i a British Columbia: the people’s story 4 - THE FIGHT FOR RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT By HAL GRIFFIN | ao the thousands who followed the gold rush to British Columbia in 1858 was a young man whose name originally had been William Alexander Smith. The first flush of the gold fever was past when he landed at ‘Victoria in No- vember and the ships bringing the eager newcomers now were carrying as many disillusioned miners back to San Fran- cisco. Of the 30,000 men estimated to have flocked to the Fraser River between May and July, all but some 3,000 had returned to the United States. But in its first few months the gold rush had already transformed the old wilderness territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company. ‘Although the company was still the dominant in- fluence in colonial affairs, its monopoly was gone and the fur trade from which it drew its wealth and power was being pushed back as the miners advanced into the hinter- land seeking the source of the river’s gold. Stimulated by the new gold-mining industry, particularly after the discoveries in the Cariboo in 1860 extended it into the interior, other industries were coming into being. Where the entire white population of Vancouver Island had been less than 400 before the gold rush and the Hud- son’s Bay Company the only outlet for the colonists’ produce, now the colonists had a sprawling city to supply. For those newcomers who turned to farming, even though it. meant slow laborious work in felling the huge trees and clearing the stumps, the high prices charged for imported .food cre- ated a ready market, Some raised hogs for bacon, the miners’: staple. Some brought cattle and sheep from Oregon to pro- vide fresh meat. Others started dairy herds. The miners needed. sawn lumber for their flumes and sluice-boxes. The merchants who followed them to their tat- terdemalion cities beside the Fraser needed it for their more permanent’ buildings. So the lumber industry sprang up to become, with coal, the first of Vancouver -Island’s export industries. Already coal from the Nanaimo mines established by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1852 was being shipped to San Francisco; and soon ships bringing supplies to Van- couver Island were loading, lumber cargoes for London and Lima, Sydney and Hong Kong. - The changes brought about by the gold rush had com- pelled the British government to create a new and separate colony of British Columbia, bounded on the east by the Rockies and on the north by the Stikine Territory, Around the time that the young man whose name had been Smith was landing at Victoria, Governor James Douglas of Van- couver Island was formally assuming the powers he had in fact exercised in the new colony since the start of the gold rush. At Fort Langley on November 19, 1858, he was sworn in as the first governor of British Columbia, an appointment conferred on his undertaking to resign his post as chief fac- tor for the Hudson’s Bay Company and to relinquish all his interests and holdings in the company. Now Douglas, the avowed ppponent of responsible government, held the governorships of both colonies. The old Hudson’s Bay Company’s empire had crumbled but the man who had administered it ‘still held governmental power and was determined not to yield any part of it to an elective body. As governor of Vancouver Island in the years 1851-57, Douglas could ignore the demands of the few colonists and represent them to the British government as the agitation of malcontents, interpreting his instructions to establish an as- sembly so as to leave real power in his own hands, The miners / _ ander Smith at Windsor on May 19, 1825, the third in of 1858 and those who followed them, to farm, to fish, to work in the coal mines and the mills, to establish workshops and businesses, could not be ignored nor could they so easily be resisted. ‘ In his attempts to retain power for himself and the small clique surrounding him, Douglas found himself involved in a bitter political struggle with a movement that took many forms, dividing on many questions. but uniting in its de- mands for responsible government. The gtievances of the first colonists, their numbers deliberately restricted by Hud- son’s Bay Company policies, now became the demands of thousands of new immigrants, They found a voice on public platforms and in the small struggling newspapers that were beginning to appear. And from this_opposition, the man whose name had: been Smith and who now called himself Amor De Cosmos emerged as the foremost spokesman for its aspirations. Like many of those who followed the gold rush, De Cosmos came to Vancouver Island from California, Un- . doubtedly in the five years he spent there he rubbed shoul- ders with many whose ideas corresponded to his own and leavened his thinking with some of the radical concepts current among men drawn from every corner of the world. But the course of his own ideas had already been shaped by his youth in Nova Scotia, where he was born William Alex- a United Empire Loyalist family of ten children. When he was growing up, Joseph Howe was advocating his Reform principles in his paper, the Novascotian, and the Reform leader made a deep impression on the idealist youth What his formal schooling lacked he acquired through ie avid reading of every book and paper he ‘could get, (Years later, his sister, Mrs. Peter Hudson Le Noir, who “died at Halifax in 1938 at the age of 105, recalled’ that De (Soemos’ teacher had told his. father, “You better take him home. , L In- stead of me learning him, he’s learning me.”) __ He went to work as a clerk in a Halifax grocery store, a job which gave him good training in the scrupulous attention to detail and methodical habits which characterized all his work but offered no scope for wider interests that even his reading failed to satisfy. Restless, he made his way to Cali- fornia in 1853 and there earned a living Photographing min- ers on their claims, There too, he had his name changed by act of the legislatu:» from the prosaic Smith to the flamboy- ant Amor De Cosmos — Lover of the Universe. When the miners streamed north to Vancouver Island and British Col- umbia, he followed them. In the young colonies he found a situation which fired all his early interest in politics. a continuation on the Pacific coast of the situation in the Canadas and Nova Scotia two decades before. : Within a short time of his landing at Victoria he launch- ed a weekly paper, the British Colonist, the first issue of which appeareed on December 11, 1858. From its first issues the influence of the earlier Reform movement on the new paper was apparent. It was reflected in the name De Cosmos coined for Douglas, his governing clique and the Hudson’s Bay Company — the Family-Company Compact — and in the allusions he made to illustrate the colonists’ demands. De Cosmos directed his first attacks at the Hudson's Bay CONCLUDED ON NEXT PAGE as April 18, 1958 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAG! - Members of the Victoria A (4 TOP: Amor De Cosmos; he most spokesman of the yer ment for responsible g0” Wi: ment. CENTRE: Dr. tof Powell, another leading fie in the movement. BOTT? unteer Rifle Corps, comp? entirely of Negroes who Ss fled persecution in the “4s, which was organized in J of and disbanded four Y¥ later.