Talk:Colony of British Columbia (1858–1866)

Material for consideration/inclusion
I'm copy-pasting the first paragraph which I'll dissemble (ressemble?) in the next day or two, and then work my way down from there. This is just a note to myself so bear with me for changes to this section in the next few days. This paragraph I could spend a day on tweaking; you'll see what I mean; the later ones I haven't read yet. It's complicated stuff, and hard to sum up for encyclopedic reading; and most of the "big histories" in print are full of crap; the moderns as bad as the 19th Century; at least those in the 19th Century had the premise of being honest, and not willing to sacrifice facts for ideology....but I digress. The geopolitical vacuum which left a dominant British claim, with an active economic infrastructure, in an area that had been a Great Power trading-piece for some time, has to be accounted properly; have a look at the Fifty Four Forty or Fight page and the new history of Alaska thing underway; I'm trying to work on getting them to coordinate with us, and also explore non-Yankee POVs on their own local history; and also to integrate their events with ours, especially important before 1871 and even since; I'll get into the whole Oregon Country thing (another article I've had a go at, but not as trenchantly as I'd like).

Anyway; here's the beginning of my notes to myself. The Mainland Colony was a truly bizarre place, with an unusual birth and an even crazier history. Let's try and do it justice.


 * The explorations of James Cook and George Vancouver, and the concessions of Spain in 1794 established British jurisdiction over the coastal area north of California. Similar jurisdiction was established inland via the explorations of such men as John Finlay, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser, Samuel Black, and David Thompson, and by the subsequent establishment of fur trading posts by the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). However, until 1858, the region which now comprises the mainland of the Province of British Columbia was an unorganised area of British North America comprising two fur trading districts: New Caledonia, north of the Thompson River drainage; and the Columbia District, located south of the Thompson and north of the Columbia River.

Skookum1 07:48, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum
Please see RE BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum re: Talk:List of United States military history events. If you think maybe I should also move some or copy some of my other stuff from NW history and BC history pages and various Indigenous peoples project article/talk pages let me know; I never mean to blog, but I'm voluble and to me everything's interconnected; never meaning to dominate a page so have made this area to post my historical rambles on. Thoughts?Skookum1 03:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Comment on my posting of this: if anyone has any questions or wants to debate any issues relating to Oregon Country/Columbia District/Pacific Northwest history/historical geography, colonialist or aboriginal/indigenous, please feel free to drop by the forum and start a thread/topic, or just butt in at yer leisure.Skookum1 05:50, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Merge proposal
I'm proposing that the United Colonies article be merged here. I can't really see the need for two, since the period of the united colonies simply describes one stage in the evolution. The material in that brief article can act as a background context to this one and avoid needless content forking. Fishhead64 21:13, 20 December 2006 (UTC)


