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I'm copy-pasting the first paragraph which I'll dissemble (ressemble?) in the next day or two, and then work my way down from there. This is just a note to myself so bear with me for changes to this section in the next few days. This paragraph I could spend a day on tweaking; you'll see what I mean; the later ones I haven't read yet. It's complicated stuff, and hard to sum up for encyclopedic reading; and most of the "big histories" in print are full of crap; the moderns as bad as the 19th Century; at least those in the 19th Century had the premise of being honest, and not willing to sacrifice facts for ideology....but I digress. The geopolitical vacuum which left a dominant British claim, with an active economic infrastructure, in an area that had been a Great Power trading-piece for some time, has to be accounted properly; have a look at the Fifty Four Forty or Fight page and the new history of Alaska thing underway; I'm trying to work on getting them to coordinate with us, and also explore non-Yankee POVs on their own local history; and also to integrate their events with ours, especially important before 1871 and even since; I'll get into the whole Oregon Country thing (another article I've had a go at, but not as trenchantly as I'd like).
Anyway; here's the beginning of my notes to myself. The Mainland Colony was a truly bizarre place, with an unusual birth and an even crazier history. Let's try and do it justice.
Skookum1 07:48, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
Please see RE BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum re: Talk:List of United States military history events#Border Commission troops in the Pacific Northwest. If you think maybe I should also move some or copy some of my other stuff from NW history and BC history pages and various Indigenous peoples project article/talk pages let me know; I never mean to blog, but I'm voluble and to me everything's interconnected; never meaning to dominate a page so have made this area to post my historical rambles on. Thoughts? Skookum1 03:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm proposing that the United Colonies article be merged here. I can't really see the need for two, since the period of the united colonies simply describes one stage in the evolution. The material in that brief article can act as a background context to this one and avoid needless content forking. Fishhead64 21:13, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
BTW there's no article in English Wikipedia on the Queen Charlottes as a separate colony or territory, briefly-lived though that was; there's one on the Stikine Territory though (Stickeen properly, in its legal name); curiously enough I found it in a listing of "lieutenant-governors" in French Wikipedia (where I weighed in as on one of the original L-G pages here about Douglas et al. not being L-G's, and also that Chief Factors and HBC Governors were not the same thing as colonial governors; in de facto terms yes but not in terms of de jure succession; there's a case to be made that Simpson, for instance, was the Governor of Columbia District by being Governor of the HBC; but the Columbia District was not a political entity, only a trading monopoly with no concrete territory other than its posts and farms; and it was run by Chief Factors, not by the company Governor...all technical asides, but related to the separate-article-for-eacy entity that relates to the pre/post-1866 BC thing just above, and to nomenclature problems in general. As far as formal succession goes, even in terms of McLoughlin's and Douglas' relations with natives as also with Vancouver's and Quadra's, t he "governors" of the region pre-1858 were the native "states" and their chiefs (explicitly and always referred to as "king" in the early days, hyas tyee); which is partly why Douglas made a point of appointing them as magistrates (hyas chutch - chutch being CJ for "judge")... Skookum1 00:23, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Realized that that hasn't been written yet, although once-intended long ago, as a result of a tangent from a link-change in Duncan River re that river's namesake as a candidate for the Council from the Kootenay District. The other colonial orgs should have articles also, have to get to that; among so much else... Skookum1 ( talk) 06:07, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
I made some small changes to the Seymour section; which appears to have been cribbed from a badly-written general history somewhere that gets both facts and geography wrong; the priority is the History of BC article for stuff like this but just serving notice this section is a "gloss" of the actual facts, and Seymour was shunted aside even before his death; affairs for most of his regime were conducted by Arthur Nonus Birch, who was teh de facto governor as the governor's dypsomania made him entirely useless as an administrator...fond of ceremony, popular with the public (because he could hold his liquor, or could drink a lot of it anyway), he really wasn't a very good governor; he wanted to be, but..... Skookum1 ( talk) 17:15, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
