James Douglas : father of British Columbia 0195401875

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James Douglas FATHER OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Dorothy Blakey Smith

Toronto OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS -

1971

The map is by C. C. J. Bond

SBN 0-19-540187-5

© Oxford University Press 1971

1 2 3 4 5 6 - 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in Canada by John Deyell Limited

CONTENTS 1. “OLD SQUARE-TOES”

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2. THE FUR TRADER

12

3. THE GOVERNOR OF VANCOUVER ISLAND

43

4. GOLD ON THE MAINLAND

63

5. THE GOVERNOR OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

78

6. “MY OWN FIRESIDE”

110

SOURCES

124

NOTES

125

INDEX

127

ILLUSTRATIONS All illustrations are reproduced courtesy the Provincial Archives, Victoria Governor Sir James Douglas, K.C.B.

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Fort Vancouver, 1845

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The Governor’s Mansion at James Bay

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Victoria, 1858

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“The Birdcages” — the Legislative Buildings

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Mrs James Douglas, probably taken before 1863

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The mule trail over the mountains before the Cariboo Road was built

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The Cariboo Road at the Great Bluff, Thompson River, 1868

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The medallion presented to Lady Douglas in 1864, now in the possession of the Provincial Archives

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Sir James Douglas in his retirement

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Lady Douglas in her widowhood

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The funeral o f Sir James Douglas, 7 August 1877

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“Old Square-toes” — Governor Sir James Douglas, K.C.B., within a few m onths o f his retirement in 1864. Photograph by G. R. Fardon.

“ OLD SQUARE-TOES” On a bright summer day in 1877 the funeral procession of Sir James Douglas, K.C.B., made its slow and solemn way from the Church of Our Lord, which is still standing in downtown Victoria, to the quiet cemetery on the shores of Ross Bay. Nearly 3,000 people came to the funeral, and crowds of mourners thronged the city streets. All over British Columbia tribute was being paid to the man who had served as Gover­ nor of the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island from 1851 to 1864, and as Governor of the Mainland Colony of British Columbia from the Fraser River gold rush of 1858 until his retirement six years later. “Today a whole province is in tears,” said the Victoria Daily Colonist. “After a long and useful life Sir James Douglas has gone to his rest followed by the blessings of a people who will ever hold his great public services and his private virtues in affectionate remembrance.” It was in 1842 that James Douglas, then a Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, first set foot on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. He wrote to a fellow fur trader: “The place itself appears a perfect ‘Eden’ in the midst of the dreary wilderness of the North-west coast, and so different is its general aspect from the wooded, rugged regions around that one might be pardoned for supposing it had dropped from the clouds into its present position.” This island paradise was

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then inhabited only by Indians, for the Spaniards had with­ drawn nearly fifty years before from their establishment at Nootka Sound, and since then no European settler had dis­ turbed the native people in their ancient way of life. On the mainland across the Strait of Georgia only a few isolated posts, manned by fur traders who had crossed the Rockies from Canada, were strung out along the routes that Macken­ zie and Fraser had explored between the mountains and the sea. Before Douglas died in 1877 British Columbia had en­ tered Confederation. The boundaries of the province were substantially the same as they are today, and the white population numbered over ten thousand. No man did more than Governor James Douglas to deter­ mine the general direction of this development from wilder­ ness to civilization. In those days it took months for the British Government’s instructions to reach their representa­ tive on the Pacific coast, and Douglas sometimes found himself in situations where he had to act first and report afterwards. It is the measure of his ability as an administrator that only once did the Secretary of State for the Colonies disallow a Proclamation issued by Governor Douglas. Without his loyalty to Queen Victoria, his initiative, his firmness of character, and his devotion to duty it is more than likely that the whole area that is now British Columbia would have been absorbed by the United States in pursuit of her “ manifest destiny” . The whole of the Pacific slope from Alaska to California would then have owed allegiance to the American flag. Thus James Douglas has rightly been called “The Father of British Columbia” . Soon after his death the people of the province erected an obelisk to his memory in the grounds of the old “Birdcages” , the Government buildings he had constructed in 1859. On

