Chapter 13. The Farthest West
13.10 A Shrinking Indigenous Landscape in the 1860s
We begin this chapter with a photograph (Figure 13.34) by well known “Native” photographer, Edward Curtis. His work has attracted controversy and criticism because of the way in which he staged each shot to create, in his view, a sense of “timelessness” and lack of progress.[1]
Smallpox, 1862-63
In the spring of 1862 “patient zero” stepped off a ship from San Francisco and into the streets of Victoria, the capital and trademart of the Colony of Vancouver Island. He was carrying smallpox and the harbour was crowded with Indigenous traders. Rather than quarantine that community and apply the kinds of practices modelled 80 years earlier at Cumberland House (see Chapter 5), the colonial administration ordered the encampments cleared. They sent traders home to their villages up the coast, which proved to be a lethal error. Smallpox travelled with them and claimed about 20,000 lives, virtually all of them Indigenous people. A third to two-thirds of the Indigenous population was gone almost overnight.
This isn’t merely a statistical note: the psychological trauma can barely be imagined. Kekulis (pithouses) piled high with the dead were simply abandoned and allowed to collapse on themselves; above-ground houses and whole villages were torched in the hope that doing so would halt the march of smallpox. Survivors, particularly children, starved to death with no one left to feed them. There were literally bodies everywhere. One account from the Cariboo gold district describes seeing canoes floating past on the Fraser River, filled with bloated corpses. This was near-extinction for many communities and some of them have never recovered.
Smallpox made subsequent appearances in British North America and post-Confederation Canada, but they were minor events by comparison. The 1860s epidemic was, for once, well documented by newcomers and as a result historians have a good sense of its enormity, particularly for those who survived. In the Pentlatch village on Vancouver Island, there was one survivor. That individual was adopted into the K’ómoks (Comox), a Kwakwakw’wakw band that moved south into the vacuum left behind by smallpox. But the K’ómoks themselves were badly reduced. There was no Indigenous community in the Comox Valley strong enough to resist the intrusion of newcomers in the decade that followed. The colonists stripped the hillsides of cedars and firs, they opened up the ground and its seams of coal, they claimed the fisheries, and confined the indigenous people to a postage-stamp sized reserve.
The experience of the K’ómoks was fairly typical of events as they unfolded on Vancouver Island and in British Columbia. Smallpox made space. The newcomers were themselves fewer in number than they had been at the height of the gold rush but some were optimistic about colonialism.
The Chilcotin War
The smallpox story continued with the Bute Inlet crisis (also known as the Chilco