Under Simpson's direction, posts were closed and consolidated. The combined force of employees was cut by more than half. Wages were slashed below even the scales proposed by the London headquarters. No cost, whether for the provisions imported for the posts or the utensils used in consuming them, came under Simpson's scrutiny without being pared.

At the time of merger, the Hudson's Bay Company had 68 posts in the North West interior and the North West Company had upwards of 57 (Depending on the method of compilation - the period and the area covered figures vary. The Historical Atlas of Canada, VoL 1 (University of Toronto Press, 1987), plates 52 and 65, gives the total numher of posts in the Northwest Interior in 1821 as 125 - 68 Hudson's Bay and 57 North West, noting that not all North West posts are known because company records are senously incomp]ete." Peter Newman in his Caesar of the Wilderness, Company of Adventurers, VoL 1 (Penguin Books Canada, 1987) pp.221-225, sets the numher of posts at 173 - 76 Hudson's Bay and 97 North West Similarly, the Historical Atlas of Canada gives the comhined work force of the two companies as 1,754, listing the numher employed at each post, while Newman sets a higher figure of 1,983.). Simpson reduced the combined total to 52 and their work force from more than 1,800 to 827.

The company's recognition that the approximately 1,000 displaced employees constituted "a burden which cannot be got rid of without expense' was colored by its fear that otherwise they would "become dangerous to the peace of the country and the safety of the trading posts". The fear was well founded. Some men were openly rebelling against their discharge and Simpson moved quickly to send them out of the territory.

The Red River Colony offered a solution that would at once eliminate any threat from discharged employees and further its original purpose of supplying agricultural products to the posts.

The company undertook to transport the men and their families to the colony. There they would be settled on lots of 20 or more acres and given tools to build homes and break the soil, seed for their crops and ammunition for hunting until the crops could be harvested.

To ensure that the new settlers would "be civilized and instructed in religion, "the company turned to the church. Closing of Fort Daer on the Pembina River added more French-Canadians and Metis to the growing population around the Catholic mission at what is now St. Boniface, established earlier at Selkirk's invitation. To show its support for the mission' 5 work, the company voted it an annual stipend of £50.

In the Red River Colony, the company decided to build an Anglican church a school and an orphanage for children whose parents had died or abandoned them. The girls would learn domestic skills and the boys would be employed in agricultural work. Indentured to settlers as they grew older, they would provide the colony with a work force. Whatever expense the company incurred, it intended to recoup its investment.

While the company established no more colonies, agriculture became an important part of its operations as Simpson carried out his reorganization of posts on the Pacific coast.
Determined to cut the cost of importing European provisions, Simpson believed that extensive farming in a country abounding in salmon could make the costs virtually self-sufficient. The post at Spokane House was abandoned for a new post, Fort Colville, where, in Simpson's view, "as much grain and potatoes may be raised as would feed all the Natives on the Columbia..." By 1837, Fort Colville was producing more than 5,000 bushels of grain.

Defending his policy. Simpson wrote, "It has been said that farming is no branch of the fur trade, but I consider that every pursuit tending to lessen the expense of the trade is a branch thereof..."

The reorganization he carried through reflected this conviction. He consolidated the Columbia and New Caledonia districts into a new Columbia district and gave it a new administrative centre. Fort George, the old Fort Astoria, was abandoned for a new site on the north bank of the Columbia about 160 kilometres upstream.

There, in 1825, Dr. McLoughlin, as chief factor for the new Columbia district, directed the building of Fort Vancouver, destined to become the company's trading hub on the Pacific coast.

The 20foot stockade, defended by 12 and l8pound cannon, enclosed offices, apartments for officers and clerks, a schoolhouse, a church, warehouses for furs and various stores, a smithy and workshops for tradesmen; and at one end, McLoughlin's residence with its huge dining hall where he presided in baronial style of the North West wintering partners at Fort William.

Outside the fort were an orchard, two sawmills that cut timber for Hawaii. piggeries and fenced fields for cattle, sheep, goats and horses, dairies, granaries and two flour mills. The total area under cultivation extended over 1,000 acres, according to a letter McLoughlin wrote to the governor and committee in London to correct what he called mistaken notions of the area being farmed. (Lieut. Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition placed the area under cultivation in 1841 at 3,000 acres.).

The difference between Fort Vancouver and the Red River Colony was that at Fort Vancouver the work was done by employees under contract to the company, not by settlers on their own land.

Lieut. Charles Wilkes of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, who visited Fort Vancouver in 1841, gave a revealing account of working conditions for the employees whose village of about 50 log houses lined each side of the road some distance from the fort.

"Without making any inquiries," he wrote; "I heard frequent complaints made of both the quantity and quality of the food issued by the company to its servants. I could not avoid perceiving that these complaints were well founded if this allowance were compared with what we deem a sufficient ration in the United States.