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the exterior of the present buildings are two statues, not one, in honour of Sir James Douglas: the first, at the main entrance of the main block, erected in 1895; the second, on the rear wing, added twenty years later. As we crane our necks below the impressive figure that looks out to the harbour with an aloof and impersonal stare, we may well feel a certain sympathy with the irreverent young civil servant of 1859 who nicknamed Governor Douglas “Old Square-toes” . And indeed it is not easy to find the man James Douglas behind the official mask. There are good reasons why this should be so. In early life he formed the habit of thinking for himself and keeping his own counsel, for he was very young when he was sent away from home to live among strangers, and when he later came from Scotland to the unknown country of Canada he was still only a boy. As a young clerk in the fur trade he had to take the responsibility for his own actions, and when he was given authority over others at the trading post his superiors held him responsible for their actions too, as well as for keeping in check the throngs of Indians outside the fort, who were quick to take advantage of any show of weakness. A young man of naturally strong passions and sensitive feelings, Douglas had to learn to keep these under rigid control and try to remain calm, cool, dignified, and impressive at all times. When he attained the rank of Chief Factor in the Hudson’s Bay Company he was treated with a deference that to us may seem excessive: he was lifted out of boat or canoe by his men, and salutes were fired whenever he entered or left a fort. The Company had found by experience that such cere­ mony was necessary to impress the Indians. A visitor from England who found Governor Douglas’s manner “ singular” and marked by “a gravity, and a something besides which

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some might and do mistake for pomposity” , explained this as the result of his long service “in an unsettled country where the white men are rare and the Indians many” . When Douglas became the Governor of Vancouver Island there was an added reason for his aloofness: he had to be mindful of the Queen’s dignity as well as his own. It is easy to poke fun at his insistence on salutes being fired on all official occasions, however small, and at his posting a militia guard outside his simple government office in the early days. But he looked upon these marks of respect as paid not to himself as a man, but to the Queen’s representative. After he retired as Governor in 1864 Douglas seemed unable to drop the official mask. The old fur trader John Tod, who had known him for over forty years, wrote in 1868: “ I had a long chat the other day with our friend Douglas (now Sir James), ever stiff and formal as in times past, qualities which from long habit he could not now lay aside if he would, and probably ought not, if he could.” Only in the letters Douglas wrote to his family during his later years does the mask lift a trifle and allow his human qualities to appear: his warm and solicitous affection for his wife and children, his basic kindness, his sensitive feeling for landscape and flowers, occasionally a touch of humour. Yet in these letters too we have to admit that the habit of command has become second nature to him now. Douglas is very much the authoritarian Papa familiar to us from mid-Victorian novels. His only son James, at school in England, is subjected to a steady though usually affectionate stream of admonition and reproof; his eighteen-year-old daughter, sent to Europe “to get rid of the cobwebs of colonial training” , finds that her correspondence is closely scrutinized for correctness in Eng­ lish composition. Once a part of her last letter is returned to

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her “pruned of redundancies, as a study. Observe how it is improved by the process.” We are hardly surprised that Martha wrote home less frequently than her father would have wished, but we cannot blame Douglas too much for conforming to the social code of his time. In Victorian days the relations between parents and children were much less casual and informal than is the custom today, and the art of letter-writing was considered one of the necessary accom­ plishments of the well-educated person. James Douglas may appear to us today as a rather intimi­ dating father-figure in both public and private life. But seen in his own historical setting he was a man of remarkable achievement, who well deserved his inclusion among the makers of Canada.

2 THE FUR TRADER James Douglas bore an ancient and honourable Scottish name. From some hardy ancestor he inherited a powerful physique and a rugged constitution that seemed unaffected by the rigours of his fur-trading days and enabled him to write when he was nearly seventy: “Had a good jumping on the verandah with the skipping rope for exercise.” His father was John Douglas, a Glasgow merchant whose family firm had sugar plantations in Demerara, British Guiana. In the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company James Douglas is referred to as a “Scotch West Indian” , and it is believed that he was born in Demerara in 1803, the younger son of his father’s connection with a woman who was probably a Creole. Although in 1809 John Douglas contracted a legal marriage in Scotland, he did not repudiate his West Indian attachment and provided for the three children. We may suppose that James Douglas spent his earliest years in Demerara with his mother, who did not die until 1839. While still very young he was sent to school in Lanark, Scotland, and with other small boys boarded in the village. Over fifty years later he remembered vividly his first dip in the River Clyde, when his landlady’s daughter plunged him “head over heels into the flowing stream. I was a very little fellow then,” he adds, “and was, at least for a time, thor12

