The Fraser Canyon War, also known as the Canyon War or the Fraser River War, was an incident between the Nlaka'pamux people and white miners in the newly declared Colony of British Columbia, which later became part of Canada, in 1858. It occurred during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, which brought a large number of white settlers to the Fraser Canyon area.
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Meetings were held by the miners, most of whom had been in the California gold rush but were a diverse lot of men from all over the world. Of the six regiments hastily organized to respond to the war, one named the Austrian Company, captained by a John Centras, was composed of French and German irregulars who had served with the William Walker filibustering campaign in Nicaragua in 1853, and had relocated to the California goldfields afterwards, following the other Californian miners northwards to Yale when news of the Fraser rush reached San Francisco (many of the Americans in the goldfields had also served in Walker's rebellion).
Another regiment, the Whatcom Company, was formed of mostly southerners under the command of Captain Graham. This regiment was of the "a good Indian is a dead Indian" persuasion and was bent on a war of extermination. The Whatcom Company's name was taken from that of the Whatcom Trail, which traversed what is now Whatcom County, Washington State from Bellingham Bay on Puget Sound, and which was used in open defiance of the British colonial administration's edict that access to the goldfields be made from Victoria and via steamboat from there only; in other words, their name implicitly indicated their annexationist sentiments.
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At Camchin, the assembled leaders of the Nlaka'pamux and allies from the Secwepemc (Shuswap) and Okanagan peoples held council. The Nlaka'pamux war leader tried to incite the assembled warriors to wipe out the white men once and for all, but the Camchin chief Cxpentlum (known commonly in English as Spintlum, or David Spintlum), had good relations with Governor James Douglas and argued for peaceful co-existence.
Snyder and Centras marched into the midst of the Nlaka'pamux war council undaunted; if they had known about the thousands of warriors watching from the surrounding mountainsides they might not have been so bold. As per native custom, they were given the right to speak, presumably speaking through translators, and told the assembled natives that if the war were to continue, white men by the thousands would come and occupy the country and destroy all the natives forever (true enough). In their own notes they presumed it was because they showed the natives their more-modern rifles (most natives, if they had firearms, had only muskets and carbines) and thought that this had persuaded them to make peace. In reality, the decision to make peace had already just been arrived at, as the native account has shown, but it is probable that the notion that it would be impossible to wipe out all white men helped persuade any chiefs sitting on the fence to take the side of the peace-maker Cxpentlum.
Six treaties were made that day, known as the Snyder Treaties, none of which has survived either in print or oral form, dealing with the co-existence in the Canyon and the working of the goldfields lining it (natives were the first to mine gold on the Thompson, and remained active miners throughout the rush).
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No formal figures of the dead from the Fraser Canyon War exist, and much hyperbole has been made by both sides. Estimates of the white dead range from several dozen to several hundred or even thousands; some say the native casualties were extreme.
Just after the war parties' return to Yale, Governor Douglas (
a Guyanese mulatto) and a contingent of Royal Engineers arrived to take control of what was feared to have been a situation that could easily have led to a war not only of extermination, but also of annexation.
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