"Many of the servants complained that they had to spend a great part of the money they receive to buy food; this is £17 per annum, out of which they have to furnish themselves with clothes.

"They are engaged for five years, and after their time has expired the company are obliged to send them back to England or Canada, if they desire it. Generally, however, when that time expires they find themselves in debt and are obliged to serve an extra time to pay it: and not infrequently, at the expiration of their engagement, they have become attached, or married, to some Indian woman, on which account they find themselves unable to leave, and continue attached to the company's service, and in all respects under the same engagement as before.

"If they desire to cultivate land, they are assigned a certain portion, but are still dependent on the company for many of the necessaries of life, clothing etc. This causes them to become a sort of vassal and compels them to execute the will of the company..."

Over the quarter century 1821-1846, the Hudson's Bay Company extended its monopoly on the Pacific coast through operations east to Idaho and Utah, south to California and north to the Russian American boundary.

In 1824, the company negotiated a contract at London to sell the East India Company 20,000 beaver and 7,000 otter skins, eliminating the need to use U.S. intermediaries which had hampered the North West Company in marketing its furs at Canton.

In 1839, a year after its license was renewed for another 21 years, it concluded an agreement with the Russian-American Company at Hamburg to lease the
Alaska Panhandle mainland exclusive of the offshore islands for a period of 10
years from June 1, 1840.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Hudson's Bay Company would pay an annual rental of 2,000 river otter skins, and the Russian-American Company would buy another 2,000 river otter skins from west of the mountains and 3,000 more from east of the mountains. It also undertook to buy specified quantities of grain and other products to be carried in British ships and to discourage trade with U.S. and other foreign ships.
For its part, the Hudson's Bay Company dropped its claim for £22,150 damages arising from the Russian action in denying its ship, the Dryad, passage up the Stikine River to establish a post on British territory in 1834.
An unusual clause bound the two companies to honor the agreement in the event of war between Britain and Russia, as in fact it was honored during the Crimean War of 1854-56.
For the Hudson's Bay Company, the agreement accomplished several objectives. It gave the company sea access to the hinterland east of the Panhandle. It virtually drove U.S. ships out of the coastal trade by making their voyages unprofitable. And it gave the company an assured market, which included Kamchatka, for the produce of its farms. Moreover, it was a profitable arrangement. In addition to its profit from produce and imported British goods, the company's annual revenue from furs harvested on the Panhandle exceeded
£8,000.
As one outcome of the agreement, the Hudson's Bay Company approved Dr. McLoughlin's proposal to form a wholly owned subsidiary, the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, which would operate farms at Cowlitz and Nisqually and to which it would transfer all its livestock and farm equipment; agricultural produce would be shipped to Alaska, and wool, hides and other byproducts would be exported to Britain. (In 1869, the Hudson's Bay Company received $200,000 for its Puget Sound Agricultural Company holdings as part of a U.S.-British settlement of $650,000.)
Another outcome was the Russian-American Company's decision to withdraw from its unprofitable and increasingly vulnerable California outpost now that it had an assured source of provisions. In 1841 it sold Fort Ross for the equivalent of $30,000 to an American, Johann A. Sutter, who had extensive landholdings in the Sacramento Valley. (It was on Sutter's land, some 70 kilometers from Fort Ross, that James Marshall, a carpenter sent by Sutter to build a sawmill, discovered gold, touching off the California gold rush.)
As the Russian-American Company moved out, the Hudson's Bay Company moved in. James Douglas, then chief trader for the Columbia district, negotiated an agreement with the Mexican government at Monterey giving the company port privileges for its ships and the right to buy land for the post it built at Yerba Buena in what is now the heart of San Francisco. In return, Douglas agreed to withdraw the company's trappers from the vicinity of Sacramento.
Conclusion of the Alaska Panhandle agreement led Simpson to a radical change of policy. Fort Simpson had been built in 1831 as one of a string of posts calculated, in Simpson's words, "to put down all competition on the coast" Furs traded at the posts, instead of being held for trading vessels, were collected by the company's larger ships, or acquired in trade along the coast by smaller schooners, denying U.S. ships the opportunity to obtain profitable cargoes.
McLoughlin strongly advocated the establishment of posts, averring in 1834 that the company could "carry on the trade of the coast to more advantage by establishing posts than by vessels and that four posts when established will be kept at less expense than one vessel."

Simpson's decision to abandon the most northerly posts now that he no longer feared competition from the Americans and Russians was outlined in his correspondence with the governor and committee in London in 1841.