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(Highly cured . . . of all longings for cold baths and deep water.” The Lanark school had a high reputation and it was not for weaklings. Many years afterwards Douglas told his son: “Had you been a strong healthy boy . . . you should have gone at once to a public school, and had to fight your own way with all sorts of boys, and to get on by dint of whip and spur as I did when a boy.” We do not know when Douglas left Lanark. Family tradition says that he also went to school in Chester, England, and that there he acquired from an emigre a polished French accent on which he was complimented when he visited Paris after his retirement. His correspondence shows that he wrote French with remarkable ease. Douglas was obviously well grounded also in the three Rs. He was trained to write intelligible English, probably through the study of eighteenth-century essayists. His letters and reports, though admirably clear, are formal in style, and in his dispatches he has been accused of “sesquipedalian diction” .1 Even in his private letters he rarely verges on the colloquial and he detested slang, which as he told his daugh­ ter is “essentially vulgar and to me unbearable” . He was taught to write in a firm precise hand, so clear that even the tiny cramped entries in his diaries are perfectly legible. He was well trained too in arithmetic and book-keeping, and later dealt without difficulty with the complicated ledgers at Fort Vancouver and the intricacies of colonial budgets. In the spring of 1819, when he was in his sixteenth year, James Douglas left school and entered the fur trade. He signed a six-year contract as a clerk with the North West Company, an organization of Montreal merchants in fierce competition with the Hudson’s Bay Company of London. His brother Alexander had joined the North West Company the

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year before, but unlike James he was not a success. He was dismissed from the service in 1824 as “stupid and inactive, deficient in education, not adapted for the country” . James Douglas sailed from Liverpool on 7 May 1819 aboard a cargo vessel that did not reach Quebec for seven weeks. At Lachine he joined the Fort William brigade and travelled, for the first of many times, in a fragile birch-bark canoe manned by tough and tireless French-Canadian voyageurs in their gaily coloured shirts and sashes. Fort William was the main depot of the North West Company and the point of departure for the canoes taking men and supplies to the far-flung posts of the fur-trading empire; it was both fort and village, so numerous were the buildings enclosed within its fifteen-foot palisade. One building containing a dozen bedrooms was assigned to the clerks, and here Douglas had his quarters during the winter of 1819-20. We may assume that he employed some at least of his leisure time in reading and writing. It is said that he took his school books with him across the Atlantic and this may well be true, for in the inventory of his effects that he made ten years later he listed forty-five volumes of the “British Classics” , a history of England, a French dictionary, and standard texts in geo­ metry, arithmetic, and grammar. In the summer of 1820 Douglas was transferred to Ile-a-laCrosse, on the Churchill River in the wilds of what is now northern Saskatchewan. Hudson’s Bay Company traders were also active in this area, and bitter was the struggle between them and the Nor’Westers for the furs of the Crees and the Chipewyans who hunted near the fort. Three duels were fought within a month, and a contemporary letter records that “young Douglas” took part in one of them, though “no blood” was shed. In his quieter moments Douglas went on

