From Louisiana to Rupert's Land

Slate, the American online... What? "Magazine," "newsfeed," whatever -- today has, amid its endless Trump scrutiny, a detailed analysis of, of all things, the Louisiana Purchase: "The True Cost of the Louisiana Purchase" by Robert Lee.

Lee starts with the common-sensical but not so common observation that the United States did not buy the Louisiana Territory from France in 1804

What Thomas Jefferson purchased wasn’t actually a tract of land. It was the imperial rights to that land, almost all of which was still owned, occupied, and ruled by Native Americans. The U.S. paid France $15 million for those rights. It would take more than 150 years and hundreds of lopsided treaties to extinguish Indian title to the same land.

And that's if you can call it extinguished.

The author, a California PhD candidate in history, explores in a lot of detail (for a Slate piece) the number and price of all the acquisitions of title that the United States has made in the Louisiana Purchase territory since 1804.  It's nothing like a fair price, but it's a hell a lot more than the $15 million paid to France.

Consider Canada's acquisition of Rupertsland from the Hudson's Bay Company

Three years after Confederation the government of Canada acquired Rupert's Land from the Company for $1.5-million: the largest real estate transaction (by land area) in the country's history.

says the Canadian Encyclopedia's Ruperts Land article  But Canada only acquired pretty much what the US got from France: "imperial rights" to what was still the territory of the First Nations.  Hence all those numbered treaties that followed.

I wonder if anyone has tried for Rupert's Land what Lee attempts for the Louisiana Purchase: a tally of all the money spent trying to acquire Crown title after the initial purchase?

 

History of moiling for gold

The thing about the great Klondike gold rush of 1898: they never found the source of the gold. All the gold that came out of Bonanza Creek and the other gold beds was alluvial. That is, erosion had washed it downstream from somewhere else and left it scattered down the streambeds.

Shawn Ryan, itinerant prospector, after years living on the modern equivalent of hardtack and beans, may have found the source. Apparently his share options alone represent a motherlode.  He's so much better off he can afford to move from Dawson to Whitehorse, and it makes him feel like Jed Clampett.

History Online: Dan Francis on the Left Coast

Vancouver historian and encyclopaedian Daniel Francis has a new project, and his lively KnowBC blog has a new feature.

Dan has begun posting chunks of his new book project, a history of the British Columbia coast, to the KnowBC blog as he goes along. First instalment here.

Edgar Dewdney, who he?

Nice to see an old historical interest of mine in the news. Regina writer C.J. Cooney, working on a biography of Edgar Dewdney, concludes that the pioneer surveyor, early lieutenant-governor of the North-West Territories, windbag, and self-promoter extraordinaire, was a self invented man. Amazingly enough, CanWest News does a pretty good job on the story -- kudos to reporter Randy Boswell. The story is based on Cooney's article in the B.C. Historical Journal.

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography has Dewdney "born to a family of means" -- which is certainly what he always said. But Cooney is pretty sure he was a nobody who reinvented himself the day he got off the boat in Victoria.

T'other hand, Dewdney apparently arrived with some skill as a civil engineer and an introduction from the Colonial Secretary and . Where'd that come from?

This is a Dewdney letter to John A. Macdonald, written March 25, 1885, explaining how Dewdney's personal intervention with Louis Riel will prevent the Red River uprising.

If I see I can do good, I will go straight to Duck Lake to camp with him. I believe that Riel and most of the halfbreeds will stick to me if I go there, for I should tell them I go as a friend and mediator. I know they have no unfriendly feeling toward me.

Fighting breaks out at Duck Lake the next morning.