Three forts, Mclanghlin on Milbanke Sound, Stikine and Taku, he wrote, were no longer needed. Their work could be done by the Beaver, built in Britain and commissioned in 1836 as the first steamship to ply the Pacific coast. The decision brought him into conflict with McLoughlin, opening a rift between the two that widened in the years preceding McLoughlin's retirement in 1846. (McLoughlin's difterences wiffi Simpson were exacerhated hy a hitter personal quarrel over the murder of his son John at Fort Stikine in 1842. Even in retirement at Oregon City after 1846 he was emhroi]ed in a long hattIe against U.S. attempts to strip him of his land titles which were only upheld after his death in 1857. Now he is honored in the state of his adoption as the 'Father of Oregon'.) Belief that the British-U.S. joint occupation of Oregon would ultimately be resolved by establishing the Columbia River as the international boundary, as proposed by Britain but rejected by the U.S, shaped Simpson's policy. To this end, he endeavored to deflect American fur traders and pioneer settlers south of the river and to implement the instructions he received in 1827 from London "to hunt as bare as possible all the country south of the Columbia and west of the mountains.

What became known as Snake brigades, nomadic communities of up to 100 and more people living off the land as they went, were formed. Led by chief trader Peter Skene Ogden, they ranged through the Snake River territory of the Snake Indians and ultimately far beyond into Idaho and Utah.

Strung out along the trail with their horses and dogs, they were a motley procession - company employees, paid trappers and hunters, Natives accompanied by their women and children. But, continued into the second decade of the joint occupation treaty after it was renewed in 1828, they produced a steady profit for the company while making the territory less attractive to the American traders.

At the same time, Simpson was looking north to the Fraser River. "Whether the Americans come to the Columbia or not," he held, the company's principal depot should be at the mouth of the Fraser as being more central to the coastal and interior posts.

By 1827, chief trader James McMillan was supervising construction of the first Fort Langley and initiating what soon became a growing export trade of dried and pickled salmon to Hawaii, China and other countries. Natives caught the salmon, for which they were paid in trade goods - in one transaction goods valued at £13/17s/2d for 7,544 salmon - and the women cleaned them on the beach. McLoughlin could well report in 1836 that "the expense of keeping up the establishment at Fort Langley is in general paid by the salmon trade.

While negotiations between Britain and the U.S. dragged on, with the U.S. asserting its claim by right of discovery and occupation of the Columbia, the issue was being decided in the territory itself.

As in the acquisition of Louisiana, Florida, Texas and California, the advance guard of Manifest Destiny was the settlers who began to make their way across the mountain passes in the eighteen-thirties. At first a thin trickle, they became a growing stream impelied westward by mass immigration from Europe and their own hunger for land.
Through resolutions and speeches extolling the virtues of the territory, senators and congressmen fostered the migration. Various religious bodies, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic, sent missions, although, as Simpson noted, they were more successful in cultivating their farms than in converting the Natives, "who are perfectly bewildered by the variety of doctrines inculcated in this quarter."
Lieut. Wilkes reached the same conclusion when he found that the Methodists in the Willamette Valley had carved out 1,000 acre lots for themselves.
The flow of migrants posed difficult problems for McLoughlin. He successfully confined American settlement to the south bank of the Columbia and he earned the goodwill of the settlers by extending credit to those who arrived destitute, selling them provisions at company prices, providing them with transportation and exerting his influence as the White Eagle' to restrain Native attacks.
None of this sat well with the governor and committee in London. They frowned upon his extending credit of nearly $30,000 which they might never collect. And when in 1843 he agreed to cooperate with the provisional government formed by the settlers in order "to prevent disorders and maintain peace until the settlement of the boundary question leaves that duty to the parent states," he was deemed to have weakened the British negotiating position.

The principal U.S. negotiating argument was the number of American settlers already in possession, an estimated 6,000 by 1845.
The Hudson's Bay Company had sought to offset the U.S. influx in 1841 by recruiting 21 families, a total of 122 people, from the Red River Colony, 77 of whom were settled at Nisqually and 38 at Colville. But the company was caught in the contradictions of its own policy. No less than the 1,000 families Selkirk had originally undertaken to settle at Red River could have matched the American influx. And as McLoughlin had told the governor and committee in 1836, "Everyone knows who is acquainted with the fur trade that as the country becomes settled the fur trade must diminish."

The issue was joined when the Democratic candidate, James K. Polk, won the 1844 presidential election with the jingoistic slogan 'Fifty-Four Forty or Fight.' The U.S. did not get 54' 400, the southern boundary of Russian America. It did want and eventually got the port sites of Puget Sound.

Countering British proposals for a boundary following the Kootenay and Columbia rivers, with a free port for the U.S. on Vancouver Island or the mainland, the U.S. held to its argument for a boundary at the 49th parallel, which would have segmented Vancouver Island from Ladysmith to Port Albion, with a free port for Britain at the southern tip.
Negotiations reached an impasse after the U.S. rejected British proposals for arbitration or referral to a joint commission, aware that the decision might favor the British proposal. Both countries placed their forces on alert.

