreat. Faced with the undeniable fact that their workplace was potentially murderous, miners – however much they were bred to the job – regularly sought opportunities beyond the pitgates (as seen in chapter 7). One miner’s experience was more than exemplary. Having witnessed his share of death in the mines, he opted to move into lumber supply. From that occupation it was a short step into carpentry and then to the building of coffins. He made this transition over the last fifteen years of the century and by the time of his own premature death in 1902, he had amassed considerable wealth and status as the coalfield’s leading undertaker.

conclusion Purchasing power and living conditions aside, was it the case that the cultural life in nineteenth-century Nanaimo, Wellington, and Union was so rudimentary as to constitute a considerable psychic loss to emigrant miners? Clearly there were various pursuits to entertain and enlighten the miners, many of which compared favourably to what was on offer in British colliery towns. Wellington and Union were undoubtedly worse off in this respect than Nanaimo, but probably not more so than some of the smaller villages in South Wales. And what Cardiff was to the Rhondda, Victoria was to the Gulf of Georgia coalfield. Taken together, the respective balance sheets of colliery-town pleasures were probably even on Vancouver Island and throughout Britain. On the other hand, the islanders were in a better position to slough off maladroit attempts at social control. Many of the respectable British hewers adopted the respectable causes: temperance, education, and missionary work. At other times the skilled Old Country miners were openly devoted to gambling, frequenting pubs, and staying home from work on Mondays, perhaps to recover from a hangover. British culture on the island coalfield was thus an imperfect mix of Scottish, Irish, English, and Welsh traditions, leavened by local stimuli. As such, it reproduced only shadows of British colliery town culture, many of which would not intermingle. In the struggle over control of leisure, worship, and education the direction preferred by the mine officials is always easier to discern than any recommended by the miners themselves. Douglas, Nicol, Bate, Bryden, and the Dunsmuirs – and several other parties as well – recorded

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their goals in correspondence with London or in the minutes of company meetings. The British miners had fewer opportunities to commit to paper their nonpolitical agendas. So while it may be impossible to say for certain how far the miners were victorious in securing their own objectives, one can judge how far the managers fell short of theirs. The Literary Institute, public schooling, the cause of temperance, the introduction of team sports, and admonitions against voluntary holidays all failed to hit their target. The colliery managers and owners could not completely dislodge low-brow amusements, drinking, wagering, and the urge to take a long weekend. British miners, aided and abetted by Canadian, American, and European immigrants, retained their cultural autonomy and celebrated it – internal contradictions and all – daily. Their ability to do so must be judged an advantage when compared to more tightly administered mining towns in Britain. There was, as well, an immutable quality to this colonial society. Saint Monday (or Blue Monday) is one of the more significant examples. The preservation on Vancouver Island of a voluntary holiday that had arisen out of an ancient agrarian tradition in England and that had all but disappeared in most of Britain by the 1880s is noteworthy. Was its durability around Nanaimo merely the predictable product of a town awash with saloons, in which the most accessible and regular entertainment involved consuming copious amounts of liquor? Or does one catch in Vancouver Island’s Blue Mondays a glimpse of the independent collier, thumbing his nose at an indignant employer who replies with pious words about hard work, sobriety, thrift, and the disappearance of the honest workman? No doubt both interpretations provide partial answers, yet one must not mistakenly label one more progressive than the other. The bottom line on voluntary holidays is that they were deplored by colliery managers (and school teachers) everywhere. Whenever the miners of Nanaimo or Wellington bunked off for the day, regardless of their reasons, they were demonstrating their indispensability, their culture of rights, and their preference for another day in bed to another day underground. For some, enlarged confrontation with the employers was the preferred corollary of Saint Monday; for others the option of leaving mining behind for good was more desirable. As we have also seen, there were reciprocal links between mine mortality, public mourning, and the character of mining society. Occupational mobility is part of that picture, as miners fled dangerous pits. But there is also the organizational response in the form of the friendly societies and the unions. There are the strategies of survival embraced by widows and orphans. There was, as well, the scapegoating of Asian workers, an emotionally powerful force in early industrial British

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Columbia. These would be core elements in any discussion of miningcommunity dynamics. But this variety of responses to death is significant for two reasons: first, it flies in the face of nineteenth-century fatalism in its very hopefulness; second, it reveals an important level at which race, radicalism, and social mobility were conceptualized. The contours of death thus reveal something of the contours of life. Together, these various cultural engagements reveal that miners’ identity as miners went beyond the business of work and was something that the miners themselves were engaged in fashioning. Allegiances with fraternal associations were every bit as potent as trade union membership; religious affiliations lost what rigidity they might have had in the Old Country; formal schooling was confronted within the context of economic possibilities and limitations defined largely by the British Columbian household and not some British ideal; the problem of premature and violent death gave rise to site-specific economic strategies and political choruses, some of them racist in form and content. Wherever one looks on the island coalfield for cultural forms one finds colonial “recalibration,› to use Cole Harris’ term, but not necessarily “simplification.” The needs of this industrial settler community combined with its special cultural heritage to produce something that was more complex, not less so.

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Conclusions

On the face of it the British coalminers of early British Columbia conform to general historical expectations. They built a dense network of unions, clubs, fraternities, political parties, and churches. Their towns were typically grimish clusters of humble homes focussed on the pithead, beneath which they toiled and too often perished. They mounted strikes; they enjoyed the occasional generosity of paternalistic mine owners. They doubted the benefits of formal schooling and trained their sons to follow in their footsteps down into the bowels of the earth. They gambled for fun above ground and with their lives below ground. Brass bands, gardening, drinking, organized religion, football clubs, and horseraces tapped their creative juices. The miners married in their youth and left many widows behind in theirs. They hoped for a better life and made real efforts to make that vision a reality. Their households were instrumental in the business of getting by and getting ahead. In all of this the British miners on Vancouver Island were kin to miners across the English-speaking world and beyond. But to conceive this as a transplanted working community, a mere carbon (if not carboniferous) copy of the British original would be a mistake. British Columbia’s early working class was not imported with a ready-made ideological predisposition to which nothing could be added in the colony and from which nothing could be subtracted. The longstanding orthodoxy that the British miners and their families travelled across the midcentury globe steeped in socialist strategies is repeatedly defied by accounts of their concern for material self-betterment, for exclusivity in the workplace, for “respectability,” and for influential elected

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politicians, regardless of party. Equally, it is clear that the British industrial colonists found in their exotic colony new stimuli that challenged them to become something more, something different. Uniquely local wage issues, working conditions, demographics, living standards, and management tactics combined, to use E.P. Thompson’s term, in the “making” of a colonial proletariat. Labour historians have emphasized the evidence and instruments of institutional class conflict as the pinnacle of this story, but union action and political engagement are only one excrescence of industrial communities. As Thompson understood, working people – men and women and children – constantly struggled in the face of their class vulnerabilities for greater security, however defined. Jeremy Mouat observes that in the wake of the unsuccessful strike of 1891 at the Dunsmuirs’ Wellington mine, the miners’ “consciousness of futility” induced them “to travel down various roads in search of more successful strategies.”1 In fact they had been exploring those alternative avenues for years, in particular those strategies outside the mine itself that might bear fruit. The history of strikes, occupational change, household economic diversification, racial conflict, and relocation point back to two themes that have been central to this study: first, the inculcation of expectations by recruitment literature, government reports, company agents, and so forth and second, the disappointment that followed. When the opportunities they anticipated failed to materialize, when partial control in the workplace was wrested from the hewers, and when remuneration and recognition appropriate to skilled miners was reduced or withheld, the British miners protested. And many of them did so as family men with long-term interests to protect, not as a radical, unstable, unmarried industrial proletariat, nor even as an inherently anti-Asian white community. Skills, custom, and security were their principal “British” watchwords, not rebellion, racism, revolution, and socialism. Although they worked side by side with considerable populations of Americans, Chinese, Nova Scotians, and others, British pitmen would register a degree of prominence in the island mining towns because of their greater numbers, the widely held belief that they were more skilled, and their longevity in the coalfield. The British settlers on the Vancouver Island coalfield selected, rejected, assembled, and dismantled the fibre of mining-town culture, and they did so within a British Columbian context in colonies that had “no pre-existing cultural identity.”2 The task of doing so was – as the responses to economic vulnerability and to death indicate – a personal affair, one in which households among themselves decided a course of action that some-

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215

Conclusions

times took on the appearance, if not the reality, of collective response. The political culture that eventually arose in the coastal mining districts thus needs to be recast as the product of the broadest social struggle. In the workplace and in the wage packet the miners’ primary objective was to achieve at least parity with their pre-emigration experiences. Regularly in the nineteenth century, British miners on Vancouver Island raised objections whenever conditions slipped (or threatened to slip) below the base level suggested by British norms. Confronted with a compromising geology and the colonial variant of monopoly capitalism, the imported standards of the British colliers provided a reference point, a benchmark in industrial and social relations; pre-emigration experience, however, could not predetermine colonial circumstances. This study shows that to the extent that the miners became radicalized at all, it was a consequence of events in British Columbia, not an ethnic predilection for militance. Their Britishness constituted a floor on which these new British Columbians were willing to stand and build, but through which they were not prepared to fall.

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Notes

abbreviations aof bc bca bcsp bl bleps blc bpp csp chr co cm ehr hbc llv mmlpa na nca pro rcs spbc

Ancient Order of Foresters British Columbia British Columbia Archives British Columbia, Sessional Papers British Library, Bloomsbury/St Pancras British Library of Economics and Political Science, London School of Economics British Newspaper Library, Colindale British Parliamentary Papers Canada, Sessional Papers Canadian Historical Review Colonial Office Papers Cumberland Museum and Archives Economic History Review Hudson’s Bay Company Legislative Library, Victoria Miners’ and Mine Labourers’ Protective Association National Archives of Canada Nanaimo Community Archives Public Records Office, Kew Royal Commonwealth Society Library, London Socialist Party of British Columbia

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218 Notes to pages 3–7 Trades and Labour Congress of Canada United Church Archives, Vancouver University of British Columbia ubc Library, Special Collections University of Victoria Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company (sometimes referred to as the Vancouver Coal Company) wfm Western Federation of Miners

tlcc uca ubc ubcs uvic vcmlc

chapter one 1 Canada, Fourth Census of Canada, 1901, vol. 4, 416; bcsp, 1900, Report of the Minister of Mines, 829. 2 The average size of typical South Staffordshire mineforces was still below 125 per pit in 1911–13, and the British national average was about 400. Benson, “Black Country History,” 106. 3 The literature on British Columbian depopulation includes Boyd, “Population Decline”; Boyd, “Demographic History, 1774–1874”; Duff, Indian History, 55; Boyd, “Demographic History until 1990”; Harris, “Social Power,” 51–4. 4 See, for example, Iacovetta, Quinlan, and Radforth, “Immigration and Labour,” 92–7. A tentative but theoretically excellent approach to regionalism as a factor in British-American comparisons can be found in Lewis, “Wales and Appalachia.” 5 Cohen, “American Management,” 608; Yearley, Britons in American Labor, 137–8; Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, 34–5. The strength of British labour traditions is identified in mining communities where other minerals are being exploited. See Vasiliadis, Dangerous Truth, 51. 6 Corbin, Life, Work and Rebellion, 27. 7 Schwieder, Black Diamonds, 8. 8 Bowen, Boss Whistle, 43. Eric Newsome claims that Black Country militance and collective action was “exported to far off Vancouver Island.” Newsome, The Coal Coast, 47. 9 Robin, Radical Politics, 44, and The Rush for Spoils, 24–7; Phillips, No Power Greater, 29. More recently Phillips has referred to “the presence of many British miners with their heritage of more political trade unionism.” “The Underground Economy,” 51. 10 Blake, Two Political Worlds, 6. See also Woodcock, British Columbia, 175– 6. 11 Currie, “The Vancouver Coal Mining Company.” 12 Newsome’s slim tome on nineteenth-century mining on Vancouver Island principally pursues labour issues. Lynne Bowen’s two narratives of the

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219 Notes to pages 8–10

13

14

15 16 17

18 19

20

21 22

23 24

Nanaimo-area coalfield are fine examples of the local history approach and are happily and gratefully cited throughout the present study for the rich detail they contain. Newsome, The Coal Coast; Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams and Boss Whistle. Other publications on the area include Norcross, Nanaimo Retrospective, and Reksten, The Dunsmuir Saga. Bowen demonstrates an analytical approach in a recent article, “Friendly Societies in Nanaimo.” Grantham, “Some Aspects of the Socialist Movement”; Loosmore, “British Columbia Labour Movement”; Smith, “Social Development of Early Nanaimo.” Another unpublished thesis that makes a significant contribution is Gallacher, “Men, Money, Machines.” McCormack, “The Emergence of the Socialist Movement”; Bercuson,”Labour Radicalism”; Conley, “Frontier Labourers”; Schwantes, Radical Heritage; Phillips, No Power Greater. Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism”; Mouat, “Mining in the Settler Dominions.” Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections.” See also Hinde, “Stout Ladies and Amazons.” See Mouat, “Western Exceptionalism,” 321, 344–5, and Roaring Days. In the latter, Mouat does venture fruitfully into the area of demographics, but it is not central to his thesis. Tomlinson, “Good Times,” 42. See Leier, Red Flags, for an examination of the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council that deftly recognizes the often contrary and contradictory calls on class solidarity. The best recent debate on the state of British Columbian labour history can be found in bc Studies, no. 111 (autumn 1996). The pieces include Leier, “W[h]ither Labour History”; Palmer, “Class and the Writing of History”; Strong-Boag, “Moving beyond Tired ‘Truths›; McDonald, ‹The West Is a Messy Place›; Leier, “Response.” Vernon, “Who’s Afraid of the ‘Linguistic Turn,› 93. This resonates across the continent, as one recent study argues: “North America is presented as an empty, unoccupied wilderness where land is free for the taking and resources are abundant. History is seen as a process of the continual recession of the frontier as European settlement pushed westward. The frontier encounter is characterized by moral opposition, conflict, and struggle; these relationships are eventually resolved through domination and conquest. Ultimately settlers reemerge from the frontier experience transformed and upholding the values of self-reliance, democracy, competition, and freedom.” Furniss, “Pioneers, Progress,” 10. Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 214. Hartz, Founding of New Societies, 40–4.

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220 Notes to pages 11–19 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Savage and Miles, Remaking of the British Working Class, 45–6. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 197, 828. Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 217. Joyce, Visions of the People, 3. Harris, Resettlement, 263. Iacovetta, Immigrant History, 3, 6, 13. As Iacovetta puts it, “how would their Englishness or Scottishness affect our understanding of these men [sic] and their worldview?” (ibid., 9). Barman, “The West Beyond the West”; Ward, “Population Growth”; Belshaw, “Cradle to Grave.” Belshaw, “The West We Have Lost.” The making of “race consciousness” among whites in another imperial setting is examined in Connell and Irving, Class Structure in Australian History, cited in Palmer, “Nineteenth-Century Canada,” 19–20. See, for example, Joyce, “The End of Social history?” Savage and Miles, Remaking, 17. Postmodern approaches to historical questions have only recently appeared in British Columbia’s literature, the most outstanding example of this development being the work of professors Tina Loo and Mary-Ellen Kelm. In Loo’s Making Law, competing definitions of colonial justice and law are presented and elegantly deconstructed. Kelm ( in Colonizing Bodies) carefully disassembles prevailing contemporary understandings of aboriginal health, demonstrating how the discourse on First Nations survival was tied to an essentialist view of the “indian.” Such works invite similar reassessments of “givens” in our history. Beik, Miners of Windber, xvi. Galois and Harris, “Recalibrating Society.” There is only one survey of mining history in British Columbia, and it was the product of an engineer: Taylor, Mining. McKay, “Coal Miners,” 222. McKay provides a concise survey of trends in the writing of coal-mining history over the last thirty years, as does Frank in “Country of Coal.” Among the best local studies are Trempé, Les Mineurs de Carmaux; Campbell, Lanarkshire Miners; Reid, Miners of Decazeville. Harris, Resettlement, 250–75. Loo, Making Law, 150. Published and unpublished studies that address the island miners in the early twentieth century include Davis, “Forty-Ninth Parallel City”; Wargo, “The Great Coal Strike”; Orr, “The Western Federation of Miners”; Morton, “Aid to the Civil Power”; McCormack, “The Emergence of the Socialist Movement,” and Reformers, Rebels, and Revolutionaries; Johnstone, Coal Dust in My Blood; Norris, “Vancouver Island Coal Miners”; Bowen, Boss Whistle; Seager, “Socialists and Workers”; Isenor, et al., Land of Plenty; Mouat, “Mining in the Settler Dominions”; Phillips, “The Underground Economy”; and Horsfall, “Ethnic Conflict in Context.”

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221 Notes to pages 21–5 c h a pt e r t wo 1 The nomenclature used throughout this study is consistent with that detailed in the most recent survey, Muckle, First Nations. Note that Kwakwaka’wakw refers to the larger ethnic grouping, while Kwakiutl refers specifically to the peoples whose territory includes the Fort Rupert area. 2 Fisher, Contact and Conflict, 26–33. 3 Morton, “The Significance of Site,” 98. 4 On aboriginal labour in nineteenth-century British Columbia, see Mackie, Trading, 283–310; Lutz, “After the Fur Trade”; and Knight, Indians at Work. 5 Akrigg and Akrigg, British Columbia Chronicles, 288–9, 394; pro, co305(1), Letter from Commander G.J. Gordon, hms Cormorant, to Captain J.A. Duntze, hms Fisgard, 7 October 1846. See also the more fulsome account in Mackie, Trading beyond the Mountains, 241. 6 bca, J.W. McKay. 7 On the hbc’s efforts at diversification, see Mackie, Trading beyond the Mountains. 8 Underhill provides an account of the recruitment process from a Scottish perspective in “A Place to Prosper?” 21–36. 9 Rickard, “Coal Mining,” 34; Gough, “Fort Rupert,” 33. 10 Rich, London Correspondence Inward, 6 February 1850. 11 Ralston, “Miners and Managers,” 42–5; Rich, London Correspondence Inward, 21 July 1852. 12 bpp 1849, 15. 13 In 1889 the vcmlc was reorganized into the New Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company and was throughout the century referred to as the Vancouver Coal Company (vcc). The practice here, however, shall be to use only the earlier title, the Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company (vcmlc). 14 Bancroft, History, 198–200. 15 Victoria, on the other hand, was said to be more like a “Bath or Cheltenham set down amid the Italian Alps.” Ormsby, British Columbia, 215; Sage, “Geographical and Cultural Aspects,” 34; csp 1872, “British Columbia,” appendix r: Extract from Dr. Rattray’s Work on Vancouver Island and British Columbia (1862), 129. 16 See Roy, “Direct Management from Abroad,” 101–2. 17 Currie, “The Vancouver Coal Mining Company.” 18 For conflicting accounts of Robert Dunsmuir’s early years on Vancouver Island, see Phillips, No Power Greater, 3; Gallacher, “Robert Dunsmuir”; csp, 1872, “British Columbia,” appendix m; Newsome, The Coal Coast, 67–8; Bowen, Boss Whistle, 80–1; Reksten, Dunsmuir Saga, 18–23.

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222 Notes to pages 25–8 19 In Britain the equivalent of “open-pit” is “open-cast.” For early mining techniques on Vancouver Island, see pro, co305(30), Letter from Rear Admiral Joseph Denman to the Secretary of State for the Admiralty, 13 September 1866; pro, co60(29), Letter from Henry Pellew Crease to Governor Frederick Seymour, 9 July 1867; pro, co60(35), Letter from Seymour to the Earl of Granville, 22 March 1869; Akrigg, British Columbia Chronicle, 399. 20 Macfie, Vancouver Island, 149. 21 Isenor et al., Land of Plenty, 78. 22 Ormsby, British Columbia, 289–90. 23 Norcross and Tonkin, Frontier Days of Vancouver Island, 29. 24 Leynard, Coal Mines of Nanaimo, 11–12, 15. 25 Thornhill, British Columbia in the Making, 53. 26 bca, Andrew Muir Diary, 2 July 1850; pro, hbc1/638, Fort Rupert Journals, 1849–1850, 22 April 1850, and 22 July 1850; bca, Helmcken Papers, vol. 14, folder 12, items 1 and 2, letter from D.D. Wishart (Fort Victoria) to J.S. Helmcken (Fort Rupert), 17 August 1850. 27 Victoria Daily Colonist, 8 June 1859, 4 October 1861. There is some dispute over the precise dates of these conflicts. Currie (“The Vancouver Coal Mining Company,” 56) claims that the strikes occurred in 1864 and 1868, whereas Bartlett (“The 1877 Wellington Miners’ Strike,” 30) argues that they took place in 1865 and 1867. 28 Currie, “The Vancouver Coal Mining Company”; Bartlett, “The 1877 Wellington Miners’ Strike”; bca, Bryden Diary, letter from John Bryden to S.M. Robins (London), 17 October 1878, 26 February, 18 March, and 9 April 1880. 29 csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 390–1. 30 The events of this strike are recorded in bcj, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike. See as well, Mouat, “The Politics of Coal.” 31 Norris, “The Vancouver Island Coal Miners”; Wargo, “The Great Coal Strike.” For later industrial disputes on Vancouver Island’s coalfield see Bowen, Boss Whistle; Johnstone, Coal Dust in My Blood. 32 See Innis, Settlement and the Mining Frontier, 173–4. 33 Bancroft, History of British Columbia, 194. 34 pro, co305(3), Letter from James Douglas to Earl Grey, 16 December 1851. 35 Blanshard was appointed governor on 16 July 1849, was sworn in on 11 March 1850, and resigned in August the same year. His brief term was marred by confrontations with obstructive hbc agents on Vancouver Island. The Colonial Office was aware of the animosity that existed between the governor and the chief factor, but no one in Westminster was entirely disposed to favour Blanshard’s accounts. pro, co305(2), Letter from Governor Richard Blanshard to Earl Grey, 8 April 1850.

