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Geographies of the lower Skeena, 1830-1920

University of British Columbia

This study generates a number of geographical ideas and methods for analysing north coastal British Columbia, attempting to show how and why historical geography is a valuable mode of inquiry. During the nineteenth century the human geography of the lower Skeena region was altered by three influential institutions: the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), the Christian Church, and the government. Three settlements were created, within easy access of one another by water. The HBC established a fur trade post (Fort Simpson), the Anglican Church created a missionary site (Metlakatla), and government laws and officials regulated a salmon canning town (Port Essington). All three settlements brought the Coast Tsimshian into sustained contact with 'whites'; HBC traders, missionaries, and government officers had important impacts on aboriginal economies and societies. These institutions comprised a discursive triad that rotated around commercial monopoly, evangelical-humanitarianism, and property-contract laws. However, the three settlements did not simply reflect these institutions, but in part they constituted their underpinning discourses. Port Essington, the most complex of these settlements, was established in 1871 as a trade settlement, but from the 1880s its economy was dominated by the salmon canning industry. Two canneries were built in the town 1883; another in 1899. From the 1880s until the 1920s, Port Essington was the canning centre of the lower Skeena, and was the chief port and commercial centre in the region. Until the 1890s, Victoria merchants extended credit to Port Essington's canners and traders. But by 1902, the town's three canneries were owned and run by Vancouver-based companies. Port Essington's canneries produced for an international salmon market and were implicated in international circuits of financial and industrial capital. The canneries brought Chinese, Japanese, 'whites', and Coast Tsimshian to Port Essington, giving the town the largest and most diverse population in the region. Port Essington harboured many forms of cultural expression. From 1893, provincial police constables monitored social relations within and between these cultural groups, and collected taxes. It is claimed that Port Essington's changing economic, cultural, and political make-up characterise the making of modern British Columbia.

Text

2010-09-02

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/28167

Geography

University of British Columbia

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