Talk:History of British Columbia/Archive 2

Useful resource
thanks to a mention on the Alexander Won Cumyow page I found the BCGenWeb list of historical documents such as voters lists, directories, newspaper marriage/death/birth notices etc.....only the 1878 and 1898 voters lists are given but I'll add their voters' numbers to the respective riding pages, and to the elections pages for those years.Skookum1 (talk) 16:38, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Removed POV/conflated material from lede
I removed this passage, which even if it weren't POv in tone (on the one hand) and conflated (on the other) isn't relevant to what's needed in a lede passage:
 * ''Indigenous peoples have inhabited the territory that is now called "British Columbia", as described in their oral traditions, from time immemorial. There are claims by the English to have explored the region in the sixteenth century but it was the Majorcan-born Spanish navigator Juan José Pérez Hernández who did the first documented travel 1774. He inaugurated a golden age for the Spaniards in the region, who in 1790 created the first non-indigenous presence in British Columbia at Nootka Sound. The Spanish era ended in 1795 when the Nootka Convention came in force, giving place to United Kingdom.

Aside from misinterpreting what the Nootka Convention actually said, it was scarcely a Spanish "golden age"; and the time immemorial claim, while typical, is also uncitable in factual terms, but "the territory that is now c alled "British Columbia" is grossly overworded and POV in intent, especially putting the provicne's name in quotes. This article has needed revision/updating for a while; and there's lots of tub-thumping in it that needs excision.  I've also taken out the belaboured list of indigenous languages, which is listed elsewhere but out of place in historical terms; this is not an article about linguistic geography and content for the pre-Contact section would better be about any known migrations/wars etc.Skookum1 (talk) 13:17, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Removed POV phrase
One reason I've avoided rewriting this article is because of the amount of prejudicial bunk, taken from the by-rote mantra of white guilt now part of school curriculums but at wide variance with the truth, but sometimes I see something that's just so noxious and so wrong I just have to take it out:
 * ''However, before 1945, racism was more rampant and socially acceptable in Canada and British Columbia's immigration policies of the past still leave an embarrassing scar.

There are all kinds of cases and counter-stories to this near-official lie; that "racism was rampant" and "socially acceptable in Canada" are POV in the extreme as there were LOTS of white people who worked and dealt with the Chinese, Indians, East Indians etc as equally as they would anybody else; the racist troublemakers in BC history come from two sources - railway and industrial workers and other newly-arriveds from other parts of Canada (1885, 1907, even 1939), and from the racism of the non-white groups; and also of some of the newly-arrived "true Europeans" (meaning non-Britons from Europe, rather than the new p.c. meaning of "white"). There's SO MUCH MORE TO BC HISTORY than this paragraph, and the line I just removed, that THAT's what's embarrassing, as is buying into the cheap cliches of the kind in that sentence, and still found in this and other articles. The complete lack of actual facts possessed by the people who write such claims is born out by the content of the sentence that says "BC's immigration policies"....'xcuse me??? The Colony of British Columbia had wide-open immigration policies; or actually because it was a colony it had no such power and what few rules it tried ot impose - including a head tax on Americans (NOT on Chinese) - were overruled in Whitehall. And the province of British Columbia had no immigration policies, contrary to the poppycock quoted as gospel truth above; immigration was federal as of 1871, much to BC's chagrin. Waht policies BC did have, in terms of on-paper policies things-that-we-would-like, were immigration programs encouraging migrants from the British Isles; these were overruled by Ottawa because they were white and cost too much and it was Ottawa who demanded that BC hire Chinese labour for cheap. BC's policy was if they were going to be there, they should