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with his self-education. Among his papers was found an essay on the North American Indians, much erased and corrected by him, which appears to belong to his days at Ile-a-la-Crosse; and after he became Governor Douglas, he was praised by a critic not usually friendly to him for “not being indifferent to mental culture in those mountain solitudes in which the flower of his manhood was passed” .2 In 1821 the Hudson’s Bay Company absorbed the North West Company, and Douglas, now described as “a promising young man” , was transferred to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s service at the same rate of pay, £15 sterling per annum. The London company was more strictly organized than the Nor’Westers had been, and had indeed a class structure of a semi-military nature. Above the “men” , the labourers and the voyageurs, were the clerks, equivalent to non-commissioned officers; above them, the Chief Traders and the Chief Factors, the “Commissioned gentlemen” who sat on the Councils of the various Departments; above them, Governor (later Sir) George Simpson, in charge of the Northern Department of Rupert’s Land, which had been recently expanded with the taking over of the North West Company to include the operations beyond the Rocky Mountains in New Caledonia and on the Columbia River; above Simpson, the Governor and Committee in far-away London. Such a chain of com­ mand made obedience to orders a prime virtue, and this lesson Douglas had now to learn. He learned it well. Twenty years later he reminded a fellow officer at Fort Vancouver who had written a letter “neither proper nor respectful” to his superior, Dr John McLoughlin, that “obedience is the very first and most important of our duties, like the A.B.C. in literature, the groundwork of all our acquisitions and in fact the great principle which all persons entering this service

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should be taught to revere.” Douglas must have given satisfaction to his new masters: on 1 June 1825 his contract was renewed for three years and his salary raised to £60 per annum. He spent the summer in charge of Fort Vermilion on the Peace River. Then, since his superiors thought him a “ fine steady active fellow, good clerk and trader, well adapted for a new country” , he was sent across the Rockies to Fort St James, the headquarters of the District of New Caledonia. Established by Simon Fraser in 1806 on Stuart Lake, in the territory of the Carrier Indians, Fort St James was in 1825 in the charge of Chief Factor William Connolly, a former Nor’Wester from Lower Canada who in 1803 had married the daughter of a Cree chief “according to the custom of the country” .* Douglas had served less than a year under him when Connolly wrote: “Mr Douglas’s salary I consider as inadequate to his merit . . . He has served six years of apprenticeship under able masters, during which period he acquired a good knowledge of the trade, of the general character of Indians and of the method observed in conducting the business—which added to a good education, sound sense, and a frame of body and mind able to carry him through any difficulty, qualify him in a high degree for the service in which he is engaged.” It does not appear that this testimonial resulted in any increase of salary for the new clerk, but Connolly took Douglas with him in 1826 on the annual journey with the packs of furs from New Caledonia to the headquarters of the Columbia Department at Fort Van*In the early days of the fur trade it was customary for white men living in isolation in the Indian country to take Indian or halfbreed women for their wives. These “fur-trade marriages” were arranged by agreement with the woman’s father and involved no formal ceremony. Nevertheless they were legally valid, and were so declared in a Supreme Court decision in 1867.

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couver. For the first time Douglas made the swift passage by boat down the rivers to Fort Alexandria on the Fraser, and rode thence with the pack trains to Fort Kamloops and on over the main brigade trail down the Okanagan Valley to the Columbia River, where the convoy again took to the boats for the last lap of the five weeks’journey to Fort Vancouver. Here it was three weeks before the year’s “Outfit” of trading goods and supplies for New Caledonia was ready, and Doug­ las had the chance to meet various important men in the western fur trade, as well as his namesake David Douglas, the celebrated botanist after whom the Douglas fir was to be named. By the end of September 1826 Connolly’s party was back in the solitude of Fort St James, where James Douglas was to spend the next four years, chiefly occupied with furs and fish. The fort journal records that in the summer of 1827 he was sent to establish a trading post on Bear Lake (Fort Connolly) and was successful in trading nine packs of beaver and twenty-three and a half pounds of castoreum, a substance obtained from the glands of the beaver and used in medicine and perfumery. As soon as Douglas returned, Connolly sent him off again to establish and superintend a fishery on a small lake near by. The party was “well provided with nets, having eight of small thread, three of willow, and four of Holland twine” , and most of the dogs went along too, for the catch would have to be hauled back on sledges to the fort. Food was often in short supply at isolated trading posts and fish was a very important item in the diet of New Caledonia, taking the place of the pemmican of the eastern fur trade. Fort St James had had a vegetable garden since 1811 and clerks and commissioned officers were also allowed a few luxuries like tea, sugar, and bacon. The men lived mostly on

