Businesses and developers take heart. Your angst over how to complete projects given worker shortages in the Capital Region is nothing new.

Vancouver Island's first governor encountered the same problem 150 years ago. Sir James Douglas, then the Hudsons Bay chief factor in Victoria, wrote to colonial offices in London, England in March of 1858 concerned about completing surveying projects with too few workers.

"Mechanics refusing employment at any thing under 12/6," Douglas wrote to secretary of state Henry Labouchere on March 5, "and common laborers 5/- a day, besides their food... may have the effect of raising the present rate of labor; I would therefore suggest for your consideration whether it would not be advisable in those circumstances to send out a greater number of men from England."

In the years leading up to the Nov. 19, 1858 proclamation declaring B.C. a British colony, Douglas wrote regular "despatches" to his superiors in London, England with reports of events, summaries of actions, and requests for help.

That the problems of his day reverberate to today is a telling discovery made by historical researchers who have studied the dispatches, transcribed by a University of Victoria professor in the 1980s and only recently compiled and posted online to a UVic website (http://bcgenesis.uvic.ca).

"These documents are relevant today because of current land claims negotiations," said Chris Petter, head of UVic's special collections, the department that has taken responsibility for storing the 58 spools of microfilm transcriptions that covers colonial dispatches from 1846 to 1871. Dispatches from Douglas could be illuminating, Petter says, "because they mention all the transactions between colonial administration and aboriginal groups."

For example, in 1857 and early 1858, UVic history professor Daniel Marshall says documents show Douglas wrote to his superiors warning of potential trouble between First Nations in the Fraser River canyon and American gold rush miners heading to the area.

"When Douglas originally warns there could be war," Marshall said, "he writes to Lord Lytton in Britain that First Nations are particularly protective of 'their' resources and land, and he talks about it in terms of 'their' resources and land."

First Nations had been mining gold in the canyon to trade with the Hudsons Bay Company. As Douglas warned, they became upset when miners from Oregon and California shouldered their way into the canyon, building ditches, draining lakes and laying waste to First Nations villages. But concerned that he might be taken to task for not preventing brutal exchanges between the two factions, and perhaps with an eye to staying in the running for governor, Douglas failed to mention the conflict in dispatches to London in the summer of 1858. He was appointed governor later that year.

Marshall said Douglas' silence needs to be clarified.

"If you're going to have true reconciliation in this province, you've got to tell this story - it's a necessary part of the healing. If we're going to have an identity we can all be proud of in this province we have to develop a more inclusive story."

More insights into B.C.'s history could be uncovered in the dozens of microfilm spools that remain to be digitized. But digitizing and posting just the 1858 transcriptions and document scans to the Genesis website cost about $5,000, paid for in part with a one-time grant. Until more funds can be found many more years of B.C. history will gather dust in UVic's special collections vault.

vmoreau@saanichnews.com

Note: Prior to 1858, Vancouver Island was a British colony and the rest of what we now call British Columbia was British territory. On Nov. 19, 1858 the mainland was proclaimed the colony of British Columbia at a ceremony attended by Douglas at Fort Langley. Vancouver Island remained a separate colony for eight more years, before being annexed in 1866.