Captain James Cook first made contact with the area now known as British Columbia in 1778. The colonists who followed soon realized they needed a written history, both to justify their dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and to formulate an identity for a new settler society.Writing British Columbia History shows how Euro-Canadian historians took up this task, and struggled with the newness of colonial society and overlapping alliances to the British Empire, the United States, and Canada. In explorers' accounts, promotional literature, "pioneer" histories, and academic studies, they eased these tensions by defining British Columbia as part of a global British Empire, incorporating it into an expanding Anglo-Saxon civilization, and writing it into the empire of history itself.This sweeping study of the role of history writing in colonialism and nation building will appeal to anyone interested in British Columbia history, the history of the Pacific Northwest, or history writing in Canada.

On a dreary morning in April, 1893, John Marshall, a Portuguese immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse, his body cold and lifeless. The farmers face was a mess, his nose smashed in and cracked blood covering his forehead around a jagged black hole. The shocked and unfortunate neighbour who discovered the body rushed to Huntingdon railway station to summon the authorities. An autopsy, coroners inquest and murder investigation followed. Only two days later, a local handyman named Albert Stroebel was arrested for Marshalls murder. Stroebel was an unlikely killer: short and physically disabled, locals considered him a harmless boy who seemed much younger than his 20 years. The young man the community knew was not capable of murder, and they were shocked to imagine that he could have killed the man who had treated him like family. But something had gone tragically wrong on the night Marshall died. Unravelling the mystery would take nine months and two lengthy trials that seized the attention of local communities on both sides of the Canadian-American border, splitting them into pro- and anti-Stroebel factions. Newspapers devoted page after page of coverage and throngs of spectators squeezed into the courtroom galleries. The first trial in New Westminster ended with the jury hopelessly deadlocked, the second in Victoria found him guilty and set an impending date for his execution. The heaviest hitters of BCs political and legal establishment took part including former and current premiers, an Attorney General, and a future Supreme Court justice. When the second trial ended with a guilty verdict and death sentence many in the public howled in protest, convinced that a young man had been condemned to die for a crime he did not commit. And the dramatic events would not stop there. With the condemned man sitting on death row, the case would take more twists and turns that would lead Albert Stroebel to the shadow of the gallows.

On a cold night in February, 1884, just metres north of the border on Sumas Prairie, BC, an Indigenous boy named Louie Sam was lynched by a mob of mounted vigilantes. The vigilantes had ridden up from Nooksack Valley in Washington Territory, hell-bent on avenging the murder of one of their neighbours, which they had pinned on Sam. The American origin of the mob, and the fact Sam's murder was one of only two recorded lynchings in Canadian history, have led historians and writers to represent it as an isolated and foreign incident -- disconnected from people and events north of the border and an aberration from the norm of Canadian history. When placed within the historical context of that time and place, the vigilante murder of Sam no longer appears to be an isolated and foreign incident. Rather, it emerges as the result of a series of events and causes on both sides of the border, with the active participation of locals in both BC and Washington Territory. DEADLY NEIGHBOURS takes a closer look at the lynching, and in so doing reveals a more complex and disturbing chronicle of the deadly grip the leading White settlers in Nooksack and Sumas held over the area -- and most notably, over their Indigenous neighbours.

Captain James Cook first made contact with the area now known as British Columbia in 1778. The colonists who followed soon realized they needed a written history, both to justify their dispossession of Aboriginal peoples and to formulate an identity for a new settler society.Writing British Columbia History shows how Euro-Canadian historians took up this task, and struggled with the newness of colonial society and overlapping alliances to the British Empire, the United States, and Canada. In explorers' accounts, promotional literature, "pioneer" histories, and academic studies, they eased these tensions by defining British Columbia as part of a global British Empire, incorporating it into an expanding Anglo-Saxon civilization, and writing it into the empire of history itself.This sweeping study of the role of history writing in colonialism and nation building will appeal to anyone interested in British Columbia history, the history of the Pacific Northwest, or history writing in Canada.

On a dreary morning in April, 1893, John Marshall, a Portuguese immigrant and successful farmer on Sumas Prairie in British Columbia, was found lying sprawled across the veranda of his farmhouse, his body cold and lifeless. The farmers face was a mess, his nose smashed in and cracked blood covering his forehead around a jagged black hole. The shocked and unfortunate neighbour who discovered the body rushed to Huntingdon railway station to summon the authorities. An autopsy, coroners inquest and murder investigation followed. Only two days later, a local handyman named Albert Stroebel was arrested for Marshalls murder. Stroebel was an unlikely killer: short and physically disabled, locals considered him a harmless boy who seemed much younger than his 20 years. The young man the community knew was not capable of murder, and they were shocked to imagine that he could have killed the man who had treated him like family. But something had gone tragically wrong on the night Marshall died. Unravelling the mystery would take nine months and two lengthy trials that seized the attention of local communities on both sides of the Canadian-American border, splitting them into pro- and anti-Stroebel factions. Newspapers devoted page after page of coverage and throngs of spectators squeezed into the courtroom galleries. The first trial in New Westminster ended with the jury hopelessly deadlocked, the second in Victoria found him guilty and set an impending date for his execution. The heaviest hitters of BCs political and legal establishment took part including former and current premiers, an Attorney General, and a future Supreme Court justice. When the second trial ended with a guilty verdict and death sentence many in the public howled in protest, convinced that a young man had been condemned to die for a crime he did not commit. And the dramatic events would not stop there. With the condemned man sitting on death row, the case would take more twists and turns that would lead Albert Stroebel to the shadow of the gallows.

On a cold night in February, 1884, just metres north of the border on Sumas Prairie, BC, an Indigenous boy named Louie Sam was lynched by a mob of mounted vigilantes. The vigilantes had ridden up from Nooksack Valley in Washington Territory, hell-bent on avenging the murder of one of their neighbours, which they had pinned on Sam. The American origin of the mob, and the fact Sam's murder was one of only two recorded lynchings in Canadian history, have led historians and writers to represent it as an isolated and foreign incident -- disconnected from people and events north of the border and an aberration from the norm of Canadian history. When placed within the historical context of that time and place, the vigilante murder of Sam no longer appears to be an isolated and foreign incident. Rather, it emerges as the result of a series of events and causes on both sides of the border, with the active participation of locals in both BC and Washington Territory. DEADLY NEIGHBOURS takes a closer look at the lynching, and in so doing reveals a more complex and disturbing chronicle of the deadly grip the leading White settlers in Nooksack and Sumas held over the area -- and most notably, over their Indigenous neighbours.