It has generally been assumed that Canada's vulnerability to invasion was a major consideration for Britain in advancing the proposal which brought about a settlement. The U.S. too was vulnerable, facing the prospect of war on both its northern and southern boundaries.
On May 13,1846, a month before conclusion of the Oregon Boundary Treaty on June 15, the U.S. invaded Mexico in a war of annexation which ended on May 30,1848 with the capture of Mexico City and imposition of a humiliating peace stripping Mexico of half its territory. Facing strong opposition to the war from the Whigs in Congress, among them Abraham Lincoln, and conscious of British threats to enter the war, Polk had reason to accept the British proposal which, while accepting the 49th parallel, set its western end at Juan de Fuca Strait and conceded all Vancouver Island to Britain.
The final boundary of the future British Columbia had been set.
The Hudson's Bay Company had already anticipated the outcome. In 1843, Chief Factor James Douglas began supervising construction of a fort at Camosack Inlet, the site he had recommended in a survey of the southern tip of Vancouver Island the previous year, and described as "a perfect Eden in the midst of the dreary wilderness of the Northwest coast.." The site of what became Fort Victoria also had the advantage, as Simpson noted in 1846, of being "so far distant from the disorderly population of Columbia that we have little cause for apprehension from that quarter."
Working with a largely French-Canadian crew of company employees, augmented by Songhee Natives who were paid one blanket for every forty 22-foot pickets they cut for the stockade, Douglas completed the fort in three months. Enclosing an area of 400 by 300 feet with its front gate at the foot of what now is Fort Street, and defended by a bastion, it contained a main hall, officers' quarters, storehouses, and the chief factor's residence.
As at Fort Vancouver, the employees who built Fort Victoria and remained to work there or on the company's farms were paid little - the standard £17 a year in addition to room and board for a 13-hour day. And as at Fort Vancouver, in the words of Berthold Seemann, the naturalist who visited Fort Victoria in 1846, they were "usually in debt to the company and (are) much in its power."
The availability of land suitable for agriculture surrounding the fort had influenced Douglas' choice of the site and he lost no time in bringing it under cultivation. By 1846, 160 acres had been sown to crops or converted to pasture and two dairies had been built. A year later the acreage had almost been doubled, producing enough beef and mutton, as well as wheat, to allow large shipments to Alaska. Ultimately more than a dozen farms in what now is downtown Victoria were being worked either directly by the company or the Puget Sound Agricultural Company.
Land became the issue in the negotiations between Sir John Pelly and Earl Grey which culminated in Britain granting Vancouver Island to the Hudson's Bay Company in 1849.
Pelly's initial proposal was for a grant of all the territory north and west of Rupert's land in which the company already had exclusive rights to trade with the Indians. Grey suggested that Pelly submit a more limited proposal embracing "a plan for colonization and government of Vancouver's Island."
The grant, when it came before the British parliament for approval, met trenchant opposition from William Gladstone and other Whigs.

Critics of Hudson's Bay policy, and particularly its resistance to colonization, aired their objections in the press. They heaped scorn on the company's proposal to sell land at £1 an acre when it could be bought at $1 an acre in Oregon. (Passage of the Donation Land Act in 1859 gave settlers in Oregon title to 320 acres (640 acres if they were married) upon completion of four years' residence.) Even the Red River Colony was brought into the debate, for the settlers there had placed their grievances before Grey in what proved to be their successful demand to be allowed to trade freely in furs with the Natives, breaking the company's monopoly. ('The right of Red Itiver colonists to trade freely in furs was estahlished in fact, if not in law, as the outcome of a trial in May, 1849. Pierre-Guillaume Sayer and three other Metis were charged hy chief factor John Ballenden with illegally trafficiting in furs. Metis organized hy a Committee of the New Nation and led hy Jean-Louis RIel, father of Louis RIel, packed the courtroom. The jury found Sayer guilW hut recommended leniency hecause "he and others were under the impression that there was a free trade." Saying that he sought no punishment heyond estahlishing the validity ot the charge, Bellenden set Sayer free and dropped the charges against the other three. The Metis gathered inside and outside the courthouse concluded that Sayer and the others had heen acquitted and echoing cries of "La commerce est lihre," carried that conclusion far and wide. Rather than try to enforce its monopoly, the company raised the prices it paid for furs to bankrupt the free traders, the reverse of the pricecutting hy which it had ruined Cooper's cranberry venture on the Pacitic coast.)
Terms of the grant, as finally approved, made the Hudson's Bay Company "the true and absolute lords and proprietors" of Vancouver Island in perpetuity, subject to its undertaking to "establish upon the said island a settlement or settlements of resident colonists, emigrants of our United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, or from other of our dominions... "Ninety percent of the gross proceeds from the sale of land and production of coal and other minerals was to be applied towards the colonization and improvement of the island," the company retaining the remaining 10 percent as profit.
The annual rent for this munificent gift was seven shillings.
The grant was made conditional upon colonization. If at the end of five years no settlement had been established, the British government could revoke it. And it allowed the British government to repossess the island on expiration of the company's exclusive trade license in 1859 by compensating the company for its expenditures and holdings.
What the company gained immediately from the grant was what became known as the Hudson's Bay Company reserve. The area initially set aside for Fort Victoria, estimated by Douglas at more than 20 square miles, was reduced to the six square miles actually under cultivation or enclosed for cattle range before the colony was founded.

