Pioneers

'God-sent Land for Colored People'

The Tyee has published the first of several excerpts from the book: 'God-sent Land for Colored People.'

Writing the Black Canadian West

Yesterday I attended a colloquium at SFU Harbour Centre on "Writing the Black Canadian West." It was great fun, and a showcase for some remarkable people: Cheryl Foggo, who writes about the black experience on the Prairies; Karina Vernon, who responded to Cheryl's presentation; Michelle La Flamme, who writes (and performs!) about the "mixed-race body" in literature; Chantal Gibson, who responded; and C. S. Giscombe, a writer and teacher who has been exploring BC in search of his maybe-ancestor, the miner John R. Giscome.

My contribution was to talk about the new edition of Go Do Some Great Thing and how this blog has made the production of the new book much easier. (So if you're here because you were at the colloquium, welcome and make yourself at home.)

All in all, it was a stimulating and thought-provoking afternoon and evening, with talented people and good conversation. Thanks to Wayde Compton, Sophie McCall, and everyone else who organized and took part in the event.

Wayde has also given me the manuscript with his editing questions and suggestions, so I'll be busy with that for the next little while.

Under a Northern Star

The Library and Archives Canada have published Under a Northern Star , an important website linking seven collections of documents related to blacks in Canada. It includes my own essay on Sir James Douglas and his role in inviting black pioneers to British Columbia.

A sad, good day in Canada

We Canadians lost Oscar Peterson last month. And today the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast Oscar Peterson—Simply the Best: The Tribute Concert.

The concert will be on the CBC website for a year, but the sooner you hear it, the better.

A portrait of Maria Gibbs

I've been fortunate enough to find a source of Gibbs family photos, including the only portrait of Maria Alexander Gibbs. Here it is:

Almost finished

The revised edition is almost done. I still have some minor changes to make here and there, especially in the introduction, where a lot of people deserve thanks. The bibliography is just about finished, with this blog serving to provide links to the many online resources. How did anyone ever write history before the Internet?

Next step is to find photos and get permission to use them from sources like the BC Archives. I have a photocopy of an article about the Gibbs family, originally published in the Negro History Bulletin in October 1947; it has some wonderful photos of Gibbs's children as adults, and the only photo of Maria Alexander Gibbs I've ever seen. It will be a challenge to find that one in a usable form.

I'm also planning to write an essay about Mifflin Gibbs for The Tyee, and to excerpt several passages from the book that The Tyee wants to publish before the book comes out.

Learning a little more about Maria Gibbs

Last night I stumbled onto the Oberlin city website and found a wealth of historical and genealogical material. Among other things, Maria Alexander Gibbs is listed in the city directories from 1873 to 1902—first as "Mrs. M.W. Gibbs," then as "Mrs. M.A. Gibbs." Her daughters Ida and Hattie (Harriet) were sometimes listed as sharing her residence.

I've also found an 1850 Oberlin census that lists several young "mulatto" women from Kentucky named Alexander; I presume they were Maria's sisters or cousins. But I still haven't found any record of her death, or any indication of an occupation. She may have devoted herself to raising the children, and presumably Mifflin Gibbs provided support.

The Gibbses were a remarkable family, and it's frustrating to find so little of their lives is recorded—even Mifflin's life.

Thinking about the Starks

I've just finished the Saltspring chapter (it will doubtless need more changes), and the last week or so of work has made me think again about the Stark family.

Much of what we know about that era on the island is thanks to Marie Stark Wallace's transcription of her mother's memories. It's a vivid and exciting account, including dramatic incidents in Sylvia Stark's girlhood as a slave in Missouri, the journey west, and the arrival on Saltspring in the midst of a ferocious battle betwen Haidas and Cowichans.

Revisiting that memoir after 30 years, I can see that some of it is more family legend than hard fact. Sylvia claimed, for example, that Harriet Tubman had been among the slaves owned by the Leopold family in Missouri, like Sylvia herself. It just isn't true. Maybe the Leopolds had a young slave who challenged their authority, but Tubman was a slave in Maryland and escaped from her owners there.

Similarly, Sylvia says the nightriders who harassed her family in Missouri were "Ku-Kluks"—but the KKK wasn't created until 20 years later, after the Civil War. And she says her husband Louis worked for a time on a pre-empted claim on Vancouver Island with a black man named Overton. A man named Overton died in Nanaimo in 1890, aged 68, so that much is possible. But BC's archives show no one by that name, or by Louis's name, pre-empting land at that time. Louis himself pre-empted land several years later in Nanaimo's Cranberry District, but that was not was Sylvia was talking about.

Even so, the bulk of Sylvia's memoir seems reliable and valuable. The errors in it are just reminders that every family saga has its embellished anecdotes and flat-out fictions.

Surprises about the Norton family

Here's a link to the 1901 Vancouver Island census, which lists John and Annie Norton on Saltspring Island: viHistory : Census Search.

Ruth Sandwell talks quite a bit about the Nortons. John was a Portuguese from the Azores who evidently arrived in BC in 1859 and pre-empted land on Saltspring in 1861. In 1867, when he was about 43, he married Annie Robinson, the daughter of Henry and Margaret Robinson. Henry was a black from Bermuda; Margaret was an Irishwoman.

Annie Norton bore her first child when she was just 12 years old, and went on to have 13 more. Apparently most of them lived and stayed on the family farm. In 1901 John Norton was 77 and Annie was 64—but among the family members as children of the head of the household were Pearl, aged 7; Grace, aged 4; and Joseph, aged 2.

This seems highly unlikely; the children were probably John and Annie's grandchildren. While John is listed as Portuguese and white, the rest of the family is listed as black.

Moreover, none of them is said to be able to read, write, or even speak English. Again, I can't believe this was the case. Norton was among the most successful farmers on Saltspring, dying in 1911 at age 88 with a considerable property. I just don't believe that the Nortons talked to one another (and the rest of the world) in Portuguese. Nor do I believe that John Norton could exploit the pre-emption system as well as he did if he was illiterate.

The answers may turn up in the next few weeks, or the Nortons may simply offer yet another mystery about the black pioneers.

Update: I think I've figured out the age discrepancy. For some reason, the census taker (or transcriber) got Annie's birthdate and age wrong. She was born in 1856, not 1836, in San Francisco; she must have been among the youngest of the black pioneers, since she arrived here in 1858.

She married John Norton in December 1873, at the age of 18. By then Norton was a widower, his first wife having died of TB. We can assume that she was the mother of Norton's son Emmanuel (born 1866) and Elizabeth (born 1868). Annie's first child would have been William, born in 1874.

She then went on to have 11 more children, the last of whom seems to have been Joseph Deblair Norton in 1899, when she was about to turn 43. She died in Ganges, SSI, on May 12, 1903, at 46.

Baptism records exist for all the children, and marriage records for some. Most of them have very ordinary names—William, Mary, Maud, Walter—but a child born in 1880 was named Gautherius.

Getting into Saltspring

I've added some links to Ontario sites related to the underground railroad. They're not directly related to the book, but it's clear that BC's pioneers were very much involved in the politics and debates that energized Blacks in the decades before the Civil War.

The Cariboo chapter is finished, though I expect to revise it as more information becomes available. I'm now getting into the story of the Saltspring Island settlers, and finding that Ruth Sandwell's book has some absolutely extraordinary material. The Saltspring story is far more complex—and violent—than I'd realized. Sandwell sees events far differently from the way I did, and has the evidence to back up her arguments. So this chapter will see quite a few changes from the first edition.