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223 Notes to pages 28–32 36 pro, co305(3), Letter from James Douglas to Sir John Parkington, Secretary of State for the Colonies, probably 15 April 1852. 37 Holbrook, “British Columbia’s Gold Mines,” 6. 38 Cole and Lockner, The Journals of George M. Dawson, 544. 39 Dawson, “Mineral Wealth of British Columbia,” 103. 40 Anthracite was found only in the Queen Charlotte Islands, but attempts to exploit that resource were frustrated by incomplete geological information, distant markets, and the opposition of the Haida nation. The Queen Charlotte Coal Mining Company, based in Victoria, was established in the 1860s but was forced to admit defeat in 1872. pro, co305(3), Letter from the Reverend Staines to the Reverend Thomas Boys, 6 July 1852; pro, co305(4), Letter from N. Grey to the Duke of Newcastle, 26 July 1853; pro, co60(25), F.G. Claudet, Superintendent of Assay Office, New Westminster, “Report: Coalfields of British Columbia,” enclosed in letter from Lieutenant-Governor Birch to the Rt. Hon. Edward Cardwell, 26 July 1866; British Columbia, General Review of Mining, no. 19, 36. 41 Macfie, Vancouver Island, 143. 42 Stafford, “Geological Surveys,” 5, 10. 43 British Columbia, General Review of Mining, no. 19, 127. 44 Ibid., 135; Campbell, “Cassidy and the Douglas Seam,” 491; Taylor, “Coal,” 69; Benson, British Coalminers, 35. pro, co305(1), Letter from James Douglas and Peter Skene Ogden (Fort Vancouver) to J.A. Duntze (hms Fisgard), 7 September 1846. 45 Brown, Geographical Distribution, 23; Campbell, “Cassidy and the Douglas Seam,” 491, 494. 46 British Columbia, General Review of Mining, no. 19, 129. 47 Sharon Meen, “Colonial Society and Economy,” and Allen Seager, “The Resource Economy,” in Johnston, The Pacific Province, 106–112, 205–244. 48 Duncan, Fifty-Seven Years in the Comox Valley, 25; Wynn, “The Rise of Vancouver.” 59 Ormsby, British Columbia, 215; pro, co305(30), Letter from James Douglas to the Right Honourable Lord Carnarvon, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 14 September 1866; Watt, “The National Policy,” 2; Silverman, “A History of the Militia and Defences,” 1. See also Barratt, Russian Shadows. 50 “The Coal Mining Industry,” 120–1; Matheson, “Some Effects of Coal Mining,” 81, fig. 16; Currie,”The Vancouver Coal Mining Company,” 55. 51 A similar description of the local market appears in Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” 64–5. See also British Columbia, General Review of Mining, no. 1, 37; “The Coal Mining Industry,” 120–1; Lutz, “Losing Steam.” 52 United States of America, Tenth Census, 416; Berry, Early California, 21–2. 53 Paul, “After the Gold Rush,” 3.

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224 Notes to pages 33–40 54 See Chekhov, A Journey to Sakhalin, 152–7. 55 Careless, “The Lowe Brothers,” 4–7; csp, 1872, “British Columbia,” 130. Some coals were raised in California itself, but the seams at Monte Diablo, San Diego, and Monterey were of a poor grade. British Columbia, British Columbia, 102; pro, co305(6), Letter from George Martin to Commodore Charles Frederick, 16 October 1854; Pemberton, Facts and Figures , 42–3; csp, 1872, British Columbia, 11; British Columbia, General Review of Mining, no. 1, 8. 56 Matheson, “Some Effects of Coal Mining,” 80. 57 Innis, Problems of Staple Production, 12–13; Innis and Lower, Select Documents, 800n2; csp, 1903, no. 36a, Report of the Royal Commission, 199. chapter three 1 Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change, 68–97. 2 In 1855, however, three miners and some family members did return to Britain at the hbc’s expense. See Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 107. 3 Jones, American Immigration, v. For a survey of the literature on emigration, see Van Vugt, “British Emigration,” 1–22. A brief synopsis of the history of British Columbian immigration is Barman, “The West beyond the West.” See also Barman’s “Ethnicity in the Pursuit of Status.” 4 Potter, “The Economic Context of Migration,” 23–4. 5 Benson, British Coalminers, 35. 6 See Machin, Yorkshire Miners, 94–5, 108; Challinor and Ripley, The Miners’ Association, 17, 95, 144. 7 Displaced Staffordshire and North Walesian blacklegs in Lancashire and Yorkshire form a well-documented chapter in the history of miners’ unionism. See Machin, The Yorkshire Miners, 309, 367–8; Challinor, Lancashire and Cheshire Miners, 85. See also Gildart, “North Wales Miners.” 8 Moore, Pit-men, 66. 9 Machin, Yorkshire Miners, 99–100, 253; Nanaimo Free Press, 7 May 1887. 10 See Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy. 11 For retentive factors in nineteenth-century Cornwall, see Rowe, Hard Rock Men, 21–3. 12 Wallace, St Clair, 180. 13 It is worth noting that Vancouver Island’s place in imperial history as a colony is set within the transitional period that Giovanni Arrighi has rightly identified as a shift from “territorialist” to “capitalist” imperatives. The Long Twentieth Century, 34. 14 pro, co305(64), Letter from C.W. Barclay to T.F. Elliot, 10 September 1853. 15 pro, co305(12), Letter from T.W. Murdoch to Herman Merivale, 6 October 1859.

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225 Notes to pages 40–2 16 More detail on the hbc’s recruitment efforts can be found in Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism.” 17 When the Scottish miners abandoned Fort Rupert in 1850, a large number went to San Francisco, and a few even returned to Scotland; most, however, eventually found themselves back on Vancouver Island, some seeking compensation from the hbc for their inconvenience. pro, co305(2), Letter from Governor Blanshard to Earl Grey, 18 August 1850; pro, co305(3), J.H. Pelly to Earl Grey, 7 November 1851; Bancroft, History of British Columbia, 195; A.N. Mouat, “Notes on the ‘Norman Morrison.› 18 Burrill “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 21; Vickers, “George Robinson,” 44; pro, hbc a11/73, fol. 650, Letter from Muir to Douglas, 6 December 1852. See also Nanaimo Historical Society, From the Black Country. 19 pro, co305(6), Letter from George P. Martin to Commodore Charles Frederick, 16 October 1854. 20 Hill, “From Brierley Hill,” 28; Goult, “First and Last Days”; Jackman, Vancouver Island, 175–6. 21 bpp, 1852–53, 45, paper 83, Return Made since 1849 by the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Relating to Vancouver Island, 1. 22 Hendrickson, “Constitutional Development,” 245. 23 Rich, History, 752–3. 24 pro, co305(7), Letter from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the co, September 1856. 25 Attempts to understand and construct colonial British Columbia to Confederation are examined in a very recent study by Perry, On the Edge of Empire. 26 Gough, “British Columbian Frontier,” 32–3; Hendrickson, “Constitutional Development,” 248. 27 A. Barclay to James Douglas, December 1849, Fort Victoria, Correspondence Inward, quoted in Ormsby, British Columbia, 100–1. 28 Macfie, Vancouver Island, 45–6. See also pro, co305(20), Letter from James Douglas to the Duke of Newcastle, 14 July 1863; Times, 18 November 1859. 29 Harvey, A Statistical Account of British Columbia, 9–10; bpp, 1870, 49, Reports on the Present State of Her Majesty’s Colonial Possessions, 7–9. 30 Macfie, Vancouver Island, 43–4; Times, letter from J.C. Helmore, 18 November 1859. 31 Silverman, “Militia and Defences of British Columbia”; bpp, 1849, 35, Accounts and Papers, 631. 32 pro, co305(20), Letter from James Douglas to the Duke of Newcastle, 14 July 1863, and Report to Lord Newcastle on Female Emigration by the Reverend Cridge, 14 July 1863. 33 Times, 10 August 1858, 10.

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226 Notes to pages 42–5 34 Even Marx and Engels made a small contribution to the rising tide of Pacific Rim publicity: “Thanks to California gold and the tireless energy of the Yankees, both coasts of the Pacific Ocean will soon be as populous, as open to trade and as industrialized as the coast from Boston to New Orleans is now.” Marx and Engels, “Review,” 266. 35 For industrial work-discipline, see the key studies by Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”; Hobsbawm, “Artisan or Labour Aristocrat?” Gutman, “Work, Culture and Society.” 36 Pethick, Summer of Promise, 107–8; pro, co305(9), Vancouver Island Trust Account, 31 October 1858; pro, co305(16), Vancouver Island Colony Accounts from 1 June 1857 to 31 December 1860, 20. 37 Rich, History, 754–7; Shepperson, British Emigration, 228–9; pro, co305(1), Letter from Lieutenant Dundas to the Colonial Office, 1848; Galbraith, The Hudson’s Bay Company, 283–307. 38 pro, co305(3), Letter from Governor Blanshard to Earl Grey, 3 February 1851. See also Rowe, Hard-Rock Men, 132. 39 Ibid., 231. Mostly the Cornish preferred the hard-rock mines of the mainland. See Le Bourdais, “Billy Barker of Barkerville.” 40 pro, co305(12), Letter from T.W. Murdoch to Herman Merivale, 24 November 1859. 41 bpp, 1871, 47, Reports of Colonial Possessions, Part 2, 7. 42 For British involvement in the defence of the Pacific colonies see Gough, The Royal Navy. 43 pro, co305(12), Letter from T.W. Murdoch to Herman Merivale, 24 November 1859. For the situation at the Colonial Office under Merivale see Cell, British Colonial Administration, 15–18. 44 Berard, “An Incident,” 21; pro, co305(12), Letter from T.W. Murdoch to Herman Merivale, 24 November 1859; pro, co60(33), Letter from Rear Admiral Denman to the Secretary of the Admiralty, 26 August 1866. 45 pro, co305(1), Letter from Samuel Cunard to H.G. Ward, Secretary, Admiralty, 3 January 1848. 46 Shi, “Seward’s Attempt to Annex British Columbia”; Neunherz, ‹Hemmed In.› 47 The first Fenian scare in British Columbia was in 1866–67; the second came on New Year’s Eve, 1871, when it was reported that a cell of Fenians was prepared and in hiding in Victoria. Fears of Russian attack did not evaporate with the sale of Alaska to the United States. Early in 1878 the appearance of a squadron of Russian ships at San Francisco harbour revealed the vulnerability of the whole coastline. Gough, The Royal Navy, 210–14; Preston, Defence, 97–8; Silverman, “Militia and Defences of British Columbia,” 55–6, 70–1. 48 pro, co305(30), Letter from James Douglas to the Rt. Hon. Lord Carnarvon, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 14 September 1866.

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227 Notes to pages 45–9 49 Nanaimo Gazette, 14 August 1865 (signed, “Sincerity”). 50 See Mikkelson, “Land Settlement Policy”; Mackie, Wilderness Profound, 59. 51 pro, co60(33), Letter from Frederick Seymour to the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, 6 August 1868. 52 Alston, Colonial Handbooks, 15; pro, co60(30), Letter from F.W.C. Murdoch to F. Frederick Elliott, 26 April 1864. 53 bleps, Emigrants’ Letters, file 57(1), Letter from Radcliffe Quine, 22 March 1878. 54 British Columbia, Journals of the Colonial Legislatures, vol. 2, 1 March 1860, 157. 55 bpp, 1863, 33, Emigration Returns,19–28. 56 Quoted in Neunherz, ‹Hemmed In,› 104. 57 pro, co60(30), Letter from T.W. Murdoch to F.F. Elliot, 26 April 1867 (marginal notes). 58 Davies, A History of Wales, 413. 59 pro, co60(36), Letter from Anthony Musgrave to Earl Granville, 18 October 1869. 60 Constantine, “Introduction: Empire Migration and Imperial Harmony,” Emigrants and Empire, 3. 61 Higgins, “Colonial Vancouver Island,” 183. 62 bca, Colonial Correspondence, file 84 (2), C. Stuart Bailey to J.W. Trutch, 30 August 1870. 63 J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London 1885), quoted in Fedorowich, “Migration of British Ex-Servicemen,” 76. 64 Times, 17 October 1864. High-brow English newspapers may seem an unusual source of information for miners, but it has been argued that nineteenth-century immigrants in Canada and the United States, especially the British, arrived displaying high levels of literacy. See Graff, Literacy Myth, 65–9. 65 bleps, Emigrants Letters, file 57(1), Letter from Radcliffe Quine, 22 March 1878. 66 Gallacher, “Men, Money, Machines,” 106–7. 67 Times, letter from the Canadian High Commissioner, 3 February 1899, 9. 68 Imperial Institute Journal, 2 (1896) no. 13, 26, and no. 24, 437. 69 bcsp, 1871, “Correspondence to and from the British Columbian Delegate to the Immigration Conference at Ottawa, 1871,” 85. 70 British Columbia, British Columbia as a Field for Emigration and Investment, 6. 71 British Columbia, Reports of Immigration Agents, 297. 72 Scottish Records Office, Department of Agriculture, etc., Emigration Files af51/90: Emigration Circular and Poster for October 1888. 73 bca, Tate Family, Add Mss 303, vol. 1, fol. 2, Rev. C.M. Tate, “Reminiscence [sic], 1852–1933.”

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228 Notes to pages 50–3 74 bca, A.F. Buckham Collection, Add Mss 436, vol. 1/25, Letter from James Dunsmuir to E.P. Bremner, Labour Commissioner, Victoria, 9 October 1900. 75 bca, Buckham Collection, 8 February 1899. 76 csp, 1903, no. 36a, Report of the Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 76–7; Nanaimo Free Press, 21 July 1900. 77 bca, A.F. Buckham Collection, Add Mss 436, vol. 1/25, Letter from Wellington Colliery Company to William Russell, Extension Mine, 2 October 1900. 78 Comox Argus, 11 April 1940. 79 bca, A.F. Buckham Collection, Add Mss 436 vol. 1/25, Letter from G.W. Clinton to Wellington Colliery Company, Extension, 31 December 1900. 80 csp 1902, Report on Chinese and Japanese Immigration, 76–7, 79. 81 bpp, 1870, Reports of the Present State of Her Majesty’s Colonial Possessions, 7–9. 82 bca, Cornelius Bryant Collection, vol. 4, fol. 1, Bryant to Dr Wood, 30 September 1875, cited in Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” 71. 83 The British Ladies’ Emigrant Society helped 4,708 emigrants to reach British colonies in 1880 alone. Charity Organization Reporter, 10, no. 381, 7 April 1881, 82–3. 84 Fawcett Library, United British Women’s Emigration Association, Report, 1896, 27. 85 Mrs Skinner, “In British Columbia,” Imperial Colonist, 2 (1905). Local Boards of Guardians sometimes financed group migrations of the poor, but evidence of such migrations to Vancouver Island is not available. Dixon,”Aspects of Yorkshire Emigration to North America,” vol. 2, 470. 86 Nanaimo Historical Society, From the Black Country to Nanaimo, 1854. Vol. 3. N.p. 87 bca, Francis C. Garrard Diary, Add Mss 46. 88 Bartlett, “Wellington Miners’ Strike.” 89 Erickson, Invisible Immigrants, 243. See, as well, Erickson, “Emigration from the British Isles to the u.s.a. in 1831,” 175–97; McCormack, “Networks among British Immigrants,” 359–63. 90 Stirling Journal, November 1859; Tamworth Examiner, 14 February 1874, 7. 91 Rees, New and Naked Land, 14–15. 92 bleps, Emigrants Letters, file 57(1), Letter from Radcliffe Quine, 22 March 1878. 93 Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 47–8. 94 bca, Alexander Papley, Correspondence Outward, 22 June 1867. 95 Gazette (Nanaimo), 2 October 1865. 96 Times, 26 May 1865; Donaldson, The Scots Overseas, 140–1; MacMillan, “Scottish Enterprise,” 46.

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229 Notes to pages 53–7 97 Duncan, From Shetland to Vancouver Island, 70. 98 Sun (Vancouver), 9 November 1964. 99 British attitudes to Asian labourers are described in May, “British Working-Class,” 1–6; Machin, Yorkshire Miners, 173. 100 Carrothers, Emigration from the British Isles, 218. The economic cycle in British mining is considered in Benson, British Coalminers, 9. 101 Imperial Institute Journal, 2 (March 1896), no. 15, 98. 102 Times, 22 August 1898. 103 Conway, “Welsh Gold-Miners,” 52. 104 For the involvement of British labour organizations in the emigration field elsewhere, see Erickson, “Encouragement of Emigration,” 248–50; Clements, “Trade Unions,” 169; Erickson, “Who Were the English and Scots Emigrants?” 364–5. 105 These practices had been established during the 1850s and 1860s. In Aberdare, for example, “emigrants … began selling their possessions under the hammer preparatory to leaving for the goldfields” of British Columbia. See Conway, “Welsh Gold-Miners”; Morris and Williams, South Wales Coal Industry, 238–9. For British miners’ emigration to the American eastern seaboard, see Benson, British Coalminers, 125–7; Campbell and Reid,”The Independent Collier,” 61–7; Pelling, America, 50–1; Yearley, Britons in American Labor, 123–41; Van Vugt, “British Emigration,” 144. 106 Nanaimo Historical Society, From the Black Country to Nanaimo, 1854. Vol. 2. N.p. 107 Between 1816 and 1870 an increasing proportion of emigrating Scots – consistently more than half – financed their own departure and resettlement. See Bumsted, Scots in Canada, 9–11. See evidence of direct migration from Glasgow to Nanaimo in na, rg76 (Immigration Branch), microfilm reel 479 (uncatalogued), cited in Seager, “Socialists and Workers,” 31. 108 Black Country Bugle (Stourbridge, England), September 1984, in na, code 3, box 1. 109 Broeze, “Private Enterprise and the Peopling of Australasia,” 235–53; Duncan,”Case Studies in Emigration,” 272–89. 110 A thoughtful consideration of the literature on this subject is Perry, ‹Oh I’m Just Sick of the Faces of Men’,” 27–43. 111 Fisher, “Matter for Reflection,” 75. 112 Dunae, Gentlemen Emigrants, 63, 67. 113 bpp, 1849, 35, Accounts and Papers, Despatch to the Admiralty from Rear-Admiral Sir George Seymour, 8 February 1847. 114 pro, co305(2), Letter from Lord Eddisbury, Foreign Office, to Herman Merivale, 15 March 1849, and Letter from William Pitt Adams, Charge d’Affairs, Peru, to Lord Palmerston, 12 January 1849. 115 Wrinch, “Land Policy,” 7, 9.

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230 Notes to pages 58–60 chapter four 1 A relatively recent exception is Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections.” Demographic measures are addressed on 67–73. 2 Newsome, The Coal Coast, 45. See also Seager, “Miners’ Struggles in Western Canada,” 160–98. 3 Robin, Rush for Spoils, 41. Clark (The Social Development of Canada, 216–17) makes an allusion to the possibility of “normal family life” in nineteenth-century British Columbian towns, but he is probably referring only to Victoria. See also Jamieson, “Regional Factors,” 505–7; Saywell, “Labour and Socialism in bc”; Fox, “Early Socialism in Canada,” 85; McCormack, “Socialist Movement,” 3–4; Grantham, “Socialist Movement,” 20–85. 4 Phillips, No Power Greater, 163. 5 The historiographical link between sex ratios and labour militance is observed and labelled as the “volcano theory” in Perry, ‹Oh I’m Just Sick of the Faces of Men,› 29. 6 For the utility and problems of such sources see Pouyez, Roy, and Martin, “The Linkage of Census Name Data,” 129–30, 144; Baines, “Published Census Data”; Tillott, “Sources of inaccuracy”; Higgs, “Structuring the Past”; Laslett, “Study of Social Structure”; Hollingsworth, “Historical Demography”; Sharlin, “Historical Demography’; Anderson, “The Study of Family Structure”; Eversley, “Population History and Local History,” 15. The history and problems of census taking in nineteenth-century Canada are charted in Curtis, The Politics of Population. 7 Kilian, Go Do Some Great Thing, 147; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 277–8. 8 Wilmott, “Approaches,” 78–9; Lai, “Overseas Chinese”; Canada, Census of Canada, 1880–1, vol. 1, table ix, 396–7; Wickberg, et al., From China to Canada, 26; Wood, “Settlement and Population,” 38; Young and Reid, The Japanese Canadians, 15. 9 bcsp, 1881, Minister of Mines Annual Report (Victoria 1881) 436–7. 10 Canada, Census of Canada, 1890–91, vol. 2, table i, 2–5; Canada, Fourth Census of Canada, 1901, vol. 1, table ix, 2. Gibson, “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast”; Yarmie, “Smallpox.” See also bcsp 1888, Report of the Minister of Mines, 291–2; bcsp 1889, Report of the Minister of Mines, 340–2. 11 Muise, “The Making of an Industrial Community,” 82–3. See also Bercuson,”Labour Radicalism,” 163–4. 12 Paul, Mining Frontiers, 25–6, 68–9; Brown, Hard-Rock Miners, 8–9. Dubofsky, “Origins,” 135–6; Weitz,”Class Formation,” 88–9; West, “Five Idaho Mining Towns,” 110–12; Erickson, “British Immigrants,” 323–7.