work for the same wages as everybody else; and the pay-system used by the CPR's labour contractors (all Chinese) meant that the workin' stiffs here saw no actual cash, only rice mats, and so had no money to spend; their wages, once they were in the black, were paid out in China; this is one reason so many deserted the railway workings for the goldfields. Racism on the Chinese side was also a factor in excluding non-Chinese from various diggings and in such matters as the massacre of the white foreman at Camp 23 near Lytton; and how rarely we hear of Chinese sales of booze to the Indians, which was taboo among whites because of its known results (which included some of the elements leading to the Fraser Canyon War). Some of you have heard all this before and must think "there goes Skokum1 on a rant again" but the reality is that I've read the material and know the material; not what the ethnic organizations and their press kits have been pushing, which are full of half-truths and also quite evil and vicious generalizations about whites and BC/Canada as a whole; and that includes the vicious generalizations of the line just above, which though it can no doubt be "cited" woudl still be a paraphrase of a false history every bit as much as citing from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Mein Kampf. The political wheel hasn't turned on the fomentations and twistifications and pat put-downs of those who circulate the line represented by what I've removed, but it will. Nothing in that line is citable in terms of facts, all of it is subjective; but it can be cited by referring to a people that treats opinion as fact and wallows in its own subjectivity; and lack of self-appraisal for signs of reciprocal racism. It sickens me to even read these falsehoods, much less have to explain them; they're self-obvious, but apparently self-righteousness doesn't include the need to self-examine or self-criticize; it's so easy to dump on "rampant" and "socially acceptable" racism....but why does nobody ever do it in critiques of Chinese history, or the history of India or Arab countries, or all the other places in thew orld where racism is much more violent, and much more overt, and systematized, than it ever was in Canada, and certainly than it ever was in BC. If BC hadn't had a tolerant element, there would have been NO non-white immigration. That should be self-obvious; and treating all whites, and all Canadians, as if they were all the same, has helped produce the false image that it was BC that was racist; it was those who came to BC at the time of the disturbances who were the root of the trouble; and that's on all sides, not just the white one.Skookum1 (talk) 01:11, 26 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I don't disagree that the blanket statement that you removed was over the top. But, I think we have to accept that by the standards of today, attitudes of the typical Europeans or 'whites' towards non-Europeans were 'racist'.  There were ingrained and unreasonable prejudices on the part of many in society towards aboriginals, Asians, blacks, etc.  There were also notable exceptions, all the more notable because they represented a principled stand against prevailing ideas.  The problem is that the same sort of generalized statement could be made about every society of that time and, as you point out, not just European or colonial societies.  It has long been part of the human condition to look down on and disparage the 'other' and history is filled with wars and persecutions to demonstrate this.  So saying that it was socially acceptable to be 'racist' in British Columbia by 1945 is a statement that could probably just be repeated in every article about almost every society in human history.  On its own it adds nothing.  It would be like saying "Most British Columbians loved their children before 1945".  What is significant to the article is how prejudice influenced and affected public policy, civil rights and private lives; and how society or elements in society petitioned for change; or resisted change; or agitated for change; or simply perpetuated their own forms of prejudice and bias, and the consequences of that, where significant.  It is a long struggle to get all of us to just get along.  We are still very much a work in progress. Corlyon (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 20:13, 30 April 2009 (UTC).
