Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast

In 1874 Thomas Crosby heeded a request, mediated by the Methodist Church, from the Tsimshian at Fort (later Port) Simpson, British Columbia, for an ordained Methodist missionary to head their newly formed congregation. Thomas felt it appropriate that the mission/church's leader be married. In the spring of 1874, Emma Douse of Ontario became his wife, and the couple headed straight to BC. The mission occupied them from 1874 to 1897. Thomas became one of Canada's most famous missionaries. He was a dynamic, revivalist preacher, committed to spreading the "word" wherever he could, whatever the cost or danger. By the time he retired, Methodist missions dotted the Northwest Coast, largely due to his leadership, the help of Native assistants and fellow Methodists, and a mission steamboat.

Until recently, critical literature on missions focused predominantly on the role of missionaries. Today, there is greater attention on the role of the congregants. A congregation "works" only if the congregants so wish it. Good Intentions follows this approach. Its treatment of the course of the mission takes into account current and recent literature. Mission "successes" and "failures" resulted from factors beyond the work of missionaries. As Jan Hare and Jean Barman note, the Tsimshian invited the missionaries and also asked them to leave.

Good Intentions, however, adds a more recent interest in the field of mission literature, namely the role of missionary wives, often ignored or mentioned peripherally. Until recently, Emma Crosby's role at Port Simpson was pieced together through bits of official correspondence that she and Thomas penned for their church organizations, calculated to encourage financial and other support by painting lurid pictures of Native savagery.

Little is known about Emma Crosby's feelings and thoughts on living in northern British Columbia. This is not surprising. There is little surviving private correspondence. We know that Emma had eight pregnancies in a marriage that included lengthy periods of time without her husband, as he created Methodist "circuits" along the coast. Thomas occasionally notes that Emma was often "in bed" (understandable with so many pregnancies), and he alluded to her loneliness, a quality with which he would have been impatient, given his unquestioned zeal for his work.

Recently, however, new sources became available. Emma's descendants privileged Hare and Barman by giving them access to previously unavailable information: Emma's correspondence home, predominantly to her mother. We have a new and important peek into her life and role at Port Simpson. The bulk of the letters cover the first seven years of the mission, 1874 to 1881, the year her mother died. They are the highlight of the book. They show a woman with considerable education (typically female) cast into an environment where she was often the only woman of her ethnic, social, and educational class. Emma went to great lengths to convince her mother that she married "right" and that she was "fine" at Port Simpson, but the letters cannot hide loneliness and pining for family. Within a couple of years of starting the mission, Crosby left for long stretches of time. She says that she does not want to complain, but. . . .

Nonetheless, Emma clearly shared her husband's desire to make the mission succeed. Hare and Barman make it clear that one of her major roles, often overlooked in mission writing, was, by her presence, to model appropriate, Christian, civilized behaviour. The kind of home she ran, the food that was eaten, the standards applied to decoration and cleanliness, the clothes that should be worn —all of these were examples of a "proper, Christian lifestyle." Her mere presence was integral to the mission. In addition, she eagerly taught school and even took Native girls into her home to "rescue" them.

After her mother's death, personal letters from Emma were rare, with only occasional ones to her father (who died five years after his wife). These lack the woman-to-woman touch of the earlier letters. Her feelings are submerged as she dedicates herself (even as she is conceiving, then losing, children) to the success of the Crosby Girl's Home, a project that she saw as the natural extension of taking troubled girls into her own home.

The changing nature of Emma's letters highlight a small problem with the book. There is little sense of her everyday life after 1881, even though we know from other sources that the mission was experiencing difficulty, especially from the Native parishioners who were increasingly frustrated and dissatisfied with missionary paternalism and the failure to resolve the land question in their area. We are required to make educated guesses about her state of mind —something that Hare and Barman acknowledge. Thus, unfortunately, for most of the time the Crosbys spent at the mission, there is sparse "personal" data. Assumptions have to be made, and there can be little doubt that these were not happy times. The correspondence that does exist, however, indicates that God's work was "proceeding" well, followed by appeals for more funds, reflecting an ever-increasing difficulty. We have not learned as much about Emma as Hare and Barman intimate in the introduction that we would.

Nonetheless, this is a valuable addition to the literature on the Crosbys and their mission (especially of the first seven years). Insight into both missionaries and cultural contact is deepened. Emma's early letters show a dynamic that was more "normal and everyday" than Thomas's unbelievable portraits of barbaric heathenism. Native people wore the clothing, did the jobs, and engaged in the economic and social activities that were part of late-nineteenth-century Canadian society. They were increasingly participating in a society that was, at the time, beginning to put in place mechanisms to exclude them. The Crosbys were powerless to stop that.

Historians often fill gaps through generous "reading between the lines." Regardless of what we do not know about Emma, the book's insight is that the mere presence of non-Natives at Port Simpson made them representatives of a different series of cultural and lifestyle assumptions. Good Intentions humanizes all parties in the encounter. It is a good contribution to an increasing volume of literature that does so.