Chilcotin War apology deserved

I must address the comments made in Paul Serup’s letter.

Paul doesn’t feel that Canada had anything to do with the Chilcotin Indian War yet all the work being done on roads and trails around that time was being done in preparation to joining Canada.

That apology was long overdue. Had Paul done just a little research it may have opened his mind, but I doubt it.

In 1863, a big businessman (Alfred Waddington) decided that he would build a trail to get groceries and merchandise into the gold fields of B.C. His trail would go up the Homathko River into the Chilcotin plateau. A terrible route!

In the spring of 1863, the Enterprise sailed up Bute Inlet to the river.

To Waddington’s dismay, where he planned his town was a large First Nations encampment of about 250 people. They were Chilcotins, Euciataws, Homathkos and Klayoosh.

Waddington forced them to move up river. It still didn’t bother the Homathkos as they willingly helped unload the ship using their canoes.

Note that most coast Indians spoke no English, but the Chilcotins did. The Royal Engineers laid out the line and Waddington’s Francis Poole had the 80-man crew. Many of the Indigenous were hired to help and they wanted pay in food, but Waddington would only pay with rifles, bullets and blankets.

By fall, some of Poole’s men were sick with small pox.

The following spring, Poole went up to two large villages where about 4,000 aboriginals lived and found “less than a couple dozen people still there.”

In these couple of years, 20,000 B.C. Indigenous people died of the pox (about one-third of the population) and about half of the Chilcotins.

Yes, the Chilcotins were angry, their people were killed and the white man was just taking their land and sending them packing. Who wouldn’t rebel? A war was in full swing.

The Royal Constabulary sought out this band of rebels and with a ruse captured them.

Judge Begbie presided over the court case. Waddingon with all his money played a major role in the case but Judge Begbie did not believe all he had to say and actually acquitted two of the chiefs captured.

To give you an idea of the attitude of the time, Governor Seymour in a letter to colonial secretary Caldwell wrote that “Europeans should thus run down wild Indians and drive them to suicide in their own hunting grounds, in the fruit and fish season” appears to me, I confess short of “marvelous.”

In 1945, a historian, Dr. Shankel, wrote “the cost of the expedition would have been sufficient to extinguish the Indian title to all the land needed for the trail. In other words had the colony not been trying to save money by not paying the Indians for land being taken by the whites, it could have resolved the situation justly and avoided bloodshed much more cheaply than it ended up.”

Canada, the Queen, you and I, owe them that apology.

Terry Burgess Prince George