 * Well, it would help if other groups would apply teh same self-criticism and mea culpa that white people are expected to kowtow to today. The phrase "attitudes of the typical [insert ethnic group] towards no-[insert ethnic group] were 'racist" is a given; the pretense of such statements is that only whites were racist, which is a gross fallacy along the lines of "only whites can be racist".  Unlike whites and Kanakas and also blacks, for example, Chinese did not intermarry very much with Indians and the Chinese remain to this day very prejudiced towards other groups in BC.  Natives, likewise, can be very racist towards whites and even moreso towards others (including other Indian groups).  Focussing on the evils of white men and white civilization is a standard dodge and is very monolithic in nature; sadly it's in many modern sources, where also the occasional evil is served up as if it were the standard; e.g. in historical works on Chinese in BC there are mentions of Chiense being run out of town or beaten in Lillooet, Hazelton, and Princeton; the reality is that those were specific cases, for claim-jumping or some other social/legal offence, and that each of those towns retained a dominant Chinese preesence for decades afterwards; yet you won't hear the latter in any of those same histories, nor readily admitted to by modern Chinese Canadian politicos.  It's not just the one-directional nature of hte criticism, it's also the completely overblown nature of many of the complaints which allegedly shore it up.  I could cite a dozen examples, I'm no no mood, just replying to your reply after creating the following section.  Somewhere out htere in Wiki adn the source that came from it stands a claim that Chinese moved eastward out of BC to escape the racist climate there; in reality the rest of Canada is far more racist (and remains so), and was even moreso at the time; this is a latter-day analysis backed up by no period sources, just a value judgmeent made by somebody trying to account for why there was a sudden increase in Chinese population east of the Rockies after 1885; the reason is simple - the railway made migration possible whereas previously it had been impossible.  But so much easier to claim BC is racist than reckon with the reality that it also had the highest rate of mixed marriages, and dozens of mixed communities, particularly in mining and ranching regions, where everybody got along just fine.  The upshot of such accounts/analyses is that white people's attitudes are generalized in teh same way that we're not supposed to generalize about the Chinese or other groups......again, I don't want to get into listing examples of anti-white predjudice, both in historical events and also in current-era histories of those times ,but they're rife and not unusual, and always excused with "it's OK to be prejudiced against white people because they had the upper hand".  Well, they don't anymore, clearly....Skookum1 (talk) 16:49, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

RE this:
 * ''"But, I think we have to accept that by the standards of today, attitudes of the typical Europeans or 'whites' towards non-Europeans were 'racist'. There were ingrained and unreasonable prejudices on the part of many in society towards aboriginals, Asians, blacks, etc.

Early BC was far more tolerant than the myths of modern-day axe-grinders allows, and "racism" is a pat dismissal of the real views of people and politicians of the time; e.g. the rationale for the BC colonists' preference for British labour to build the railway over Chinese were largely economic and cultural (the same reason that Chinese employers today prefer to hire Chinese employees, in fact, even though that's somehow not labelled "racist" even though it really is). BC history and society is presented as monolithically racist; but for everything from the Chilcotin War (where about half the colonist population sympathized with the Tshilhqot'in, particulary at public meetings in Victoria - according even to Rothenburger's account, and he's not pro-Tshilqot'in) or the Chinese vote (Chinese kept on voting in the Lillooet electoral district despite the law, and also continued to buy land even though disallowed, etc); heavy-racist incidents like the '07 riots and the '86 ones, too, were not by British Columbians so much as those newly arrived from more racist parts of British North America or the US; a large population of the city had no interest in the matter, but all British Columbians get tarred with it as if we all though like one racist whole. In rural areas and smalltowns especially, Chinese and natives lived side-by-side and had good relations with their neighbours; with as the book Mahkook (google that, parts of it are in Googlebooks) explains, natives often had the upper hand economically and in terms of the land base; Dr Miyazaki who at first thought Lillooet was "a little racist town in the desert" upon his arrival there, soon realized that "you can't be a racist for long in Lillooet, because all relationships are personal and you're likely to have nearly any ethnic/colour group in your social circle or clientele or extended family" (that's