The object of every sound system of colonization should be, not to re-organize Society on a new basis, which is simply absurd, but to transfer to the new country whatever is most valuable and most approved in the institutions of the old, so that society may, as far as possible, consist of the same classes, united together by the same ties and having the same relative duties to perform in one country as in the other.
In order to set the scene, it is necessary to emphasize that it was the twenty years between 1840 and 1860 that opened up the west. During that time, the North American population grew and expanded in a westerly direction at a rapid rate. It was an exciting time, full of promise and hope, and countless adventurous men and women wanted to be a part of it. The challenge of the unknown spurred many a courageous heart to leave behind all that was familiar and start afresh in some far-flung outpost of civilization.
So it was with those who settled in Victoria, British Columbia’s capital. They left the land of their birth for various reasons, but they arrived in the new world with the same burning desire to build an ideal settlement. What they did not realize was that although they were rebuilding their lives in another place geographically, their building tools were the same as they had always been—the long-established traditions, values, customs, and beliefs they held. They were, in fact, merely creating another small part of the empire in their adopted land.
Many people consider the gold rush of 1858 to be the beginning of Victoria’s settlement, but it began long before that. Victoria, both socially and economically, grew at the hand of the Hudson’s Bay Company, that gallant “Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay,” founded in England in 1670.
By the early part of the nineteenth century, the company had expanded across the North American continent, and in 1820, Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River became its western headquarters. While it continued to trade very profitably in furs, negotiations were ongoing concerning the location of the boundary between British and American territory. When it became obvious that the forty-ninth parallel would be the point of demarcation, rather than the Columbia River, the company decided to look for new headquarters.
The southerly tip of Vancouver Island was considered to be the ideal location. In all probability, it would remain under British rule. A young fur trader with the company, James Douglas, was assigned to explore the area. Douglas set about this formidable task in 1842. In the spring of 1843 he finally found what he considered to be the perfect site, and the construction of Fort Victoria began immediately.
Even the company men, however, cannot truly be considered the original establishment of Victoria. The First Nations played an important role as the first inhabitants and traders in the area. According to G.P.V. & Helen B. Akrigg’s British Columbia Chronicle (I778–1846), Native lore, memory, and legend extend back only two hundred years before the coming of the white man in 1778, but they had lived on the land now known as British Columbia for perhaps thousands of years before that.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Victoria had become the central point for much trading activity between the local peoples and the white man. Salmon, potatoes, and fur were traded for blankets and ammunition.
In January 1849, six years after the establishment of Fort Victoria, the British government granted formal control of Vancouver Island to the HBC in exchange for seven shillings a year for the next ten years. The company was also strongly encouraged to establish a British settlement within five years.
Colonial Secretary Earl Grey had always come down in favour of British immigration and colonization on Vancouver Island. The HBC governor, Sir John Pelly, agreed wholeheartedly. He had expressed as much in many of his letters. In one, for example, he stated,
the colonization of Vancouver’s Island [is] an object of great importance; I shall, at present, merely submit to Earl Grey’s consideration whether that object, embracing as I trust it will, the conversion to Christianity and civilization of the native population, might not be most readily and effectually accomplished through the instrumentality of the Hudson’s Bay Company.”1
It was generally agreed that the best form of colonization was to “recreate on Vancouver Island the social structure of England, a stalwart squirearchy with the working class properly relegated to an inferior station.”2 This rather high-handed, snobbish attitude of the company gives a clear picture of what \was expected of Victoria’s early settlement.
There was, according to the company, a need for British gentlemen who were well placed in life and would have the wherewithal to purchase large acreages of land for one pound per acre. They would then be expected to employ one labourer for every twenty acres. It was not a popular concept and apparently did not work well for, by December 1854, a census compiled by James Douglas showed there were still only two hundred and thirty-two settlers in Victoria, and even by 1858 the population had reached barely three hundred.
It can be assumed from this scenario that the company did not keep its end of the bargain. It made no overt attempts to foster colonization and tended, for its own purposes, to concentrate on fur trading. However, in fairness, it should also be said that in order to strengthen the economy, it did give some support to other industries such as coal-mining and fishing.
More importantly, although the company still discouraged colonists from settling within a twenty-mile radius of Fort Victoria (the land known as the fur trade reserve), it did make an attempt at bringing in men who would establish Victoria as an agricultural centre.
