PAGES OF HISTORY
Proclamations date to Fraser gold rush, when population of area boomed
Colonial B.C. governor James Douglas’ signature and seal adorn a property document that is going up for sale this Saturday. The document is one of several dating to B.C.’s early days that will be available in an auction held by All Nations Stamp and Coin.
The B.C. mainland became a Crown colony on Aug. 2, 1858. A month later, colonial Gov. James Douglas issued a proclamation at Fort Hope, making it illegal to sell or give “spirituous or other intoxicating drinks to Native Indians.”
The document called for anyone who violated the law to be “mulcted in the penal sum of not more than twenty pounds, not less than five pounds, for each and every offence.”
Mulcted is an arcane, 1858 way of saying “fined.” If the person who was convicted couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the fine, they faced a jail term of two to six months.
One-hundred-and-sixty years later, an original copy of the proclamation is going up for sale at Saturday’s All Nations Stamp and Coin auction in Vancouver. The estimate: $300.
A second 1858 proclamation isn’t quite as shocking or racist.
It advises the masses that “certain persons in Victoria and elsewhere have attempted to delude the public by making pretended sales of certain lands on (the) Fraser River.”
In fact, the document asserts, “no lands at or near Langley, or elsewhere on the Fraser River, have been in any way encumbered or sold, and that the title to all such lands is vested in the Crown.”
The second document dates to Sept. 15, 1858, and was also proclaimed by Douglas. It also carries an estimate of $300.
“I understand that these particular versions are 1860s printings,” said Brian Grant Duff of All Nations Stamp and Coin. “I would imagine them being in the post offices, etc. But obviously there weren’t many official government buildings or post offices then.”
There weren’t. The documents date to the Fraser gold rush, when the B.C. mainland went from having a couple of handfuls of residents of European descent to about 30,000, virtually overnight.
The influx of American miners led Britain to declare the mainland a full colony. Vancouver Island had already been declared a Crown colony on Jan. 13, 1849; it remained a separate colony until it merged with B.C. on Aug. 8, 1866.
Douglas, a longtime official of the Hudson’s Bay Co., was named the governor of both colonies. The auction also includes an 1860 document signed by Douglas and another prominent pioneer, Alfred Waddington, over the lease of some land in today’s Fairfield District in Victoria. Its estimate is $750.
John McLoughlin was also a prominent Hudson’s Bay Co. official, in the era where HBC lands went all the way to the Oregon border. American settlers flooded into what became Oregon in the 1840s, and McLoughlin’s aid to them was so key to their survival that in 1957 the Oregon state legislature named him the “Father of Oregon.”
Grant Duff is auctioning an HBC document signed by McLoughlin on Nov. 9, 1842 that will appeal to collectors on both sides of the border. It lists some goods that arrived damaged aboard the SS Beaver, the legendary HBC vessel that ran aground off Prospect Point in Stanley Park on July 26, 1888. The goods had been sent from Fort Nisqually on Puget Sound ( between Tacoma and Olympia, Wash.) to Fort Vancouver (today ’s Vancouver, Wash.). It has an estimate of $500.
Another historic gem is a letter from San Francisco to Williams Creek in the Cariboo in 1864. Williams Creek was a mining settlement located a mile or so from Barkerville during the Cariboo Gold Rush in the 1860s.
“(Pioneer express companies) Wells Fargo, Barnard’s (Cariboo Express) and Dietz and Nelson all had a hand in carrying this letter from San Francisco to Williams Creek,” said Grant Duff. “It was originally pasted on a larger package, presumably damaged and someone managed to put it back together. It’s an amazing mix of U.S. stamps to pay the U.S. postage, B.C. stamps to pay the B.C. postage and expresscompany franks (stamps).”
Online bidding for the auction can be done now, and live bidding will start at noon on Saturday.
I would imagine them being in the post offices, etc. But obviously there weren’t many official government buildings or post offices then.