 * There's a technical issue involved; the Colony of British Columbia was not the same entity as the Colony of British Columbia, and I don't mean in geographic terms; I mean in terms of its incorporation/constitution despite the identical name; it's as distinct as the Colony of Vancouver Island and if the one has its separate article then so should the other (only fair, I'd think); I never did like the United Colonies you came up with in our previous round of this, but I still have difficulty with an article about the Gold Colony era being confused with the article about the pre-Confederation union of the two colonies; granted that term "Gold Colony" was still used re the Mainland post-1866, right up until the 1880s in fact, but I'm using it here to distinguish that era from the prelude to Confederation (which was the whole point of 1866 and of Musgrave's appointment). As also re previous comments one of either the Vancouver Island or mainland colonies was a Crown Colony, the other just a Colony, and there's some kind of difference in status/charter/governing structure between the two forms that escapes me right now; not sure if was a Crown Colony or a plain old Colony; I think the latter and (if my hunch is right) the Crown Colony status has to do with the unusual/aprotocolic nature of the declaration of the Mainland Colony by Douglas (i.e. without London's say-so), and also how its "command structure" worked (which is why de Cosmos and the rest were always howling about responsible government, as it was government-by-governor more on the Mainland than even on the Island.  I can deal with a merge so long as the distinction between pre-1866 British Columbia and post-1866 is made clear; it's confusing enough for us here in BC but even moreso no doubt for those from beyond the mountains.  I'm always fiddling, btw, with language in US articles and other Canadian articles about referring to "in Canada" re BC pre-1871 and in the Prairies pre-1867; at least in the Prairies' case the nomenclature is clear enough as Rupert's Land, but in BC's case there's no firm name until 1858; even New Caledonia was a bit vague and only became applied to the whole of the British mainland by default post-1846; Forts Langley, Yale and Hope and the whole gold region of the Canyon only came under the appellation of New Caledonia for lack of another option; the old Columbia District had been pretty well absorbed entirely by the US and the notion of the remainder being British Columbia would wait until Queen Victoria came up with it when the colony was finally formalized (can't remember what it was in Douglas' declaration of the colony, but history records that it was the Queen who derived the name, long after August 2, 1858 when the proclamation of colonial status was made...seems a bit of a non sequitur, doesn't it?  Tradition ascribes it to Victoria; but it seems to me that it was Douglas who came up with the name; unless the original proclamation said New Caledonia?  Whatever; the point being that even the name New Caledonia was not meant originally to apply to the Coast and Canyon and southern part of what is now the province; the Fraser Valley-Sunshine Coast had been nominally dubbed New Georgia earlier in the 19th Century, or perhaps by Capt. Vancouver.  Which is why I'm always around various articles fudging the language because of comments as in older Oregon history pages about "Canada" north of the 49th Parallel pre-1871.  This is in the same category of naming fudginess as referring to Douglas as a Scots Canadian.  A Scots British Columbian maybe, and a West Indian British Columbian, but much more a British Columbian than a Canadian (those terms still being rather distinct when he died, even though he lived long enough to see the Dominion come to be).Skookum1 00:13, 21 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Somehow, I managed to read through that massive post by Skookum1. (Cheering in the background) And after going through both articles, I noted a very large content overlap. I was pretty clear that we should merge the two, until I read Skookum1's post - now I'm a wee bit confused... This page has been on the merge-lists for quite a while, I think we should try to reach a solution to this problem. Skookum1, I see you've got a lot of experience related to British Clumbia. Your contributions to the project are truly amazing. What do you suggest we do to prevent content forking? Any editors watching this page, any ideas what to do? xCentaur | talk  12:10, 4 February 2007 (UTC)


 * My own suggestion would be a comprehensive article, called Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. This overcomes the technical issue to which Skookum1 referred, since the plural form encompasses all three colonial entities. Fishhead64 21:33, 4 February 2007 (UTC)


 * That might be the only way to handle it, I guess; partly because any attempt to distinguish two BC colonies articles is always going to wind up having newer editors and/or occasional visitors thinking/mistaking one to be the other. The short-lived Colony of the Queen Charlotte Islands is at least a stub, I'd think, as well as a reminder there were four colonies, technically, and IMO because of the Stikine Territory and New Caledonia (Canada) et al must be a separate article and not part of the BC/VI Colonies article, unless it's carefully set out as a separate section in that article and has a redirect; there's also a territorial name for the Peace River Block, before it was formally added to BC, I think at the time of colonial union in 1866 or thereabouts; it wasn't there right away in 1858, nor was Stikine or what lay north of it.  As to the proposed article name, so long as all other possibilities redirect to it (including that Crown Colony/not-Crown Colony technicality which I've still got to sort out the why and wherefore of).  I don't like it, in separate-article-for-each-topic-of-note terms, but because of the name and the merger of the Island Colony, I suppose there's not much else we can do.Skookum1 00:55, 5 February 2007 (UTC)


