Warriors of the North Pacific: Missionary Accounts of the Northwest Coast, the Skeena and Stikine Rivers and the Klondike, 1829-1900

J.R. (Jim) Miller is Canada Research Chair of History at the University
of Saskatchewan and the author of Reflections on Native-Newcomer
Relations: Selected Essays and Lethal Legacy: Current Native
Controversies in Canada.

Charles Lillard, a Victoria poet and student of Indian lore, has made four nineteenth century accounts of West Coast Indian life more accessible to a modern audience. For this, everyone interested in the history of Indians and Indian-white contact is indebted to him. The same can be said of the excellent maps that accompany the text, though they would be even more valuable if the route of the missionaries’ trips appeared on them. Unfortunately, one cannot be as positive about Lillard’s introduction, which is frequently idiosyncratic and at times downright cranky in its evaluation of scholars’ work.

The heart of Warriors of the North Pacific is Lillard’s edited compilation of four missionary records of contact with Indians on and near the Pacific Coast. They include American Congregationalist J.S. Green’s description of his work among coastal Indians in 1829, an excerpt from Methodist Thomas Crosby’s account of his work “Among the An-ko-me-nums [Coast Salish]” beginning in 1863, Anglican Charles Harrison’s perceptive observations of the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands 1882-90, and Church of England Bishop William Ridley’s “Snapshots from the North Pacific” during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Lillard has assembled the descriptive accounts principally from published memoirs, supplementing these on occasion with the missionaries’ private correspondence and their contributions to evangelical magazines.

The result of Lillard’s work is a highly readable treatment of how missionaries perceived the Indians during a critical period of contact, between the decline of the fur-trade era and the emergence of a modern British Columbia in which forestry, mining, large-scale fishing, and agriculture dominate. The missionaries manifest all the usual emotions: admiration for the finer qualities and revulsion at the debasement of the Indians; fervent belief in the efficacy of Christianity to elevate the Indian and despair at the corrupting influence that most white Christians exert; and respect for the Indian’s hardiness and contempt for his sometime inability to adapt to the white man’s way of life. For making these colourful and readable accounts much more widely available Charles Lillard deserves the thanks of all students, academic and otherwise, of the interesting Indian peoples of the Pacific Northwest.