I changed the description of the Governor's route, which was via the Homathko Canyon and only incidentally via an extremity of the Coast Range, namely the bit through which teh Homathko flos; but the Homathko's length is mostly through the Coast Mountains as such, of which the Chilcotin Ranges are only a small part, and their bulk is southeast of anywhere the Governor got...he camped out on the Chilcotin Plateau at Puntzi Lake, with a view of the Chilcotin Ranges...he did not "cross them", nor is that anythign remarkable in comparison to crossing mountains nearly anywhere else in the province...more impressive if he'd come via Bella Coola and the Atnarko via the Mackenzie grease trail, which at least required some real mountain-crossing (via the Rainbow Range, though, not the Chilcotin). The typical sendup of "Chilcotin Ranges" mythology, the romanticism attached to the Chilcotin that is overlain on surrounding areas/peoples when really only incidental, it always gets me, coming from the Interior as I do.....the fashionability and cachet of the Chilcotin name has been extended southwards to the Lillooet Country and north into the Nechako; one fatuous and widely-published academic history says the Tsilhqot'in took part in the Fraser Canyon Gold rush; which is rubbish but the UBC professor who published that hasn't been asked to surrender her tenure as a result (which I believe should be a punishment for such traveesties of bad history and bad geography. Similarly the logic given concerning the colony's fate towards amalgamation comes off like synthesis, or the analysis of only one source....I'm beginning to finally come to terms with Wikipedia's main failings; intelligent writing of history cant' be done without some synthesis, some inquiry, some recognition fo what are bad sources and worse analyses....so while eventually accretive additions to most articles can eventually coalesce all published knowledge within wikipedia, it will only make as much sense as it's now allowed to, and there's very little room for debating what's a good source and what's a bad source. To me, much of this article was written using bad sources, or at least hackneyed "officialized" accounts...this is not a criticism of the previous editors, only of the result of the inefficacy of the sources in relaying useful truths; the colonial economy discovered an important truth - the more you spend to build infrastructure to support economic extraction without properly controlling the revenues from that extraction, it's inevitable that such infrastructural spending will cause governmental bankruptcy; the Cariboo Road is painted as some kind of great work; it was, engineering-wise, but not politically or financially, in which case it was a freaking disaster and wound up leading to the colony's unfair terms of union with Canada.....all because the colonial officials had been too weak-kneed to look into the pokebags of American and Chinese and other non-reporting revenue extractors (or been paid off not to look), and the government made little money from its road-building efforts or from the cost of the Gold Escort and spending on supply infrastructure like flour mills; Seymour was captain of a desperately sinking ship, that was doomed before he took charge, and corrupt in the extreme like all colonial administrations were....no wonder he drank himself to death..... Skookum1 ( talk) 04:50, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
This has an issue:
No, not the next six years, certainly...I'll check the date of Seymour's accession to the job, I think it was in '64 (five years later, or less. Seymour also made a point of living in New West, if anywhere (i.e. when not "on the road" around the province). Skookum1 ( talk) 17:32, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
If this is supposed to be the official language, the Colony did not have one, other than in de facto terms; if it's supposed to be "languages spoken there", it's a long list and that doesn't mean just native languages and Chinook Jargon. Skookum1 ( talk) 10:18, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
The map displayed shows British Columbia as it is, not as the colony was. See the description in the first paragraph wherein it is stated that the colony was only about one-half the size of modern B.C. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 154.5.153.168 ( talk) 18:23, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
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I'm copy-pasting the first paragraph which I'll dissemble (ressemble?) in the next day or two, and then work my way down from there. This is just a note to myself so bear with me for changes to this section in the next few days. This paragraph I could spend a day on tweaking; you'll see what I mean; the later ones I haven't read yet. It's complicated stuff, and hard to sum up for encyclopedic reading; and most of the "big histories" in print are full of crap; the moderns as bad as the 19th Century; at least those in the 19th Century had the premise of being honest, and not willing to sacrifice facts for ideology....but I digress. The geopolitical vacuum which left a dominant British claim, with an active economic infrastructure, in an area that had been a Great Power trading-piece for some time, has to be accounted properly; have a look at the Fifty Four Forty or Fight page and the new history of Alaska thing underway; I'm trying to work on getting them to coordinate with us, and also explore non-Yankee POVs on their own local history; and also to integrate their events with ours, especially important before 1871 and even since; I'll get into the whole Oregon Country thing (another article I've had a go at, but not as trenchantly as I'd like).
Anyway; here's the beginning of my notes to myself. The Mainland Colony was a truly bizarre place, with an unusual birth and an even crazier history. Let's try and do it justice.