 * "Colony" seems to be the default term, rather than "Crown Colony" for the title, with the type of colony defined more precisely in the body of the text. I agree with your suggestion that the separate colonial statuses of other territories be included in a separate section of the article, if in fact these were colonies and/or under the legal jurisdiction of the Governor of British Columbia.    New Caledonia is a special case, however, since it was an administrative department of the HBC and not a colonial entity or under the jursidiction of a colonial governor.  In other words, if the article is about colonial entities, that should be its sole focus:  A link to New Caledonia will inevitably appear in the context of the discussion.  It is telling that New Caledonia does not appear in the relevant template - it was under the jurisdiction of the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Fishhead64 02:59, 5 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I was being brief by not mentioning the Columbia District in the same breath as New Caledonia, and I didn't mean to indicate that New Caledonia or the Columbia District be part of the context of the various oolonial and territorial entities. There's a bit of murky there for me at the moment, as the initial boundaries of the declared Mainland Colony in 1858 at first didn't include the Stikine or Peace....or somewhere else; it's important to remember that Stikine Territory was not part of the HBC lease of the Panhandle's mainland that was part of the precursor to the British-Russian agreement whose interpretation led to the fiasco/disastre of 1902-03 (the loss of the Yukon Ports and the Panhandle Mainland, effectively, though less de facto than de jure in the wake of the Klondike gold rush).  But whatever was north of the Stikine Territory was something else; another territory perhaps but a precursor to the Yukon, or at least to the legal demarcation of the 60th Parallel as the boundary, and also the Peace.  Mention should be made of BC's attempts at territorial aggrandizement, especially in colonial days - the attempts to get London to give BC the Yukon, and also what is now Alberta as part of the deal with Canada, and later on WAC Bennett's repeat attempt to annex the Yukon (linked to a once-famous Columbia Treaty-era threat to secede).  The Queen Charlotte Colony is the only other one I'm aware of; the others were all capital-T territories; in something I read lately - maybe the preface to Kerr- there seemed to be a separate governate or something that had to be annexed, maybe the Gulf Island to the Colony of Vancouver Island, I can't quite remember.  BTW the Colony vs Crown Colony has a constitutional distinction, they mean something slightly different in their charters; I had it explained to me once and will try and dig out the explanation again, even if I have to mail him (an old friend who's a law prof at U.Vic).Skookum1 06:49, 5 February 2007 (UTC)


