The next eighteen months were difficult ones for Duncan. He had one notable success—the baptism of the first Tsimshian Christians by Reverend Tugwell—but Fort Simpson’s chronic violence depressed him. His health was sabotaged by a severe bronchial infection, and he barely escaped death in several terrifying confrontations with First Nations opponents. The Tugwells went back home; they were not fit enough to endure the work or the climate. Duncan was left isolated and lonely. For true company he had only his dream of “a model Christian village, reflecting light and radiating heat to all the spiritually dark and dead masses around us.” His dream was alive, however. The location of the new colony had been chosen: twenty-five kilometres south, at an important former winter village site named Metlakatla, or “a passage connecting two bodies of salt water.” The move was set for spring.
In May of 1862, while an advance party was cutting timbers and planting potatoes at Metlakatla, alarming news arrived from Victoria. Another smallpox epidemic was at large on the coast. Using the dreaded plague as a stimulus, Duncan exhorted his followers to quickly dismantle the combined mission and schoolhouse that had been erected at Fort Simpson the previous year and flee. About seventy Tsimshians paddled to their new home, set up camp and began the exhausting work of rebuilding a community.
A week later, the epidemic struck Fort Simpson with a vengeance, and three hundred more natives arrived at Metlakatla. They were accepted only if they agreed to abide by Duncan’s fifteen commandments. A complete change of lifestyle was required: no more shamanism, gambling, potlatching, face-painting, “deviltry” and, of course, drinking. Prospective Metlakatlans had to rest on Sunday, attend church, send their children to school, be industrious, peaceful, clean and “liberal and honest in trade.” They had to “build neat houses” and pay a village tax.
By July, the plague reached Metlakatla. Duncan had managed to secure a shipment of vaccine from Reverend Cridge in Victoria, and he worked frantically to inoculate his flock. By some estimates, the 1862 epidemic killed one-third of the coastal population; Fort Simpson alone saw more than five hundred deaths. But only five Metlakatlans were lost, and the village’s reputation as a holy sanctuary was born. By August, Duncan estimated that six hundred people were living there. The vaccine had proven stronger than the shamans’ medicine; resistance to Duncan’s way of doing things diminished. The Tsimshian spirit had been subdued, if not crushed, by the holocaust of disease. And the word of the tenacious little missionary became law.
By the end of 1862, Duncan and the villagers had erected about thirty houses in Metlakatla, plus a combined church and school that could seat six hundred. Most people spent the winter in bark-covered huts. Duncan convened a village council consisting of himself, the hereditary chiefs and twenty people elected from the community at large. A corps of constables and a group of church elders were also elected. The community was organized into companies, each led by three councillors, two elders and two constables. Company leaders were given eighteen specific instructions to follow; among other responsibilities, they were to visit the sick, consult together, raise money and admonish backsliders.
The firm hand of the schoolteacher is evident in this village plan, yet it seems to have worked. The Tsimshian may have accepted the new social structure because of its vague similarity to the crest or phratry divisions of the coastal bands. It also solved, at least temporarily, one of the largest problems Duncan faced: how to avoid alienating the chiefs. Social rank was of great importance to Tsimshian society. By involving the chiefs, who had lost much authority in the move to Metlakatla, in major decisions, Duncan hoped to avoid their disaffection. Leaders received badges of office, to be worn on special occasions. On New Year’s Day, the proudly emblazoned chiefs led their companies to the main square for speeches and celebration.
Duncan moved quickly to introduce industry and trade to his new realm, to help it become self-sufficient and fulfill the expectations of Henry Venn and the Church Missionary Society. Foremost in his plans were a sawmill, a fish-processing plant and a store. Duncan modelled his approach on self-supporting villages that the society had established in Africa, India and New Zealand, and on an English co-operative village scheme, which never came to much, promoted by the Anglican church as a “practical demonstration of Christian brotherhood and unity.” These experiments, in turn, had been influenced by Moravian Brethren settlements in England, where members had to agree to abide by certain rules—and by the relatively humane design of new British industrial towns like Saltaire.
So that his mission should not be at the mercy of the Hudson’s Bay trading posts, Duncan purchased a fifteen-metre schooner. The Carolena took Metlakatla’s furs, salted and smoked fish, oolichan oil, dried berries, lumber, cedar shingles, mats and First Nations handicrafts directly to Victoria, the most competitive market on the coast, and returned with a wide assortment of manufactured goods. A store was opened, which outbid the Bay for skins and sold merchandise at lower prices. To the chagrin of established traders, Metlakatla soon began to monopolize the regional fur business.
In 1863, Douglas appointed Duncan a magistrate, and the missionary turned his attention to the illegal traffic in alcohol, which continued in his area. Metlakatla’s First Nations constables participated in “sting” operations, first posing as buyers and then arresting the whiskey dealers. Heavy fines were imposed and boats were impounded. Corrupt traders had been the bane of Duncan’s existence for years, and he went a bit overboard in his pursuit of justice, nabbing several likely parties on insufficient evidence. Victoria’s upright citizens were outraged at the prospect of First Nations authorities apprehending and punishing white criminals. Duncan was reprimanded and the charges dropped. Alcohol sales continued.
Duncan had always been strong on law. He was proud of Metlakatla’s lack of crime. The villagers were free to leave or stay, but if they stayed, they obeyed the rules. Metlakatla had a jail as well as a police force, and offenders were disciplined by flogging, incarceration and fines. Bonds might be posted to ensure good behaviour. Persistent transgressors were shamed with a black flag hung outside their door. Corporal punishment for children, both boys and girls, was frequent.
Metlakatla flourished and grew stronger as the 1860s progressed. More missionaries joined Duncan from England. Some soon faltered and returned to familiar terrain or, like Robert Cunningham, left Christian service altogether and metamorphosed into Hudson’s Bay Company traders. Others, like Arthur Doolan, Robert Tomlinson and William Collison, became trusted Duncan aides, later going on to found or supervise miniature versions of Metlakatla at Kincolith on Nass Bay, Masset in Haida Gwaii and Alert Bay to the south. For while Metlakatla was the most complex and autonomous “model Christian village” founded in British Columbia at this time, it was not the only one. Other branches of the church were involved in similar projects even before the 1862 epidemic.
Father Peter Rondeault, for instance, established an early Roman Catholic mission, school and farm at Cowichan in 1858. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate also did pioneering work in BC, founding Catholic “model” villages at Sechelt and North Vancouver, and later at Mission and Williams Lake. First Nations culture was generally allowed freer scope in Oblate villages than at Metlakatla—except in the boarding schools. There, First Nations languages and customs were forbidden; children who reverted to old ways were punished, and those punishments left scars that have lasted to the present day. Other well-known mission villages were founded in the 1870s, including at Hesquiat on the wind-swept west coast of Vancouver Island, by Father Augustin Brabant; at Fort Simpson, by the Methodist missionary Reverend Thomas Crosby; and at St. Eugene in the East Kootenays, by Father Léon Fouquet.
St. Paul’s, Metlakatla’s great church, was constructed of red cedar and could hold 1,200. The building was finished in 1874 and burned to the ground in 1901. Image B-03572 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives
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