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231 Notes to pages 60–7 13 Something of a later exception was the Iowa coalfield where, in 1925, the British constituted 60.5 percent of the miners, though only 38 percent of the population as a whole. Schwieder, Black Diamonds, 112–18. 14 Creese and Strong-Boag, “Taking Gender into Account,” 19. 15 In English mining towns where other occupational niches could be found – as in Wigan, for example – rates of female employment were much higher than in the mono-industrial colliery towns elsewhere. Jordan, “Female Unemployment,” 188. See also John, By the Sweat of Their Brow; Higgs, “Women”; Wise, “Cannock Chase Coalfield,” 236–46; Lewis, The Rhondda Valleys, 239; Cohen, Women’s Work, 128–34. 16 Paul, Mining Frontiers, 17, 40. In a sample of mining camps in Idaho the average female proportion was 26.3 percent in 1880. West, “Five Idaho Mining Towns,” 110. 17 Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” 70. 18 Seager, “Miners’ Struggles,” 184n43. Two fifteen-year-old “miners” appear on the nominal census returns for 1881. See also British Columbia, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 1891, Report of the Select Committee on the Wellington Strike, cccxx. 19 Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” 71. 20 The profile for 1891 is very similar to the aggregate population profiles of Montana, Wyoming, Washington, and Colorado in 1890. Oregon and California had much less pronounced male surpluses. Gannett, Statistical Atlas of the United States, 26. 21 pro, co305(6), Letter from James Douglas to Lord Russell, 21 August 1855. 22 Victoria Daily Colonist, 31 January 1863, 3. 23 Crofts, “Madeley,” 31. 24 Hammell, Johansson, and Ginsberg, “The Value of Children,” 346–7. 25 Erickson, “Emigration from the British Isles, Part I,” 350, 359. See also Erickson, “Emigration from the British Isles, Part II,” 34–5. 26 See Wells, Population of the British Colonies, 6–17. 27 Pickens, “Marriage Patterns,” 188–9. For the situation in Quebec see Gossage, “Family Formation.” 28 Muise, “Making of an Industrial Community,” 82–3. Religious toleration, at least within Protestant parameters, extended to other members of miners’ households as well. The household of Absolam (English, Church of England) and Anna Uren (Norwegian, Lutheran) included their two daughters (American and British Columbian, both Methodists), five lodgers who were miners (one Canadian, four British, two Baptists, one Anglican, one Presbyterian, one Methodist), and two Chinese cooks (both born in China, religion presumably Confucian). na, Nominal Census Returns, 1880/1. 29 These “non-aboriginal” figures include mixed-race marriages between white males and native females. Twenty-five marriages of this kind were

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232 Notes to pages 68–71

30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44 45

recorded in the census returns of 1880–81, along with six additional cases of common law co-residency. Only one active miner in 1881 was a participant in a mixed-race marriage; sixteen of the other local white males married to aboriginal women were farmers, easily the largest occupational group taking native wives. The practice of intermarriage declined for various reasons associated, most usually, with the arrival of greater numbers of white women and clergy who frowned on the practice. For attitudes towards “mixed-race” marriages in British Columbia see Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 48–78. Contrast this information with Van Vugt’s contention that around midcentury, British miners emigrating to the United States were the “least likely [occupational group] to be travelling with children.” “British Emigration during the Early 1850s,” 142. Hair, “Children in Society,” 40–1. See, as well, Stevenson, “Fertility.” Redford, Labour Migration, 56–7; Benson, British Coalminers, 121–3; Friedlander, “Demographic Patterns,” 40, 43; Glass, Population Policies, 69; Haines, “Fertility,” 253, 256, 271–2. Quoted in Levine, Reproducing Families, 205. Woods and Hinde, “Nuptiality,” 134. Stevenson, “Fertility,” 424–5. Friedlander makes reference to the “functionalist” aspects of miners’ families in Britain: “Demographic Patterns,” 44–5. Friedlander and Moshe, “Occupations,” 10. Quoted in Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 133. na, Canada Census, 1880–81. For a range of quantitative approaches to fertility measurement see Willigan and Lynch, Historical Demography, 102–3. Comparable fertility figures from the American Pacific Northwest show that the Nanaimo and Wellington area was slightly below the average for the region – Washington State had a one-to-one ratio, and there were 1,111 children per 1,000 women in Oregon. No other American states, however, had rates that were so high. Potter, “The Growth of Population,” 674–5. Of the 126 households headed by miners 97 contained offspring. Of these, 102 (81 percent) were headed by miners who originated in Britain. The average size of Canadian families in the region is surprisingly low. One study reveals that in 1871 in the Canadian households of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick there were 3.9 unmarried children, on average. Darroch and Ornstein, “Family Coresidence,” 162. uca, Ladysmith, bc, First United [Presbyterian] Church. Marriage Register, 1904–19. For a discussion of this type of method see Demos, “Families in Colonial Bristol,” 102–3. In 1891 more than 80 percent of the miners’ wives had co-resident children. Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” 73.

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233 Notes to pages 72–7 46 Archives of the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia, St Paul’s Nanaimo, text 330, box 8. 47 Benson, British Coalminers, 120–1; Van de Walle, “Marriage and Marital Fertility,” 486–501. 48 Crofts, “Madeley,” 33. See also Outhwaite, “Age at First Marriage in England.” 49 One historical case study maintains that late marriages can be attributed almost entirely to poor farming conditions and local economic difficulties, but in that instance both men and women married late. What is exceptional about the Vancouver Island mining community is that only the men married late. See Bieder, “Kinship.” 50 For the reduction in family size in late nineteenth-century Britain see Teitelbaum, The British Fertility Decline. 51 The relationship between fertility levels and the household economic contribution of women is discussed in Tolnay and Guest, “Childlessness,” 218, and “Urban Industrial Structure and Fertility,” 388–9. 52 Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society, 79; Mackie, “Colonial Land,” 162. 53 The presence of families on the North American frontier was not an aberrant development. It has been shown elsewhere that the caricature of a sparsely distributed population dominated by single, self-sufficient males was inaccurate in the American Midwest in the nineteenth century. “Families, instead, provided the basic element of social structure on the frontier, as elsewhere in American society.” Modell, “Family and Fertility,” 615. chapter five 1 csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, miner’s testimony, 271. 2 This approach owes much to the “functionalist” model used by Aurand (From the Molly Maguires) in which the process of work inherently contains (and creates) problems of a social character. 3 Brown, On the Geographical Distribution, 23; Macfie, Vancouver Island, 150–1; The Colonial Enterprise, 28 June 1894. 4 Macfie, Vancouver Island, 144; bcsp, 1899, Reports of the Minister of Mines, 1170–1; “Coal Mining Industry in Canada.” 5 Gazette (Nanaimo), 21 August 1865. 6 bcsp, 1897, Report of the Minister of Mines, 585. 7 Currie, “The Vancouver Island Coal Mining Company,” 55. 8 Pemberton, Facts and Figures, 47; bcsp, 1888, Report of the Minister of Mines, 287. 9 Matheson, “Some Effects of Coal Mining,” 43; Griffen, Coalmining, 104–7.

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234 Notes to pages 77–83 10 csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 80. 11 Haines, “Fertility,” 266. See also Derickson, Workers’ Health, chap. 2. An excellent account of mining hazards in eastern Canada is Macleod, “Colliers.” 12 Harvey, The Best-Dressed Miners, 41, table 3. 13 bcsp, 1879, Report of Minister of Mines, 384–5. 14 Hair, “Mortality from Violence,” 549. Submarine mining also occurred in Nova Scotia. 15 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 116. Before the Great War the worst American mining catastrophes were at Dawson, New Mexico (263 dead), Scofield, Utah (200 dead), and Hannah, Wyoming (169 dead). Powell, “Labor’s Fight for Recognition,” 20. 16 Benson, British Coalminers, 38–9. 17 Canada, Census, 1901, vol. 4, table v, 72–88. 18 The terms “bord-and-pillar” and “pillar-and-stall” refer to roughly the same process. On Vancouver Island the latter term, however, was used almost exclusively. 19 Daunton, ‹Down the Pit.› 20 The term, “oncost workers” embraces all those mineworkers engaged in moving coal underground, maintaining the roadways, running any ventilation equipment, and so on. In short, the oncost workers were all those mineworkers who were not directly engaged in the hewing of coal. See Church, British Coal Industry, 201–15. 21 Corbin, Life, Work and Rebellion, 38. 22 Pollard, The Hardest Work under Heaven, 26. 23 Trist and Bamforth, “Longwall Method,” 7; Hinton, Labour and Socialism, 3. 24 Clement, “Subordination of Labour,” 134–8; Trist and Bamforth, “Longwall Method,” 6. 25 Corbin, Life, Work and Rebellion, 38. 26 Daunton, “Down the Pit,” 583; Griffen, Coalmining, 104–7; Pollard, Hardest Work under Heaven, 42. 27 csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 199; Ormsby, British Columbia, 215; Silverman, “History of the Militia,” 1; bca, Captain Stuart Journal, 1 November 1855. 28 bca, John Bryden Diary and Letter Book, 29 September 1878; bcsp, 1884, Report of the Minister of Mines, 415–19; Cole and Lockner, Journals of George M. Dawson, vol. 2, 544. 29 bcsp, 1888, Report of the Minister of Mines, 287; bcsp, 1890, Report of the Minister of Mines, 296–300. 30 bcsp, 1889, Report of the Minister of Mines, 298–9. 31 bcsp, 1891, Report of the Minister of Mines, 386; British Columbia, General Review of Mining, no. 19, 127, 132, 134, 137–8.

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235 Notes to pages 83–7 32 bcsp, 1882, Report of the Minister of Mines, 366. 33 Boyns, “Technical Change,” 158–9, 163–4. 34 bca, Bryden Diary, 29 January 1878; pro, co305(2), letter from J.H. Pelly to Earl Grey, 4 October 1855. 35 bcsp, 1875, Report of the Minister of Mines, 560–2; bcsp, 1884, Report of the Minister of Mines, 415–16; Cole and Lockner, Journals of George M. Dawson, vol. 2 544. 36 bcsp, 1899, Report of the Minister of Mines, 834–5, passim. Underground endless-rope haulage powered by electricity appeared in British mines in the early 1880s. Griffen, Coalmining, 60–1. 37 bca, Andrew Muir Private Diary, 9 November 1848 – 5 August 1850, 19 October 1849. 38 Campbell and Reid, “The Independent Collier in Scotland,” 57–9; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 484; Benson, British Coalminers, 191. Keith Ralston has also emphasized the importance of these ethnic and skill demarcations; Bill Burrill argues that the issue was control over “the intensity” of the miners’ labour. In the most important respect this comes down to the same thing: as “labourers” the miners were unable to exploit their skills to earn their contractually guaranteed bonuses as hewers of coal. The “intensity” issue comes down to whether the miners were going to be able to work as miners at all. See Ralston, “Miners and Managers”; Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 50–1, 79. 39 pro, co305(3), Letter from Andrew Muir to Richard Blanshard, 29 April 1851, and Letter from J.H. Pelly to Earl Grey, 7 November 1851. See also Ralston, “Miners and Managers,” 42–55. 40 Free Press (Nanaimo), 25 June 1887. The use of screens, or “riddles” was, in fact, common throughout most of the English coalfields, though less so as the century wore on. See Currie, “The Vancouver Coal Mining Company,” 150; Griffen, Coalmining, 105, 108–9; Machin, Yorkshire Miners, 118–19, 210–11, 245–48. 41 bca, Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company, 25August 1880. 42 Matheson, “Some Effects of Coal Mining,” 43. See also testimony following the 1887 disaster in the Nanaimo Free Press, 29 June 1887. 43 bca, Inspector of [Coal] Mines, Correspondence, gr 184, letter from Edward Fowler Prior to John Bryden, 1 November 1877. 44 bcj, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike, cclxi–cclxii, cclxxxviii. 45 At Alexandra Mines around 1900 there was still very little slack or dirt being removed from the pit. csp 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 239. Also see bcj, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike, cclxi– cclxii, cclxxxviii. 46 Free Press (Nanaimo), 22 December 1883; British Columbia, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 1891, Report of the Select Committee on the Wellington Strike, cclxii; csp, 1903, No. 36a, Royal Commission on

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236 Notes to pages 87–92

47 48 49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

65

Industrial Disputes, 353–4. Cavilling is described in Daunton, “Down the Pit,” 585; Griffen, Coalmining, 10. bca, Bryden Diary, Letter from John Bryden to S.M. Robins, 26 March 1880. bcj, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike, cclxiii–cclxiv, cccvii–cccviii. Some cavilling took place at the Northfield Mine on a three-monthly basis for several years in the 1890s, but for some unknown reason the practice was discontinued. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 354. Campbell and Reid, “The Independent Collier in Scotland,” 58–9; Campbell, Lanarkshire Miners; Moore, Pitmen, 75. See also Childs, “Boy Labour.” Campbell, “Skill, Independence, and Trade Unionism,” 156–7. bca, Michael Bate “Reminiscences,” cited in Gallacher,”Men, Money, Machines,” 203. The authoritative work on the subject of young labourers in the Canadian coal mining industry is McIntosh, Boys in the Pits. csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 76, 89. Brown, Geographical Distribution, 11–12. bca, Bryden Diary, 21 January 1878. McIntosh, “Patterns of Child Labour.” “Legislation for the Protection of Employees.” bcsp, 1897, Report of the Minister, 595–6. bcj, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike, cccxx. Gallacher, “John Muir,” 626–7. Porter, “British Columbia’s Mining Casualties,” 88–9. Studies of British Columbian living standards are limited, but the reader is directed to Bartlett, “Real Wages.” For Canada as a whole and other provinces, see Snell, “The Cost of Living”; Bertram and Percy, “Real Wage Trends”; Copp, The Anatomy of Poverty; Piva, Condition of the Working Class; Gagan and Gagan, “Working-Class Standards of Living.” For a survey of the standard of living debate among British economic and social historians down to the 1990s, see Crafts, “Real Wages.” See also Taylor, Standard of Living in Britain. bcsp, 1875–1900, Minister of Mines Reports, passim. For methods of calculating miners’ wages see Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom, 96–109. Shortcomings of the British parliamentary enquiries ought to be mentioned: the studies “were concerned with mine safety, truck, and the employment of women and children – wages were relatively ignored.” Hunt, Regional Wage Variations. An example of a rigorously quantitative approach to a similar problem can be found in Shergold, ‹Reefs of Roast Beef,› and “The Standard of Living of Manual Workers.”

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237 Notes to pages 92–5 66 See Ralston, “Miners and Managers”; Bowen,”Independent Colliers at Fort Rupert,” 28–30; Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 19. An econometric critique of the perceived link between rising wages and declining productivity usually associated with the darg is Greasley, “Wage Rates and Work Intensity.” 67 nca, d3/17, Indenture between the Hudson’s Bay Company and John Thompson of Brickmoor, 10 May 1854. 68 bca, Nanaimo Correspondence, Letter from James Douglas to Joseph McKay, 20 May 1853 and 2 June 1853. 69 pro, co305(6), Letter from George Martin to Commodore Charles Frederick, 16 October 1854; bca, Captain Stuart Journal, 1 November 1855. 70 nca, d3/21, Indenture between the Hudson’s Bay Company and William Incher of Dudley, 2 May 1854. The miners at Fort Rupert received a ration diet agreed upon in advance in discussions with Chief Factor James Douglas. Every month they were entitled to 14 pounds of flour, 10.5 pounds of beef or venison or, in lieu, as much fresh salmon as should be equivalent, 1 pound of sugar, 4 ounces of tea, and 3 gills of rum per week. The miners were offered one shilling in lieu of rations, but this was rejected because the prices in the company store were so high. As well, the produce of the colony (e.g., potatoes) was provided free of charge to miners. bca, Andrew Muir Diary, 82–3. 71 Gallacher, “Men, Money, Machines,” 73. 72 Daily Colonist, 10 June 1862; pro, co305(3), Letter from J.H. Pelly to Earl Grey, 14 January 1852; Nanaimo Gazette, 21 August 1865; bca, Alexander Papley, Correspondence Outward, 8 January 1864. On exchange rates see pro, co60(29), Letter from Henry Pellew Crease to the Colonial Office, 21 June 1867; Harvey, A Statistical Survey, 23. 73 Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 149–50. 74 bca, Bryden Diary, 19 January 1878, 23 January 1878, 7 August 1879. Checkweighmen at this time earned only $2 per day. bca, Joseph Papley, Correspondence Outwards, 1 April 1872. 75 Phillips, No Power Greater, 5–6. 76 Tweedy, “The 1880 and 1881 Strikes,” 25, 34–5. An average daily productivity rate of slightly more than two tons seems to have been reckoned as the norm. 77 Trempé, Les Mineurs de Carmaux, 359–60. 78 csp, 1885, no. 54a, Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 76. The Nanaimo strike of 1880–81 was a response to management’s attempts to roll back tonnage rates as a means of softening the losses incurred at the Chase River Mine. Although the vclmc’s manager, John Bryden, resigned in disgust when the head office in London turned his certain victory into a humiliating defeat, the Nanaimo miners were unable to advance their wages for the rest of the decade. Dunsmuir took advantage of the situation to

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238 Notes to pages 95–8

79

80 81

82

83 84 85 86 87 88

89

90 91

cut his own operating costs and to poach dissatisfied Nanaimo miners in a period of labour scarcity. The tables would be turned in 1891. Kwakiutl labourers were usually paid in shirts or blankets. pro, co305(6), Martin to Frederick; bca, Nanaimo Correspondence, James McKay to James Douglas, 9 September 1852, ts. McKelvie, “The Founding of Nanaimo,” 176–7. Daunton, “Down the Pit,” 585; Griffen, Coalmining, 10; British Columbia, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 1891, Report of the Select Committee, cclxii; csp, 1903, no. 36a, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, cclxix–cclxxi, 353–4. The vulnerability of Chinese wages should be noted. In 1899 James Dunsmuir anticipated that his campaign against Asian exclusion legislation would result in a large bill from the Privy Council and the provincial courts; consequently, he ordered the deduction of a fifty-cent tariff from the monthly wages of all his Chinese employees. Likewise, in the year that followed Dunsmuir covered similar costs by deducting one dollar from the monthly pay of every one of his Chinese employees. In a curt message to his mine manager at Union, Dunsmuir wrote, “The coal mine arbitration cost us over $3000.00. Take it off every chinaman irrespective of what he is working at.” bca, Buckham Collection, vol. 21/1, Letter from James Dunsmuir to F.D. Little (Wellington manager), 19 September 1899, and to George W. Clinton (Union manager), 9 April 1900. csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 81. British Columbia, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 1891, Report of the Select Committee, cccxx. McNab, British Columbia for Settlers, 200–3. Canada [Labour], The Impact of Winter on the Canadian Worker; bca, Bryden Diary, 9–10 January 1878. bcj, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike, cccxxxii; bca, Bryden Diary, 6–15 April 1878. See also Barnsby, “The Standard of Living in the Black Country,” and “A Rejoinder,” 514–16. The work-year in British mining towns is calculated to have been 226 days during the last half of the nineteenth century, in Church, British Coal Industry, 560. See also Morsa, “Real Wages,” 98. pro, Hudson’s Bay Company Papers 1/638, Fort Rupert Journal, 27 November 1849; nca, d3/17, Indenture between the Hudson’s Bay Company and John Thompson of Brickmoor, 10 May 1854. Brown, Geographical Distribution, 11–12. “The Coal Mining Industry”; csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, exhibit 17a, 761; British Columbia, General Review of Mining, no. 19, 127. For the struggle to reduce working hours in Britain’s coal mining industry see McCormack and Williams, “The Miners and the EightHour Day, 1863–1910”; Pelling, British Trade Unionism, 105–6.

