Many in British Columbia cling to the belief that a peaceful transfer of power in the mid-1800s transformed Indigenous lands into a British colony.
However, both the written record and the oral histories of many Indigenous peoples tell a different story.
In the 1850s and 1860s, on Vancouver Island and elsewhere on the coast, British colonists took advantage of disaster while seizing Indigenous land and crushing Indigenous resistance. In 1859, the colony’s first governor, Sir James Douglas, warned it was “unreasonable and hopeless to expect any change in the ideas and minds of savage races.”1 A year later, he declared that “persuasive and gentle means” would not be enough to establish British authority.
When a smallpox epidemic struck Vancouver Island in 1862, colonial authorities set in motion a plan that led to the deaths of thousands. By then, European settlers had occupied Lekwungen territory and named it “Victoria” after their queen. The newly-appointed Governor Douglas and a small army of police had forced the Songhees people in the area to move their villages to small reserves. Meanwhile, access to European trade goods drew Indigenous people from all over the coast to surround Victoria with ad hoc communities, governed by their own laws, that often outnumbered the colonists.
Smallpox was endemic in Europe, but unknown in North America before European immigration and trafficking of enslaved people from other continents. Victoria’s newspapers first reported smallpox cases on March 28, 1862 among children at the Songhees village.2 The official record blames an infected passenger who got off a ship from San Francisco and visited the Songhees Reserve.
Smallpox was unknown in North America before European immigration and human trafficking
The epidemic would have been stopped in its tracks if Governor Douglas had taken the obvious step of quarantining the victims. Instead, records show the governor left the infected children in the close quarters of their family homes without medical care. As the disease spread through the Songhees Reserve, he ordered the police to drive other Indigenous groups from their settlements onto the reserve at gunpoint, burning their homes as they went and forcing healthy people into close contact with the deadly disease.
At the same time, authorities endeavoured to safeguard the health of the settlers by vaccinating almost all of them immediately. This was effective, as the Daily British Colonist reported in mid-May: “So far as we can learn, there are no white persons afflicted with small pox in Victoria and only one at the hospital.”3
But few Indigenous people were vaccinated, and those few received vaccines that were ineffective at best. They were not provided with medical care; a “hospital” established on the reserve was little more than a warehouse for the sick and dying. The bodies spread further contagion on the reserve, as the authorities refused to bury them.4
At the height of the epidemic, between April and June 1862, the Police Commissioner made several “sweeps” through Indigenous communities, moving large groups of people from one area to another before expelling them entirely and burning their homes. This ensured that “every two weeks, a new wave of infected natives fleeing Victoria would wash up the coast and increase the risk of new epidemics at every locality,” as Tom Swanky writes in The True Story Of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific.
On April 28, the police broadcast their first expulsion order: “All Indians living within the limits of the town, who do not live with whites, have been notified to leave for the Reserve or the huts occupied by them will be pulled down about their ears. The gunboat Grappler arrived in the harbor last evening to be on hand,” wrote the Daily British Colonist.5
“Fully 75 per cent of the Haida that left Victoria are said to have perished from the disease.”
The Victoria Daily Press reported May 28 on the Police Commissioner’s command for “the immediate ejection of all the aborigines living anywhere in the vicinity of white settlements … [W]e may expect three days hence not to have any members of the native tribes in the streets of Victoria.” The police again burned Indigenous homes and possessions so the owners could not return to them.
Haida people were the last to be expelled in late May. Many of them had fallen ill, and on June 22, 1862, the Colonist reported that “Fully 75 per cent of the Haida that left Victoria are said to have perished from the disease.”
Another Colonist news report stated bluntly: “We should not be in the least surprised if the disease were to visit and nearly destroy every tribe between here and Sitka.” Indeed, when Indigenous people fled to their communities along the coast, the epidemic came with them, with devastating consequences.
Approximately 14,000 people – almost all of them Indigenous – died during the epidemic of 1862-1863.
There were some efforts to mitigate the tragedy. A few white settlers attempted to shelter native people by hiding them in their homes. In parts of Washington state, Indigenous people were given proper vaccines. Indigenous leaders at Alert Bay set up a quarantine zone on a nearby island for visitors and residents fleeing Victoria, which protected the community from the worst of the epidemic.
In 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau exonerated six Tsilhqot’in chiefs executed in 1864 by colonial authorities during the Chilcotin War. The chiefs were publicly hanged for killing white colonists who they saw as invaders deliberately spreading smallpox to Indigenous settlements. In the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation, we may one day see an apology for the brutality of British colonial authorities during the smallpox epidemic.
Our thanks to Tom Swanky for his extensively-researched book The True Story Of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific and The Smallpox War Against the Haida, available at
www.shawnswanky.com. All footnotes are from that work.
- Anglican Archives of BC. Bishop George Hills, Journal, 1862, April 3 and 9
- The Daily British Colonist, March 28, 1862.
- The Daily British Colonist, May 14, 1862.
- The Daily Press, April 27, 1862
- The Daily British Colonist, April 30, 1862.
