JOHN DEAS SAW MONEY IN CANNING SALMON BOUNTY
Black businessman from U.S. set up first commercial facility in B.C.
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians. When 800 ounces of gold from B.C. arrived at San Francisco’s mint in February 1858, it triggered a frenzy. John Sullivan Deas, a free black tradesman, followed the stampede.
Conflict with First Nations in Washington Territory channelled the gold rush through Fort Victoria. It went from a population of 30 to 3,000 in months. By year’s end, 30,000 gold seekers had passed through.
Among the first arrivals were 400 black members of San Francisco’s Zion Methodist Episcopal Church looking for “liberty under the British lion.” They were welcomed by Gov. James Douglas, himself having black ancestry, and Edward Cridge, a progressive Englishman who built the colony’s first Anglican Church, created Victoria’s first hospital, an orphanage and supervised schools.
Born in Charleston, S.C., in 1838, Deas arrived in Victoria in 1862. He married Fanny Harris, who had come from Hamilton, Ont., with Cridge presiding. By 1866, Deas was in business at Yale, but by 1868 was back in Victoria running a hardware and stove business. Deas was convinced that the real money wasn’t in moiling for gold but harvesting the silver bounty of salmon. And he had just the skill to exploit the abundance — he knew how to make cans.
In 1871, Deas partnered with Captain Edward Stamp. Stamp provided capital and Deas provided cans. Stamp died suddenly, Deas pre-empted what is now Deas Island, and by 1877, he had the leading commercial salmon cannery.
Then unscrupulous competitors moved in. A cannery in New Westminster appropriated drifts that Deas had cleared of snags. When he objected, he got three weeks in jail. He was acquitted on appeal, but his season was lost.
The following year, he sold out and moved with his wife and sev- en surviving children to Portland, where Fanny bought a rooming house.
Deas died July 22, 1880, aged 42, the leading black industrialist in a fishing industry that would come to define B.C.’s economy. The tunnel under the south arm of the Fraser once bore his name but, in 1967, it was renamed for George Massey, a one-term Social Credit MLA from Delta. Today, all that remains of his once-mighty cannery is a historical plaque and the graves of two of his children, Robert Lyle, who died in 1868 just before his third birthday, and Margaret, who died aged two months in 1877, a family tragedy that perhaps spurred the decision to leave.