 * It has been some time now. Do people still want to somehow merge these articles or leave them separate?-- Birgitte  SB  18:06, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Territory/Colony of the Queen Charlotte Islands
BTW there's no article in English Wikipedia on the Queen Charlottes as a separate colony or territory, briefly-lived though that was; there's one on the Stikine Territory though (Stickeen properly, in its legal name); curiously enough I found it in a listing of "lieutenant-governors" in French Wikipedia (where I weighed in as on one of the original L-G pages here about Douglas et al. not being L-G's, and also that Chief Factors and HBC Governors were not the same thing as colonial governors; in de facto terms yes but not in terms of de jure succession; there's a case to be made that Simpson, for instance, was the Governor of Columbia District by being Governor of the HBC; but the Columbia District was not a political entity, only a trading monopoly with no concrete territory other than its posts and farms; and it was run by Chief Factors, not by the company Governor...all technical asides, but related to the separate-article-for-eacy entity that relates to the pre/post-1866 BC thing just above, and to nomenclature problems in general. As far as formal succession goes, even in terms of McLoughlin's and Douglas' relations with natives as also with Vancouver's and Quadra's, t he "governors" of the region pre-1858 were the native "states" and their chiefs (explicitly and always referred to as "king" in the early days, hyas tyee); which is partly why Douglas made a point of appointing them as magistrates (hyas chutch - chutch being CJ for "judge")... Skookum1 00:23, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Legislative Council of British Columbia
Realized that that hasn't been written yet, although once-intended long ago, as a result of a tangent from a link-change in Duncan River re that river's namesake as a candidate for the Council from the Kootenay District. The other colonial orgs should have articles also, have to get to that; among so much else...Skookum1 (talk) 06:07, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh, it does exist; OK, I'll add it to the See also in this article; it's probably in the body somewhere but it wouldn't hurt to have it more visible, no?Skookum1 (talk) 06:08, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
 * All mistaken; but I'll try and add something here about Jack Duncan, who never got on the Council but was only a candidate; it's his only claim-to-fame I've found so far, maybe he needs an article....I'll add him to this one tomorrow while I figure out if he's relevant or not; maybe not.Skookum1 (talk) 06:10, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Seymour and Birch
I made some small changes to the Seymour section; which appears to have been cribbed from a badly-written general history somewhere that gets both facts and geography wrong; the priority is the History of BC article for stuff like this but just serving notice this section is a "gloss" of the actual facts, and Seymour was shunted aside even before his death; affairs for most of his regime were conducted by Arthur Nonus Birch, who was teh de facto governor as the governor's dypsomania made him entirely useless as an administrator...fond of ceremony, popular with the public (because he could hold his liquor, or could drink a lot of it anyway), he really wasn't a very good governor; he wanted to be, but.....Skookum1 (talk) 17:15, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Bad geography in Seymour section
I changed the description of the Governor's route, which was via the Homathko Canyon and only incidentally via an extremity of the Coast Range, namely the bit through which teh Homathko flos; but the Homathko's length is mostly through the Coast Mountains as such, of which the Chilcotin Ranges are only a small part, and their bulk is southeast of anywhere the Governor got...he camped out on the Chilcotin Plateau at Puntzi Lake, with a view of the Chilcotin Ranges...he did not "cross them", nor is that anythign remarkable in comparison to crossing mountains nearly anywhere else in the province...more impressive if he'd come via Bella Coola and the Atnarko via the Mackenzie grease trail, which at least required some real mountain-crossing (via the Rainbow Range, though, not the Chilcotin). The typical sendup of "Chilcotin Ranges" mythology, the romanticism attached to the Chilcotin that is overlain on surrounding areas/peoples when really only incidental, it always gets me, coming from the Interior as I do.....the fashionability and cachet of the Chilcotin name has been extended southwards to the Lillooet Country and north into the Nechako; one fatuous and widely-published academic history says the Tsilhqot'in took part in the Fraser Canyon Gold rush; which is rubbish but the UBC professor who published that hasn't been asked to surrender her tenure as a result (which I believe should be a punishment for such traveesties of bad history and bad geography. Similarly the logic given concerning the colony's fate towards amalgamation comes off like synthesis, or the analysis of only one source....I'm beginning to finally come to terms with Wikipedia's main failings; intelligent writing of history cant' be done without some synthesis, some inquiry, some recognition fo what are bad sources and worse analyses....so while eventually accretive additions to most articles can eventually coalesce all published knowledge within wikipedia, it will only make as much sense as it's now allowed to, and there's very little room for debating what's a good source and what's a bad source. To me, much of this article was written using bad sources, or at least hackneyed "officialized" accounts...this is not a criticism of the previous editors, only of the result of the inefficacy of the sources in relaying useful truths; the colonial economy discovered an important truth - the more you spend to build infrastructure to support economic extraction without properly controlling the revenues from that extraction, it's inevitable that such infrastructural spending will cause governmental bankruptcy; the Cariboo Road is painted as some kind of great work; it was, engineering-wise, but not politically or financially, in which case it was a freaking disaster and wound up leading to the colony's unfair terms of union with Canada.....all because the colonial officials had been too weak-kneed to look into the pokebags of American and Chinese and other non-reporting revenue extractors (or been paid off not to look), and the government made little money from its road-building efforts or from the cost of the Gold Escort and spending on supply infrastructure like flour mills; Seymour was captain of a desperately sinking ship, that was doomed before he took charge, and corrupt in the extreme like all colonial administrations were....no wonder he drank himself to death.....Skookum1 (talk) 04:50, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Problematic wording
This has an issue:
 * ''Douglas accepted these conditions, and a knighthood. British Columbia was given its own capital — New Westminster — in 1859, but James Douglas would govern both colonies from Victoria for the next six years.

No, not the next six years, certainly...I'll check the date of Seymour's accession to the job, I think it was in '64 (five years later, or less. Seymour also made a point of living in New West, if anywhere (i.e. when not "on the road" around the province).Skookum1 (talk) 17:32, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Language in infobox
If this is supposed to be the official language, the Colony did not have one, other than in de facto terms; if it's supposed to be "languages spoken there", it's a long list and that doesn't mean just native languages and Chinook Jargon.Skookum1 (talk) 10:18, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Map Error
The map displayed shows British Columbia as it is, not as the colony was. See the description in the first paragraph wherein it is stated that the colony was only about one-half the size of modern B.C. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 154.5.153.168 (talk) 18:23, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

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