Captain Walter Colquhoun Grant was an example of the kind of colonist the company wanted. He hailed from Scotland and, having recently lost all his money through gambling, had resigned his commission there with the 2nd Dragoons, the Scots Greys, and was more than ready for adventure. With the promise of work as a surveyor with the company, in addition to what he would make as a gentleman farmer, he felt confident of his success. He was young and full of hope. A large man standing well over six feet, he was also blessed with a certain undeniable charm. In fact, Dr. James Helmcken described him in his Reminiscences as “a splendid fellow and every inch a gentleman.”3 He was, however, sadly lacking in experience and common sense.
Grant’s uncle had given him money for his passage to the new world, as well as supplying funds for the purchase of land on Vancouver Island. Passage for eight men to be hired as Grant’s labourers had also been paid by his uncle. These men set sail in November 1848 aboard the company’s ship, the Harpooner. In June 1849 they arrived at Fort Victoria and waited anxiously for their employer. Captain Grant did not appear until August. He had apparently taken the Panama railway route to reach Victoria, supposedly to avoid the long voyage around Cape Horn, but he had spent all his money by the time he reached San Francisco.
There it had been necessary for an HBC agent to advance him money for his passage to Victoria. Along the way, Grant had mislaid his surveying tools, and upon his arrival in Victoria, he supposedly shot a cow, mistaking it for a buffalo. It was not the most auspicious of beginnings for Victoria’s first settler.
Captain Grant was offered land twenty-five miles from Fort Victoria in what is today the Sooke area. He cleared land for his wilderness home, known as Mullachard, and began planting and cultivating the soil. Cattle grazed on the remainder of his property and he even built a sawmill. His intention was to establish a small Scottish colony in the wilderness, but lack of expertise, coupled with the discontent of his men, doomed his endeavours to failure. With precious little financial success, he was eventually forced to discharge the men.
He then took up Douglas’s offer of some surveying work, but again his abilities, once put to the test, were sadly lacking. In the face of so many problems, and probably suffering loneliness in the isolation of his property, he decided to take a trip to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) for a few months to forget his problems. He returned in February 1851, bringing with him some broom seeds given to him by the British consul. These he planted near his Sooke home. Soon the broom had spread over the entire southern coast of the island, and remains today as the only reminder of Victoria’s first settler.
Grant did not stay long in the colony. During the months before he departed for good, he frequently passed his time at the fort in the company of other Hudson’s Bay men who enjoyed drinking as much as he did. The frequent downing of whisky in jovial company was the only thing that made his life bearable. Totally unsuited to colonial life, he eventually sold his Sooke property to Thomas Muir and promptly left for Oregon in search of gold, an endeavour that also proved fruitless. In 1853, a report of his activities stated that Grant had not a cent to his name, and he was off to Mexico to try his luck there.
Returning to England, Grant joined his old regiment at the time of the Crimean War. In January 1857, before the Royal Geographical Society in London, he read his paper, “Description of Vancouver Island,” for which he was greatly praised and commended. This, and a subsequent paper submitted to the society in December 1859, were perhaps Grant’s greatest contributions to colonization and appear to somewhat redeem his character from a historical perspective. He later served with distinction in his regiment in India and died there from dysentery in August 1861.
Meanwhile, Douglas had other problems to deal with. Many of the men at the fort were leaving, lured by news from the California goldfields, and the labour shortage forced him to hire Native people. Employing the local people and the Kanakas (Native people originally from Hawaii) to work the farms or man the ships meant that it was essential to maintain good relations between colonists and Native people. Also, he was being pressured by the Colonial Office in London to ensure that the colonists would be protected in the event of any future trouble over land claims. To this end, on April 29, 1850, Douglas negotiated the first of thirteen treaties at Fort Victoria. All the treaties clearly identified the land that was to be surrendered to the HBC, as well as the exact payment to be made.
Other settlers did slowly begin to arrive at Fort Victoria during the 1850s, following Captain Grant’s departure. Two early arrivals were the Reverend Robert Staines and his wife, Emma, who came aboard the HBC barque Columbia to teach school in the colony.
In March 1850, the Norman Morison arrived in Esquimalt Harbour with over eighty immigrants, including one well-trained doctor from London, John Sebastian Helmcken. As the fort’s first doctor, he was to become famous and very well loved by many generations of Victorians. More settlers continued to trickle in. They came on other immigrant vessels such as the Tory. Many settlers—the Langfords, the McKenzies, and the Skinners among them—came as employees of the Puget Sound Agricultural Company (a subsidiary of the HBC).