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239 Notes to pages 98–100 92 Phillips, No Power Greater, 19; Canada, Department of Labour, Wholesale Prices in Canada. At the International Colliery on Cape Breton Island miners worked eight hours and labourers ten. 93 Bancroft, History of British Columbia, 577–8; Robin, Rush for Spoils, 74. 94 Challinor and Ripley, The Miners’ Association, 54. See also the survey of early nineteenth-century wages in Britain in Flinn, British Coal Industry, 374–95. 95 Campbell, The Lanarkshire Miners, 326–7; Raybould, The Economic Experience, 211–12. Benson, British Coalmining, 77. 96 E.H. Hunt, British Labour History, 101–2. 97 Reid, “Alexander MacDonald,” 158–9. Bowley estimates that Lanarkshire miners earned on average 3s. 9d. from 1861 to 1870. Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom, 107, 172. 98 Barnsby, Social Conditions, 27, 212; Taylor, “Working Class Movement,” 121; Staffordshire Country Council Education Committee, “Coal Mines in Staffordshire,” 32. 99 In South Wales timbermen were paid more than hewers. See Thomas, “Migration of Labour,” 282–3; Lewis, The Rhondda Valleys, 234–5; Morris and Williams, South Wales Coal Industry, 219–20. 100 Rowe, Wages in the Coal Industry, 72. See also bpp, 1887, 89, Return of Wages, 24–6, 134–45; Benson, British Coalminers, 69; Hunt, Regional Wage Variations, 72; Griffin, “Conciliation.” 101 The earnings cycle of (married) miners in Lancashire meant that colliers were bringing home their “peak earnings” about the time their children were born – that is, when they reached about twenty-seven years of age. Physical wear and tear thereafter ensured that the hewers’ contribution to the household income would actually decline as family expenditures grew. This fine line was probably walked as well by British Columbia miners. Daunton, “Income Flows,” 144. 102 Paul, Mining Frontiers, 35. Figures for other American mining areas can be found in Brown, Hard-Rock Miners, 20–35; Eller, Miners, 182–98; Fishback, Soft Coal, 79–101. Fishback provides a dissenting view of the role played by truck shops in mining towns; see also his article “Company Store.” 103 bca, John Helmcken Papers, vol. 14, folder 12, items 1, 2. 104 Snell, “The Cost of Living,” 189. Average earnings for masons in New York State were higher, as were those in Maine, but not by much. 105 bpp, 1892, 41, Report on Hours of Adult Labour (Colonies), 7–16. 106 Leboutte, “Passing through a Minefield,” 142. 107 One writer claims that nineteenth-century settlers on Vancouver Island found a lower cost of living, although he offers no evidence on this score. Dunae, Gentlemen Emigrants, 110. In 1903 an Extension/Ladysmith miner reported that food costs were lower at Extension and that the

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240 Notes to pages 101–4

108 109

110 111

112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

126 127 128 129 130 131

Dunsmuirs’ control of the stores at Ladysmith was detrimental to the welfare of the miners and their families. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 52. pro, co305(3), Letter from J.H. Pelly to Earl Grey, 12 June 1851. pro, co305(60), Letter from George Martin to Commodore Charles Frederick, 16 October 1854; bca, Nanaimo Correspondence, Letter from Joseph McKay to James Douglas, 19 May 1852; Johnson, A Short History of Nanaimo, 11. Currie, “The Vancouver Coal Mining Company,” 57. As a directing force within the Dunsmuir empire, Joan’s role has come to be more fully appreciated. See, for example, Newsome, The Coal Coast, 171–2, and Reksten, The Dunsmuir Saga, 112. Canada, Census 1880–81, vol. 3, 228–9, 248–9; Canada, Census 1891, vol. 4, 8–9, 116–17, 224–5; Canada, Census 1901, vol. 2, 64–5. Innis and Lower, Select Documents, 794. Similar resources played a significant role in working-class diets across America. See Wallace, St Clair, 146–7. British Columbia [G.M. Sproat], British Columbia, 19–20. bca, Tate Family, vol. 1, file 2. Scottish Records Office, Emigration Circular and Poster for October 1888. See also Snell, “The Cost of Living,” 190–1. “The Coal Mining Industry in Canada,” 127. Barnsby, Social Conditions, 251. pro, co305(3), Letter from J. Pelly to Earl Grey, 14 January 1852. Macfie, Vancouver Island, 501; bca, Joseph Papley. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 298–9. McNab, British Columbia for Settlers, 200–3. Bancroft, History of British Columbia, 574. The extent to which home-ownership was part of a working-class strategy of thrift is examined in Benson, “Working-Class Consumption,” 88–90. See also Johnson, Saving and Spending. bca, Manson’s Store, Ledger; Daily Colonist (Victoria), 2 August 1890. Davis, “Forty-Ninth Parallel City,” 42; McNab, British Columbia, 200–3. Bartlett, “Wellington Miners’ Strike,” 20; Morton and Copp, Working People, 52. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 36, 46–9, 65–6, 298. Ibid., 298. csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 75, 79; see also W.A. Carrothers, Oriental Standards of Living, appended to Young and Reid, The Japanese Canadians, 276; Wickberg, From China to Canada, 40.

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241 Notes to pages 104–6 132 See Moffat, “A Community of Working Men,” 109. 133 bcj, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike, cccxx. 134 Victoria Daily Colonist, 7 March 1880, 2. In each of February and March 1890 one Wellington hewer was deducted $9.25 from his wages for powder and 30¢ for oil. In April these costs increased to $13.87 and 60¢ respectively, but in May they fell to $4.64 for the explosive powder, and there was no charge for oil. bcj, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike, exhibit a, cccxxxii. 135 bca, Ancient Order of Foresters, 27 June 1885, 20 August 1887, 4 February 1888. 136 Benson, British Coalminers, 78; Tweedy, “The 1880 and 1881 Strikes,” 40. 137 See Levine, Reproducing Families, 206. This was a right claimed also by Nova Scotian miners at the other end of the country. MacLeod, “Colliers,” 247. 138 Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 66. 139 See Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” 73–5. 140 Seager and Perry argue the opposite, that women’s exclusion from minework was contrived. There is little evidence to suggest that the male British miners on Vancouver Island had ever worked beside women in Old Country mines, so the introduction of exclusion legislation a quarter century after the opening of the Fort Rupert mines and nearly forty years after the British legislation had been enacted was merely the formal recognition of what had become a culturally entrenched set of relations. What they inexplicably miss is the fact that Belgian women worked underground into the 1890s, which goes a long way to explaining tensions between Belgian and British settlers on the island coalfield in the 1890s. Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” 74; Hilden, “Rhetoric,” 411–36. 141 Cohen, Women’s Work, 8, 154. 142 Lummis, Labour Aristocracy, xi. 143 For an American parallel see Schwieder, Hraban, and Schwieder, Buxton, 71–6, 113–35. Part of the imperial situation is assessed in Frances, Kealey, and Sangster, “Women and Wage Labour.” Female involvement in the household economy in Eastern Canada is explored as well in Bradbury, “Pigs, Cows, and Boarders.” 144 Zola, Germinal, 76. 145 Nanaimo Historical Society, From the Black Country to Nanaimo, 1854. Vol. 2, N.p. 146 See Bourke, Working-Class Cultures, 82–4; Giesen, Coal Miners’ Wives, 63–7; Szurek, ‹I’ll Have a Collier.› 147 West, “Beyond Baby Doe,” 189; csp 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 67.

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242 Notes to pages 107–11 148 Campbell, “Honourable Men and Degraded Slaves,” 234–5. The actual numbers are as follows: for Larkhall, 37 out of 358 miners’ wives; for Coatbridge, three out of 680; for Vancouver District, four out of 115. 149 csp, 1885, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 363–6. 150 csp, 1902, 81–2. For competition in the service sector in British Columbia, see Crease, “Class, Ethnicity and Conflict,” 61–8. 151 csp, 1885, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 158. 152 Jordan, “Female Unemployment in England and Wales,” 177, 188. On the ways in which census-takers underestimated female participation in the economy see also Higgs, “Women, Occupations, and Work,” 60–70. 153 bca, Tate Family. 154 bca, Joseph Papley, 29 July 1872. 155 na, Nominal Census Returns, 1880–81. 156 Naturally the danger varied from coalfield to coalfield, but even in Britain’s most explosive mines premiums were typically a fraction of those on Vancouver Island. Benson, “The Thrift of the English Coal-Miners,” 417. 157 Hunt, British Labour History, 83. 158 Burnett contends that the availability of employment for women outside the home hindered the development of culinary skills among British workingclass women in the nineteenth century and that this was a further detrimental factor in the feeding of the British industrial proletariat. On Vancouver Island the usurpation of these female job prospects by Chinese males suggests the corollary: that the colonial white miner’s housewife had an opportunity to become a better cook than her Old World counterpart, thereby better nourishing her male relatives. Burnett, Plenty and Want, 99. 159 Victoria Daily Colonist, 8 June 1859, 3. 160 McKelvie, Tales of Conflict, 40; pro, co305(10), Survey at Nanaimo, Report of the Engineer in Charge, in letter from J.D. Pemberton to James Douglas, 22 July 1859; bca, Charles Alfred Bayley, 29. Times, 26 May 1864, reported that “the principle food of the [Leech River gold miners] is venison, which is very abundant and good on the island.” At Comox, deer, wild duck, and geese were caught by the local Amerindians and sold to nearby communities of white prospectors, miners, and settlers. 161 csp, 1872, British Columbia, 138–40, 235. 162 pro, co305(10), Survey at Nanaimo. See, for examples of advertisements, Free Press (Nanaimo), 23, 27 May 1889. 163 nca, Industry, box 3, g-2, code 16, b16/16. 164 bca, Life at Burrard Inlet, e/c/m13, James C. McCulley to “Parents,” 5 September 1875. The author is grateful to Dr R.A.J. McDonald for this reference. 165 Norcross, Nanaimo Retrospectives, 101–3. 166 Nelson, “Social-Class Trends,” 102–3.

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243 Notes to pages 111–16 167 Moore, Pitmen, 81; Benson, British Coalminers, 105–6. See also Duckershoff, English Workman, 29–49; Waller, The Dukeries Transformed, 75– 107. 168 Quoted in Challinor and Ripley, The Miners’ Association, 50–1. 169 Benson, British Coalminers, 106–7; Hunt, British Labour History, 88–9. 170 Burnett, Social History of Housing, 171–2. 171 pro, co305(6), Letter from George Martin to Commodore Charles Frederick, 16 October 1854; co305(4), Letter from A. Barclay (hbc secretary) to James Douglas, quoted in H. Merivale to Lord Newcastle, 18 February 1853. 172 Victoria Daily Colonist, 31 January 1863, 3. 173 Nanaimo Gazette, Letter from “A Miner” to editor, 29 January 1866. 174 pro, co305(23), Governor Kennedy to the Rt Hon. Edward Cardwell, 22 November 1864; csp, 1903, 262–3. 175 Nanaimo Historical Society, From the Black Country, vols. 1–3, passim. 176 bcsp, passim; Logan, “Mortality,” 134–5. 177 Potter, “Growth of Population,” 679; Steckel, “Health and Mortality.” 178 Benson, British Coalminers, 132. 179 Canada, Census 1901, vol. 4, table xvi, 348, and 72–88, table v. See also Ward and Ward, “Infant Birth Weight,” 324–45. 180 See Gagan and Gagan, “Working-Class Standards of Living,” 187–9. 181 In 1890–91 nearly 3 percent of all female deaths in the district were attributed to childbirth; the figure for contemporary Ontario was 1.79 percent. Canada Census 1891, vol. 2, 106–9, table xi. Of the thirty-four women buried by the Anglican Church in Nanaimo from 1881 to 1894, four (i.e., 11.7 percent) died in childbirth. Archives of the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia. chapter six 1 The mainstays of the debate are Ward, “Race and Class”; Warburton, “Race and Class”; Ward, “A Reply.” But see also Creese, “Class, Ethnicity and Conflict”; Tan, “Chinese Labour.” 2 Ward, “Race and Class,” 28. 3 Warburton, “The Workingmen’s Protective Association.” 4 Published and unpublished works dealing with the subject of British Columbian left-labour politics include Loosmore, “British Columbia Labour Movement”; Grantham, “Socialist Movement”; Schwantes, Radical Heritage; John Douglas Belshaw, “Provincial Politics, 1871–1916” in Johnston, Pacific Province, 156–8. Accounts of specific industrial disputes include Bartlett, “Wellington Miners’ Strike”; Tweedy, “Strikes”; and Mouat, “Politics of Coal.”

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244 Notes to pages 117–20 5 Quoted in Mackie, Trading beyond the Mountains, 299. See also Codere, Fighting with Property, 22; Simpson, Narrative of a Journey, 206; Fisher, Contact and Conflict; Vaughan, “Cooperation and Resistance,” 71. 6 Lutz, “After the Fur Trade,” 76. 7 bca, Michael Muir, “Reminiscences,” 2. 8 bca, Andrew Muir Diary, 16 April 1850. 9 bca, Michael Muir, 3; Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Fort Rupert Journals, 6 October 1849. 10 pro, hb1(638), Fort Rupert Journals, 7 December 1849. 11 bpp, 1849, 35, Vancouver’s Island, letter from Commander Gordon to Captain J.A. Duntze, 7 October 1846, 632. 12 Robinson, “Spirit Dancing among the Salish Indians,” 54–5. 13 pro, hb1/901, Inward Correspondence to Fort Victoria, 25 June 1850. 14 In 1867 one observer described the Native people of Vancouver Island as “generally in a degraded state, valueless in the labour market.” Harvey, Statistical Survey of British Columbia, 9. It is important to note, as well, that relations between the Euro-Canadians and the First Nations were filtered through assumptions made by the former about the latter that often hardened suspicion and hostility. In the 1870s, for example, the local newspaper carried reports of a cannibalistic feast at Fort Rupert, a charge that was vigorously challenged by the Reverend Thomas Crosby. Nanaimo Free Press, 8 April 1876. 15 Johnson, Nanaimo, 13; Knight, Indians at Work, 137. 16 bca, Alexander Papley, 17 October 1875. 17 Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 126–7. 18 Hayman, Robert Brown, 103–4. 19 bcsp, 1888, Report of the Minister of Mines, 340. 20 Lutz, “After the Fur Trade,” 76. 21 Isenor et al., Land of Plenty, 47. 22 Wilmot, “The Chinese in British Columbia,” 38–9; Lai,”Home County and Clan Origins.” For the state of mining in China during the second half of the nineteenth century, see Brown and Wright, “Technology, Economics and Politics.” 23 Lai, Chinatowns, 43. 24 Murayama, “Contractors, Collusion, and Competition,” 291. 25 Carrothers, Oriental Standards of Living, 285; csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, Minutes, 74. 26 csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 85. 27 Ibid., 72. 28 Lai, Chinatowns, 39. 29 Nanaimo Free Press, 22 December 1883. 30 bcsp, 1888, Report of the Minister of Mines, 283–4; bcsp, 1889, Report of the Minister of Mines, 334–5.

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245 Notes to pages 120–3 31 bca, Bryden Diary, 23 March 1878. 32 A comprehensive review of the political and legal dimensions of anti-Asian legislation and jurisprudence is given in Grove and Lambertson, “Pawns of the Powerful.” 33 British Columbia, Royal Statutes, 1897, chap. 138, sec. 82, rule 34; csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 86. 34 By 1900 no Crows nest pass mine employed Chinese miners. Nor, for that matter, did any Washington State mine that competed against Vancouver Island coal. Only the Dunsmuir collieries held on to this divisive practice. British Columbia, Royal Statutes, 1890, 115; csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, Minutes, 74, 89; Campbell, “Blacks and the Coal Mines of Western Washington.” 35 csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 81–8. 36 See Kolehmainen, “Harmony Island”; csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 82. From 1904 to 1915 the Presbyterian Church at Ladysmith was the scene of sixteen weddings involving Finns; in four cases both partners originated in the same village. uca, Ladysmith, Church Marriage Register, 1904–19. 37 British Columbia, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 1891, ccxxxvi–ccxi. 38 See Kilian, Go Do Some Great Thing; Winks, Blacks in Canada; csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 79. 39 For histories of the Chinese in British Columbia see Lai, “Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association”; Morton, In the Sea of Sterile Mountains; Roy, A White Man’s Province; Ward, White Canada Forever; Wickberg, From China to Canada; Wilmott, “The Chinese in British Columbia.” 40 Knight, Indians at Work, 138. 41 Howay, Sage, and Angus, British Columbia, 182. 42 Creese, “Class, Ethnicity and Conflict,” 61. 43 See Horsfall, “Ethnic Conflict in Context.” 44 csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, testimony of Francis Deans Little, 76. 45 csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 107–8. 46 Keith Ralston and Greg Kealey have suggested that white colliers were concerned only with Chinese faceworkers, not Chinese labourers generally. This position is inconsistent with white miners’ historical experience of “apprenticeships” and with the miners’ need to augment household incomes. See “Samuel H. Myers.” 47 csp, 1885, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 82–4. Because the Knights could not testify as an unregistered secret society, the commission was issued with a statement along with other evidence. See Wickberg, From China to Canada, 53–4, 155–6.

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246 Notes to pages 123–8 48 csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, testimony of William Stocker, 1901 President of the Miners and Mine Labourers Protective Association, 87. 49 csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 84–5. 50 Ibid., 86. 51 Ibid., 156. 52 Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour, 56. 53 One study indicates that the virtues of the “single life” for men were a subject of lively discussion in 1891 at Northfield, which suggests that the moral concerns this generated were being faced regularly. Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” 71–2. See also, Perry, On the Edge of Empire, passim. 54 csp, 1885, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 72, 83–4; csp 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 298. 55 csp 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 84. 56 Wickberg, From China to Canada, 50–1. 57 Mark-Lawson and Witz, “From ‘Family Labour’ to ‘Family Wage’?” 58 csp, 1885, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 158, 88. 59 Ibid., xvii. 60 csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, testimony of William Woodman, 82–3. 61 Thomas “The Migration of Labour”; Church, British Coal Industry, 191, 221–2; Benson, British Coalminers, 191. 62 Otuathaigh, “The Irish”; Clapham, “Irish Immigration.” 63 Campbell, The Lanarkshire Miners, 191; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 480. 64 Miners’ Advocate, 7 March 1874. There was also a tradition of British antiAsian sentiment with which the Vancouver Island miners had a symbiotic connection. At the turn of the century the British Columbian situation was referred to by sinophobic speakers at the thirty-fifth Trade Union Congress to galvanize concern over the “Asiatic locust,” which they feared was about to descend on Britain itself. May, “The British Working Class,” 7–8, 21–2. 65 Parmet, Labor and Immigration, 31, 38. 66 Leinenweber, “Immigration and the Decline of Internationalism,” 43; Kroes, “The Twain Have Met,” 202–24; Wyman, Hard Rock Epic, 32–3, 37–40. 67 MacLeod, “Colliers,” 247. 68 See Flinn, British Coal Industry, 339–49; Church, British Coal Industry, 215–16; Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour, 2. 69 See Lai, “Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.” 70 See Muryama, “Contractors.” 71 For the condition of Afro-Americans in nineteenth-century British North America, see Winks, Blacks in Canada; Kilian, Go Do Some Great Thing;

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247 Notes to pages 128–33

72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87

88 89 90 91

92

Katz, The People of Hamilton, 3. For the situation in the United States see Campbell, “Blacks”; Gutman, “Reconstruction in Ohio”; Lewis, Black Coal Miners. See Morton, Sea of Sterile Mountains, 48. Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion, 76. See also Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, testimony of James Dunsmuir, 239. The literature on intermarriage, miscegnation and “household colonization” in British Columbia continues to grow. See, for example, van Kirk, “Tracing the Fortunes.” csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 450–3; Exhibit 14, 755. bca, Bryden Diary, letter from Bryden to Robins, 17 October 1878 and 7 August 1879. See Phillips, “Underground Economy,” 44. See Newsome, The Coal Coast, 118. csp, 1885, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, Appendix c, 363–6. Ibid., xx. csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, testimony of Francis Deans Little, 76; Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” n13. For a quantitative approach to the question of race and skill, see Fishback, “Discrimination on Nonwage Margins.” A useful discussion of the taxonomy of skill and the idea of the artisanal labour is Hanagan, “Artisan and Skilled Worker,” 28–31. See also McKay, “By Wisdom, Wile or War,” 18; Campbell, “Skill, Independence, and Trade Unionism.” Nanaimo Free Press, 7 March 1888. See Schwieder, Black Diamonds, 20. bcsp, Minister Mines Reports, passim. It is worth noting that productivity in Vancouver Island mines in the last quarter of the century was consistently higher than in Glamorganshire and Monmouthshire in the same years. See Walters, “Labour Productivity,” appendix, 300. csp, 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 79. See Phillips, “Underground Economy,” 45. Industrial News, 26 December 1885. In any event, it is difficult to determine with confidence whether the Chinese “strikebreakers” were invited to join the strike. Race certainly complicated industrial disputes, but it did not dictate the form of the confrontations that followed; economic and political issues were clearly more consistently important. Lai, Chinatowns, 46–7. Powell, “Labor’s Fight for Recognition,” 21.

