The Things One Learns While Killing Time

[mbarrick]

I have another photography gig tonight and was just killing time having dinner and a Guinness at the pub. I grabbed an old copy of the "British Columbia Historical News" from work to read over dinner and learned some very interesting things:

Turns out the James Douglas (the first governor of British Columbia and Vancouver Island, for which the main street in Victoria is named) was not born in Scotland as I was taught in school. Turns out that while his father was Scottish, James Douglas was born in the Caribbean and his mother was a Jamaican mulatto. And while it is common knowledge that the British put an emphasis on colonising Vancouver Island in the early 1860's to provide a bulwark against American "Manifest Destiny" expansionism, what is not common knowledge is the first 100 colonists brought by Douglas where blacks from California that wanted to leave the U.S. and become British citizens for fear of California joining the Confederate states (most of those colonists ended up bailing on Victoria and going back to the U.S. after the south lost the war, BTW). Interesting stuff.

Comments

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

yeh the book i read said he was born in british guiana...in fact the black community of victoria formed the first militia defences of the island, they were called the victoria pioneer rifle corps...another interesting thing is that the san juan islands were actually awarded to the states through arbitration by a german emporer after the pig war...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

The militia is only logical since Douglas was looking for permanent residents to defend the island. It was probably part of the deal for citizenship.

I knew about the pig war. The Alaska Panhandle border was similarly ambigiously worded and we got the short end of the stick on that one, too. Skagway was founded as a Mountie outpost during the Yukon gold rush.

The article I read mentioned his birth in British Guiana, but explained that his father left the mother while she was still pregnant to go to British Guiana to make money and it is presumed, based on one account, that the mother followed at a later date and gave birth there. There is no definite record of the birth.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

yeh the british messed it up in many ways...they actually colonized right down to the columbia river...it was only when the threat of manifest destiny was evident that they agreed to make it the 49th parallel...otherwise seattle would be in canada, and we'd be the kings of crappy software...ha ha...