Founding Father

From fur trader to colonial governor, the controversial Sir James Douglas shaped the foundations of British Columbia in Canada

- by KENNY MacASKILL

CANADA is a land to which huge numbers of Scots emigrated, with many coming to the fore and some even viewed as amongst the nation’s founders.

Sir John Macdonald, the country’s first Prime Minister, and Tommy Douglas, the architect of the country’s Medicare system, spring to mind. But there was another — acclaimed as the “Father of British Columbia” — far less well known. Perhaps that province's distance from Scotland, on the shores of the Pacific, is the reason, but whatever, this is the story of Sir James Douglas.

He was born in 1803, but actually outside Scotland, in Demerara, now part of Guyana, on the north coast of South America, where his father, John Douglas, was a cotton and sugar merchant — shamefully, almost certainly involving slavery, even if only indirectly. Ironically, his mother was a mixed-race woman.

James was one of three children born from that relationship, though his parents never married.

In 1809, James's father returned to Scotland, taking James with him. He'd never see his mother again, with his father marrying and he and his brother sent to school in Lanark. Those events must have been traumatic for a young child. What he thought of it isn’t known, but it must have scarred him, perhaps explaining why, in 1819, at the age of 15, he became an apprentice with the North West Company and set off for Canada.