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248 Notes to pages 133–7 93 bca, Bryden Diary, letter from Bryden to Robins, 18 March 1880; Nanaimo Free Press, 13 March 1894; Bartlett, “Wellington Miners’ Strike,” 61–72. 94 Morton, Sea of Sterile Mountains, 50. See also Newsome, The Coal Coast, 167. 95 Creese, “Class, Ethnicity and Conflict,” 80. 96 Victoria Daily Colonist, 31 January 1883. 97 Pollard, Genesis of Modern Management, 187–90. 98 The events of the ill-fated Fort Rupert mining experiment are detailed in Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Fort Rupert Journals 1(638). See also pro, h.b.1(901), Inward Correspondence to Fort Victoria, letter from John Muir to Archibald Barclay, 2 July 1850; pro, co305(2), letter from Richard Blanshard to Earl Grey, 18 August 1850. 99 This connection is described in Gough, The Hudson’s Bay Company. 100 Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Fort Rupert Journals, 1(638), 28 April 1850. In the original the writing at this point betrays an agitated mind; the highlighted words are triple underlined. 101 Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Fort Rupert Journals, 1(901), Inward Correspondence, letter from John Muir to Archibald Barclay, 2 July 1850. McNeill was regarded by his superiors in the hbc as “hot tempered,” though it would seem that his actions were hardly out of keeping with management practices at the company’s outposts. Rich, London Correspondence Inward, 215. For a more detailed account of these events see Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 42–4. 102 bca, Captain Stuart Journal, 11–12 September 1855. 103 Ibid., 11–12, 20, and 24 September, 6 October 1855. 104 See Fisher, Contact and Conflict, 54–5. 105 pro, co305(5), letter from Deputy-Governor John Simpson to Sir George Grey, 3 August 1854, and “Memorial,” 1 March 1854. 106 Gallacher, “Men, Money, Machines,” 108–10. 107 For the role of the Royal Navy on Canada’s West Coast in this period see Gough, “‘Turbulent Frontiers,› and “British Columbia Frontier.” 108 Silverman, “Militia and Defences,” 160–2; Morton, “Aid to the Civil Power,” 410; Bartlett, “Wellington Miners’ Strike,” 61, 72; Phillips, No Power Greater, 56–60. 109 Victoria Daily Colonist, 19 July 1890, 5. 110 csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, Minutes, 351–2, 434. 111 Ibid., 747. 112 Bryden married Robert Dunsmuir’s daughter Elizabeth in 1867, when the family fortune was not yet established. Ibid., 79, 434; Orr, “The Western Federation of Miners,” 61.

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249 Notes to pages 137–40 113 Mouat, “Politics of Coal,” 4. Theodore Davie would himself be premier from 1892 to 1895, following in the footsteps of his brother, who held the same office from 1887 to 1889. 114 Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux, 66. 115 bca, Nanaimo Correspondence, ts. Letter from Douglas to Joseph McKay, 26 August 1852. 116 Victoria Daily Colonist, 10 June 1862. 117 bca, Ancient Order of Foresters; Bowen, “Friendly Societies in Nanaimo,” 16–17. 118 Ibid., 19; bca, Coburn Diary, vol. 2; bca, Buckham Collection, vol. 162/11, Cumberland News, 24 May 1899. 119 Benson, “Trade Union Accident Funds,” 199, and British Coalminers, 199; Arnot, The Miners, 44–8, 61; Machin, The Yorkshire Miners, 274. The role played by similar institutions in the Rocky Mountain mining camps is examined in Derickson, Workers’ Health, chap. 3. 120 For the earliest attempts at nation-wide unions in the British Isles, see Taylor, “The Miners’ Association”; Challinor and Ripley, The Miners’ Association, 245–6; Harrison, Before the Socialists, 9–10. 121 See Phillips, No Power Greater, 12, 55–60. 122 Pelling, America, 63. For the experience of the Knights of Labor in Britain during the 1880s see Taylor, “The Working Class Movement,” 293–5; Pelling,”The Knights of Labor,” 320–1. Seager and Perry have inexplicably claimed that in my article “The British Collier in British Columbia,” I “speculat[e] that British coal miners found the [Knights] uncongenial”; they are clearly incorrect on that score. Seager and Perry, “Mining the Connections,” n13. 123 See Phillips, No Power Greater, 19. 124 bcsp, 1894, Annual Report of the Minister of Labour, 1005–10; “The Coal Mining Industry in Canada,” 124–7. 125 Tweedy, “The 1880 and 1881 Strikes,” 32–4. At this stage nearly 40 percent of the Nanaimo electorate were listed as “miners.” 126 bcsp, 1877, Petitions of Proprietors of Coal Mines, 504. 127 See Pelling, “Labour Aristocracy,” 47; Hobsbawm, “The Labour Aristocracy,” 273. See also McLellan, “The Labour Aristocracy”; Gray, “The Labour Aristocracy,” 25–6, and The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh; Moorhouse, “Marxist Theory.” The argument made here regarding “skills” and class consciousness addresses Ian McKay’s concerns that the “ease with which the miner has been assimilated into the ranks of the ‘artisan’ and the ‘skilled worker› was “an essentialist and reductionist move” by labour historians. McKay, review of What’s a Coal Miner to Do? 201–3. The connexion between recruitment and a recognition of skills held true, roughly speaking, on Cape Breton Island, where the

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250 Notes to pages 141–5

128 129

130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

142 143

144 145 146 147

hewers were described as “a select element of the community, the imported labourers from Britain.” Muise, “Making of an Industrial Community,” 79. Mark Leier considers the relevance to nineteenth-century Vancouver’s labour scene of the labour aristocracy theory in “Ethnicity,” and in Red Flags, 102–7. See McCormack, “Emergence of the Socialist Movement,” 3, and Reformers, 34. See, for example, the testimony of George Scarth (an ex-Durham Country miner) in British Columbia, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 1891, cccxxii; csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 463–4. British Columbia, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 1891, cclviii. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 296, 300–2, 468, 747. bcsp, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike, 305–6. csp 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 305–6. James Hawthornthwaite was a notable exception, one whose career spanned a stunning array of occupations, none of them underground. See Orr, “The Western Federation of Miners,” 75–6, 85. bcsp, 1891, Report on the Wellington Strike, 381–2. See Moore, Pit-men, 36–7; McKay, “By Wisdom.” See Robin, Radical Politics, 42. See also Bercuson, “Labour Radicalism,” 155–7, 174; McCormack, “Socialist Movement,” 7–9. See Moore, Pit-men, 40. Benson, “Black Country History,” 104. Phillips, “Underground Economy,” 45. Smith’s liberal views were discussed broadly in csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 1066–73. See also Craven, “An Impartial Umpire,” 132–4, 144–5. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, Testimony of Arthur Spencer, Minutes, 348. Following the royal commission enquiry of 1903 William Lyon Mackenzie King (then deputy minister of labour) submitted a report that was primarily critical of the miners’ international link, uncommitted on the question of socialism, and skeptical of the methods used by James Dunsmuir in his dealings with workers and the state. See Craven, “An Impartial Umpire”; Davis, “Forty-Ninth Parallel City”; Seager, “Socialists and Workers”; Orr, “The Western Federation of Miners”; csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 300–2; Saywell, “Labour and Socialism.” csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 412. csp, 1885, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 155–60; Watt, “The National Policy”; Mackirdy, “Conflict of Loyalties.” Cunningham, “The Language of Patriotism,” 18, 21–2. bca, Charles Alfred Bayley, 22.

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251 Notes to pages 145–50 148 Morton, In the Sea of Sterile Mountains, 50. In 1885 Robert Dunsmuir advocated the enfranchisement of the Chinese as part of his campaign to continue employing Asians in his mines. Grove and Lambertson, “Pawns of the Powerful,” 13. 149 Duncan, From Shetland to Vancouver Island, 144–5. 150 Ralston and Kealey, “Samuel Myers,” 637–9. 151 Gemmill, Canadian Parliamentary Companion, 1886; bcsp, 1899, List of Persons Entitled to Vote, 315–26. 152 Mouat, “Politics of Coal,” 29. 153 Clegg, Fox, and Thompson, A History of British Trade Unions, 246, 271–3. 154 Babcock, Gompers in Canada, 61. 155 McCormack, “Emergence of the Socialist Movement,” 5–6. For a comparable situation in Australia see Pascoe and Bertola, “Italian Miners,” 11– 12; McEwen, “Coalminers in Newcastle.” For the United States see Laslett, Labor and the Left, 193. 156 It should be noted that from 1888 ownership of the Union Colliery was split evenly between the Dunsmuir family, on the one hand, and directors of the Southern Pacific Railway, on the other. This may have had a bearing on the Dunsmuirs’ decision to fight Chinese exclusion legislation, but it does not diminish the presence of the family in local affairs. See Grove and Lambertson, “Pawns of the Powerful,” 11, n47. 157 See Weitz, “Class Formation and Labor Protest,” 86–7. 158 This doggeral rhyme was signed, with irony, “D. Rex, 1st year of our reign.” Nanaimo Free Press, 5 December 1883. 159 Mouat, “Politics of Coal,” passim. 160 Martin, Reports of Mining Cases, 220–2; Pentland, “The Canadian Industrial Relations System,” 10; Morton and Copp, Working People, 25; bcsp, 1901, Report of the Commissioner, 337–68. 161 McCormack, “Socialist Movement,” 21. 162 Hobsbawm, “Artisan or Labour Aristocrat?” 368–9. 163 Derickson, Workers’ Health, 7. 164 British Columbia, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, 1891, cclxii. 165 For a comparable situation among Canadian crafts workers in the nineteenth century see Conley, “Frontier Labourers.” 166 A similar perspective can be found in an examination of labour politics in the southeastern corner of the province in the same period. See Mouat, Roaring Days. chapter seven 1 Ralston and Kealey, “Samuel H. Myers,” 637–9. 2 Fishback, Soft Coal, 3–10.

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252 Notes to pages 151–2 3 Chudacoff, Mobile Americans, 160. 4 Gagan, “Geographical and Social Mobility in Nineteenth-Century Ontario,” 152–3. 5 See Baskerville and Sager, Unwilling Idlers. 6 See Thernstrom and Knights, “Men in Motion”; Knights, The Plain People of Boston; Katz, The People of Hamilton, passim. 7 Chudacoff, Mobile Americans, 149–50; Fagge, Power, Culture, and Conflict, 65. 8 Thernstrom and Knights, “Men in Motion,” 17; Gagan, Hopeful Travellers, 96. 9 Brown, The Hard-Rock Miners, 9–10; Katz, The People of Hamilton, 20. 10 Three sources enabled this analysis. First, the provincial voters lists from 1877 to 1900 provide an irregular but thorough enumeration of the adult white-male population in the area. The usual requirements of residency, however, virtually assure the omission of transients from voters lists; nevertheless, as an indication of the validity and utility of these sources, the number of miners found on voters lists from 1877 to 1900 was usually very close to the total number of coalminers reported annually by the provincial Ministry of Mines. The second source is the nominal census returns of 1880–81 and 1891 for the coalfield area (na, Nominal Census Returns, 1880–81). Third and finally, local directories were examined. Directories containing names, addresses, and occupations of town dwellers were commonplace in larger American settlements, but as Thernstrom and Knights observed, these were rarely available for centres with fewer than thirty thousand inhabitants. In British Columbia, however, directories were compiled from an early date to cover most of the province’s very small and highly isolated villages. The purpose of these guidebooks was to promote the individual settlements and to serve as a source of information for retailers and government officials. Provincial directories were published from 1875 to 1900 by at least three firms, and the accuracy of each edition varies. Notwithstanding hazards of comparing lists compiled by different canvassers, the overall impression is that the directories reliably recorded the departure of individuals and the presence of permanent and semipermanent white, adult, male settlers. The weakness of each of these sources can be outlined briefly: first, they tell us virtually nothing about the women in these communities; second, residence requirements would have kept temporary inhabitants off the voters’ lists, and, similarly, individuals who came and left within, say, a twelve-month period would have been missed by the directories as well (the census enumerators were, in this respect, more diligent); third, homonymous names pose some problems, exemplified by the plethora of coalmining Joneses; fourth, variations in the spelling of an individual’s name (e.g., Johnson, Johnston) are common enough to represent a separate difficulty. Account has been taken of these objections. Since the to-

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253 Notes to pages 153–8

11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

tal numbers involved were low enough in the first instance to permit record linkage by hand, individual cases that do not fit comfortably into any category have been weeded out. See Pouyez, Roy, and Martin, “The Linkage of Census Name Data,” 129–30, 144; Higgs,”Structuring the Past”; Thernstrom and Knights, “Men in Motion”; Knights, The Plain People of Boston, appendix a, 127–43. For miners-turned-farmers in the Comox area, see Mackie, The Wilderness Profound, 36–40. Voters lists and city directories for Nanaimo between 1877 and 1900 are of uneven quality. The decision to focus on the contents of the lists for 1877, 1881, 1890, and 1899 was made on the basis of availability, apparent comprehensiveness (i.e., if the list suggested a demographic catastrophe where it was clear that none had occurred it was rejected), and signs of rigorous updating over previous years. The List of Persons Entitled to Vote for 1875 lacked information on occupation and residence in many cases. Before 1877 there was considerable confusion over the provincial franchise. By 1877, however, the voters list could be taken to present a reasonably accurate roll of the voting population. See Foster, “Law Enforcement.” Porter, “British Columbia’s Mining Casualties,” 88–91. Canada, Census, 1880–81, 2, 380–1; Canada, Census 1891, 2, 70–1; Canada, Census 1901, 2, 278–81, 194. In his study of Hamilton, Ontario, Michael Katz observed that transience was a condition common to all classes and occupation groups. The dividing line, he discovered, was home ownership. Katz concludes that a high level of merchant and professional mobility, as well as working class transience, indicates the presence of two social formations: one mobile, the other settled. Katz, The People of Hamilton, 20–1. Of these it can be said with certainty that 12 died in mining accidents. Langley, The Dunsmuirs, 66 Leaving 13 whose place of residence was unclear. Forrester, “Urban Development,” 15. McNab, British Columbia for Settlers, 200. In sharp contrast with McNab’s hard words was the glowing praise given Wellington by the provincial government in recruitment propaganda for emigrants. See British Columbia [Agriculture, 1883], Canada: Its Climate and Resources, 127. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes in British Columbia, 36. bc, Journals of the Legislative Assembly, cccxxxix–cccxi; Williams Directory 1893, 181–5, 190–6. It is not possible to determine how many miners moved from say, Nanaimo to Wellington and back again in this period. Katz, The People of Hamilton, 19–20. Gagan, “Geographical and Social Mobility.”

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254 Notes to pages 158–63 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Kirk and Kirk, “Migration,” 152–5. Thernstrom and Knights, “Men in Motion,” 30. Benson, British Coalminers, 126. Corbin, Life, Work and Rebellion, 40. nca, d3/17, Indenture between the hbc and William Incher of Dudley, 1 May 1854. Victoria Daily Colonist, 23 February 1865, 3. To a small extent this pattern was reversed briefly in 1870 when several colliers departed Nanaimo for Suquash, about ten miles from Fort Rupert, where a good source of coal had allegedly been discovered. pro, co305(3), Letter from James Douglas to Earl Grey, 29 January 1852. pro, co305(6), Letter from George Martin to Commodore Charles Frederick, 16 October 1854; Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 106. Audain, From Coalmine to Castle, 23–4. bca, Captain Stuart Journal, 11–12 September 1855. Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 112–15. csp, 1872, British Columbia, 8. pro, co60(32), Letter from Frederick Seymour to the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, 17 March 1868, 19 March 1868. Victoria Daily Colonist, 21 February 1878, 2; Nanaimo Historical Society, From the Black Country to Nanaimo, 1854, vol. 2, n.p. One Nanaimo man, J.D. Stewart, was drawn north to Skagway by the promise of gold in 1897–98. Stewart is noteworthy for the fact that his loss of $2,800 in gold to local criminals precipitated the rebellion of Skagway vigilantes against the local gangster dictatorship of Jefferson “Soapy” Smith. Greever, The Bonanza West, 344–5. Conway, “Welsh Gold-Miners,” 51–8. Savage, “Social Mobility,” 69–70. See Goldthorpe, Social Mobility; Miles, “British Society.” See also Sewell, Structure and Mobility. Savage and Miles, Remaking, 34. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 72–4. British Nanaimo colliers first staked the Comox area in 1861 and 1862. Mackie, The Wilderness Profound, 39. na, Nominal Census Returns. The voters list for 1874 show a David Hoggan as a miner near Comox, but in 31 October the Nanaimo Free Press carried an advertisement for “David Hoggan, butcher” in the larger mining town. Elsewhere there is evidence that one of the Hoggan brothers was the proprietor of Nanaimo’s Oriental Hotel in 1883. Thirty years later, two hotels were opened in Merritt, in the interior of British Columbia, by John, Alexander, and Christina Hoggan, who were drawn there (possibly from Nanaimo) by the new collieries nearby. Isenor et al., Land of Plenty, 78; nca, Industry, Box 3, g-2,

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255 Notes to pages 163–7

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56

57 58 59

60 61 62 63

64 65 66

code 16, b16/12 and b16/13; Nicola Valley Archives Association, Merritt and the Nicola Valley, 75. Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 292; Isenor et al., Land of Plenty, 256; Mackie, The Wilderness Profound, 192. Jackman, Vancouver Island, 178–9; bc, Voters Lists, 1890, 605; bc, Voters Lists, 1894, 381; bc, Voters Lists, 1899, 328. Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 371. na, Nominal Census Returns; Anderson, British Columbia Directory, 1882/3, 180; Williams Directory, 1895, 192; bcsp, Voters List, 1899, 319. na, Nominal Census Returns; Williams Directory, 1893, 315; Williams Directory, 1894, 227. Williams Directory, 1894, 219; bcsp, Voters List, 1899, 339. Thomas Hardy himself is listed as a “botanic druggist” in 1892 or 1893. Williams Directory, 1893, 300–1; Williams Directory, 1895, 243. One might point as well to James McGregor, another nineteenth-century mla for Nanaimo. His father, John McGregor, arrived from Scotland in 1849 and worked as an overman in the Nanaimo mines. Marwood, “Newspaper Gleanings.” Another Robert Dunsmuir opened several mines in Ayrshire from about 1815 to 1830. This mining engineer was likely the emigrant Dunsmuir’s grandfather or uncle. Wilson, The Ayrshire Hermit, 63–6. For a detailed biographical account of the lives of both Robert and James Dunsmuir see Reksten, The Dunsmuir Saga. The Dunsmuir rags-to-riches myth is given close scrutiny in Burrill, “Class Conflict,” 115–19. Gallacher, “Robert Dunsmuir”; Audain, Alex Dunsmuir’s Dilemma, 20– 23; “James Dunsmuir,” 234. “Labourer” was an all-purpose heading that could indicate an upward, downward, or lateral move on the social ladder for colliers. Miners who became labourers in these years often subsequently became mine foremen, overseers, engineers, and so forth. Williams Directory, 1894, 231; Williams Directory, 1893, 320; bc, List of Persons Entitled to Vote, 1899, 348. csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 59. Campbell and Reid, “The Independent Collier,” 56, 66–7; Campbell, “Skill,” 161–2. None of the sources used for this study could accommodate more than one occupational description per person. The number of miners who had two or more sources of income cannot, therefore, be known. Nanaimo Historical Society, From the Black Country to Nanaimo, 1854, vol. 2, n.p. Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 225. Johnson, Very Far West Indeed, 43–4.

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256 Notes to pages 167–71 67 pro, co305(64), Letter from C.W. Barclay to T.F. Elliot, 10 September 1853; pro, co305(15), Letter from T.W. Murdoch to H. Merivale, 6 January 1860; Cail, Land, 4–5, 15. 68 Ibid., 31–8, and appendix b, table 1, 262–3. 69 bca, ar 1/6, Assessment Rolls, 1884–85, Wellington and Nanoose Bay. 70 Smith, “Early Nanaimo,” 78; Williams Directory, 1893, 312. 71 bca, Alexander Papley, Correspondence, 17 October 1875. 72 See for example csp, 1903, Royal Commission on Industrial Disputes, 46. Taking in boarders was one way of improving household incomes that had been tried and tested all over North America. See Modell and Hareven, “Urbanization”; Bradbury, “Pigs, Cows, and Boarders.” 73 nca, Industry, box 3, g-2, code 16, b16/16, 17, 19. 74 bca, Michael Manson. 75 Norcross, Nanaimo Retrospective, 18–19. 76 Smith, “Social Development,” 67–8. 77 Forrester, “Urban Development,” 18. 78 na, Nominal Census Returns. 79 csp, 1885, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 157. 80 At least one study makes a link between high-risk factors in Vancouver Island mines and the lack of regulation possible in pits where subcontracting and its corollary, competition rather than teamwork, was to be found. Morton and Copp, Working People, 50. See also Horsfall, “Ethnic Conflict in Context.” 81 The penny capitalist is responsible for the whole of his/her endeavour, from taking the risks to setting the daily ground rules of the business. Benson, The Penny Capitalists, 5. 82 Pascoe and Bertola, “Italian Miners.” 83 Benson, British Coalminers, 89; “Working-Class Capitalism”; “Thrift.” 84 nca, Beck Family Fonds, 1892, a-06-01, box 1, Malpass Family. 85 Archives of the Anglican Diocese. By contrast, of the twenty-six weddings involving miner’s daughters held in the Ladysmith Presbyterian church between 1904 and 1915, twenty-two of the miner’s daughters were paired off to miners. uca, Ladysmith. 86 Porter, “British Columbia Mining Casualties,” part 5, 89–91. 87 Nanaimo Historical Society, From the Black Country to Nanaimo, 1854, vol. 2, n.p. 88 bca, Wills: gr 1304, box 50, fol. 883; gr 1052, box 3, fol. 411–20; gr 1304, box 104, fol. 2427. 89 In 1880 a younger sister was employed as a resident domestic servant in the household of John Bryden, the vcmlc’s manager. na Nominal Census Returns; Anderson, British Columbia Directory, 1882–83, 158. 90 Galloway, A History, 3. 91 csp, 1885, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, xvii; csp 1902, Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 72.