not an exact quote but rather his gist). About th railway stuff I suggest you find J. Morton's In the Sea of Sterile Mountains, though Howay & Scholefield lay it out excellently (in Vol. 2) re the original plans to import Britons to work on the railway and remain and actually settle. Barman and others make wild leaps based on one event, in her case as I recall she mentions some Chinese thrown out of Hazelton for illegal activities (can't remember what) as if all Chinese were expelled; maybe it's Granite Creek in her reference, I've seen similar re Lillooet in Saltwater City. In all cases the Chinese remained about a third, often over half, the population, for decades after the incidents in question; but POV "modern scholars" don't like to talk about that, and IMO most of them don't even f*****g know. I was shocked at SFU being instructed by a history prof/course that what the "accepted method" was to posit a conclusion, then go looking for items to back it up, and not to look for things that might refute it; whole bodies of historiography are built like that now, it's very anti-historiographical in the extreme, selective evicence, specious leaps etc...Skookum1 (talk) 22:35, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Alabama Claims removed
Here is the removed section, Quill; I doubt there's anything in it that's not in the main Alabama Claims article.Skookum1 (talk) 23:18, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The annexation is is too important to be simply erased. Overlap with another article is irrelevant. Rjensen (talk) 20:05, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It's not "overlap", this issue has no role in the history of British Columbia itself, it "wasn't on the stove".  It may have been going on somewhere else, but it's not part of BC's political history and I don't even think people/governments here were aware of it.  The issue of annexationist threats/movements IS important; but this is NOT relevant to any of them, which are much more significant than this other-side-of-the-continent poker-chip brokering.  The Trent Affair had more to do with BC, in terms of exacerbating tensions in the regions; but even it's not part of BC's own history, which is what this page is about.  The Alabama Claims weren't even a blip in British Columbia history, and they certainly weren't more relevant to the annexation issue that the Fraser Canyon War, McGowan's War of the geopolitics of railway routes and the mines of the south; or to TE Roosevelt's threat to invade and annex British Columbia during the Alaska boundary dispute.  Alabama Claims? - never heard of them in any major BC history (Howay/Scholefield, Ormsby, Begg).  That we were a poker chip on someone else's cardtable is not part of our history, except only VERY peripherally.Skookum1 (talk) 20:55, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Unclear where Skookumi gets his notions--they are not based on the RS. Best to read Barman (1991) pp 91-97 who emphasizes the importance of the annexation issue, as well as the Shi article. Rjensen (talk) 21:02, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
 * If Barman only talks about the Alabama Claims re the annexation issue, it's more proof to me of how out-of-depth and shallow she is on so many aspects of BC history, despite the glowing reviews for her over-promoted volume. I'll look through Ormsby, Begg, Bancroft, Scholefield & Howay (all online) for any reference to "Alabama Claims"....I'll be surprised to find even one entry; same with the online archives of the Times-Colonist, which was in print at teh time.Skookum1 (talk) 21:00, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Every page of Barman makes me wince, often more than once, with gaffes of judgement and/or description that she makes. And her modern-era chapters are even more pitiful than her earlier ones, or those to do with regional histories; glaring errors, wild mis-statements and opinions, all psssed over by the Quill and Quire types who raved over it, without knowing the material enough to realize how off-base she is.  Like BC's modern-era newspapers, she's not really a reilable source, though in Wikipedia terms (sadly) she is.Skookum1 (talk) 21:02, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

I just went through Begg, Bancroft and Howay & Scholefield, will look to see if I can find Ormsby online, she wasn't on that same site (http://www.noracines.ca), nor the Akriggs who are the other main formal history, other than Hugh McLennan's The Pacific Province. None of Begg, Bancroft or Howay & Scholefield mention Alabama at all, much less the Alabama Claims. Frankly, about Barman, she has a way of making wild speculations/opinions based on some minor clue, and then behaving as if they were fact. All of the other authors just named were in contact with the founders of the province/colony, those surviving by those era; if the Alabama Claims were important to BC history, they'd be in there. To me, Barman should read more BC history, instead of writing her own.Skookum1 (talk) 21:37, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I found one - and one only - passing reference in "History of British Columbia'' by Margaret Ormsby. And not in connection with annexation politics within British Columbia, which is what any "Annexation" section should be about; idle - and highly transient - diplomatic threats from afar are not relevant to the topic.  