On the Cusp of Contact

Gender, Space and Race in the Colonization of British Columbia

Jean Barman, Margery Fee

• Publisher: Harbour Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781550178968
• eBook ISBN: 9781550178975
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"The ways in which we can redress the past are many and varied," writes Jean Barman, "and it is up to each of us to act as best we can." The seventeen essays collected here, originally published between 1996 and 2013, make a valuable contribution toward this laudable goal. With a wide range of source material, from archival and documentary sources to oral histories, Barman pieces together stories of individuals and groups disadvantaged in white settler society because of their gender, race and/or social class.

Working to recognize past actors that have been underrepresented in mainstream histories, Barman's focus is BC on "the cusp of contact." The essays in this collection include fascinating, though largely forgotten, life stories of the frontier—that space between contact and settlement, where, for a brief moment, anything seemed possible.

This volume, featuring over thirty archival photographs and illustrations, makes these important and very readable essays accessible to a broader audience for the first time.

Finding Solace in Family and Place

8 Family Life at Fort Langley

This essay tracks the families of those men who worked at Fort Langley as “servants” for the Hudson’s Bay Company on three-year contracts. They were primarily French Canadians, Kanakas (Hawaiians), and “English, Scots and men of mixed descent, including Iroquois from eastern Canada and Cree from Red River.” Their wives were mainly Kwantlen and Cowichan. Permitted to partner with local women only after two years of services, these men’s alliances were intended to encourage them to take up another three-year contract with the company. This business tactic succeeded, although some men had difficulty coping with wives who were not used to submission and who left when not well treated. Nonetheless, even after the closure of Fort Langley, the families remained and descendants of these families still live in the area.

By Jean Barman. Reprinted with permission from British Columbia Historical News 32, no. 4 (1999): 16–23.

We each bring to the fur trade our particular sets of assumptions. I long conceived of it as a man’s game in which, to use the clichés of an earlier day, “tough-minded” Scots, “easygoing” voyageurs who always seemed to be singing as their canoes sped along, and “obliging” Kanakas more or less hung out together in the wilderness.¹ There is nothing wrong with these images, so long as we use them as a starting point and realize that much more also went on, including family life.

Context

To understand the origins of family life, generally and at Fort Langley, we have to reflect on the fur trade as a whole and to recognize, most importantly, that it was a business. The Hudson’s Bay Company, which ran the fur trade across the Pacific Northwest by the time of Fort Langley’s establishment in 1827, was a private enterprise out to make a profit. The goal was to persuade local Indigenous people to trade furs for goods at an exchange rate low enough to make a profit when these furs were turned into products of desire, ranging from trimming for clothing to beaver hats.

The fur trade worked only so long as Indigenous societies remained reasonably intact. Local people had both to be able to continue to hunt and trap and to want the goods that fur traders had to offer with no or few options for acquiring them. This meant that trading posts like Fort Langley and the two or three dozen others scattered across the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the nineteenth century were, by their very nature, isolated dots within an Indigenous world. Once gold was discovered along the Fraser River and the gold rush broke out in 1858 the world of the fur trade essentially collapsed. Some posts continued in operation for a time, as did Fort Langley, but as pale reflections of what they had once been. The arrival of thousands of newcomers gave local people new choices that unbalanced the fur trade and also the Indigenous societies themselves.

Most of the jobs in the fur trade were in no way glamorous or romantic. What they demanded was hard brute labour. Furs had to be traded, packed, and transported out and new trade goods brought in. Foodstuffs had to be raised or acquired. Other commodities that might be usefully sold had also to be packaged to be shipped out, as, for instance, salmon in barrels. All the same, it is the officers whom we have most often equated with the fur trade. In particular, the few published studies we have about family life, notably Many Tender Ties by Sylvia Van Kirk and Strangers in Blood by Jennifer Brown, are really only talking about officers and their families.²

Each post had just one or two men known as officers, who were generally English or Scottish in background, literate, in the fur trade as a career, and what we might think of as gentlemen. The other dozen to two dozen men stationed at Fort Langley or at any of the other Pacific Northwest posts at any one point in time were what the HBC called servants. These were men hired on three-year contracts who were usually of very modest background and generally illiterate.

About 120 men worked at Fort Langley between 1827 and 1858, of whom no more than eight or ten were officers or clerks. The two most important were Archibald McDonald, there from 1828 to 1833, and his successor, James Murray Yale, from 1833 through mid-century. It was McDonald and then Yale who lived in the “Big House,” in the case of McDonald with his wife, Jane Klyne, and growing family. All of the other hundred-plus men at Fort Langley were contract employees, who divided roughly equally into three groups. The first were French Canadians, the second indigenous Hawaiians known as Kanakas, and the third a combination of Englishmen, Scots, and men of mixed descent, including Iroquois from eastern Canada and Cree from Red River.

This then was Fort Langley, an isolated dot in an Indigenous sea where a gentleman officer, possibly with a clerk to assist him, oversaw a dozen to two dozen illiterate men of diverse backgrounds and language whose brute labour made the difference between profit and loss, and hence the future career prospects of the officer in charge.

Origins of Family Life

Family life came about because, quite simply, it served the economic self-interests of the fur trade and, more specifically, of Fort Langley, and also the self-interests of the Indigenous peoples all around them. Kwantlen, Musqueam, Nanaimo, and Cowichan peoples regularly passed by Fort Langley as they went up and down the Fraser River, sometimes in the hundreds.³ It is only to be expected that they would be curious about this strange new place in their midst and were soon jostling with each other for best advantage. What better way to get access than to have someone trustworthy on the inside? Given that these newcomers were mostly men alone, without women, who better than a daughter or a sister?

McDonald, as the officer in charge during Fort Langley’s early years, was just as eager as were local peoples to establish ties in order to encourage more furs to be offered. The interplay between the two sides, how each sought to manipulate the other, becomes visible by looking at this first test case, so to speak.

It was in November 1828, just over a year after Fort Langley’s establishment, that McDonald made a suggestion to his young clerk, James Murray Yale, which he reported in his journal: “The “Quaintkine [Kwantlen], . . . being the principal Indians of the neighbourhood & [the only ones] who at all exert themselves to Collect Beaver, we have thought it good Policy in Mr. Yale to form a Connection ...

Table of contents

• Author’s Preface
• Introduction
• Making White Space
• Indigenous Women
• Finding Solace in Family and Place
• Navigating Schooling
• Selected Works by Jean Barman
• Index