He once had in his hands the life of (future Sir) James Douglas, but was great enough to refrain from taking it,” reads Chief Kwah’s gravestone. Photo: hp071315
There’s a lot of things that are written that are not true about the Native people and their ways like they say. Like, my tribe, they’re the Carrier, and they say that they used to carry the bones of their husbands on their backs. According to my father, that isn’t true. They didn’t carry them, the bones, on their back at all. He said he had never heard of this. I told him what was written, and he said “I never heard of such a thing.” He said they used to bury them in the trees, sort of cache them, I guess. And they would bury them later, I guess. After the white man came, they showed them how to bury their dead.
But the story about James Douglas, well, it’s been retold so many times, and a thing added here and a thing added there. Well, this is the true story of what, just what did happen.
ORCHARD: How did they resolve that problem?
HALL: Well, they talked about it after he told the fellow to—this man—he let him go. And he didn’t want to let him go, but Kwah said to let him go, so he had to take his hands off James Douglas. And then they talked about it, you know, and so they left quite peaceably after that. Well, remember that there was no law, no policemen or anything, and these Natives were used to protecting one another and protecting their wives and their families.
The townsite of Lytton, 1875. Photo: hp037815
Won’t Do
Anyone Any Good to Fight
DANNY MILO
on Natives and White Men during
the First Gold Rush
(RECORDED IN APRIL 1963)
_____
DANIEL MILO (1864–1966) was 98 years old at the time of this interview. Born in Sardis, B.C., in the Fraser Valley as a member of the Chilliwack First Nation, Milo outlived all eleven of his brothers and sisters. His parents lived in a home on the banks of the Old Chilliwack River, and when he was a child, the current swelled and the family home was washed away. He offered many flood stories to Orchard. Milo also illustrates a lot of history and some oral tradition about the Chilliwack people, including details about geography, particularly that of Cultus and Sumas lakes.
Here, Milo discusses details about what is now known as the Fraser Canyon War, which took place in the fall of 1858. The combatants of the war were six impromptu regiments of immigrant gold workers from around Yale, and the Nlaka’pamux (known in English as the Thompson or Hakamaugh). The centre of Nlaka’pamux territory was called Camchin, the modern-day townsite of Lytton. Gold panning in the area greatly disrupted the riverbeds and, consequently, the livelihoods of many First Nation communities. The tensions escalated when the Nlaka’pamux retaliated for the rape of one of their young women by French miners and sent decapitated bodies downriver. Many miners panicked when bodies began to circle in the eddies by Yale, the centre of commerce.
There were two regiments of particular importance: 1) the Whatcom Company was formed of mostly southern Americans and was led by Captain Graham. They were enthusiastic about a war of extermination as a means of dealing with anything that stood in the way of their search for gold, and 2) New York’s Pike Guards were the most influential of
all the regiments and were led by Captain Snyder. Snyder had corres-pondence with Governor James Douglas in Victoria and sought a peaceful resolution to the conflict. Snyder urged the members of all regiments to make
a distinction between “friendly Indians” and “hostile Indians.”
All but two or three men in the Whatcom Company died in a nighttime gun-battle, but there were no Aboriginals in-volved. A panicked reaction to a rifle falling and discharging had led the soldiers to shoot one another. Meanwhile, the Nlaka’pamux war leader wanted to exterminate the non-Natives, but as Milo describes, the Chief Cxpentlum (known as David Spintlum in English), who had a good relationship with Douglas, managed to broker a peaceful pact with Captain Snyder. Six treaties were made after the meeting, though none of them exist in any form to this day.
Milo discusses two groups of “Indians” in his anecdote: the Chilliwack and the Nlaka’pamux, or Thompson, Nations.
MILO: You know, the Indians, when I first hear them speaking about the white man. In them days, those white people, they were travelling on the way to the gold rush. They were starving. Because they were starving, they had nothing to eat on the way through. Well the Indians began to feed them, feed them until they get all right, and then they start again.
They say the Indians here in this valley, Chilliwack Valley, are about the kindest Indians that’s living. That’s what the white people said.
They got way up at the canyon. On that time, there was no road at all, just little trails for the Indians to travel on. Well those Indians got mean, and they drowned a lot of them that were walking through that trail. My father used to tell me, every once and while, he’d see a man drifting with a pack, drifting down the river. Well, they found out what was going on up there, wherever they send the armies from, around Victoria, I guess, or New Westminster. They sent them up to stop them people, or kill them, because they kill a lot of white people going up to the gold mine.
They come there, these armies, and look around the place there. They don’t see any man that is fit to be going around at all. Just old people, women, that’s all they see.
And there was a man that was living at Lytton. He was the head man of all that speaking. Thompson language, you see. There was a man, the head of that speaking, you see. He lives at Lytton. His name was Spintlum. He come down there and see the army was right there, ready to catch any Indian that’s around there.
He started to talk to them. “I don’t think it will do anybody any good at all to go and fight about this. I’ll talk to them myself.”
“Those men are down some, you can’t find them. Them people, they know the whole place of these hills here, mountains. They go up there, you can’t get them.”
“So it’s just the good way for you people to just let it go, and I’ll talk to them to quit that.” That’s what this Spintlum said.
Well, the army said, “All right. We wish that you would do that, and talk to them not to do it anymore.” So they quit. They started to build a road then from Yale to the gold mine. They began to have pack horses, wagons.
When I was a boy, I see a pile of wagons there at Yale, what they use going up to the mines, see, and pack horses, you know. It was the Spanish people using the pack horses, you know. They’re the ones that understand how to use pack horses.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен