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dried salmon and water, the standard allowance at Fort St James in 1811 being four whole salmon per day per man. Douglas had told the Company that he wanted to retire at the expiry of his contract in 1828, but he changed his mind. His salary was raised to £100 per annum, and on 27 April 1828 Connolly allowed him to marry his eldest daughter “ according to the custom of the country” by which he himself had been married in 1803. This was still the only form of marriage possible in the wilds of New Caledonia, where there was as yet neither priest nor clergyman. Amelia, who was not yet sixteen, was “a shy, sweet, and lovable girl, ‘modest as the wood violet’, and having in addition to per­ sonal beauty the blood of native heroes in her veins” .3 She was dark-haired and grey-eyed, and so fair of skin in spite of her Indian blood that the men at Fort St James called her “Little Snowbird” . Soon after the marriage Connolly placed Douglas in charge at Fort St James and left on the annual trip to Fort Vancouver with the furs. He did not get back until the afternoon of the 17th of September, just missing the arrival of Governor Simpson on his way to inspect the Col­ umbia District. So it was the young clerk Douglas who, amid “a brisk discharge of small arms and wall pieces from the fort” , received the Governor’s party, which according to one of them approached “in the most imposing manner we could, for the sake of the Indians” : the British flag in front, a piper in full Highland costume playing the march of the clans, the Governor and the gentlemen on horseback, and the men following with their burdens. During Connolly’s absence Douglas had been involved in what his own notebook refers to as “Tumult with Indians” . This affair has provided more picturesque and conflicting anecdotes than any other incident in Douglas’s career. It also

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illustrates very clearly how hard it is to find out the truth about the past. Extracts from the brief official account in the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company were published in 1944 in the Company’s short biography of Douglas. There is no doubt that in the summer of 1828, an Indian who had helped to murder two Hudson’s Bay men five years before ventured to visit his relatives in the Indian village at Fort St James and was there put to death by the Company’s men. Douglas’s report to Connolly on this “accomplishment of a much desired event” states that the murderer has been “dis­ patched . . . in the Indian Village . . . without confusion or any accident happening to any other individual” . The Indian version of the affair was gathered nearly sixty years after the event from eyewitnesses, their children, or contemporaries, by Father A.G. Morice, who went as a missionary to the Stuart Lake Indians in 1885 and lived for many years among them. This version is far more lurid. Entering the Indian village, from which all the men were absent, Douglas seized the terrified murderer by the hair, shot at him with a blun­ derbuss but missed in the struggle, and then permitted his assistants to stun the Indian with the garden hoes they were carrying and to drag the body, “a shapeless jelly” , toward the fort. In his old age Douglas himself commented to his daugh­ ter on this episode of his youth. An eastern newspaper had used yet another version of the story to illustrate “the extraordinary personal intrepidity” of Douglas, saying that he went alone into the Indian camp, seized the chief, and meeting with some resistance “ BLEW OUT HIS BRAINS , in the centre of his tribe” . Douglas writes to Martha: “They wish to make of me, who am as you know a quiet old gentleman enough, a sort of daredevil, fearing nothing. True, I seized the Indian, a noted murderer, as stated, and secured

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him after a desperate struggle, but I did not shoot him with my own hands; he was afterwards executed for his crimes. It was a desperate adventure, which nothing but a high sense of duty could have induced me to undertake.” We may admit the “high sense of duty” that sent Douglas to capture the murderer, for the Company could not afford to let crimes against Hudson’s Bay men go unpunished, but to say that the murderer was “afterwards executed” sounds rather more dispassionate and legal than seems to have been the case. Governor Simpson arrived at Fort St James while the affair was fresh in everyone’s mind, and one of his party wrote that the murderer “was destroyed by Mr Douglas and six men on the spot” . We cannot overlook either the fact that Simpson himself, writing in his private “Book of Servants’ Characters” , said that Douglas was “furiously violent when roused” . Wherever the exact truth lies, we must agree with Doug­ las’s biographer Dr W. N. Sage that “Douglas did not come well out of this affair” and that his difficulties with the Indians might have been one reason why he was transferred to Fort Vancouver the next year. For he had had further trouble with the natives. The Hudson’s Bay records say that late in October 1828 he was “attacked without provocation” on his way to Fraser Lake, though on this occasion his conduct “impressed the minds of the natives with a higher opinion of the whites than they previously entertained” . Early in 1829 Connolly told Simpson that “Douglas’s life is much exposed among these Carriers. He would readily face a hundred of them, but he does not much like the idea of being assassinated. With your permission he might next year be removed to the Columbia. Wherever he may be placed he cannot fail of being essentially useful.” The news of Douglas’s transfer reached Fort St James at