For this land, which extended beyond the townsite of Victoria, the company paid nothing. For any other land it wanted it had to pay the set price of £1 an acre, 90 percent of which was credited to improvement of the colony.

The company was committed to establishing a settlement, but it wanted neither the planned immigration of the Red River Colony nor another influx of uninvited settlers. The scheme it devised enabled it to honor its commitment while maintaining its absolute control and adding thousands of acres to its land reserve.

The scheme envisaged creation of a number of large farms patterned after the English country estate to be managed, but not owned, by 'gentlemen bailiffs'. The land was bought at £1 an acre by the Puget Sound Agricultural Company which, in opening four farms, established a reserve for future development, to be paid for as taken up, pre-empting most of the agricultural land between Victoria and Esquimalt.

Although nominally a separate company, that legal distinction was belied by the fact that it had the same stockholders as the Hudson's Bay Company, whose officers directed its affairs, and the operations of the two Companies were intermeshed.

'Gentlemen bailiffs' were required to post £200 as security. Their passage out, but not that of their families, was paid by the company. Their laborers, mostly from the south of England, were brought out under contract to the Hudson's Bay Company at £17 a year and then transferred to the Puget Sound Agricultural Company. If they Completed their five-year contracts, they were promised 20 acres of land.

The five-year contracts of the 'gentlemen bailiffs' allowed them to draw on the company for construction of their own houses and quarters for their laborers, who were paid by the company, and all the provisions they wanted from the Hudson's Bay store. Since everything was charged against a farm's operation, it left in question the profit to be shared by even a successful 'gentleman bailiff.'

Remote Vancouver Island, competing with other British colonies for immigrants but restricting them to men of means, attracted few independent settlers. The Puget Sound Agricultural Company required them to pay the £1 an acre set price and to bring out "five single men or three married couples for every 100 acres." Most of the more suitable agricultural land having been placed in reserve, they found they had to go to Sooke or other outlying areas for large acreage.

To the colonists the difference between the companies was limited to their titles. They bought their provisions and other needs at a high markup from the company store. The company set the prices at which it bought their produce. Any attempt they made to find another market was thwarted, as one independent settler found when he began trading with Natives on the mainland to ship cranberries and potatoes to San Francisco - the company ended James Cooper's bid to get higher prices by undercutting him.

Although Earl Grey initially accepted Sir John Pelly's proposal that he appoint James Douglas as the colony's first governor, the company had to wait two years before it could give its monopoly the cloak of colonial government. Fresh in Grey's mind after the loss of Oregon was the question: 'What would the company do to avert this danger from a tide of democracy rolling north?"

Concerned more with formal separation of government and company then with representation, Grey sought the opinion of Lieut Adam Dundas, a British naval officer who had recently returned from a tour of duty on the Northwest coast.

Dundas' report was forthright in condemning "an overbearing illiberal usurpation of power on the part of the Hudson's Bay Company..." He characterized the company's effort on Vancouver Island as having "the sole motive of protracting to as late a period as possible a monopoly they have so long enjoyed and which could not benefit the country, the only object of establishing a settlement in such a distant quarter."

Accepting as he did the legal distinction between the Hudson's Bay and Puget Sound companies, Grey could not have appreciated Dundas' reminder to him "that these two companies are wholiy incorporated in each other and their interests are mutuaily blended, their object being to engross all those other available sources of revenue to which the fur trade is not immediately applicable."

No British colonial governor can have been treated more shabbily than Richard Blanshard, the young London lawyer appointed by Grey in July, 1849 to be the first governor of Vancouver Island.

Whatever inducements had been held out to him, he was soon disillusioned. Arriving at Victoria aboard HMS Driver on March 10, 1850, he found no accommodation awaiting him, although months had elapsed since his appointment. He had to live aboard and travel with the ship until quarters were found for him at the fort and then wait until a small house was built for him outside the stockade.

Before leaving London he had been promised 1,000 acres, but when his request for the land was referred to London the company qualified the promise to mean land to be used only during his term as governor. He was denied even 100 acres as a settler.

