As told in the story of Kamloops, gold was discovered this very year on Thompson River. A year later, the air was full of wild rumors of gold discoveries north of Colville, in Cariboo, on Queen Charlotte Island. The tide, that had rolled over the mountains to California, now turned to British Columbia. When the second five-year grant of Vancouver Island to the Hudson’s Bay Company expired in 1859, it was not renewed. Douglas foresaw that the gold stampede to the North meant a new British empire on the Pacific. The discovery of gold sounded the death knell of the fur lords’ ascendancy. Douglas resigned his position as Chief Factor and became governor of the new colony now known as British Columbia, including both Vancouver and the mainland. For the repurchase of Vancouver Island, the British Government paid the Hudson’s Bay Company £57,500. The Company claimed that it had spent £80,000. Among the gold seekers stampeding north from Oregon were our old trappers and traders of the mountain brigades, led by Dr. David McLoughlin, now turned prospector.
Notes to Chapter XXXIII.—The contents of this chapter are drawn from the same sources as XXXII; in addition Hansard and Congressional Reports for both the Vancouver Island and Oregon disputes, the Parl. Enquiry Report of 1857; H. B. C. Memorial Book on Puget Sound Company; Fitzgerald’s Vancouver Island, 1849; Martin’s H. B. Territories, 1849; De Smet’s Oregon Missions, 1847; Oregon (Quarterly) Hist. Soc. Report, 1900; Schafer’s Pacific Northwest, 1905; and most important—H. H. Bancroft’s invaluable transcripts of Douglas and Finlayson MS. in his “British Columbia.” For a popular account of McLoughlin from an absolutely American point of view nothing better exists than Mrs. Dye’s “Old Oregon,” though it may be sniffed at by the higher critics for unquestioning acceptance of what they please to call the “Whitman myth.” Whitman’s ride was not all myth, though the influence was greatly exaggerated; and the truth probably exists half way between the critics’ skepticism and the old legend. Wilkes’ Narrative of the Exploring Squadron, 1845; the reports of Warre and Vavasseur, the two special spies on McLoughlin; early numbers of the old B. C. Colonist and Cariboo Sentinel; Sir Geo. Simpson’s Journey Round the World; Lord’s Naturalist, 1866; Macfie’s Vancouver Island, 1865; Mayne’s B. C., 1862; Milton’s North-West Passage, 1869; Paul Kane’s Wanderings, 1859; Dunn’s Oregon Territory, 1844; Grant’s Ocean to Ocean, 1873; Gray’s Oregon, 1870; Greenhow’s Oregon, 1844; Dawson’s Geol. Reports, Ottawa; Peter Burnett’s Letters to Herald N. Y.—also throw side lights on the episodes related.
CHAPTER XXXIV
1857-1870
THE PASSING OF THE COMPANY
The tide of American colonization rolling westward to Minnesota, to Dakota, to Oregon, was not without effect on the little isolated settlement of Red River. Oregon had been wrested from the fur trader, not by diplomacy, but by the rough-handed toiler coming in and taking possession. The same thing happened in British Columbia when the miner came. What was Red River—the pioneer of all the Western colonies—doing?
The union of Nor’Wester and Hudson’s Bay had thrown many old employés out of work. These now retired to Red River, where they were granted one hundred acres of land and paid a few shillings an acre for another twenty-eight acres, making up farms of one hundred and twenty-eight acres, all facing the river and running back in long, narrow lots to the highway now known as St. John’s Road. St. John’s and Kildonan expanded to St. Paul’s and St. Andrew’s settlements northward. Across the river were three sets of settlers—the French Plain Rangers, descendants of the old Nor’Westers, the De Meuron soldiers, and the Swiss. These gradually clustered round the settlement just opposite the Assiniboine, where the Catholic missionaries were building chapel and school, and the place became known as St. Boniface, after the patron saint of the Germans. In the old buildings of Fort Douglas lived the colony governor distinct from the Company governor, Sir George Simpson, whose habitat was Fort Garry, near the site of old Fort Gibraltar, when he was in the West, and Lachine, at Montreal, when he was in the East.
The colonists continued to hunt buffalo in Minnesota during the winter and to cultivate their farms in the summer; but what to do for a market? Colonists in Oregon could sell their produce to the Spaniards, or the Russians, or the Yankee skippers passing up and down the coast. Colonists in British Columbia found a market with the miners, but to whom could the Red River farmer sell but to the fur company? For his provisions from England, he paid a freight of 33 per cent. ocean rate, 58 per cent. profit to the Company, and another 20 per cent. land rate from Hudson Bay to Red River—a total of over 110 per cent. advance on all purchases. For what he sold to the Company, he received only the lowest price, and he might on no account sell furs. Furs were the exclusive prerogative of the Company. For his produce, he was credited on the books, but the credit side seldom balanced the debit side; and on the difference the Red River settler was charged 5 per cent.—not a high debtors’ rate when it is considered that it was levied by a monopoly, that had absolute power over the debtor; and that the modern debtors’ rate is legalized at 6 and 8 percent. It was not the rate charged that discouraged the Red River settler; but the fact that paying an advance of 110 per cent. on all purchases and receiving only the lowest market price for all farm produce—two shillings-six pence for wheat a bushel—he could never hope by any possibility to make his earnings and his spendings balance. Mr. Halkett, a relative of Selkirk’s, came out in 1822, to settle up the affairs of the dead nobleman. The Company generously wrote off all debt, which was accumulated interest, and remitted one-fifth of the principal to all settlers.
Mr. Halkett and Sir George Simpson then talked over plans to create a market for the colonist. These successive plans and their successive failures belong to the history of the colony rather than the history of the Company, and cannot be fully given here.