James Douglas – First Governor of British Columbia
By
John C Abercrombie
The image that is painted by United States history in relation to people of color is that of slavery in the Southern states. That picture is a caricature. Grossly false and extremely limiting. It paints a people without intellect, morals or ambition.
The picture that is painted is one that seems to make people believe that the only place to find Black people is Africa and the United States. They do not consider the people of South America who were enslaved along with the people of the United States.
In this post, we look at Sir James Douglas, governor of Vancouver Island from 1854 to 1864 and British Columbia from 1858 to 1864. He was born August 15, 1803, in Demerara, a South American country now known as Guyana. He is known as the ‘Father of British Columbia”.
Douglas is the son of John Douglas, a Scottish merchant of cotton and sugar. He owned a plantation in Demerara (now known as Guyana) was a Dutch colony. The Douglas family was well established in Scotland. John Douglas the father of James was descended from the earls of Angus. John’s brother, Lieutenant General, Sir Neil Douglas, commander in Chief of Scotland in 1842.
James Douglas’s mother was a free woman of color named Martha Ann Ritchie. She was born in Barbados. In this case of acknowledgement of her color is due to her being of African ancestry.
When James Douglas was 9 years old his father sent him and his brother Alexander to Lanark, Scotland for schooling. This is not the way many Blacks in the United States were treated as their White fathers treated them cruelly and even sold them away which makes you question the morality of these men who would treat their own flesh and blood in this manner.
When he was 15, he apprenticed with the North West Company a major source of the fur trade. His first year was spent working in the counting house of Fort William which is located in what is now Ontario. He learned the fir trade ad accounting practices.
There was intense competition between the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company. There was economic and occasional physical violence. Later Douglas was employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company when they merged with the North west Company.
Douglas was posted at Fort St. James in 1826, in what was then called New Caledonia but is now mainland British Columbia where he joined the first overland fur brigade from Fort Alexander on the upper Fraser River to Fort Vancouver. Fort Vancouver is now better known as Vancouver, Washington (USA) located on the Columbia River. He is described as a “Fine steady active fellow good clerk and Trader, well adapted for a new country.”
April, 27l 1828, Douglas married Connolly’s daughter, Amelia, whose mother, Miyo Nipiy, was Cree.
In 1846, the Oregon Treaty established the forty-ninth parallel as the border between the United States and British North America in the West, leading the Hudson’s Bay Company to withdraw from Fort Vancouver (now Washington State). This also put an end to the 54-40 or fight.
January 13, 1849, Vancouver Island was declared a Crown Colony. October of 1851 Douglass was chosen governor. Between 180 and 1854 Douglas negotiated 14 land purchases with First Nations on Vancouver Island. This included land in and around Fort Victoria, Fort /Rupert and Nanaimo. These are often referred to as the Douglas or Fort Victoria Treaties.
As Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company he helped the Hudson Bay Company become a trading monopoly in the Pacific Northwest. As governor he initiated British rule west of the Rocky Mountains. In the role of governor of the Crown colonies he initiated British rule west of the Rockies and negotiated purchases with First Nations. He was also against American annexation. Douglas also initiated the building of roads and presided over the Fraser River Gold Rush and the Cariboo Gold Rush.
In 1858 the first of 25,000 newcomers arrived in Fort Victoria on their way to the Fraser River in search of gold. Douglas was concerned that as the number of Americans arrived that there was a threat that they would not submit to English rule and may try to annex to America. As such Douglas took claim of the land and mineral right for the Crown. He distributed licenses to the miner to stem the invasion.
Douglas reached out to members of the San Francisco Black community seeking to find immigrants who might be sympathetic to British rule. An 1857 United States Supreme Court decision had denied citizenship to Blacks enslaved ad free. Douglas promised them British citizenship after 5 years of land ownership. Several hundred Black families moved to take advantage of this offer.
Amid the gold discoveries Britain cancelled the special privileges granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company ad Douglas was offered the governorship of the new colony of British Columbia ad he was given extensive political power. November 1858 Douglas who was still governor of Vancouver Island was inaugurated at Fort Langley as governor of British Columbia and appointed Companion of the Order of the of the Bath in recognition of his administration of Vancouver Island.
Douglas was also instrumental in the selection of Victoria as the Capital.
Because of his concern for the welfare of miners he set his gold commissioners to lay out reserves for indigenous peoples. This also minimized the threat of warfare. The gold commissioners also adjudicated mining disputes.
As the call for self-government grew, Douglas retired in 1864.
In 1864 he was invested as a Knight Commander of the Order of Bath
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James Douglas and the Colony of British Columbia
The Colony of British Columbia was established in 1858 after 30,000 fortune seekers from the US crossed the 49th parallel and fought their way up the Fraser River against native resistance. Up until that time there had been no settlers, no military and no religious missions on the entire mainland of what is now British Columbia.
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History
HistoryWe are often amazed at the variety of people, places and events that we don’t know about. It is not your fault; it is based on what we have been taught. That information has been filtered but you recognize that there is a wealth of information and the place to explore it is with the Amazon affiliate link below
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James Douglas: Father of British Columbia
James Douglas’s story is one of high adventure in pre-Confederation Canada. It weaves through the heart of Canadian and Pacific Northwest history when British Columbia was a wild land, Vancouver didn’t exist, and Victoria was a muddy village. Part black and illegitimate, Douglas was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1803 to a Scottish plantation owner and a mixed-race woman. After schooling in Scotland, the fifteen-year-old Douglas sailed to Canada in 1819 to join the fur trade. With roads non-existent, he travelled thousands of miles each year, using the rivers and lakes as his highways. He paddled canoes, drove dogsleds, and snowshoed to his destinations. Douglas became a hard-nosed fur trader, married a part-Cree wife, and nearly provoked a war between Britain and the United States over the San Juan Islands on the West Coast. When he was in his prime, he established Victoria and secured the western region of British North America from the Russian Empire and the expansionist Americans. Eventually, Douglas became the controversial governor of the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia and oversaw the frenzied Fraser and Cariboo gold rushes. Named one the Best Books of 2010 (nonfiction – grades 7-12) by Resource Links Magazine.
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Early British Columbia and the Hudson’s Bay Company:
An Aboriginal Perspective The 1910 Memorial to Prime Minister Laurier by several First Nations Chiefs is a powerful document that records the thoughts of aboriginal people about the arrival of Europeans. It speaks of the arrival of traders with the North West Company which then became the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Memorial is positive about this experience which contrasts dramatically with the arrival of other Europeans during the Gold Rush starting in 1858. The difference was so stark they called the Hudson’s Bay Company people ‘real whites’.
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As monuments to colonizers face growing scrutiny, how should B.C.’s founding figure be remembered? The City of Langley wants to put up a plaque to James Douglas, the founding figure of British Columbia. But in an era where monuments to colonizers are going down across North America, can a plaque go up that everyone agrees on? Justin McElroy tackles that question.
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