I'll keep on looking, but I see little relevance to the subject, when there were so many other issues closer to home; if it were an important subject, Scholefield & Howay or Bancroft would have had something to say about it.....and they're far more genuine RS's than Barman can ever be.Skookum1 (talk) 21:46, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Your additions are better, though still placing undue emphasis on the Alabama Claims - and without mentioning the local machinations to do with the Trent Affair - and if you're going to quote Barman so endlessly, get her name right (not "Bartlett' or "Barlett" or whatever the error is). Contemporary historians piece things together that in their time weren't connected; again, you'd do better going through Bancroft and Howay/Scholfield for early history than relying on latter-day academics with odd ideas.Skookum1 (talk) 21:54, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I found a few items in Googlebooks by searching Alabama+"British Columbia" in subject "British Columbia", including McLennan, but note this passage from an essay by Friesen in Historical essays in British Columbia: "Even events such as the purchase of Alaska and the Alabama claims failed to arouse any great attention in the colony." The Alaska purchase did, after the fact, when it became clear that the Americans did not intend to honour free-navigation rights on the Stikine which were a key part of the 1825 treaty with the Russians whose obligations they were supposed to observe.  Angus & Howay, the first book linked, seem to have something, I'll read that over lunch, but I suspect re annexation there's a lot toothier detail in there than just that.  Wood and the BCHQ item look interesting, but also I expect will treat it as a minor blip, not the primary focus of annexationist pressures/movements directly on or within the province.  By the time the arbitration was done (1885) the Bering Sea Crisis was underway and could have led to full-scale war and potential annexation (of a lot more than just BC, too); it directly affected BC history and the BC economy (seizure of "British" vessels by the US, and a temporary closure of the local sealing industry in response).  Whether the US Navy/Army would have been able to pull it off is highly debatable, given the prospect of wider war; the US was in a much better position to annex BC when TE Roosevelt made his Klondike-era boundary threat.  The fears associated with, again, the Fraser Canyon War, McGowan's War, spillage of the Yakima War into British territory, and the easier access to the Boundary/Kootenays from adjoining parts of the US which led to the creation first of the Dewdney Trail and then the Southern Mainline - those are far more imporatnt, and have some local context/relevance.  Nugent, who was US consul at Victoria at the opening of the gold rush, also agitated openly for annexation, among others.  Far more than the Alabama Claims, which were just a diplomatic poker chip.Skookum1 (talk) 22:10, 28 December 2010 (UTC)


 * OK, I'm still working on it. :) Wikipedia rules require us to use the latest reliable sources by scholars--they do indeed put together the pieces. I love Bancroft but he's not up to date anymore, and he did not see the international documents re annexation issues. Let's keep in mind that the folks in BC had very little voice when it came to high level diplomacy between US and Britain--as the Alaska Boundary Dispute of 1903 proved. Rjensen (talk) 22:13, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * And Oregon, and the San Juans etc. likewise the Salmon War and their willingness to sell out for the Columbia River Treaty and more. "they do indeed put together the pieces" is more like "they do indeed put things together piecemeal" and without contemporary context.  Bancroft, when you do read him, bear in mind he's something of an anti-British, anti-HBC propagandist, always defending/justifying US views/policies; compare parallel passages in Howay/Scholefield or Begg or the Akriggs and the contrast can be very marked.  And if it's high-level diplomacy it's not really BC history, unless it was an issue locally (as with the San Juans, the Stikine dispute, the Bering Sea Crisis, the Alaska dispute etc).  You might want to get and read DJ Hauka's "McGowan's War" which covers things like Nugent and the eponymous war in greater detail.  I really wonder about "Wikipedia rules require us to use the latest reliable sources by scholars" - that's a bad policy to me, given what I know about "the latest [reliable] sources" not being all that reliable, and often very POV-ized.Skookum1 (talk) 22:20, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Note this page's fourth item, re an organized petition; date would seem to be gold-rush era but I can't get at the rest of the quote, which is frmo the British Columbia Historical Quarterly; they're online separately, beyond GoogleBooks, I'll see if I can find that item online, though it might be at the local library.Skookum1 (talk) 22:40, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh that one item is Wood, not McLennan, I was confused by the similar title; Goolebooks reminded me that Woodcock's out there, too, and I'd put a lot more stock in him than in Barman.Skookum1 (talk) 22:52, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