Since the colony's sole revenues - 90 percent of the proceeds from land and resource sales - were controlled by the company and his appointment carried no provision for salary and expenses, Blanshard had to pay all his own living costs. Prices at the company's store were fixed by category. Company officers paid a 30 percent markup above cost, employees variously paid between 50 and 100 percent and settlers paid 100 percent. Blanshard fell into none of these categories and he was charged around 300 percent His living costs, he complained to Grey, were £1,100 a year.

He found himself governor of a colony in which the effective administration was run by Douglas, who usurped even the few formal prerogatives of his office, such as signing ships registers. Except for a handful of settlers, the colony consisted of company officers and employees or persons connected with the company. His small house contained an office, but other than writing his dispatches to Grey and hearing grievances, he had little use for it.

In a later century, his one opportunity to assert his authority would have provided an avid press with sensational headlines replete with murders, illegal confinement, false reports, a strike, desertions and breach of contract. But Vancouver Island's first newspaper had yet to be published and the story, spread by rumor and inflamed by fear, was confined to official correspondence, to be published years later in the reminiscences of participants.

With the advent of steamships on the Pacific, the company built Fort Rupert on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island in 1849 to exploit what surface samples indicated to be a good coal deposit To develop it, agents in Britain contracted with John Muir to send out a party of eight Scottish miners, all related to him, with their wives and children.

Their introduction to their mine site at Suquash, south of the fort, was hardly encouraging. They were surrounded by Natives demanding that the company compensate them for land containing a substance valued by the white men. Rebuffed, they staged a display of force, threatening to kill them.

When Blanshard visited Fort Rupert during his enforced stay aboard HMS Driver the miners were down 70 feet and an eight-inch seam was the deepest they had struck. Skilled men, used to working the productive seams of the Scottish mines, they were being forced to do laborers' work and, as Blanshard reported to Grey, "unprovided with proper implements, discontented with their employers, and can scarcely be induced to work."

Rumors of employees at company farms and posts breaking their contracts and heading for California merely quickened their desire, in face of the misrepresentations made to them, to break their own three year contracts and join the gold rush. Wage rates at San Francisco were $4 a day, four times their own annual rate of £6~70.

Discontent broke into open revolt on May, 1850. The miners went on strike.

Capt. W. H. McNeill who, as commander of the Beaver, had directed construction of Fort Rupert, had two of them, Andrew Muir and John McGregor, seized, chained and imprisoned in the bastion.

His attempt to break the strike failed. The miners would not go back to work and after nine days the men were finally released.

They were still refusing to work and were being joined in their complaints by the English laborers when Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken arrived later in the month to take up his post as surgeon.

Blanshard, frustrated by his inability to find anyone not connected with the company to appoint, commissioned Helmcken as magistrate and justice of the peace, empowering him to investigate the dispute. As a newcomer, he felt, Helmcken would be least susceptible to company influence.
But Helmcken had made the long voyage from Britain around Cape Horn with the English laborers and he used their complaints about the food they were given aboard the Nonnan Morison against their new grievances about the 'wild food' they were offered. They said they had been promised beef and mutton - and beer and grog and new wine. Oblivious to the fact that beef and mutton were being shipped from the Company's farms to Alaska, Helmcken told them it was out of the question. He failed to persuade them that they would come to like 'wild food' and before long they struck too.
The incidents that followed the arrival of the barque England in June constituted a microcosm of the social upheaval shaking the Old World. Peasants forced off the land by enclosures into the mines and mills, refugees from the horrors of war and the miseries of the industrial revolution, streamed into the Canadas and the U.S. seeking a new life. Too often they found they were subject to the same harsh exploitation and the laws originating in the Old World designed to uphold it.
Aboard the England when she anchored to take on a load of coal for San Francisco were four seamen who had jumped ship in Victoria and either stowed away or been signed on by her master, a Capt. Brown, because he was short of crewmen. Days later the Beaver under Capt. Charles Dodd called at the fort on her way north. Dodd informed Helmcken that he wanted the four held as deserters, but apparently they had been forewarned by the crew. A search of the England failed to find them.
Dodd brought Helmcken's commission as magistrate and instructions from Blanshard to appoint special constables and allow no one to leave the fort. When Helmcken called all the men together and asked for volunteers to serve as constables, however, no one stepped forward. Had he not been a company employee, he would have been as powerless as Blanshard himself.
Years afterward, reflecting on the tragic consequences of the dispute, Helmcken was to write in his memoirs that the Natives "in reaiity, were our best friends and wished to be on good terms with us." (The Remintscences ofDr. John Setastian Helmrken, edited by Dorothy Blakey Smith (University of British Columbia Press, 1975) p.316.)