Skookum1 07:48, 4 March 2006 (UTC)
Please see RE BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum re: Talk:List of United States military history events#Border Commission troops in the Pacific Northwest. If you think maybe I should also move some or copy some of my other stuff from NW history and BC history pages and various Indigenous peoples project article/talk pages let me know; I never mean to blog, but I'm voluble and to me everything's interconnected; never meaning to dominate a page so have made this area to post my historical rambles on. Thoughts? Skookum1 03:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm proposing that the United Colonies article be merged here. I can't really see the need for two, since the period of the united colonies simply describes one stage in the evolution. The material in that brief article can act as a background context to this one and avoid needless content forking. Fishhead64 21:13, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
BTW there's no article in English Wikipedia on the Queen Charlottes as a separate colony or territory, briefly-lived though that was; there's one on the Stikine Territory though (Stickeen properly, in its legal name); curiously enough I found it in a listing of "lieutenant-governors" in French Wikipedia (where I weighed in as on one of the original L-G pages here about Douglas et al. not being L-G's, and also that Chief Factors and HBC Governors were not the same thing as colonial governors; in de facto terms yes but not in terms of de jure succession; there's a case to be made that Simpson, for instance, was the Governor of Columbia District by being Governor of the HBC; but the Columbia District was not a political entity, only a trading monopoly with no concrete territory other than its posts and farms; and it was run by Chief Factors, not by the company Governor...all technical asides, but related to the separate-article-for-eacy entity that relates to the pre/post-1866 BC thing just above, and to nomenclature problems in general. As far as formal succession goes, even in terms of McLoughlin's and Douglas' relations with natives as also with Vancouver's and Quadra's, t he "governors" of the region pre-1858 were the native "states" and their chiefs (explicitly and always referred to as "king" in the early days, hyas tyee); which is partly why Douglas made a point of appointing them as magistrates (hyas chutch - chutch being CJ for "judge")... Skookum1 00:23, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Realized that that hasn't been written yet, although once-intended long ago, as a result of a tangent from a link-change in Duncan River re that river's namesake as a candidate for the Council from the Kootenay District. The other colonial orgs should have articles also, have to get to that; among so much else... Skookum1 ( talk) 06:07, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
I made some small changes to the Seymour section; which appears to have been cribbed from a badly-written general history somewhere that gets both facts and geography wrong; the priority is the History of BC article for stuff like this but just serving notice this section is a "gloss" of the actual facts, and Seymour was shunted aside even before his death; affairs for most of his regime were conducted by Arthur Nonus Birch, who was teh de facto governor as the governor's dypsomania made him entirely useless as an administrator...fond of ceremony, popular with the public (because he could hold his liquor, or could drink a lot of it anyway), he really wasn't a very good governor; he wanted to be, but..... Skookum1 ( talk) 17:15, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
I changed the description of the Governor's route, which was via the Homathko Canyon and only incidentally via an extremity of the Coast Range, namely the bit through which teh Homathko flos; but the Homathko's length is mostly through the Coast Mountains as such, of which the Chilcotin Ranges are only a small part, and their bulk is southeast of anywhere the Governor got...he camped out on the Chilcotin Plateau at Puntzi Lake, with a view of the Chilcotin Ranges...he did not "cross them", nor is that anythign remarkable in comparison to crossing mountains nearly anywhere else in the province...more impressive if he'd come via Bella Coola and the Atnarko via the Mackenzie grease trail, which at least required some real mountain-crossing (via the Rainbow Range, though, not the Chilcotin). The typical sendup of "Chilcotin Ranges" mythology, the romanticism attached to the Chilcotin that is overlain on surrounding areas/peoples when really only incidental, it always gets me, coming from the Interior as I do.....the fashionability and cachet of the Chilcotin name has been extended southwards to the Lillooet Country and north into the Nechako; one fatuous and widely-published academic history says the Tsilhqot'in took part in the Fraser Canyon Gold rush; which is rubbish but the UBC professor who published that hasn't been asked to surrender her tenure as a result (which I believe should be a punishment for such traveesties of bad history and bad geography. Similarly the logic given concerning the colony's fate towards amalgamation comes off like synthesis, or the analysis of only one source....I'm beginning to finally come to terms with Wikipedia's main failings; intelligent writing of history cant' be done without some synthesis, some inquiry, some recognition fo what are bad sources and worse analyses....so while eventually accretive additions to most articles can eventually coalesce all published knowledge within wikipedia, it will only make as much sense as it's now allowed to, and there's very little room for debating what's a good source and what's a bad source. To me, much of this article was written using bad sources, or at least hackneyed "officialized" accounts...this is not a criticism of the previous editors, only of the result of the inefficacy of the sources in relaying useful truths; the colonial economy discovered an important truth - the more you spend to build infrastructure to support economic extraction without properly controlling the revenues from that extraction, it's inevitable that such infrastructural spending will cause governmental bankruptcy; the Cariboo Road is painted as some kind of great work; it was, engineering-wise, but not politically or financially, in which case it was a freaking disaster and wound up leading to the colony's unfair terms of union with Canada.....all because the colonial officials had been too weak-kneed to look into the pokebags of American and Chinese and other non-reporting revenue extractors (or been paid off not to look), and the government made little money from its road-building efforts or from the cost of the Gold Escort and spending on supply infrastructure like flour mills; Seymour was captain of a desperately sinking ship, that was doomed before he took charge, and corrupt in the extreme like all colonial administrations were....no wonder he drank himself to death..... Skookum1 ( talk) 04:50, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
This has an issue:
No, not the next six years, certainly...I'll check the date of Seymour's accession to the job, I think it was in '64 (five years later, or less. Seymour also made a point of living in New West, if anywhere (i.e. when not "on the road" around the province). Skookum1 ( talk) 17:32, 2 October 2010 (UTC)
If this is supposed to be the official language, the Colony did not have one, other than in de facto terms; if it's supposed to be "languages spoken there", it's a long list and that doesn't mean just native languages and Chinook Jargon. Skookum1 ( talk) 10:18, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
The map displayed shows British Columbia as it is, not as the colony was. See the description in the first paragraph wherein it is stated that the colony was only about one-half the size of modern B.C. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 154.5.153.168 ( talk) 18:23, 17 July 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 3 external links on Colony of British Columbia (1858–66). Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
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Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 21:35, 10 August 2017 (UTC)