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the people’s sto

3 - THE OPENING OF B.C.

By HAL GRIFFIN

‘OR Governor James Douglas and other officials of the
Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Victoria in April, 1858,
the arrival of the steamer Commodore with 450 men aboard
bound for the gold bars of the Fraser River was the har-
binger of the changes they had known must come and yet
had striven so hard to delay.

Life in New Caledonia, as the mainland was known, had
changed little since Simon Fraser had established Fort McLeod
for the old North-West Company in 1805, the first trad-
ing post in what is now British, Columbia. And since 1821,
when the Hudson’s Bay Company merged with the rival
North-West Company and obtained a grant from the British
government extending its trade monopoly to all territory east
and west of the Rockies not included in its original charter,
a network of trading posts had been. stretched across New
Caledonia. In the north the network reached the Pacific at
Fort Simpson, even extending into Russian territory at Fort
Stikine and Fort Taku in the ‘Alaska Panhandle by agree-
ment with the Russian American Company. In the south
the network ended.at Fort Victoria.

Over the first half of the 19th century New Caledonia
and Vancouver Island had been absorbed into a vast private
trading empire that reached from Hudson Bay to the Pacific,
Within this empire there were only two colonies, Assini-
boia, reconveyed to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1834, and
Vancouver Island, and in both development was restricted
by the company’s monopoly. Elsewhere the company effec-
tively discouraged settlement by refusing to sell land around
its trading posts, upon which settlers had to depend for sup-
plies. But while it preserved the still dominant fur trade of
its wilderness empire against settlers and independent trad-
ers, the company itself increasingly developed subsidiary
sources Of revenue from. timber, which it cut-and exported
from the Pacific coast, from fisheries, from wheat, cattle,
sheep and horses. And increasingly these facts were noted,
in Toronto and Montreal as in London.

In the Canadas, where only two decades earlier the
Patriots and the Reformers had taken up arms to assert the
claims of the rising Canadian capitalist class and secure
responsible government, the foundations of new fortunes,
originally derived from the fur trade, were being laid in

railroad construction and industry. To these new capitalists*

the Hudson’s Bay Company’s monopoly was a barrier to ex-
pansion that had to be broken. “Do the*Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany think they can shut out people from the direct road to
the Great West forever?” the Toronto Globe asked indig-
nantly in 1856.

At London,.a select committee of the British House of
Commons had been investigating conditions in the Hudson's
Bay Company’s territories and its report, when it was brought
down in.1857, was an indictment of the company’s rule.

Among those who testified. before the committee were
Richard Blanshard, who had championed the colonists’ in-
terests against the company during his two years as the first
governor of Vancouver Island, and James Cooper, one of the
Vancouver Island colonists. When the committee charged
in its report that profits om goods sold at company stores
ranged from 100 to 400 percent, Blanshard could verify the
charge from his own experience, for it had been one of his
complaints to Earl Grey that he had been charged 300 per-
cent above London prices for everything he bought, although
he served without salary. And when the committee charged
that the company drove out all individual traders, part of its
supporting evidence was the testimony of James Cooper who
had been forced out of business when he started an indepen-

dent trading venture in blueberries with the Native Indians
on the mainland.

The abuses charged against the company ranged from
a systematic supplying of the Native Indians with liquor to
a no less systematic discouragement of settlement, the motive
for which was disclosed in the company’s profit statements.
Since 1840, it was reported, the company’s average annual
profit from the fur trade alone had been £65,573.

The committee recommended that “the districts on the
Red River and the Saskatchewan” should be “ceded to Can-
ada on equitable principles,” that the Vancouver Island grant
should not be renewed and that the company should relin-
quish all ‘its claims to territory west of the Rockies. To
these the committee added the final recommendation that the
company should be deprived of its.exclusive trading rights.

Threatened with the loss of its empire, the company used
all its political and financial influence to modify the govern-
ment’s. decisions, In an address to the British House of Com-
mons it pledged to correct abuses and’ institute reforms. It
could no longer hope to maintain its trading monopoly and
once this was lost it could-not retain its hold on Vancouver
Island, which was accessible by sea. But it was determined to
retain the greater part of its holdings, and when the govern-
ment’s decision was brought down it was to give the com-
pany another uneasy renewal of its charter, shorn of the
Vancouver Island grant.

Whatever decisions the British government might make
and even before they could be effected, out on the Pacific
coast Douglas could see the company’s monopoly being ended
before his eyes, not only on Vancouver Island but on the
opposite mainland as well.

The rumors of gold along the Fraser River had become
a reality, which was being magnified with every retelling in

Concluded on next page

The first paddle steamer to be put into service carrying miners up the Fraser Rt

Fort Hope in 1858 was.the Surprise.

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April 11, 195¢ — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PA®