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257 Notes to pages 172–7 92 Lamb, “Early Lumbering,” 48; Gallacher, “John Muir”; bc, Journals of the Colonial Legislatures, vol. 2, 3, and vol. 1, 19. 93 Nanaimo Historical Society, From the Black Country to Nanaimo, 1854, vol. 2, n.p. 94 bca, Michael Manson, 4. See bca, Buckham Collection, vol. 1/25, Letter from James Dunsmuir to E.P. Bremner, Labour Commissioner, Victoria, 9 October 1900, and Letter from Wellington Colliery Company to William Russell, Extension Mine, 2 October 1900. 95 Down to 1894 the majority of legislators in British Columbia hailed from the United Kingdom; thereafter their share only dropped slowly. 96 Bercuson, “Labour Radicalism,” 167–8. 97 See Benson, The Penny Capitalists, 136. 98 Fagge, Power, Culture, and Conflict, 66. 99 Gagan, Hopeful Travellers, 96. chapter eight 1 One aspect of the “contested terrain” of culture, albeit mostly in the twentieth century, is considered in Friesen and Taksa, “Workers’ Education.” 2 An exception is Reid, “Mine Safety.” See also Benson and Sykes, “TradeUnionism.” 3 Historians of British Columbia have shown remarkably little interest in mortality, either as a demographic fact or as a social phenomenon. Exceptional in this respect is a study of cultural attitudes towards mortality by Coates, “Death in British Columbia.” 4 The quotation is from Davies, History of Wales, 440. The seminal work in the social history of leisure is Bailey, Leisure and Class. See also Jones, “Class Expression”; Cunningham, Leisure; Storch, Popular Culture; Davies, Leisure; McLelland, “Time to Work,” 207–8. 5 Two excellent and relatively recent works in this field are Strange and Loo, Making Good, and Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap, and Water. See also Prentice, The School Promoters. On sport see Metcalfe, Canada Learns to Play, and Kidd, The Struggle for Canadian Sport. 6 Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society, 80. 7 Whitsuntide, the seventh Sunday after Easter, was kept “religiously” in South Staffordshire, allegedly more so than anywhere else in the British Isles. Colliery Guardian, 21 May 1880, quoted in Benson, British Coalminers, 59. 8 Much of this festival culture was reproduced across British Columbia. See Sage, “The Critical Period,” 430; Buddle, “Gold Rush Entertainment.” 9 bca, Vertical Files; Nanaimo Free Press, 23 and 27 May 1874, 1 July 1874. 10 Nanaimo Free Press, 4 March 1876, 5 May 1875. 11 bca, Captain Stuart Journal, 100.

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258 Notes to pages 177–81 12 Storch, ‹Please to Remember the Fifth of November,› 73–4. 13 See Reid, “The Decline of Saint Monday,” 78–88, 96–7; Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, 64. For examples of unofficial voluntary holidays see bca, Captain Stuart Journal, 24–31 December 1855, 3 January 1856, 25 December 1858, 1 April 1858. 14 nca, Industry, box 3, g-2, code 16, b16/12 and b16/13; Smith, “Early Nanaimo,” 67–8. 15 nca, Industries, b16. See also Sale, “Early Hotels,” 81–4. 16 The phenomenon of heavy drink in the coalfield, as well as the serious problem of whiskey running, is described in Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, passim. Bowen also surveys the manifold leisure activities preferred by the community. 17 Innis and Lower, Select Documents, 794–5. 18 pro, co305(4), Report from Douglas to Barclay, in letter from Barclay to Merrivale, 14 June 1853. Also see Smith, ‹Poor Gaggin.› 19 Campbell, Demon Rum, 12. 20 nca, Industries, b16/11, Sheriff Drake’s Report and Dr Walkem’s Report. 21 Pelling, “Labour Aristocracy,” 53–4. 22 Victoria Daily Colonist, 31 January 1863. 23 City Archives of Vancouver, Bryant Papers, 4 March 1878. 24 uca, Nanaimo – Haliburton Street Methodist Church, 22 February 1895. 25 James Uren was charged with selling liquor to native buyers, but he also received a fifty-dollar fine for being found drunk “in an Indian house.” Nanaimo Free Press, 20 September 1888. 26 Rich, The History of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 857–8. 27 For Wesleyan tolerance of drink, see Pollard, The Hardest Work, 87. The later movement of nonconformism away from prohibition was not significant in Wales. The erection of barriers between man and the world continued to be the norm in much of the Rhondda throughout the nineteenth century. See Daunton, Coal Metropolis, 218. 28 nca, Industry, William McGregor, box 3, g-2, code 16, b16/11. 29 bcsp, Minister of Mines Annual Report, 1880. 30 Benson, British Coalminers, 151. 31 Orr, “The Western Federation of Miners,” 44. 32 The association and its membership were not entirely without vices, as the presence of no fewer than a dozen spittoons in their hall reveals. bca, Ancient Order of Foresters. 33 Campbell, Demon Rum, 17–18. 34 Pollard, The Hardest Work under Heaven, 87. 35 Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 118, 242. 36 See DeLottinville, “Joe Beef of Montreal.” 37 It is not possible, however, to endorse the conjecture of one student of local industrial relations that “the grievances and frustrations of Nanaimo min-

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259 Notes to pages 181–7

38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

ers were channelled more often into … heavy drinking in the numerous pubs than into labour disputes.” Orr, “Western Federation of Miners,” 42. Benson, British Coalminers, 144, 145. Storch, “Persistence and Change,” 14. Ripmeester, “Mines, Homes, and Halls,” 105–6. Reid, “Alexander MacDonald,” 150–1, 154–5, 169. Audain, Alexander Dunsmuir’s Dilemma, 21. nca, Societies, box 1, f-4, code 8, d8/1a.b.; Anderson’s Directory, 1882– 83, 154; Nanaimo Free Press, 8 August 1874, 9 May 1877, 19 September 1883. For work on another part of early settlement-era British Columbia, see Edwards, “Temperance.” Nanaimo Free Press, 16 September 1874. Anderson’s Directory, 1882–83, 154. The first Masonic Lodge at Nanaimo was established in May 1867. The Freemasons, 11. Bowen, “Friendly Societies,” 10, 17, 19, 22. The salience of this concern is explored in Davies, “Old Age.” For a discussion of the insurance function of British trade unions, see Boyer, “What Did Unions Do?” pro, co305(5), Merrivale to Sir G. Grey, 18 July 1854. Victoria Daily Colonist, 10 June 1862, 31 January 1863. City Archives of Vancouver, Bryant Papers, 9 January 1878. bca, Rev. C.M. Tate, 3 Nanaimo Free Press, 5 June 1889. Canada, Census 1880/1, vol. 1, table ii, 200–1; Canada, Census 1891, vol. 1, table iv, 224–5; Canada, Census 1901, vol. 1, table x, 154–5. Pollard, The Hardest Work, 86. Canada Census, 1901, vol. 4, tables xix and xx, 361, 364. In a study of the West Virginia miners in roughly the same period one author observes that “Because of their extreme geographic mobility, many coal diggers belonged to between six and ten different denominations during their lives in the coal fields.” Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion, 148. Benson, British Coalminers, 88. uca, Wesleyan Methodist Church, Quarterly Official Board Minutes, 1860–1911. uca, Nanaimo, St Andrew’s United (Presbyterian) Church. Minute Book, 2 April 1887. Fisher, “Missions to the Indians,” 6. Daunton, Coal Metropolis, 216–17. Belchem, Industrialization and the Working Class, 227. “The Miner,” Nanaimo Free Press, 20 October 1883. These elements of institutional spirituality were complemented by the occasional appearance of professional mediums on the coalfield. Nanaimo Free Press, 30 May 1878.

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260 Notes to pages 187–91 66 Office of the City Engineer, Nanaimo. 67 bca, “Nanaimo – Celebrations,” vertical files. 68 Metcalfe, “Organized Sport in the Mining Communities of South Northumberland,” 484. 69 Hobsbawm, “The Making of the Working Class,” 201–2. See also Tony Mason, Association Football. 70 Matheson, “Some Effects,” 225. 71 bca, Garrard Papers, 68. 72 Moore, Pit-men, 84. I am grateful to Mr Norm Levi for sharing with me the fruits of his research into the chequered life of James Hawthornthwaite. 73 bca, “Nanaimo – Clubs,” vertical files; Nanaimo Free Press, 10 October 1888. 74 Nanaimo Free Press, 30 May 1874. See Metcalfe, “Organized Sport,” 470, 482. 75 Moffat, “A Community,” 98–9. Pigeon racing was particularly popular in Belgium during the nineteenth century, and it is possible that its appearance on Vancouver Island had more to do with Belgian than British immigrants. See Mott, “Miners” 87. 76 Metcalfe, “Organized Sport,” 474; Nanaimo Free Press, 5 May 1870, 27 May 1874; bca, Garrard Papers, 65, and Ebenezer Robson, 28 August 1885. 77 Local Councils of Women in British Columbia, Woman’s Life and Work, 33. 78 csp, 1872, British Columbia, 138–40, 235. 79 Nanaimo Gazette, 27 December 1865. 80 nca, Societies, box 1, f-4, code 8, d8/1a.b. 81 bca, Buckham Collection, vol. 162/7, Letter from James Dunsmuir to H. Murdock, Bandmaster, Cumberland, 3 April 1902. 82 bca, John Cass, “The Origin of the Nanaimo Cornet Band,” q/a/c27. 83 bca, “Nanaimo – Celebrations,” vertical file. 84 Belchem, Industrialization and the Working Class, 223, 226. 85 Forester, Ocean Jottings, 103. 86 Sewid-Smith, “In Time Immemorial,” 23–4. 87 pro, hb1/638, Fort Rupert Journal, 17 April 1850. 88 bca, Andrew Muir Diary, 106–10; Burrill, “Class Conflict and Colonialism,” 38–9. 89 Smith, “Early Nanaimo,” 80–1. 90 Nanaimo Gazette, 2 October 1865. 91 bca, Ebenezer Robson; bca, Rev. Canon John Booth Good, “The Utmost bounds of the West,” Pioneer Missionary Reminiscences [n.d., c.1861– 1900], e/b/g59. 92 Hayman, Robert Brown, 103–4. 93 Bolt, Thomas Crosby, 35.

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261 Notes to pages 191–3 94 A recent study would protest that this is to “subtly” invoke the “scarcity model” and/or the “volcano theory” of sexual relations in an area where there is a pronounced sex ratio. These two approaches “are based on essentialist understandings of both sexuality and race.” I think one can be confident that there was, in fact, a substantial heterosexual male population among the British settlers and that they sought spouses where they could find them. Sometimes, in the absence of Euro-Canadian women, this meant marrying aboriginal women, though it might also mean drawing on external populations. This is not to say, for an instant, that “mixed-race relationships are at worst unfathomable and at best the products of abnormal historical circumstances.” Rather, they are utterly fathomable and very definitely the product of specific historical conditions. Perry, ‹Oh I’m Just Sick of the Faces of Men,› 29–30. 95 Nanaimo Gazette, 2 October 1865. See also 18 September 1865. 96 bca, Alexander Papley, Correspondence Outward, passim; Jordayne C. Brown [Probationary Catechist among Indians], “1863 Census,” Daily Colonist, 24 January 1863, 3. 97 See Harris, “Moving amid the Mountains,” 5–7; bca, John Wood Coburn Diary for 1886, 2 September 1886. 98 Bancroft, History of British Columbia, 574. A second contemporary report concurred: “Although one of the collieries is practically in the town, the workings extending all around the harbour, Nanaimo is the brightest, cleanest sunniest and most cheerful little place imaginable.” Galloway, The Call of the West, 89–90. 99 Another example of the distinctive educational history of British emigrants in British Columbia is pursued by Jean Barman in two closely related works: “Growing Up British in British Columbia” and Growing Up British in British Columbia. See also Brown, “Gender and Space.” 100 Elements of this period are covered Mackie, “The Colonization of Vancouver Island.” 101 Lupul, “Education in Western Canada,” 251. 102 pro, co305(3), Douglas to Earl Grey, 14 April 1852. A good survey of early British Columbian education history can be found in Dunae, The School Record. See also Barman, “The Emergence of Educational Structures.” 103 Lamb, “The Census of Vancouver Island,” 53. 104 Canada, Census, 1901, vol. 4, table xxii, 398. See also Brown, “Binaries, Boundaries, and Hierarchies.” 105 Other denominational institutions followed, including one devoted exclusively to the education of girls. bca, “Nanaimo – Churches,” vertical file. 106 Lupul, “Education in Western Canada,” 252–4, 261. 107 British Columbia, Journals of the Legislative Council of British Columbia, 5.

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262 Notes to pages 194–8 108 Fleming, “In the Imperial Age,” 52. 109 James Douglas to Archibald Barclay, quoted in MacLaurin, “The History of Education,” 16. 110 pro, co305(16), Vancouver Island Accounts from 1 June 1857 to 31 December 1860. 111 Lupul, “Education in Western Canada,” 256. 112 Smith, “Early Nanaimo,” 89. 113 na, Nominal Census Returns. 114 See Horan and Harris, “Children’s Work,” 591–2. 115 bca, Nanaimo – Colonial Schools, c/ab/40.8/n16, Register of Attendance, 1862–66. 116 bc, Reports of the Superintendent of Education, 1873–1900, passim. These truancy rates may have been typical – or even low – compared to other regions of the province. The point here is to explain them in their specific setting. 117 Johnson, John Jessop, 90. Jessop’s designs to build British Columbia’s education system along Upper Canadian lines foundered on a lack of fiscal support. See Spragge, “An Early Letter,” 54–6; Fleming, “In the Imperial Age,” 52–6. 118 MacLaurin, “History of Education,” 40, 280. 119 Johnson, John Jessop, 90. 120 Ibid., 90–1, 125. 121 bc, Report of the Superintendent of Education, 1901, 236. 122 The relationship between provincial schools legislation and civic funding support is explored in Brown, “The City and the State.” 123 bc, Report of the Superintendent of Education, 1873–1900, passim. 124 bc, Report of the Superintendent of Education 1878, 29. The same was true in England. See Levine, Reproducing Families, 206. 125 Walters and O’Connell, “The Family Economy,” 1117. 126 McIntosh, “Canada’s Boy Miners,” 38. 127 This was as true of enrolments at Sunday schools as it was of public day schools. 128 Nanaimo Free Press, 17 June 1874. 129 csp, 1902, no. 54, Royal Commission on Chinese and Japanese Immigration, 87. 130 James Douglas to Captain Stuart, quoted in MacLaurin, “History of Education,” 31. 131 Canada, Census 1901, vol. 4, tables xix and xx, 361, 364; Smith, “Early Nanaimo,” 20–1. 132 Nanaimo Free Press, 6 January 1870 lists the names of over two-dozen Sunday scholars of the Wesleyan Church, almost all of them the offspring of miners. 133 Engels, Condition of the Working-Class, 275.

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263 Notes to pages 198–202 134 Benson, “Motives,” 15. 135 When Canadians hear the name Lord Durham their thoughts most likely turn to the three Rs of nineteenth-century history: rebellion, responsible government, and reunification of the Canadas, as well as to Durham’s acid comments on French Canadian culture. British social historians, however, remember Radical Jack primarily as a colliery owner and as a textbook paternalist. New, Lord Durham (Oxford, 1929), 239, quoted in Duffy, “Coal, Class and Education,” 147. 136 Colls, ‹Oh Happy English Children.› 137 Curtis, Building the Educational State, 302. 138 Colls, “Rejoinder,” 162. Also useful in this respect are Aries, Centuries of Childhood, and Burnett, Destiny Obscure. 139 Douglas to Archibald Barclay, quoted in MacLaurin, “History of Education,” 16. 140 Benson, “Motives,” 16. 141 Duffy, “Coal, Class and Education,” 150. 142 For a British comparison, see Sanderson, “Literacy and Social Mobility.” 143 New, Lord Durham (Oxford, 1929) 239, quoted in Duffy, “Coal, Class and Education,” 147. 144 Levine, Reproducing Families, 207–9; Vinovskis, “Family and Schooling,” 26–7. 145 See, for example, Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars. For a review of the literature to 1990, see Wilson, “The New Diversity.” For a survey of the American literature to the late 1980s, see Vinovskis, “Family and Schooling.” 146 Gaffield, “Children, Schooling, and Family Reproduction,” 163–5. 147 bca, Charles Alfred Bayley, 24. 148 Gaffield, “Schooling, the Economy, and Rural Society,” 90. 149 Engels, Condition of the Working Class, 274. 150 Phillips, No Power Greater, 8–9; Moffat, “A Community of Working Men,” table 4, 77; Morton and Copp, Working People, 50. 151 Giesen, Coal Miners’ Wives, 4. Similarly, American historian Elliott West writes that in the mining towns of the West, the “underlying social ideology of the Victorian era … taught that a woman should use her life to make and preserve a proper home: a safe harbour of rest and support for her husband.” “Beyond Baby Doe,” 189. 152 Provincial Archives of Alberta, 77.237, box 8, f48.b. I am grateful to Dr Allen Seager for this reference, not least because the miner in question was my great-grandfather, Robert Belshaw. 153 Anderson, “The Emergence of the Modern Life Cycle,” 70; Engels, Condition of the Working Class. See also Boyns, “Work and Death.” 154 For the links between mining, silicosis, tuberculosis, and pneumonia see Derickson, Workers’ Health, 39–51.

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264 Notes to pages 202–6 155 Canada, Census, 1901, 232–5, table vi. Comparable material on the situation in central Canada can be found in Gagan and Gagan, “WorkingClass Standards of Living,” 189. 156 Hunt, British Labour History, 50. See also Fishback and Lauszus, “The Quality of Services.” 157 bc, Sessional Papers, “Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages,” j15– j20. Provincial government records also indicate that typhoid, heart disease, and pneumonia were consistently more dangerous in the interior than on the coast. 158 As described in two demographic surveys: Ward, “Population Growth,” and Barman, “The West beyond the West.” 159 Gould, Women of British Columbia, 117. 160 Macdonald, “Vital Statistics,” 40–2. 161 Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 200–1. 162 nca, b5/81, Coroner’s Inquest, January-February 1888. 163 bca, Wills, gr 1052, box 1, file 31–40. 164 For an example, see Lindstrom-Best, “Canadian Mining Towns,” 206. 165 Canadian Index of Historical Microfilm, 15009, Funeral To-day of the Late Hon. R. Dunsmuir: Order of Procession [Victoria, 1889]. 166 See Huskins, “From Haute Cuisine.” 167 Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 289. 168 To be fair to Robert Dunsmuir, at least he did not spare himself gruelling exposure to his miners’ tragedies. On being informed of the disaster of 1888 at his mine at Divers Lake, the elder Dunsmuir recruited doctors and gathered up medical supplies in Victoria, which he delivered expeditiously to Wellington on board one of his e&n trains. He then stayed to assist with the rescue and recovery operations, aided in his efforts by the manager of Nanaimo’s vcmlc mines. This could hardly make amends for running what was universally condemned at the time as a poorly ventilated and inadequately managed pit. See Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 277. 169 Porter, “British Columbia’s Mining Casualties,” 89–91; Canada, Labour Gazette, 1, 354–5. 170 Introductions to this aspect of historical demographic thinking are numerous, although one might consult Elder, “Family History,” 282–3. 171 Levine, Reproducing Families, 206. 172 Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 230–1, 232. 173 Studies on this question in Britain are dominated by the works of John Benson, specifically, “Colliery Disaster Funds”; “Trade Union Accident Funds;” and “Thrift.” 174 bc, Sessional Papers, 1889, Return of Intestate Estates, 465–76. 175 Bowen, “Friendly Societies.” 176 Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 239–40, 270; Nanaimo Free Press, 9 June 1887.

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265 Notes to pages 206–14 177 Nanaimo Free Press, 13 July 1887. 178 uca, Ladysmith, bc, First United [Presbyterian] Church. Marriage Register, 1904–19. 179 Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 271. See also Bradbury, “The Fragmented Family.” 180 Anderson, Family Structure, 148. 181 Uhlenberg, “Death and the Family,” 246–7. 182 Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 372. 183 Uhlenberg maintains that half of all American couples around 1900 would be predeceased by a child. “Death and the Family,” 245. 184 Bowen, Three Dollar Dreams, 230, 270. conclusions 1 Mouat, “Politics of Coal,” 29. 2 Fagge, “Power, Culture, and Conflict,” 27.

