The Anglican church, however, had already chosen a mission site. James Prevost, captain of a Royal Navy sloop based on the West Coast, had been appalled by the lawless scenes he’d observed at Fort Simpson, a Hudson’s Bay post in northern BC. He appealed to the church to establish a presence there. Douglas didn’t really want a mission on the north coast. He feared—rightly, as it turned out—that Duncan might disrupt the profitable fur trade, and told him the area was too dangerous. But the church and navy insisted, and Douglas acquiesced. Until passage became available, Duncan moved in with Reverend Edward Cridge, Fort Victoria’s chaplain. The young missionary spent the summer studying Chinook, the regional trade jargon, and Tsimshian, the north-coast First Nations language.
When he finally reached Fort Simpson in October, more than nine months after leaving England, Duncan found a tidy, fifty-metre-square log palisade, painted white with bright red trim, surmounted by two gun bastions and eight cannons. The Hudson’s Bay Company would provide him with room and board there for the next four years. After running a gauntlet of curious First Nations people, the self-conscious Duncan joined eighteen post employees and their families behind the wooden pickets; outside, a First Nations encampment of more than 2,300 souls occupied about 140 traditional longhouses.
The fort had been built in 1834 between the mouths of the Nass and Skeena rivers, about 850 kilometres northwest of Victoria. It lay in the heartland of the Tsimshian people—avid middlemen in the fur trade—who bought skins from neighbouring bands and sold them at the fort. Entire bands had left their villages and moved their longhouses to Fort Simpson to be close to the action. By the 1850s, it had become one of the largest permanent settlements on the west coast of North America.
Duncan was understandably apprehensive about the task before him. “I feel almost crushed with my sense of position,” he wrote in his journal. “My loneliness, the greatness of the work, which seems ever increasing before me … together with deepening views of my utter weakness: these indeed at times seem ready to overwhelm me, but the Lord is my refuge.”
The new arrival began his duties by conducting church services and school lessons for the fur traders and their children. He engaged as a language tutor a bright young Tsimshian named Clah. The fluency that Duncan eventually achieved with the local language was fundamental to his success; most other missionaries in British Columbia, despite genuine efforts, were unable to master a First Nations tongue. With no alphabet or dictionary to help him, Duncan compiled a list of fifteen hundred common English words and, through a combination of Chinook and charades, he managed to learn their Tsimshian equivalents.
He also visited each longhouse and studied First Nations customs. Tsimshian dwellings were framed with giant posts and beams and smaller rafters, then covered with cedar planks that could be removed and transported between winter and summer habitations. A big lodge might house an extended clan of thirty or more people, with each individual family having its own eating and sleeping areas. Furnishings were minimal, but included cooking utensils, bark mats and bentwood boxes for storing valuables. Tsimshian society was hierarchical and competitive; aristocrats had larger living quarters, and the most imposing structures belonged to important chiefs.
Although clearly impressed with Tsimshian craftsmanship in wood and other natural materials, Duncan managed, simultaneously, to abhor their “garish” house and body decorations. He primly refused to take any pleasure in ceremonial dancing and viewed potlatch habits, where chiefs gained status by giving away goods, as a barbarous waste. He was also horrified, though with more reason, by the casual Tsimshian cruelty to slaves, the endemic drunkenness and prostitution, and the murders that regularly occurred beyond the walls of the fort. “Intoxicating drink,” he felt, was the root problem. Although supposedly illegal as a trade medium, alcohol was widely available—and the cause of much grief—on the coast.
Duncan’s journal reveals a high regard for the intelligence and industry of the people he had come to convert, though he soon grew doubtful about his mandate, which was to turn them into farmers, following the example of successful missionaries elsewhere in the world. On the north Pacific coast, where the great coniferous forests stretched to the ocean’s edge and the annual rainfall often exceeded four metres, large-scale agriculture was a fantasy. The Tsimshian had no need to farm, in any case; they had built a rich, stable, complex culture from the abundant resources of land and sea.
The inhabitants of Fort Simpson showed great interest in the intense young missionary, who was unlike any foreign intruder they had yet encountered. They assumed that his role was not unlike that of their own shamans. The Tsimshian were intent on acquiring and converting to their own use the various and singular powers that the white strangers seemed to possess, and they were open to hearing this newcomer’s message.
During his first winter, Duncan restricted his activities to starting a modest school for Tsimshian children and evening classes for adults. He translated hymns, conducted drills and marches, and introduced the concept of writing. He visited the sick and the elderly and tried to dispense a little preventative medical advice. Within the walls of the fort, however, his characteristic stubbornness soon became evident. Duncan refused, for instance, to conduct Sunday services while fort employees were still working. After an angry exchange, factor William Henry McNeill backed down and allowed his men to observe the Sabbath.
By the summer of 1858, Duncan felt comfortable enough with the Tsimshian language to begin sermonizing in the village. He started in the longhouse of Neyahshnawah, the friendliest chief. “My heart quailed greatly,” he confided to his journal. “I knelt down to crave God’s blessing, and afterwards I gave them the address. They were all remarkably attentive.” He repeated the procedure at the house of Legaic, the most powerful chief, who was not so friendly but couldn’t appear to be less hospitable than his rivals. By day’s end, Duncan had delivered simple explanations of the Bible and Christian purpose to nine longhouses and nine hundred individuals. It was the first time that BC’s First Nations people had been preached to in their own tongue.
Over the next two years, Duncan went on teaching and preaching, and gathered a group of fifty or more adherents. In “Bringing the Indians to their Knees,” a Raincoast Chronicles essay, Howard White looks closely at these early days, noting that Duncan’s followers were mostly young and low-born, people on the fringes of Tsimshian society. He was making little serious headway with the chiefs and shamans, several of whom were implacably opposed to him. Others seemed polite and even captivated by Christian ways, says White, but had a blithe and irritating tendency to continue traditional practices. The winter ceremonies of dancing and potlatching were as popular as ever—and so was alcohol.
Duncan had a penchant for sensationalizing the so-called savagery of the Tsimshian in his letters to the missionary society, which were published in the Intelligencer and found a wide audience. In one notorious report, he described a secret society ritual and implied that the Tsimshian were cannibals. He later declared that he knew this was not the case; Hamatsa dancers merely feigned the eating of flesh in a performance designed to induce fear and loathing in onlookers. The misleading impression created by Duncan’s letter dogged First Nations culture for decades (though the spectre of cannibalism did prompt a surge of donations to the society).
In 1860, Duncan visited Nisga’a villages on the Nass River, then spent the summer in Victoria. He discussed with James Douglas a momentous idea he had been mulling over: moving the mission. He had written to his superiors in England, suggesting that “a colony ought to be established in some spot where industry would be taught and rewarded; and where intoxicating drinks would be excluded.” He believed that “no real or permanent good, in my humble opinion, can be effected” at Fort Simpson, but that “we might reasonably expect the Gospel tree to take root” at some other location. Douglas supported the plan and agreed to reserve any necessary lands.
The governor was pleased with Duncan’s progress, and asked for his advice