Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West

2. To Take Your Own Part: Violence among the Settlers

To Take Your Own Part Violence among the Settlers ON 13 FEBRUARY 1834 William Fraser Tolmie, a Hudson's Bay Company physician, attacked one Charbonneau, a "rascaUy Canadian noted for laziness &dishonesty" who had been engaging in lewd conduct behind the doctor 's house. Tolmie "thought it right to make an example of him to the others & accordingly" planted "a hearty kick" on his bottom together with some other blows. Charbonneau soon fought back, grappling with his superior and scratching his face. Another ofthe post's leaders then arrived "& hurled the fellow to the earth & another kick on the posterior completed his punishment ." Tolmie remarked that "Mr. Manson's interference probably saved my credit,U for Charbonneau "is a brawny fellow of nearly 6 feet." But he hoped that "my pommelling him will show the others that I am not to be trifled with.'" Tolmie's attack on Charbonneau is representative of the way prominent Hudson's BayCompany men used violence against rank-and-file employees. Tolmie decided that one of these men deserved and required a beating, and he administered it, with the help ofa peer, so that the recipient had little chance of successful resistance. The relationship between power and violence was simple and clear: Tolmie and people like him had the right and responsibility to use physical force to punish the insubordinate acts of their inferiors, to show who had power and who did not. This traditional conception ofviolence by no means disappeared with the arrival of thousands of newcomers seeking land, gold, and other opportunities on the north Pacific slope a few decades later. We have already seen how these men treated Natives, how they paired their claims for land with an eager To Take Your Own Part • 47 willingness to whip and humiliate aboriginals who resisted them. But Native people were only the most obvious target of the powerful newcomers' violence . People of high status asserted and often benefited from their right to use nonlethalviolence against a wide range ofothers: men from China, wives, and children. They shared Tolmie's understanding of violence and power. Some subordinates accepted that understanding. But others used their fists and their bodies to contest, like Charbonneau before them, this hierarchical version of social relations. Thousands ofwhites from the Midwest and upper South flooded into Oregon and then Washington in the 18405, drawn largely by agricultural opportunities . They set up relatively stable communities, particularly in Oregon's fertile Willamette Valley. By1860 Washington had over eleven thousand people, Oregon over fifty thousand, and four out of every ten Oregonians was female. Settlementproceeded much more slowly and fitfully north ofthe line. Vancouver Island had fewer than one thousand whites in 1854. It and the mainland colony boomed a few years later when the gold rush drew thousands to Victoria and to the Fraser and Thompson Rivers. But mining had declined by 1871, the year British Columbia joined Canada. The young province then had fewer than nine thousand white residents, another fifteen hundred or so from Asia. Females made up less than 30 percent of its non-Natives.2 British Columbia had all the makings ofa lawless frontier: wide expanses dotted with settlements ofunattached and mobile males. Yet leading British Columbians styled themselves as tradition-minded colonials. Hudson's Bay Company employees held key governmental positions long after the fur trade's decline, and even the mining boom did not bring a democratic revolution . Indeed, Bulwer Lytton, Secretary of State for the Colonies, proclaimed in 1858 that "the grand principle offree institutions" should not be entrusted to "settlers so wild, so miscellaneous, perhaps so transitory, and in a form of society so crude."3 The two colonies (Vancouver Island and British Columbia did not merge until 1866) required a well-regulated, orderly society. Those south ofthe line, on the other hand, associated settlement with individualism . Hence a young man traveling the Oregon Trail in 1852 later recalled that thejourneytook his party"beyond the realm ofsocialconstraint, conventional usage, and the reign of law," and that many "seemed to exult 48 • To Take Your Own Part in their so-called freedom."4 Law preceded settlers in British Columbia. It followed them in Oregon and Washington.5 British Columbia'selite cherished andexaggerated the differences between their society and the less inhibited one to the south. Edmund Hope Verney, anaval commander, remarked in an 1862 letter to his father that he preferred the mainland's...