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Willigan, J. Dennis, and Katherine A. Lynch, Sources and Methods of Historical Demography (New York: Academic Press, 1982). Wilmott, W.E. “Approaches to the Study of Chinese in British Columbia.” bc Studies 4 (spring 1970): 38–52. Wilson, J. Donald. “The New Diversity in Canadian Educational History.” Acadiensis 19, no. 2 (spring 1990): 148–69. Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971). – The Myth of the American Frontier: Its Relevance to America, Canada, and Australia (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1971). Wise, W.J. “Some Notes on the Growth of the Cannock Chase Coalfield.” Geography 36 (November 1951), part 4: 235–48. Wood, Colin J.B. “Settlement and Population.” In Vancouver Island: Land of Contrasts, Charles N. Forward, ed. (Victoria: Department of Geography, University of Victoria, 1979): 3–22. Woodcock, George. British Columbia: A History of the Province (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1990). Woods, R.I., and P.R.A. Hinde. “Nuptiality and Age at Marriage in Nineteenth Century England.” Journal of Family History 10, no. 2 (summer 1980): 119–44. Wrigley, E.A. Industrial Growth and Population Change: A Regional Study of the Coalfield Areas of North-West Europe in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). – Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Wrinch, Leonard. “Land Policy of the Colony of Vancouver Island, 1849– 1886.” ma thesis, University of British Columbia, 1932. Wyman, Mark. Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution 1860–1910 (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1979). Wynn, Graeme. “The Rise of Vancouver.” In Vancouver and Its Region, Graeme Wynn and Timothy Oke, eds. (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1992): 106– 16. Yarmie, Andrew. “Smallpox and the British Columbia Indians: Epidemic of 1862.” b.c. Library Quarterly 31 (1968): 13–21. Yearley, Clifton K. Britons in American Labor: A History of the Influence of the United Kingdom Immigrants on American Labor, 1820–1914 (Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). Young, Charles H., and Helen R.Y. Reid. The Japanese Canadians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1938). Zola, Emile. Germinal (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985).

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aboriginal peoples, 21, 221n1; competition with Chinese, 118–19; demographics, 191; economic activity of, 21, 244n14; in food trade, 101, 118, 190–1; gendered economic roles among, 118; health, 202–3; labour organizations, 138–9; liquor use, 179; missions to, 183–7, 191; racial conflict and, 117–19, 191; schooling and, 193; and threat of, 24, 135, 190–1. See also coal mining, Haida, Hul’qumi’num, Kwakwaka’wakw, Sne ney mux accidents and disasters, 184; 1884 Nanaimo disaster, 206; 1887 Nanaimo disaster, 39, 52, 120, 124, 141, 169, 184, 205–6, 208–10; 1888 Wellington disaster, 120, 124, 131, 141, 169, 184, 203–5, 209–10, 264n168; 1901 Cumber-

land disaster, 147, 205; in American mines, 78, 234n15; in British mines, 78–9; Chinese miners and, 88, 120, 124, 129; gas, 77–9, 202; influence on immigration, 53; in Nova Scotia mines, 78; occupational mobility and, 210; in Vancouver Island mines, 77–9, 170, 184, 202–3, 208. See also mine safety Afro-Canadians, 51, 59, 121; racism and, 128–9; as strikebreakers 133; in unions, 128–9 age structure. See demography agriculture, 101, 109, 167, 200–1. See also five-acre lots Akenhead, James, 164 Akenhead, Mary Ann, 164 Akenhead, Thomas, 204 Akenhead, Walter, 164 Alaska, 45 Albion Iron Works, 204 alcohol. See liquor Alexandria Colliery, 122;

and coal sorting at, 235n45 Alexandria Miners’ Protective Union, 123 American Federation of Labor, 127, 146 American Socialist Labour Party, 143 Ancient Order of Foresters (aof), 104–5, 138, 180, 183, 204, 206 Ancient Order of United Workmen, 183 Anderson, Michael, 207 Anglicans, 183–7, 231n28; in Britain, 194; funerals, 243n181; schooling, 193; on temperance, 180 animal-baiting, 176. See also leisure pursuits Asian mineworkers: employers of, 116–17, 119, 121–2; employment of, 131; housing of, 104; and mining techniques, 91. See also Chinese mineworkers assisted emigration, 40, 43, 46–7, 51, 56; and women, 46, 51.

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Australia, 46, 56, 169; and miners’ politics, 251n155 Ayrshire miners: on Vancouver Island, 40, 82 Baptists, 231n28 baseball, 187 Bate, Mark, 180, 189; and public office, 136 Bayley, Charles, 144–5 beer, 100 Belgian miners, 96, 121 Bell household, 66–7 benevolent associations, 134, 138, 176, 183, 212; and Chinese, 128. See also friendly societies Bennie family, 171 Benson, John, 169 Bercuson, David, 172–3 Bevilockway, Joseph, 170 bicycling, 188 Biggs, George, 171, 206 Biggs, Henry, 171 Biggs, Jane, 166–7, 171 Biggs, John, 166–7, 171 Black Country: cost of living, 102; cultural practices, 177, 257n7; dependency rates, 65; emigrants on Vancouver Island, 135, 166–7; political culture, 143; wages in, 98, 105; work-year, 98. See also Brierley Hill, South Staffordshire blacklists, 136; in Britain, 37–8 Blackpool, 192 blacks. See Afro-Canadians Blanshard, Governor Richard, 35, 222n35 Blenkinsop, George, 135 Blue Monday, 177, 211. See also Black Country, holidays Blundell household 66–7, 205 boardinghouses, 159, 168, 173–4, 185, 205 bord-and-pillar. See pillarand-stall

boys, 88–9, 125; Asian mineworkers and, 122, 171; economic role in Britain, 68; economic role on Vancouver Island, 73, 196, 200; mining apprenticeships of, 82, 87– 8, 125, 134, 172, 196, 200–1, 213, 245n46; numbers employed, 89; schooling of, 196; and wages of, 96, 107, 113. See also child labour Brierley Hill, 40, 192; pioneer cohort from, 135, 166–9, 179, 183. See also South Staffordshire, Black Country Brinn, Richard, 170 Britain, 206; correspondence to, 52–3; culture, 7, 15, 189; economy, 54. See also British mining communities, Wales British Columbia, 24, 43; economy of, 202; mortality, 202; prohibition referenda, 180; and provincial government, 48–9, 162 British mining communities, 16–17, 38, 210; coalfields, 38; demographics, 66; emigration from, 39, 229n105; geographic mobility, 159; housing, 111; labour organizations, 138; liquor use, 181; mine disasters, 52, 78; occupational mobility, 169; politics of, 6, 141, 143, 146; social division, 126; sports, 188; temperance, 258n27; wages, 98–9, 109, 205– 6, 239n99; women’s labour, 63, 106–7; and workforce size, 218n2. See also Black Country, Derbyshire, Durham, Lancashire, London, Northumberland, Not-

tinghamshire, Shetland Islands, South Staffordshire, and Yorkshire Brown, Robert: on native labour, 118, 191 Bryant, Rev. Cornelius, 179, 183 Bryden, John, 83, 139, 256n89; on labour disputes, 237n78; and public office, 136–7, 145 California, 101, 206; Asian labour in, 127; coal mines of, 224n55; miners’ wages in, 99; mining populations, 60; and sex ratios, 63, 231n20. See also San Francisco Canada, government of: and recruitment of labour, 48 Canada West. See Ontario Canadian Pacific Railway (cpr), 45, 49, 60, 167 Cape Breton. See Nova Scotia Cardiff, 210 Catholics, 184–7, 208 cavilling, 87, 137; at Northfield Mine, 236n49 Cedar District, 109, 171 Chase River Mine, 83, 93– 5, 237n78 checkweighmen, 131; and wages, 237n74 child labour legislation. See labour legislation child mortality. See infant mortality children and childhood, 188, 192, 199–200, 205–7 Chinese community, 208; assimilation of, 127; in Chinatowns, 129; at Cumberland, 51, 129; in domestic service, 128; economic competition with white settlers, 107, 116–17; Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway and,

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125; franchise of, 145, 251n148; geographic mobility of, 129; health and hygiene of, 122–3; hostility of white community toward, 115, 209, 214; housing, 104, 111, 123, 231n28; sex ratios in, 59, 128; and sojourning, 128, 159. See also Chinese mineworkers Chinese immigration, 150, 159, 169; and Chinese Benevolent Association, 128 Chinese mineworkers, 88, 119–22, 209; 1888 ban, 88, 120, 142, 197, 209– 10; competition with other miners, 105, 113, 118–19, 121–2, 125–6, 131, 171, 197; competition with other settlers, 197; employability, 51; in labour disputes, 119– 20; mining techniques and, 119, 122; minister of mines on, 124; mobility, 150; mortality among, 203–4, 206; outside of British Columbia, 245n34; productivity of, 131; recruitment of British miners and, 54; savings among, 206, 208– 10; skills of, 121, 124, 127, 129, 209–10; as strikebreakers, 125, 131; subcontracts and, 96, 125, 131; unions and, 126, 141; wages of, 121– 2, 124–5, 129, 238n82; at Wellington, 90, 120. See also accidents and disasters, Chinese community, Chinese immigration churches, 70, 175, 179–80, 183–7, 191–2, 207–8; and temperance, 179–80. See also Anglicans, Bap-

tists, Catholics, clergy, Confucians, Lutherans, Methodists, missions, Presbyterians cigar factory, 178 city directories, 252n10, 253n11 class conflict: 115–16, 133; and historiography, 15 clergy, 179, 183–4, 189, 191–2, 193 coal miners on Vancouver Island, 59–60; British, 60, 211; farming and, 162–7, 200; health of, 112, 162, 202; politics and, 133–4, 214–5; and rifle corps, 190. Coal Mines Regulation Act, 139. See also legislation coal mining: aboriginal peoples and, 22, 88, 96– 7, 117–9, 238n79; age of miners, 88; assignment of places, 137; in Britain, 37–8, 81, 87, 235n36, 247n87; control of production, 81, 126; dangers, 77–8, 83, 98, 112; divisions of labour, 81, 85–6, 88, 137, 141; race, 87–8, 96–7, 126; skills in, 82, 121, 127, 129, 130, 211, 214, 249n127; slag or slack, 77, 86–7; split labour market, 119–22; techniques, 75, 77, 81–3, 85, 88, 119; timbering, 86, 88; in the United States, 130; ventilation, 78, 83, 131; and working conditions, 181, 202. See also cavilling, mechanization, wages coal quality, 29–30; compared to British and American, 29–30; and Welsh coal, 22–3 coal seams: in Comox area, 28, 77; descriptions of, 30, 75–6, 77, 81, 85; at

Fort Rupert, 28; at Nanaimo, 28; reports to Colonial Office on, 28; submarine, 77, 202; at Wellington 76–7 coal sorting, 77, 86–9; by aboriginal labour, 88; in Britain, 235n36; by Chinese labour, 89 Coal Trimmers’ Protective and Benevolent Association, 138–9 collective bargaining. See labour disputes, labour organizations, unions Colonial Office, 183, 201, 222n35; and colonization policies, 43 colonization policies. See Colonial Office, settlement policies and programs Colorado, demography of, 231n20 colliery management (see management) Comox, 169. See also coal seams, Cumberland, Union company stores, 100, 168. See also truck shops Confucians, 231n28 conservatism, 141, 144–5 contracts, 92, 97 Cortes Island, 158. See Gulf Islands cost of living, 102, 108; in Black Country, 102 Craigdarroch Castle, 165 cricket, 187, 192 Croft, Henry, 136 Crowsnest Pass, 202; and Chinese mine labour 245n34 cultural politics, 189 Cumberland: Chinese community, 51, 104, 129; Japanese community, 104; mine productivity, 131; mine disasters, 147, 205; retail sector, 168; Scottish miners, 50–1;

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subcontracting, 169; voluntary associations, 138 Cunard, Samuel, 44 Curtis, Bruce, 198 Davie, Theodore, 137 death. See accidents and disasters, mine safety, mortality demographics: and historiography, 14–15 demography of coalfield: age structure, 63–4, 66, 192, 203; dependency rates, 64–6, 207; family size, 73; at Fort Rupert, 58, 191; historians’ views on, 58; household structures, 66–7, 168– 70; life-course, 205, 207; and overviews of, 59. See also fertility, marriage, mortality, nuptiality, sex ratios Department of Indian Affairs, 119 Departure Bay, 164 Derbyshire: miners’ wages in, 99, 109 desertions: from Cumberland, 51; from Fort Rupert, 27; and from Nanaimo, 27, 135, 159 diet, 110–11 directories. See city directories domestic labour, 118, 128 Dominion Day. See holidays Douglas, James: on children in colony, 65; on churches, 183; on colonial economy, 45; on early prospects for coal mining, 23; Lanarkshire miners and, 137; land policy of, 40; on liquor restrictions, 178; management style of, 135; patronage, 136; on schooling, 192–3, 197–9 Douglas Pit, 83

Druids, 138 Dunsmuir, Alexander, 7, 155, 181 Dunsmuir, James, 7, 164–5, 205, 210; on Asian labour, 88, 129, 157, 209– 10, 238n82; as company town owner, 101, 136, 239n107; housing policy of, 104, 136–7; influence of, 137; in labour disputes, 143, 147; on mobility of labour, 156– 7, 168; in Presbyterian church, 185; in public office, 26, 146, 164–5; on radicalism, 144; and recruitment of miners, 50– 1, 160 Dunsmuir, Joan, 101, 136 Dunsmuir, Robert, 7, 25, 164–5, 172, 194; on Asian labour, 120, 125, 129, 209–10, 251n148; business elite of Vancouver Island and, 25–6; on child labour, 125; as company town owner, 101, 136; Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway and, 26, 165, 204; funeral of, 204–5, 207; housing policy of, 104, 136–7; in labour disputes 143, 147; liquor use and, 181; militia support for, 136; as mine operator, 237n78, 264n168; political elite of Vancouver Island and, 26, 136; in Presbyterian church, 185; in public office, 136, 145–6; secondary enterprises of, 26, 32; and Union Colliery, 251n156. See also Cumberland, Extension, Ladysmith, Union, Wellington Dunsmuir and Diggle, 180. See also Robert Dunsmuir

Durham: coal mines and miners in, 78; emigration from, 39; mine disasters in, 159; schools in, 198; sports, 188 Durham, Lord: on schooling, 198; as mine owner, 263n135 East Wellington mine, 131 economy. See British Columbia, James Douglas, retailing, service sector education, 175; of adults, 182–3, 199. See also Mechanics’ Literary Institute, schooling, Sunday schools, superintendent of schools eight-hour day. See hours of work elections, 144–6; and franchise, 145, 251n148. See also politics elites on Vancouver Island, 137 emigrants: attitudes to the United States, 57; and motives, 36–7, 54 emigrant recruitment, 36, 204, 214; by Canadian government, 48; Chinese mineworkers and, 54, 121, 123; descriptions of Vancouver Island, 56–7; influence of correspondence from colonies, 52– 3; of miners, 23–4, 200, 214; promotional literature, 41–2, 48, 162; Scottish miners, 50–1; and unskilled labour, 121. See also Ayrshire miners, Brierley Hill, Lanarkshire miners emigration: assistance for, 40, 50; British historians on, 10–12; British policy on, 47; and costs of, 55–6 Emigration Office, 43, 46–7

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endogamy in marriage. See marriage, nuptiality Engels, Frederick, 198, 202, 226n34 Engineers’ Protective Association, 139 England. See Britain, British mining communities Esquimalt. See Royal Navy Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway, 167; Chinese labour on, 125; grant to Robert Dunsmuir, 26; and land sales,103 evictions. See housing exogamy in marriage. See marriage, nuptiality Extension: company town, 101, 156–7; housing at, 103–4, 168; mine supervision at, 87; and subcontracting, 169 families. See demography of coalfield, fertility, household wages farming: and miners, 162– 7, 200 fatalism, 212 Fenians, 45 fertility rates: 69–70; in Britain, 68–9; by origin, 69–70; in Canada, 232n42; in the United States, 232n40; on Vancouver Island coalfield, 69–70; variables of, 72–3; and in Victoria, 69 Finnish mineworkers, 121, 245n36 First Nations. See aboriginal peoples fishing. See food supply five-acre lots, 102–3, 106, 109, 167, 200 food prices, 100–2, 104. See also beer food quality, 101, 109–10, 181–2. See also diet food supply, 101, 109–10, 118, 162, 166, 188, 190,

237n70; and United States, 166 football, 187–9, 192, 213 Fort Colville, 24. See also Nanaimo Fort Rupert, 23–4; aboriginal peoples of, 117–19, 244n14; coal mining at, 82; demography of, 58, 191; disputes at, 86; Lanarkshire miners at, 27, 40, 82, 85–6, 134–5, 159, 172, 190–1; leisure pursuits at, 190–1; miners’ contracts at, 92–3, 97; organization of labour at, 137; and wages, 95 forts. See Hudson’s Bay Company France: miners’ wages in, 95 Freemasons, 136, 138, 183 friendly societies, 134, 146, 170, 183; in Britain, 176, 202. See also benevolent associations fruit. See food supply funerals and mourning, 204–8, 211. See also mortality fur trade, 22. See also Hudson’s Bay Company Gabriola Island, 158, 163, 171. See also Gulf Islands Gaffield, Chad, 200–1 Gagan, David, 158 Galsworthy, John: and Strife, 7 gambling, 188–9; in Britain, 189 Ganner, Elijah, 183 Garrard, Francis, 52–3 gas. See accidents and disasters gender relations, 60, 183, 200, 246n53; in Britain, 60–3 geology. See coal seams. gerrymandering. See elections

girls: economic activity of, 196–7, 200; schooling, 196–7, 261n105 geographic mobility, 152– 8; age and, 155; American studies on, 158–60; in Britain, 55; British studies on, 158–60; Canadian studies on, 158– 60; Chinese on Vancouver Island, 129; marital status and, 154–5; methodology, 252n10; national origin and, 155; occupational mobility and, 170–2; place of residence and, 156 gold rushes, 24, 168, 254n38; effects on labour supply, 42–4, 121, 159–60, 163; on Vancouver Island, 47, 118 Gompers, Samuel, 127 Good Templars, 183 Gordon, D.W., 145 Gough, Edwin, 170 Gough, Elizabeth, 170 Gough, Reuben, 89. See also Amanda Norris Gough, Samuel, 172 Greenwell, John, 96 Gulf Islands, 48, 157–8, 189 Gulf of Georgia, 21 Guy Fawkes Night. See holidays Haggart, James, 163 Haida, 190, 223n40 Hardy, Thomas, 164 Harewood Mine, 119 Harris, Cole, 16, 18, 212 Haslam, Richard, 171 Hawthornthwaite, James, 143, 188, 250n134 Haywood, William “Big Bill,” 129 health and hygiene, 112– 13, 122–3, 162, 202; and lung diseases, 202– 3. See accidents and disasters

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hewers, 81–2, 126, 131, 140–2; and skills of, 140–1, 211. See wages Hewitson, 39 Hills, Bishop, 193 Hobsbawm, Eric, 148 Hoggan, Alexander, 163 Hoggan, William, 170 holidays, 175, 177, 211; and the Queen’s Birthday, 177, 189–90 homesteading, 167. See also land policy homophobia, 124 Hornby Island, 158. See also Gulf Islands horse races, 188, 208 hospitals, 203, 205 hotels, 168 hours of work, 98, 132, 145; in Nova Scotia, 239n92. See also wages, Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company household structures. See demography of coalfield household wage, 105–9, 125–6, 171–2, 174, 196– 7, 200–1, 213 housing, 142, 213; in Britain, 111; company housing, 103–4, 135, 172; costs of, 102–3, 103–4; at Extension, 103–4; as management weapon, 102–3, 135, 137, 143, 197; and quality of, 111–12, 181. See also boardinghouses Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc), 164; aboriginal labour and, 117–19; as colonial administration, 24, 192–3; company store, 168; desertions from, 135, 159; in fur trade, 22; housing, 102, 111; as mine owner and operator, 23–4, 134–5, 159; at Nanaimo, 135; return migration and, 225n17; schooling,

192–4; on settlers and settlement, 40–3, 47. See also Fort Rupert, Kwakwaka’wakw, Lanarkshire miners Hul’qumi’num, 191; missionaries to, 179, 185; as threat to Nanaimo, 24, 135 Hunter, Joseph, 137, 167 hygiene. See health and hygiene Idaho: sex ratio in, 231n15 illness. See health and hygiene immigrants: British, 59; and voyage to Vancouver Island, 55 immigration: historians on, 13–14, 36 Imperial Institute Journal, 54 Independence Day. See holidays Indians. See aboriginal peoples Industrial Disputes Commission, 98 infant mortality, 112–3, 207–8 insurance, 104–5, 109, 170, 183, 206. See also benevolent associations, friendly societies, mortality, unions intermarriage. See marriage Iowa: British miners in, 231n13 Irish: as miners in Britain, 85, 115, 126 Italian miners, 51, 127 Japanese community. See Asian mineworkers, Japanese mineworkers Japanese mineworkers, 96, 119–20; and productivity, 131. See Asian mineworkers Jarvies, Robert, 98