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the end of January 1830 and he left at once for Fort Vancouver. Now twenty-six years old, he was to be described by Simpson in 1832 as “a stout powerful active man of good conduct and respectable abilities—tolerably well educated, expresses himself clearly on paper, understands our Counting House business and is an excellent trader. Well qualified for any service requiring bodily exertion, firmness of mind, and the exercise of sound judgement . . . Has every reason to look forward to early promotion and is a likely man to fill a place at our Council board in the course of time.” Fort Vancouver, where Douglas was to spend more than nineteen years of his Hudson’s Bay Company service, had been established in 1825 by orders of Governor Simpson. The site, which is now a historic monument within the confines of the city of Vancouver, Washington, was delib­ erately chosen on the north bank of the Columbia River. For Simpson could see the shape of things to come. In 1818 the boundary line between the British and American territories east of the Rockies had been fixed at the 49th parallel, but west of the mountains both British and American citizens had the right of free entry. In 1819 Spain had surrendered to the United States her rights north of the 42nd parallel. Thus American fur traders and settlers could infiltrate from the south and the east into the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur preserve on the Columbia River. In any final settlement of the boundary the best the Company could now hope for was a line following the Columbia River, and if this line should be chosen, any of the Company’s posts or property south of the Columbia would have to be abandoned to the Americans. Therefore Simpson placed Fort Vancouver on the north bank of the river and transferred to it the establishment and the prestige of Fort George (the earlier Fort Astoria), which was

Fort Vancouver, 1845. Sketch by Lieut. H. J. Wane in his Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory (1848).

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located on the south bank near the mouth of the Columbia. The basic policy of the Company must now be to resist the encroachment of the Americans from south and east, and if possible to extend the fur empire northward, beyond New Caledonia to 54° 40’, the boundary between British and Rus­ sian territories fixed by the Convention of 1825. In charge of Fort Vancouver in 1830 was Dr John McLoughlin, the “Great White-headed Eagle” of the Columbia Department, and under him James Douglas served as chief accountant for over fifteen years. Douglas’s own patient, careful, and methodical habits were now reinforced by McLoughlin’s training, with its almost fanatical attention to detail. In 1832 and 1833 Douglas was sent across the moun­ tains to present the accounts of Fort Vancouver to the Council at York Factory, and in December 1834 he was promoted to the rank of Chief Trader. Instead of his clerk’s salary of £100 he was now entitled to one of the eighty-five shares in the profits of the Company that were set aside for “the gentlemen of the interior” . The average earnings per share for the years 1821-33 had been nearly £400, but even in a bad year Douglas could now expect about double his previous income. He was handed his commission in person at Lower Fort Garry on 3 June 1835 and took his place as a member of the Council of the Northern Department. Douglas’s diary of the six-month trip from Fort Vancouver to the Red River, on to York Factory and back to the Columbia, is a revealing commentary on the risks and hard­ ships that the men of his time in the fur trade took as a matter of course. Leaving Fort Vancouver on 3 March 1835 the party went by boat up the Columbia River with its dangerous rapids, on snowshoes through the Athabasca Pass across the Rocky Mountains, then by canoe and boat down