Helmcken and Blanshard, both a few months out from London, perceived it differently at the time. In their view Fort Rupert was surrounded by 3,000 "savage and treacherous" Natives. Members of various South Kwakiutl bands speaking the same dialect but with their own patterns of local alliances and territorial boundaries along the coasts of Queen Charlotte Sound and northern Vancouver Island, they had adapted to European ways while still preserving their own culture.

That culture included not only the potlatch, the embodiment of their spiritual and social existence and the despair of early missionaries; it also included the surprise attack on another village to seize captives who would be held as slaves for eventual ransom. Most of the employees at the fort had seen the heads of slain enemy warriors arrayed on stakes along the beach at the large Quechold village adjoining the fort. It is unlikely though, that anyone except Helmcken was reminded of the British medieval practice on bridges and castle gates. (Helmeken's observation was: 'Of course, the whites thought all this wrong. They might have asked how many have been lulled in wars by Christians." Pg. 299)

Helmcken blamed liquor supplied by the England's crew for the collapse of discipline among employees at the fort, but liquor was a consequence, not the cause of the strike.

On July 2, six of the Scottish miners deserted, leaving their wives and children behind. With them went the Scottish blacksmith without whose skills the mining operation must eventually grind to a halt. Only John Muir, the oversman and patriarch of the family, his wife Anne and his young son Michael remained at the fort where the other employees maintained their strike.

Then the miners' wives demanded that they be allowed to leave on the England which was preparing to sail, threatening that otherwise they would make the perilous journey by canoe. Sweeping aside all objections, they made their way with their families to the ship.

Over the next few days Helmcken asked Capt. Brown not to take any deserters aboard. He replied that he could not prevent deserters from boarding at night and if any did, officers should be sent to arrest them. Helmcken himself went aboard on July 6 expecting the ship to sail, but he had to go ashore at night to attend Natives injured by a falling tree at the mine.

The England, beset by adverse winds, was still at anchor the next day when Natives brought reports of having seen three white men on an island.

Assuming them to be the miners, George Blenkinsop, in command at the fort, asked an old Quechold chief known to the miners to persuade them to return. Speaking in French through a French-Canadian interpreter, according to Helmcken, he used the expression "par tete" in promising him blankets for each miner he brought back. In the furor that followed this was construed by
the miners to mean "so much per head." Soon the Chief returned to report that the white men were gone from the island.

On July 7, rumors relayed by Native informants indicated that three white men had been murdered. Linecous, the fort's Native interpreter, was sent to find out, returning with another deserter, who was imprisoned in the bastion. But he was not one of the miners.

They, Linecous reported, were safe in their camp at Suchart, some 40 kilometers north of Fort Rupert. He had spoken with Andrew Muir, charged by Capt. McNeill as being the strike leader, and he had said that they were well treated by the people of the Nahwitti village across the strait. Sailing ships followed a course to and from Victoria which took them through Queen Charlotte Strait and along the west coast of Vancouver Island and they intended to board the England as she passed their camp.

Returning from Victoria on July 9, Charles Beardmore, Blenkinsop's second in command, set out two days later in a canoe manned by four Quechold Natives.

His mission was to find the bodies of the three deserters and ascertain who had murdered them.

He returned on July 14 to give a written report to Helmcken that the Nahwittis had denied committing the murders, blaming Haidas or other northern peoples. They had, however, described the spot about six kilometres from Suchart where he found the bodies of Charles and George Wishart, shot through the heart. The body of the third man, Fred Watkins, had been sunk in the water. He had covered the bodies and left them for Helmcken to see for himself, as Helmcken did the following day, taking the bodies back to the fort for identification and burial.

In the meantime, Blanshard had received a letter from one of the strikers which formed the basis for his statement to Grey that many "do not scruple to accuse the officers of the Hudson's Bay Company of having instigated the Indians to the deed by offers of reward for recovery of the men (sailors who had absconded) dead or alive," adding that he had "not yet been able to inquire into the truth of this report, but it is very widespread and men say that they ground their belief in what the Hudson's Bay Company have done before." (Since the maintenance of friendly relations in the fur trade was essential both to the Hudson's Bay Company and the Native chiefs who controlled the supply, the company would hardly have wanted to endanger those relations by seelting the return of the deserters 'dead or alive'. Blanshard, in his dispatches, observed that the Natives "are always treated with the greatest consideration - tar greater than the white laborers, and in many instances are allowed liberties and impunities in the Hudson's Bay Company's establishments that I regard as extremely unsate. No liquor is given them by the company on any pretence, but it is impossible to pr~ vent their obtaining it from the merchant vessels that visit the coast" In the tense atmosphere at Fort Rupert, the train of events understandably engendered suspicion and the accusation of company complicity in the murders. The Scottish miners, however, were being well treated by the Nahwittis and the hunting party may well have intended to assist the deserters. Knowing the penalty for deserrion and fearlng seizure, the deserters' hostile response to an intended friendly gesture apparentiy transformed it into a murderous attack.)

