HEN tthe story of

British Columbia _ comes to be written,” 88 it will, not from tHe’ standpoint of those who Seized its wealth but those who produced it, the names. of Yale and Hope will loom large in its telling. In these two little Fraser Valley towns, Jumping off points along the ld Cariboo trail, the province had its industrial beginnings and the struggle for representative Sovernment found its first ex- Pression. And this year and next they are celebrating their centenary—the founding of Fort Hope in 1847 and Fort Yale in 1848,

oi his Letters from America, 2 eh Brooke remarked of anada, “It is an empty land = : there are no ghosts here.” ut Yale is full of ghosts.

ake are the shadowy fig- as of those unknown explor- 3 who travelled down the ae Canyon centuries before ai aaa and left on a Biystay 100 feet above the river éthn, gus inscriptions which Ologists who have examined oS raty. as Ogam, the ear- orm of Runic writing.

auras are the more tangible at S of the last century when of pe was a city of thousands oc pone with hotels and board- ne parce for the miners flock- aa the Cariboo, stables for Shope and oxen, blacksmiths’ mills and one of the first flour in the province.

oe tourist camps have re- sal hotels’ long since torn 7] highw and forgotten along a need that still follows the Engine, Toad built by the Royal neighbo. Unlike Hope, its is th r down the river, which © thriving center for some

" People, Yale has dwindled to Py little Village of three ur hundred population

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ad and the highway to. A in existence now that hausteg -8Tavel bars are ex- a and the sternwheelers _ at come up the Fraser. tivey ty dying orchards on the akelets, nks, the few weathered eSeanea a of buildings that have moe he wrecker’s bar, alone of its colorful past.

i Oa are some who remem Place Mae Yale was still a steamer «7° importance and the ad of Tan to Emory’s Bar, the er a5 navigation on the Fras- ae on distance down river. Woman eco is an old Indian Om I found painstak-

ing] : inittin Washing wool for later oS . Into sweaters in a house

he little white church. Were - I first came here there Tivey» Cf people along the Shrugees © said. “Now... she ing, an her shoulders, observ- ferar doesn’t make much dif- ence to’ us.” I . Mentioned the Native Bro- and asked her if the there belonged to it. Some = brightened. “Yes, Where °,” she replied. “Back ’ Ple bey Come from all the peo- Brother® to it. We hope the Tor yan Sod will do something

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Yale has completed a cycle, from a jumping off point for the gold rush to a_ stopping off point for tourists, and without industry or agriculture to sustain it the future can nev- er be as bright as the past. The Native Indian people, as they have elsewhere, have suf- fered most, for the gold rush that opened the mainland of British Columbia to develop- ment stripped the river bars of the gold they used for trad- ing and looked on as their own. No one, then or now, has sug- gested that they have a right to compensation.

“The younger ones work in the logging camps,” the old woman said. “We fish, make blankets and sweaters, do odd

jobs. Our children go to board- and

ing school at Kamloops Mission.” “The essential difference is

that they are organizing now to demand equality of educa- tion (only 24 Indians attended

high school last year) as a means of obtaining the other

equalities they seek without surrendering privileges that are theirs by right.

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i Remnant

Britain’s plan in India N estimation of the new status . Page 10

big Alberta oil steal € farmers hold the bag © anti-vivisectionists again lence feature by Dyson Carter

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TTT VU UAL TU

OW much of ‘the story is.

told when the centenary is celebrated next summer depends upon the participation of the Native Brotherhood and_ the IWA, which has a large mem- bership in the camps around Hope and sends a representative to the organizing committee.

Henry Johnson, who -was born on the homestead at Haig, across the Fraser River from Hope, where his father located in the nineties, has an idea that the committee in charge of the celebration should re-create an Indian village as it was when the first Europeans came _ to retrieve Indian art and culture from the museum and place its achievement before the thous- ands of people the celebration is expected to attract.

“Naturally, we don’t want any- thing that will savor of de- grading or exploiting the In- dians,” he told me. “But there’s a lot in Indian art that should be revived and encouraged be- fore it is forgotten.”

Johnson, who is the driving force behind the committee, also has an idea of staging an his- torical play, somewhat along the lines of the Theater Under the Stars, if he can get the assistance of the more progres- sive-minded artists in Vancou- ver. The story that play should portray is one of the first strug- gle of the people of British Co- lumbia for their democratic rights.

TS men who flocked to New Caledonia in 1858, making

their way up river to Yale aud

thence overland to the Cariboo, were strongly imbued with a sense of their own rights. They

‘came from the United States

with a vigorous heritage of their own revolution. They came from England, Scotland and

Treland with their living tradi- tions of liberty. They came tco, from the countries of Europe resenting anything that smack- ed of the oppression they had fled.

Some were adventurers, seek- ing only to find along the Fra- ser River the easy fortune they had failed to find in California and when the gold rush ended they’ were gone. The others re- mained to build a country.

They found an empire of na- tural wealth, which men like James Dunsmuir were presently to usurp for themselves, peo- pled only by a few whites, for the most part company offi- cials, and Indians. They found the Hudson’s Bay Company in absolute control, a law unto it- self, ruling over a vast area end jealously guarding its inter- ests. Its one purpose was to exploit the wealth for the bene- fit of its distant shareholders and to exclude from the terri- tory all whose intrusion constit- ed a threat to its continued rule.

The influx of thousands of miners~ challenged that rule and signified the end of an era. For half a century, beginning with the establishment of Fort Mce-

_Leod by Simon Fraser in 1808,

the company had_ successfully maintained its monopoly. It could and did discourage settle- ment. But it could not hold back the tide of development that swept in with the gold rush.

Victoria in 1858 became a city of 20,000 people. Fort. Langley and Yale counted their tran- sient populations by the thous- ands. Barkerville, in the sixties, was a city of 55,000, second only to San Francisco.

The Hudson’s Bay Company had fought for ten years to hoid back the gathering democratic

&

by HAL GRIFFIN. ——

‘ernment that obtained

sent'ment for representative zgnv- strong reintorcement from the men trought into the new colonies by the gold rush.

In 1849 Richard Blanshard was appointed governor of Vancocu- ver Island, not with any inten- tion of giving the colony more representative government but in order to tie it more closely to the British crown. The Oregon koundary dispute of 1846 had a'armed the British government and Earl Grey, then secretary of state for the colonies, him- self asked: “What would the company do to avert this dan- ger from a tide of democracy rol‘ing north?”

James Douglas, chief factor for the Hudson's Bay Company at Victoria, had his own ideas for dealing with “this danger from a tide of democracy” which, within the colony, had come principally from the coal miners at Fort Rupert, on the northeast of Vancouver Island, and . independent settlers. He wanted no _ interference, even from the British government. If there had to be a governor, he preferred to hold the ‘reins of

office for himself.

EN Blanshard reached

Victoria in March 1850 he found that no preparations had been made for his coming and he had to make his headquart- ers aboard the HMS Driver which had brought him to the colony, so that “for some time thereafter the government head- quarters were migratory.”

The Hudson’s Bay Company officials tried to ignore him and where this could not be done, to discourage him.

He had been promised 1000 acres of land before he left

(Continued on page 12)