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the rivers and lakes to York Factory. Sometimes the diary records “a fine clear morning” , but many a day was marked by rain, snow, fog, thunderstorms, or boisterous winds, and after a frosty night “many of the people who slept with wet garments or bed-clothes found them in the morning stiff as boards.” Sometimes the boats could hoist their sails to a fanbreeze, but more often than not the men had to labour at the oars or pole their craft along. When the rivers were low the boats kept grounding on gravel bars or rocks concealed by a few inches of water, and the crews had “ no other way of clearing these obstacles but by leaping out and dragging them into deeper water, which is certainly not an agreeable pastime on a cold morning with the ice forming all around them” . When the boats were struggling upstream they had to be towed along the shore by men walking along the bank with tracking lines. Where the current was particularly strong three track lines had to be attached to each boat, “for singly they snap like cobweb” . Once as a boat was “toiling up the steepest part of the rapids” the lines broke, and “two men had rather a narrow escape from drowning.” The year 1836 saw the arrival at Fort Vancouver of the little steamer Beaver, which Simpson expected would give the Company a decided advantage in the coastal trade over the Americans in their sailing ships. The Beaver herself arrived under sail, but with her engines in the hold. After she had been satisfactorily converted to steam, her captain gave much pleasure to the inhabitants of Fort Vancouver by taking them for short excursions on the river. The ship’s log records, for instance, that on 31 May 1836 the captain received on board “a party of ladies and gentlemen from the fort” . Among these, we may suppose, were Chief Trader James Douglas and his wife Amelia, who after the death of her first child at Fort

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St James in 1830 had joined her husband at Fort Vancouver. All the women then at the fort had Indian blood, Mrs Douglas among them, and this must have eased for Amelia the transition from savage isolation to the comparative civil­ ization of Fort Vancouver, “the grand mart and rendezvous for the Company’s trade and servants on the Pacific” . 4 Within its stockade were offices, warehouses, workshops, a schoolhouse and a chapel, living quarters for the staff, and an imposing residence for Dr McLoughlin. But even at Fort Vancouver the women were restricted to their own quarters. Only the men dined in the mess hall and afterwards chatted with the visiting fur traders and other travellers from farther afield in the smoking room called “Bachelor’s Hall” . Here there was “a great deal of amusement, but always kept under strict discipline, and regulated by the strictest propriety” . Even so, the women were not allowed to share in these “gala times after dinner” or to meet any of the “great influx of company” : we have it on the authority of one of Dr McLoughlin’s daughters that the females “never saw anybody” . Thus a particularly unpleasant situation arose when in 1836 the Rev. Herbert Beaver, appointed Company chaplain at the post, arrived with his wife, and Mrs Beaver refused to associate with any of the women at the fort because they had none of them been married according to the rites of the church. Douglas did what he could to correct matters by remarrying Amelia, on 28 February 1837, according to the rites of the Church of England as performed by the Rev. Mr Beaver. But he must have been angered by this disdainful and narrow-minded treatment of his wife, and we can well imag­ ine the effect on Amelia Douglas of her first encounter with a civilized English lady. But she can have had little time to brood over it: ten of her thirteen children were born at Fort

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Vancouver and five of these died in infancy there. In the spring of 1838 Dr McLoughlin was called to London to report on the Columbia district, and Douglas was left in charge at Fort Vancouver. He accepted the responsibility “with a degree of diffidence and oppressive anxiety regarding the future” , for the interests of the Company were increas­ ingly bound to collide with the “foreign and independent interests growing up on every side” . But he assured the Governor and Committee that these difficulties “will neither discourage from exertion, nor prevent the most strenuous efforts on my part to repay your confidence” . Douglas was greatly concerned also for the “moral and religious improvement” of the people under his charge, and gave every encouragement to the church and school at the fort. He thought that the chaplain’s “juvenile school” for the white children was exerting “a powerful and salutary influ­ ence” and that its results would be increasingly evident in later years, when the youth who were attending it would “attain rank and control over the society around them” . The Indians were given a Sunday school carried on in their own language, to inculcate in them as well “the moral and social duties of man” . We may note also that it was Douglas who late in 1838 welcomed “with every demonstration of re­ spect” , as Father De Smet reported, the first Roman Catholic missionaries to arrive in the Oregon country. One particular problem Douglas found himself unable to resolve: the traffic in slaves that the Governor and Commit­ tee at a safe distance in London had desired him to suppress. The practical Douglas could see very clearly the danger of any “ forcible emancipation” of the Indian slaves, which might well provoke the “desperate animosity” of the natives toward the Company. But he did try to discourage the

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THE FUR TRADER

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