Nevertheless, population growth was slow and Victoria remained little more than a rural village. Then, in the spring of 1858, this state of affairs changed overnight when the first of British Columbia’s gold rushes took place on the Fraser River. The subsequent influx of immigrants, starting with the arrival of the Commodore in April of that year, was unprecedented. With a white population of little over three hundred at first, Victoria became a town of three thousand by year’s end. This figure sometimes rose as high as six thousand if transients were included. It was an interesting, highly colourful population composed of many races and cultures, which brought with it a boosted economy but also numerous problems for Victoria.
A few years earlier, following Captain Grant’s short and unproductive career, Douglas had secured the skills of a far more proficient surveyor. Joseph Despard Pemberton was a competent and experienced man. He arrived in Victoria in June 1851 and immediately set about resurveying the fur trade reserve and laying out a plan for a town adjacent to the fort. His plan is worthy of praise, for it stood the test of time through Victoria’s two gold rushes and its incorporation as a city in 1862.
The plan adhered to the accepted principles of colonization at that time. These were that the “most valuable and most approved,” as Barclay had put it, individuals in British society would be encouraged to settle in Victoria. It was apparent that the old class system, so ingrained in Britain, would continue in the new colony.
Pemberton’s aim was to concentrate settlement within the town itself while encouraging farming in the surrounding areas. He was sure that up to that point, colonization had failed mainly because of Vancouver Island’s distance from Great Britain. A five-month-long sea voyage and an expensive overland route via the Panama Canal did not make the most attractive of prospects. In addition, the colonist was faced with the lure of California’s gold regions so near. Many had even stopped off in San Francisco en route to Victoria, deciding to abandon their original plans and stay on in California. Land was expensive on Vancouver Island, compared with its price in Oregon, and the level of wages was far from satisfactory.
Pemberton laid out his clear and concise plan to help improve conditions and override these setbacks. The colonist, he believed, needed to be induced into coming to Vancouver Island. He needed to be sufficiently attracted by the island’s prospects to risk his all by crossing an ocean into the unknown.
The price of land at one pound an acre, with grants of no less than twenty acres, Pemberton believed to be the first incentive. Passage at reasonable rates was also held out as a carrot to attract the colonist. And, although any minerals discovered on the land would automatically belong to the HBC, the owner would be allowed to work for his own benefit any coal mine that might be on his land, on payment of royalty of half a crown per ton. Fishing rights were given to the colonist, and an added attraction was the fact that all ports and harbours were open and free.
Despite all this, real success in colonization did not come about until after the first gold rush of 1858. It can, therefore, be surmised that one of the foremost reasons why any man decided to uproot himself and his family in order to travel to the other side of the world was simply that he had developed a bad case of gold fever.
The British government had seen the need to colonize Vancouver Island as protection against the threat of further American infiltration. What happened in 1858 and again in 1862, however, was certainly not what the government had envisioned, for among the numerous nationalities arriving in Victoria were many Americans.
Nonetheless, the colonists with British backgrounds gradually grew in number until Victoria’s original establishment became so strongly entrenched in society that even the new cosmopolitan atmosphere developing alongside it could not destroy it. In the final analysis, it would seem that Pemberton’s town plan and his ideas for colonization were indeed successful and would have continued to be successful, albeit more slowly, even had there not been a gold rush.
Other ethnic groups brought with them new and diverse religions, as well as their culture and customs. Victoria’s society became a mixture of many things, but one aspect did not change. A strong division of class was still evident: the upper echelon of the population continued to set the tone and pace of life in those early years.
These people were an elite and powerful group of settlers who became the aristocracy of Victoria. Their backgrounds varied, and in many cases those backgrounds were quite unremarkable. Once they were established in their chosen new life, however, their uniqueness, coupled with a broad visionary awareness of what was required to make that new life successful, enabled them to turn those pasts into phenomenal futures. Names such as Douglas, Skinner, and Pemberton were the foundation of that new world. In due course, other names such as Crease, O’Reilly, Rithet, Trutch, and Barnard, joined the group. This new breed of colonist was the beginning of a dynasty.
As the stories of these families unfold, the social life they enjoyed will be explored and examined. Their new world was still very young and vulnerable, but the colony’s upper-class citizens intended to establish a society fashioned according to the institutions of the old world they had forsaken in favour of greener pastures in Victoria.
Consequently, without realizing it, they created instead a unique community halfway between British traditionalism and North American brashness.