ritish Columbia: the people's story | 6 - BLOOD ON THE COAL By HAL GRIFFIN Soon the outset, the story of British Columbia has been one of giveaways—political gifts of the people’s heritage by governments of the day to individuals and corporations. In 1849 the colony of Vancouver Island was founded on a giveaway. For a rental of seven shillings a year and an undertaking to promote settlement, which it deliberately evaded, the Hudson’s Bay Company received the entire island as a grant from the British government. Nine years later, the British government bought the island back for £57,500, leaving the company richer by the thousands of acres it retained. This pattern of giveaways, .so lavish that it must have been exhausted in a land less richly endowed, has persisted from colonial times to the present, The personal and cor- porate fortunes built on the land giveaways of Premier Sir Richard McBride’s Conservative government between 1903 and 1915 grew into the great monopolies to which Premier W. A. C. Bennett’s Social Credit government, after 1952, gave huge timber and power resources. Through giveaways governments have created fortunes for their supporters and in turn been created and maintained until the stench of cor- ruption drove them out of office. Nowhere is this more true than of the 1,000-acre coal lands grant which Robert Dunsmuir and his son James mani- pulated into a multi-million dollar coal empire on Vancouver Island. The coal industry was born with the colony of Vancou- ver Island, and it was born in struggle as for a century it would. live in struggle. The little group of skilled Scottish miners brought out by the Hudson’s Bay Company “in 1849 to develop the coal seams at Fort Rupert—John Muir, his sons Andrew, Robert, John and young Michael, his nephew Archibald, and John McGregor and John Smith—went on strike when they were ordered to do laborers’ work. Two of them, Andrew Muir and John McGregor, were put in irons for six days. When the barque England put in to load coal, all but John Muir Sr. and young Michael stowed away for the California gold fields, In the meantime, coal had been found at Wenthuysen Inlet, where it had long been known to the Native Indians of the region, a loose confederacy of five bands who gave their name Sne-ny-mo, meaning “the whole tribe,” to the new settlement—until 1860 its official but little used name was Colville. a A Native Indian, bringing his broken musket to Fort Victoria to be repaired in 1849 was intrigued by the “black rock” burning on the blacksmith’s fire. He asked where the white men got the rock. The blacksmith told him that they brought it across the sea-in their ships. This amused the Indian. The white men; he said, were not as clever as they pretended to be or they would use the black rock already here. The blacksmith reported the Indian’s remarks to a Hud- son's Bay Company official, J. W. McKay, who acted promptly if not generously. As\ McKay recounted years later: “I went to the shop and talked with the Indian and sete told him to bring me some pieces of coal from his home and I would give him a bottle of rum and have his gun repaired for nothing.” a Months later the Indian returned with his coal samples. It was good bituminous coal, far better than that obtained from the shallow seams at Fort. Rupert, and James Douglas, : - ... the company’s chief factor, sent J. D. Pemberton, his sur- veyor, to investigate. Pemberton’s report was so encouraging: that Douglas went to see the outcroppings for himself, report- ing to London that “with the assistance of natives, we pro- cured about 50 tons in a single day at a total cost of £11 _paid in goods.” The Vancouver Island coal mining industry had been launched in the spirit of profit that was to dominate all its operations. Landed at San Francisco, the coal sold for $28 a ton. The miners and their families from the Staffordshire “Black Country” of England who landed at Nanaimo on November 27, 1856, after.a six-month voyage around Cape Horn aboard the Princess Royal, found a dreary prospect awaiting them. Along the shore straggled the few colliery buildings and a line of miners’ cabins, covered with soot. Above them stood the bastion, built by the company to -pro- tect its holdings from the Native Indians whose lands it had usurped. Beyond stretched the dark forests. The company. had lost no time in claiming and develop- ing the coal deposits through its subsidiary, the Nanaimo Coal Company. John Muir had been brought from Fort Rupert, where he had been joined by Boyd Gilmour, another Scottish miner under contract to the company. With Gilmour came his nephew, Robert Dunsmuir, and his wife Joanna, Gil- mour returned to Scotland when his contract ended. but Dunsmuir, persuaded by his wife, remained. As the full 200 square-mile extent of the Nanaimo coal field was proven, Dunsmuir was among those who schemed to seize it for themselves. Through his political connections - he obtained a grant of 1,000 acres of coal lands. Then, with some British naval officers stationed at Esquimalt, he formed a partnership and the firm of Dunsmuir, Diggle and Company. was established to-exploit the rich seams discovered on his Wellington property in: 1869. But this-was only the beginning. Shrewd, ambitious and unscrupulous, Dunsmuir used his growing wealth to extend his political and financial connections and when the Cana- dian Pacific Railway began building through British Colum- bia in the eighties he was ready to make his audacious bid for the first great giveaway of the new province. i James Dunsmuir, Robe! Dunsmuir’s son, headed short-lived ‘provincial: 8 he ment in 1900, two yee i fore he acquired sole 0” ies ship of Wellington collie and the Esquimalt an@ i, naimo Railway, which ‘it sequently sold to Macke, and Mann for $11 mil “ie Robert Dunsmuir himself president of the counct i) 1887 until his death im ue Shown above are James muir and his wife Lauré Craigdarrock, the. mansion built by Robert Dunsmuir in Victoria. May 2, 1958 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAG! n