Discovery of the bodies heightened the tension at the fort, the English laborers, in Helmcken's words, being "the most refractory," the seasoned French-Canadians and Kanakas less so, but "still rebellious." But with the departure of the England, their hope of deserting vanished.

Beardmore, as it transpired from his second report, had intercepted the England. He had found her anchored off Suchart, where some of her crew were sounding the bar, having taken the Scottish miners aboard. He went aboard to question Capt. Brown and complained later that the crew had given the Native paddler accompanying him enough liquor to make him useless.

Then he made his way to the Nahwitti summer camp at Buli Harbor where the Nahwittis reluctantly allowed him to land. From the chief in whose lodge he spent the night he elicited the story of the murders that he had falsified by omission in his first report to Helmcken.

Four Nahwittls returning from a hunt saw three white men in a canoe and closed in to tell them where the Scottish miners were camped. The three white men, unarmed except for an axe, fled to shore and turned to face an expected attack. one hurled a rock, smashing the Nahwittis' canoe. Infuriated, the Nahwiffis shot one man and, pursuing the others through the bush, shot and killed them both.

Beardmore returned to the England, but the mate and a crewman pointed muskets at him and would not let him aboard, while a third crewman, Fred Watkins' brother, threatened his revenge.

Reflecting the company's studied policy of isolating Blanshard, Beardmore left his second report at Fort Langley for Douglas to read.

Helmcken did not see it until Beardmore asked to correct his original statement in mid-August, although he had already tendered his resignation as magistrate, citing conflict of interest in his role as a company employee dealing with the complaints of other employees without any means of enforcing his decisions.

By then the strike had folded under the pressure of Douglas' order that those who refused to work should be placed on a daily ration of one pound of flour and confined to the fort. First the French-Canadians and Kanakas returned to work and finally, after what Helmcken termed "trivial concessions" by the company, the English laborers.

Unwittingly the strikers had set the pattern for a century of struggle in Vancouver Island coal mines that would profoundly influence the politics of British Columbia and leave its indelible imprint on a labor movement still in embryo.

Blanshard, who stood accused of maligning the company on the strength of reports reaching him without ascertaining the facts deliberately withheld from him, was the last to see the corrected report. He learned of it in October when he arrived at Fort Rupert aboard HMS Daedalus, commanded by Capt. George Wellesley, one of the British naval vessels stationed on the Pacific coast whose occasional visits afforded him any armed force.

Having determined that the murderers were in fact the three Nahwitti named by Beardmore - the fourth was merely a boy - he determined "to get possession of and punish" them.

Helmcken went in a canoe with a crew of six Secholds, accompanied by Linecous, the interpreter, and Basil Battineau, who had been sworn in as a constable. Approaching the Nahwitti village, they found the beach lined with armed and painted warriors confronting them in the traditional threatening manner. From the canoe, through Linecous, Helmcken demanded that they surrender the murderers. They refused, offering instead to pay compensation in blankets or furs. Warning them that force would be used to seize the murderers if they were not surrendered, Helmcken returned to the fort.

Two days later, three armed boats from the Daedalus descended on the village. But it was deserted, all the Nahwittls gone. To punish them, by Helmcken's account, the boats "practised with some shot and shell and to some extent destroyed the village."

No further attempt to seize the murderers was made until the summer of 1851 when boats from HMS Daphne, commanded by Capt. Edward Fanshawe, went looking for them. They found the Nahwittis had rebuilt their village in a new and more defensible location which they used to good effect before they retreated into the forest, leaving casualties on both sides, although a Nahwitti chief was the sole fatality. The British burned the village and returned to their ship.

Blanshard, still awaiting acceptance of the resignation he had tendered in November, 1850, ordered Blenkinsop to offer a reward for capture of the murderers, 30 blankets for each man. Realizing that the punitive attacks would continue, the Nahwittis decided to surrender them. But the murderers resisted. Two were shot, one escaped, and reportedly a slave was killed as a substitute. Then the Nahwittis took the bodies to the fort to claim the reward. Blenkinsop refused to pay and sent the claim to Blanshard.

By this time Blanshard had Grey's dispatch informing him that he was by no means satisfied with this earlier action to punish the murderers. The British government, Grey wrote, "cannot undertake to protect, or attempt to punish, injuries committed upon British subjects who voluntarily expose themselves to the violence or treachery of the Native tribes at a distance from the settlements.

It was the final slight to a man who throughout his unequal fight to fulfill his duties as governor, had honestly believed he was carrying out British imperialist policy.