WP:Undue weight on Alabama Claims
The history of BC re annexation to the US is very complex and you would have done the topic more justice by researching more of it; you have barely scratched on it, and continue to place the Alabama Claims as if they were more important than the San Juan Dispute (which was much more immediate re both war and annexation), the fisheries dispute, the naturalization dispute, and other matters which were resolved; even in the brief mention here, you give it too much profile relative to the non-event it was on the actual history of British Columbia. It is a diplomatic footnote, a "thing that did not happen", and the least of many much more REAL threats of annexation and/or associated political movements; you do know, I hope, that there was a petition to Britain in 1867 basically asking the Home Office to "shit or get off the pot, if you're not gonna help us we want to join the US" (I'll find that bit, it was in I think Scholefield's solo history, not the dual oen with Howay; might be in the dual one, but I have to go out right now). I also don't see any major BC historians among the citations (I don't consider Barman a major historian, only an over-hyped and over-promoted one), and I don't see a BC perspective in what you're writing. Annexation is an important topic in BC - in fact it still is - but your account, so far, leaves much to be desired. Threats to annex BC were made by General Harney, also, and they were much more real than some obscure flipping of diplomatic notes in a political card game thousands of miles away which made no impact locally. Some of the American agitators of the Fraser Canyon WAr also called for annexation; a particular batch of those managed to shoot themselves to death in the dark near Boston Bar, as things worked out. Hill and his Northern Pacific were explicitly aimed at draining the resources from and controlling access to/from southeastern BC, and both Idaho and Montana pressed for annexation at times of adjoining parts of BC....and as I said, Nugent, the US consul to Victoria, and various US newspapers, openly agitated for forcible annexation. This isn't a diplomatic footnote bargained away in a larger settlement, as was the mere bargaining chip that BC was, of many, in the Alabama Claims. It was put on the table, sure, but so were teh sun and the moon and a whole lot else too; you make it sound, and have made it sound, like the Alabama Claims were the critical moment re annexation pressures, and that they were important to the History of British Columbia. They were not; they were important to British-American relations, but not to BC.Skookum1 (talk) 06:33, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
 * sounds like Skookum1 should publish all his research so we can make use of it. At present Wikipedia editors are only allowed to report what the published scholars say in Reliable Sources about it and we are not allowed to report Skookum1's personal point of view. For example the RS say that the US proposed to trade BC for the Alabama Claims, but then dropped BC for cash. The Alabama Claims gets less than a sentence in the article (Seward thought Britain would accept this in exchange for the "Alabama claims". In the event, Seward dropped the idea of an exchange), and that is based on two books and two scholarly articles. Rjensen (talk) 11:13, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

rjensen, what "published scholars say in Reliable Sources" is very much determined IMO by who footed their bills; minorities unfortunately do not have the luxury of having their slates of "published scholars". I fully understand that the alternative to this is not necessarily a pretty sight either but there has got be a way to put certain "opinions" forward on wikipedia that do not necessarily rely on the deep pockets of institutional establishments. Wikipedia will otherwise just recreate some of their half-truths. — Preceding unsigned comment added by LeCanardHasBeen (talk • contribs) 03:48, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * @rjensen = Undue weight is undue weight, period. Despite the two cites you've found, which do not say "this was an important point in BC history", youv'e treated it like it was and as if it was the only annexation issue in BC history, and that's just plain wrong, OK?  Undue weight means that you've given it too much signfiicance, and insisted that it's important that a lot of other stuff you are either unaware of or just don't care much about, yet were much more important.  That I'm too busy with a host of issues (see my usercontributions) and also in real life doesn't mean I don't have sources or other material to produce, it means I don't have the time to get at this.  