Jessop, John, 194–5 Journeyman Tailors’ Union of America, 139 Katz, Michael: on mobility, 158, 253n14 Keith, Thomas, 143 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 75, 98, 250n143 Knights of Labor, 138, 141; as benevolent association, 208–9; on Chinese labour, 107, 122–4, 130–1, 133, 141, 144; on female labour, 107; homophobia of, 124; on nationalism, 144; on occupational mobility, 169; in politics, 139, 145; radicalism of, 146; in Utah, 133 Knights of Pythias, 138 Kwakiutl. See Kwakwaka’wakw Kwakwaka’wakw, 221n1; conflicts at Fort Rupert and, 117–19, 134; in mine work, 22–3, 82, 88, 238n79; missions to, 185; and population of, 190–1; Scottish miners and, 190. See also aboriginal peoples labour aristocracy: in Britain, 140–1; historians on, 140, 148 Labour Day. See holidays labour disputes, 27, 133–4, 222n27; Chinese and, 119–20; food supply during, 101; at Fort Rupert, 86; historians on, 137; housing during, 102–3, 197; impact on children, 197; at Nanaimo, 133, 138, 142, 184; schooling during, 197; at Wellington, 89, 96, 98, 103, 136, 141, 214. See strikebreakers labour legislation. See legislation

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labour organization, 116, 137–8, 146, 209. See also labour disputes, unions Labour Party (Britain), 140 Labour Party (British Columbia), 139, 145 labourer: definitions of, 255n59 Ladysmith, 103–4, 157, 168; nuptiality at, 70, 200, 245n36, 256n85 Lanarkshire: social division in, 126 Lanarkshire miners: conditions at Fort Rupert, 134, 159, 190–1; desertion by, 159, 225n17; James Douglas on, 137; mobility of, 172; organization of, 137; recruitment of, 23, 40; and wages in Scotland, 99, 239n97; work at Fort Rupert, 85– 6, 117–19 Lancashire: childhood in, 207; and miners in, 68, 239n101 land policy, 40, 45–6, 167 Leeds. See Yorkshire legislation: on child labour, 88; on education, 193–4; on labour in Britain, 105–6; on labour in British Columbia, 88, 105–6, 135; on mines, 139, 145, 209–10 leisure pursuits, 175, 187– 9; in Britain, 176–7, 192; in Canada, 176–7; at Fort Rupert, 190–1; historians on, 176–7; hunting and fishing, 109, 188; music hall, 182, 189; outdoor pursuits, 188; racing, 188–9; and travel, 189–90. See education, sports, Wellington Debating Society Lib-Labs, 145 life-course. See demographics Lin Jim, 169

liquor: aboriginal peoples and, 178–9, 191–2; in British coalfields, 179, 181; miners and, 179– 82, 211, 213; production of, 178; use of, 177, 187. See also beer, pubs, temperance literacy. See education, schooling Little, Francis Deans: on Scottish miners, 51 Little Englanders, 47 livestock, 110 lockouts. See labour disputes London: immigrants from, 59, 201 longwall, 81, 85, 88, 91, 119. See also coalmining lung diseases. See health and hygiene Lutherans, 231n28 McCormack, Ross, 148 MacDonald, Alexander, 99, 111 McGregor, James, 255n54 McGregor, John, 255n54 McGregor, William, 207 McNeill, John, 207 McNeill, Captain William, 135 Malpass, Eliza, 169 Malpass household, 66–7, 169 management of mines and miners, 134–6; in Britain, 134 Maple Bay, 193 marital status. See marriage, mobility, nuptiality markets for coal: American and other foreign, 32–3, 91; domestic, 31–2; Royal Navy, 31; seasonal fluctuations, 98 marriage, 63, 66; age at first marriage 68, 70–3; endogamy and exogamy by denomination, 185–7;

endogamy and exogamy by nationality, 67–8, 245n36; endogamy and exogamy by race, 128–9, 191, 232n29; and remarriage, 201, 207–8 marriage patterns, 67–8. See also demography, marriage, nuptiality, Marx, Karl, 226n34 marxism, 148 Maryland: mining fatalities in, 78 Masons. See Freemasons May Day. See holidays Mechanics’ Literary Institute, 182, 199, 211 mechanization of mine work, 83–5; education and, 199; in Britain, 235n36 Merritt, 254n46 Methodists, 183–7, 231n28; in Britain, 184– 5, 194, 258n27; missions, 191; schooling, 193, 197–8; and temperance 179–80 mine disasters. See accidents and disasters mine output, 131, 237n66 mine safety, 199, 202, 209; Chinese labour and, 124, 129–30; occupational mobility and, 210; and safety lamps, 124. See also accidents and disasters, legislation miners. See coal miners on Vancouver Island, British mining communities Miners’ and Mine Labourers’ Protective Association (mmlpa), 140–3; insurance, 206, 209; in politics, 139, 146; on role of females, 197; on social mobility, 197 Miners’ Federation (Britain), 141, 143 Miners’ Mutual Protective Society (mmps), 138

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mines legislation. See legislation minister of mines (Victoria), 124; reports 252n10 missions, 179, 183–7, 191. See also churches, clergy, aboriginal peoples mobility: American studies, 151; historians on, 160–2; household structures and, 168–71; marital status and, 154, 159; and theories on, 151–2, 160–1. See also geographic mobility, occupational mobility, social mobility Moffat, David, 55 Montana: sex ratio in, 231n20 Montreal, 201 mortality, 178–9, 201–10; age distribution, 203; in British Columbia, 202; community responses to, 203–8; fatalism, 212; historians on, 176; life insurance and, 104–5, 206; lung diseases, 202– 3; maternal, 243n181; mining fatalities, 153–4, 202; and significance of, 208–10. See also funerals and mourning, infant mortality Mottishaw, Samuel, 165 Mouat, Jeremy, 145–6, 214 mourning. See funerals and mourning Muir, Alexander, 190 Muir, Andrew, 27, 172 Muir, John, 137 Muir, John Jr, 172 mules, 85, 188 Musgrave, Governor Anthony: on sex ratios, 51 music hall, 189 Mutual Aid Society, 138 Myers, Samuel, 150, 206 Nanaimo: 1887 disaster, 39, 52, 87, 184, 205–6,

208; aboriginal peoples, 118–9, 191; Asian housing in, 104; Chinese labour at, 120, 129–30, 160; churches, 179–80, 183–7, 210; cultural activities, 189, 210; descriptions of, 103, 111, 156, 192, 261n98; divisions of labour at, 88; education, 182, 192–5, 199, 210; elections, 144–5; female economic roles in, 107, 200; as Fort Nanaimo, 171; hotels, taverns, saloons, and pubs, 110, 168, 177–9, 254n46; labour mobility, 156–9; labour organizations at, 138, 143; Lanarkshire miners at, 82, 172; land preemptions at, 167; livestock, 110; miners’ wages at, 93, 95–6; and sports, 187–9, 210. See also coal mining, funerals and mourning, labour disputes, leisure pursuits Nanaimo Amateur Minstrel Troupe, 182 Nanaimo cemetery, 207 Nanaimo Central Hotel, 110 Nanaimo Colonial School, 194 Nanaimo Concert Band, 189 Nanaimo Free Press: on Chinese labour, 120; on gender roles, 197 Nanaimo Gazette: on aboriginal crops, 191; on coal seams, 77; on intermarriage, 191; on Nanaimo, 112 Nanaimo High School, 195 Nanaimo Opera House, 189 Nanaimo Philharmonic Society, 189

Nanaimo Reform Club, 141, 145–6 Nanaimo Silver Cornet Band, 189 National Colonial Emigration League, 48 Nattress, 39 Nevada: Asian labour in, 127; and mining populations, 60 New Brunswick: wages, 99 Newcastle Island, 77 new unionism, 138, 143 New Zealand: marital patterns in, 67. See also assisted emigration Nicol, Charles, 47–8; in public office, 136 nonconformity. See Baptists, Methodists Norris, Amanda (Gough), 106 Northfield Mine, 83, 85; and gender roles, 246n53 Northumberland: coal mines, 78; cost of living, 107–9; cricket in, 187; mobility in, 159; and schools, 198 North Wellington: labour organizations at, 138 Nottinghamshire, wages, 99 Nova Scotia: accident rates, 78; coalminers and demographics, 60, 67; hours of work, 98, 239n92; mining, 234n14; and xenophobia, 127 nuptiality: British rates, 72– 3; on coalfield, 63; at Ladysmith, 70; and remarriage, 201, 206–7. See also demography of coalfield, marriage occupational mobility, 18, 146, 162–5, 181; in Australia, 169; in Britain, 169; coalfield women and, 168–70; company

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housing and, 172; family size and, 70; geographic mobility and, 170–2; methodology, 161; mine safety and, 210; national origin and, 172; and significance of, 173–4. See also mobility, occupational mobility, social mobility Oddfellows, 136, 183 oncost labour, 81, 142; definition of, 234n20; and wages of, 96–7 Ontario: mobility studies of, 158, 174; schooling in, 198, 200–1; and wages in, 99 Orange Order, 129, 138 Oregon, 101, 188; and demographics 231n20 output. See mine output overmen. See supervision Papley, Alexander, 191 Papley, Joseph, 191 patronage, 136. See also Robert Dunsmuir Pelly, Sir Henry, 40 Pennsylvania: mine fatalities in, 78; and miners’ wages in, 99 penny capitalism, 169, 173–4 pigeon-racing, 188 pillar-and-stall, 81, 88, 122, 234n18. See also coal mining, longwall Pioneer Society, 204 pneumonia, 202–3. See also health and hygiene political campaigns, 141. See also elections politics: American influences, 140; British influences, 140, 146; coal miners in, 133–4, 214– 15. See also conservatism, elections, radicalism, socialism political parties, 134 Pooley, C.E., 137

population: of Nanaimo, 3; of Vancouver Island coalfield, 54. See also demography of coalfield Presbyterians: interdenominationalism and, 184–7, 231n28; and Sunday schools, 198; on temperance, 179–80 probate records, 206 prohibition, 180, 187. See also temperance Protection Island, 77, 83 pubs, 177–81; owned by miners and their wives, 106. See also liquor punishment, 135 Queen Charlotte Islands: coal on, 223n40; and gold rush to, 159 Queen’s Birthday. See holidays quoits, 188 race relations, 115–19, 190–2; divisions of labour, 87–8, 141–2; and race riots, 133. See also aboriginal peoples, AfroCanadians, Asian mineworkers, Chinese community, Chinese mineworkers, Japanese community, racism, split labour market racism, 122–3, 209, 211, 214; Afro-Canadians and, 128–9; American influences, 127; in Britain, 126–7; in coalmining, 127, 210; Victoria Daily Colonist on, 128. See also aboriginal peoples, Afro-Canadians, Asian mineworkers, Chinese community, Chinese mineworkers, race relations, split labour market radicalism, 134, 143, 147, 174, 214. See also West-

ern exceptionalism, politics, socialism Rand, the, 124 Randle, Joseph, 163 “rational recreation,” 176 real wages, 99–100, 102, 113. See also cost of living recreation. See leisure pursuits, “rational recreation” religion. See churches, sectarianism, Sunday schools rents. See housing remarriage. See demographics, marriage, nuptiality, widows and widowhood “respectability,” 140, 180, 182, 187, 213. See also labour aristocracy retail sector, 100–1, 142–3, 163–4, 169. See also shop-keeping Reynard, Rev. James, 189 riddles and screens. See coal sorting rifle corps, 190 Ring, Babbington, 145 Robins, Samuel, 146; on cavilling, 87; on Chinese labour, 119–20, 124; on labour organizations, 142; on radicalism, 144. See also Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company Robinson, George, 40 Ross household, 66–7 Royal Commissions, 141, 143; 1885 Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 169, 171; Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, 1902, 96–7, 123; 1903 Industrial Disputes Investigation, 250n143 Royal Navy: as consumer of coal, 31; Dunsmuirs and, 26, 136; at Esquimalt, 45, 164

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rugby, 188, 192 Russophobia, 144 Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, 139 Saint Andrew’s and Caledonian Society, 204 Saint David’s Day. See holidays Saint George’s Society, 204 Saint Monday, 177, 211. See also Black Country, holidays Saint Paul’s Anglican Church, Nanaimo, 70 saloons. See pubs Salt Spring Island, 158. See also Gulf Islands San Francisco, 190. See also California, markets savings. See wages sawmills, 162 schooling, 192; for aboriginal peoples, 193; administration by state, 49, 194–6, 198–9; in Britain, 198–200; in Canada West, 198; class conflict and, 198–9; curriculum, 105; discipline in, 195–6; enrolments, 194; girls and, 196–7, 261n105; Hudson’s Bay Company, 193–4; miners’ response to, 194–6, 198– 200; schools, 193; teachers in, 193, 195; truancy, 194–5; in the United States, 200. See also education, John Jessop, Sunday schools, superintendent of schools screens and riddles. See coal sorting sectarianism, 129 service sector, 162; children in, 196–7, 200; class relations and, 173– 4, 181; miners in, 167–8; and women in, 106–7, 168, 170

settlement policies and programs: of British Government, 43–4; of colonial administration, 43; regarding Mormons, Germans, and Welsh, 46 sex ratios, 60–1, 66, 127, 203–4; aboriginal peoples, 191; Afro-Canadians, 59; in British Columbia, 63, 191; children, 65; labour militance and, 230n5; Governor Musgrave, 51; moral panic, 51; in the United States, 63, 231nn15, 20; in Wales, 63; and whites 59, 191. See also demography of coalfield Seymour, Governor Frederick, 160; land policy of, 45; on schooling, 193–5 Shetland Islands, 111 shop-keeping, 169, 173–4, 206. See also retail sector Sing Fung, 169 Sisters of Saint Anne, 207 skills. See also coal mining Slocan Valley: work year in, 98 smallpox, 179 Smith, Ralph, 143 Sneddon, William, 170 Sne ney mux: labour organizations, 139; as mine workers, 88, 118–19; and relations with settlers, 135, 191 spirituality. See churches split labour market, 119– 22. See also coal mining, race relations sports, 175–6, 187–9 soccer. See football social mobility, 146, 160–2, 174; in Britain, 161; intergenerational, 256n85; methodology, 161; significance of, 173–4. See also geographic mobility, mobility, occupational mobility

socialism, 141, 143–4, 213 Socialist Labour Party of British Columbia, 143 South Staffordshire: dependency rates, 65; economic conditions, 38; holidays in, 257n7; housing, 111; liquor use in, 181; mines, 218n2; and recruitment of miners from, 40. See also Black Country, Brierley Hill South Wellington mine: Chinese labour in, 130; liquor use at, 180 spiritualists and mediums, 259n57 Sterling Journal: on emigration, 52. Stewart, J.D., 254n38 Stocker, William, 142 strikebreakers, 121, 125–6, 131 Sunday schools, 194, 197– 9; enrolments, 262n127 superintendent of mines, 196, 209–10 superintendent of schools, 194–6 supervision, 82, 87, 209–10 Suquash, 254n30 swimming, 188 Tamworth Examiner: on emigration, 52 taverns. See pubs Texada Island, 158. See also Gulf Islands teachers. See schooling temperance, 178–80, 187, 210; churches on, 179– 80; employers on, 179– 80; friendly societies, 180; and miners, 179– 80. Thanksgiving Day. See holidays Thetis Island, 158, 167. See also Gulf Islands Thompson, Edward, 179 Thompson, E.P., 214 Thompson, John, 166

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Times (London): on British Columbia, 54; on Vancouver Island, 42, 47, 53 Toi-san, 119 trade unions, 134, 138. See also labour organization, unions Trades and Labour Congress of Canada, 146 Trades Union Congress (England), 140, 246n64 truck shops, 98, 137 Trutch, Joseph, 47 tuberculosis, 202–3. See also health and hygiene typhoid, 112, 203 Union: Chinese labour at, 119, 131; as company town, 101, 104; leisure pursuits at, 210; mine disasters at, 147, 170; mine ownership, 251n156; mine productivity, 131; mine supervision, 87; mines, 26; mining techniques, 83, 85; name change to Cumberland, 3, 53; retail sector, 168; schooling, 195; and subcontracts, 131. See also Cumberland unions, 134, 138–9, 146; in Britain, 249n120; on race, 123, 126, 128–9; and working-class opposition to, 141 United British Women’s Emigration Association, 51–2 United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, 139 United Englishwomen’s Emigration Association, 51–2 United Mine Workers of America, 139 United States of America, 206; Manifest Destiny, 45; mining communities in, 147; purchase of

Alaska, 45; and relations with British Columbia, 43–4 unskilled labour. See coal mining Uren, Absolam, 168–9, 231n28 Uren, Anna, 168–9, 231n28 Uren household, 231n28 Valdes Island. See also Gulf Islands Vancouver, 173 Vancouver Island: descriptions of, 42, 53–4 Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company (vcmlc): aboriginal mineworkers, 118–9; accidents and disasters, 77; Chinese labour, 119–20, 122, 125, 209–10; coal sorting, 86–7; company stores, 168; directors, 25; hours of work, 97; housing, 102–3; labour disputes, 146, 237n78; labour mobility, 162; liquor use, 180; management style, 7, 136; Mechanics’ Literary Institute, 182–3; mining techniques, 82–3, 171–2; as patron of the arts, 189; productivity, 131; purchase of hbc mines, 24–5; on radicalism, 144; recruitment of immigrants, 47–8; reorganization, 221n13; and wages, 96–7. See also accidents and disasters; Bryden, John; Bate, Mark; five-acre lots; Nanaimo Vancouver Island: Colonial Office attitude towards, 47; and descriptions of, 21, 42, 54, 56 ventilation in mines, 78, 83, 120, 131, 209

Victoria, 173, 210; description of, 221n15; Dunsmuirs and, 204; holidays in, 189; households in, 230n3; schooling at, 192–3; and temperance, 180 Victoria Daily Colonist, 136; on coalfield politics, 133–4; on mine safety, 129; on racism, 128 violence, 133; and discipline, 134–5. See also punishment Vipond, 39 voters’ lists, 252n10, 253n11 wages, 97, 200; for Asian labour, 121–2, 124–5, 130–1, 238n82; in Black Country, 98, 105; for boys, 96, 107–8, 113; in Britain, 98; comparative, 49, 215; contracts, 97; deductions, 104, 109, 238n82, 241n134; for farmworkers, 101; fluctuations of, 95–6; at Fort Rupert, 95, 238n79; in France, 95; gambling and, 188–9; of hewers, 93–4; method of payment, 86; at Nanaimo 93, 96; for oncost workers, 96–7, 142; perquisites, 105; piece-rates, 93–5; publicized, 49; rations, 93, 101, 237n70; reductions, 87; savings, 107, 205–6, 208–10; sources of data, 91–2; at Wellington, 93; and work-year, 97–8. See also real wages, household wage Warburton, Rennie: on race and class conflict, 116 Washington State, 121, 159; and Chinese mine labour 245n34; and demographics 231n20

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water quality, 181–2 Weardale, Durham, 39 Wellington, 164; 1888 disaster at, 86–7, 131, 141, 169, 184, 203–5, 209– 10, 264n168; aboriginal mineworkers, 118–19; Chinese mineworkers, 90, 119–20, 122, 130; churches, 183–7; coal seams, 85; coal sorting, 86–7; as company town, 101, 104; descriptions of, 103, 156, 253n19; females at, 200; labour disputes, 89, 138, 146–7, 214; labour mobility, 156–7, 159; labour organizations, 138, 143; land preemptions, 167; leisure pursuits, 210; mine productivity, 131; miners’ wages, 93; mining techniques, 83; schooling, 195–6; subcontracting, 88, 169; supervision, 87; timbering, 86; and work-year, 98. See also accidents and disasters

Wellington Debating Society, 182–3 Wesleyans. See Methodists West Shore, 49 West Virginia: and labour mobility, 159, 259n57; mine fatalities in, 78 Western exceptionalism, 7–10, 148, 172–3 Western Federation of Miners (wfm), 106, 139, 144; on Asian miners, 129 White, Rev. Edward, 183–4 Whitsuntide. See also holidays widows and widowhood, 183, 206–8. See also friendly societies, insurance, mortality, women Wilmer, Edmund, 96 Wolverhampton, 192 women: aboriginal, 87–8, 191; assisted emigration and, 51–2; in associations, 138, 206; in Belgian mines, 241n140; in British Columbian mines, 87–8; in British mines

and mining communities, 60–3, 69, 87, 106–7, 231n15, 241n140; in competition with Chinese labour, 107; domestic life, 242n158; economic roles, 69, 105–7, 113, 168–70, 196–7, 206; as miners’ daughters, 196– 200, 256n85; miners’ mortality and, 205; as miners’ wives, 202; and violence toward, 135. See also girls, widows and widowhood woodworkers, 138 workday. See hours of work, wages work-year. See hours of work, wages working-class culture: British, 12–13; theoretical approaches to, 8 Working Man’s Party, 139, 145 Wyoming: and demographics, 231 Yorkshire: miners from, 39