And I've already pointed out at other sources and other issues on annexation, but you just want to tub-thump the Alabama Claims as if they were the decisive moment; that's just nonsense, and I'm also not going to go re-read all that Iv'e read (which many know here is voluminous) just to provide cites and informations that you have time to go look up yourself; Iv'e pointed the way, you want to keep on pointing at Alabama.  But it wasn't even a blip in BC's political history, and in annexationist issues re BC.  Just a blip.  @LeCanardHasBeen - I agree with you very much; Barman, for instance, is an axe-grinder consummate and is also full of very bad calls of judgement, including the undue weight she places on this, which earlier historians do not do much more than mention it in passing; her notion that if teh Pacific Northwest were more francophone then it would have been fully overtaken by the US is utter rubbish; but becaues she has tenure and good reviews for her "survey" history she gets to say things like that at conferences and her worshippers go "oooh".  But none of them read Howay, Scholefield, Begg, the Akriggs, other than to look for tdibits to shore up their latter-day conjectures and what-if notions, based on sketchy information in badly-written academic paqpers.  If Wikipedia calls for morerecent sources to be used in preference to older ones, that's a very bad policy, when the older sources in question were in personal contact with the individuals and times they were writing about.....rather than just one more ideologically-driven tub-thump like what's presented at BC History conferences nowadays.....the older authors try to be objective, they don't presume to preach, or over-reach, or impose modern ideologies and prejudices and re-interpretations on teh past, they let it speak for themselves....Skookum1 (talk) 04:30, 5 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Skookum1 is entitled to his private views but he needs to back them up with RS--that is the Wikipedia rules. He has not done so and instead ridicules modern scholarly books and articles. The older sources did not have access to the secret letters and documents that were released much later, and they did not have personal contact with the people in Washington and London who controlled policy re BC. Rjensen (talk) 04:42, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * yeah, and they barely had contact with BC itself, and that those soruces have come out in the meantime doesn't make them part of BC's history[, it makes them a what-if footnote and not much else. Rather than attacking me, why don't you just READ MORE BRITISH COLUMBIA HISTORY and find more about the annexation issue, rather than tub-thumping this obscure and very post-modern re-take on the times; it's not significant and your isnsitency that it is is "undue weight", especially when there's so much else you're clearly wilfully not wanting to even consider.  I don't have time for you any further; you want to take some trivial diplomatic note, blow it all out of proportion, and build a whole section in a history article on a place you clearly don't know very much about, and probably have never even been to....history is about context, and about events on the ground, and issues at the time; and there's way more to the Annexation agenda in BC history than this, FAR MORE.  But you bloated a whole section about it, as if it matters or mattered; it didn't and doesn't.Skookum1 (talk) 05:10, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * goodness, all this nastiness about one sentence....that is what I would call disproportionate attention. Anyway people might want to read the coverage of annexation on pp 235-244 of British Columbia: A History by Margaret A. Ormsby (1958)-- or is that too recent and politically correct as well? Rjensen (talk) 06:43, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * One sentence?? No, it was a bloated, overblown SECTION that was the issue here.....and the absence in your thinking of OTHER issues concerning annexation, of which this is pretty much the most trivial of all relative to so many much more immediate others, which were in public, and not hidden in some secret memos between Washington and London thousands of miles away....Even Scholefield and Howay mention it, but not in any kind of dominant way; but many don't mention it at all, while covering other much more present-at-the-time material. While you're at it, why not read all of Ormsby, and all of the Akriggs, and all of Scholefield & Howay et al.  Without just looking for one liners about the Alabama Claims....fine it's one sentence right now, but that's all it deserves to be.Skookum1 (talk) 06:48, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * there is an entire chapter "Chapter VIII: British Columbia In The Balance— Annexation Or Confederation 1866-1871" in British Columbia and the United States by Henry Forbes Angus et al (1942), but perhaps that is too recent and too scholarly to pass muster. They devote 40 pages (pp 178-217) to the topic; and they have another full chapter on the "San Juan Boundary, 1845-1872". Rjensen (talk) 07:04, 5 January 2011 (UTC)