The History Behind the Story
The story is fictional. The historical world it is built inside is real.
Four empires came to take a coast from primitives. They traded with sovereigns instead.
Russia. Spain. Britain. America. Hundreds of ships between Haida Gwaii and the Skeena. All of them wanted the same thing. None of them could take it.
"Within the first three minutes of WILD WOMAN OF THE WOODS, you've already established that... they were not 'waiting to be discovered.'"
— Former Warner Bros. & New Line Reader · PAGE International Screenwriting Awards
The Sovereigns
The Tsimshian and Nisga'a held the Nass and the Skeena rivers.
Two rivers, and everything worth having moved on them. Salmon. Grease. Every fur coming down out of the interior. The nations who owned the water owned the trade, and they ran it as a monopoly.
The Company came north in 1831 and put its fort at the mouth of the Nass — because the Tlingit had already run them off the Stikine.
Three years later a Tsimshian chief told them the fort was in the wrong place. They moved it. It became the largest post on the coast, and it sat exactly where he said.
Fort Simpson, 1862. Drawn by Frederick Alexcee, Tsimshian.
They set the prices. Played the empires against each other until the traders bled. The Company called them obstinate. Grasping. Impossible. Then dealt with them anyway, because there was no other way in.
The Wars They Couldn't Win
The Tlingit went to war with Russia and won.
They burned the fort at Sitka to the ground. The Russians came back with warships. The Tlingit fought them off and kept the coast.
Three passes through the mountains, and the Tlingit owned all three. The Company tried to go around them. Chilkat men walked three hundred miles inland and burned the post down. The Company built another. That one burned too.
The Russians called it treachery. It was a trade dispute. The Tlingit won that one too.
Haida warrior. Wooden helmet and armor.
The Haida came out of the fog in seventy-foot canoes.
Thirty men to a hull. Wooden helmets. Sea-lion armor. Paddles honed to a blade.
Sixty miles of open water and they went home clean.
1794. They took two ships. Killed all but one man of each crew.
The Haida are coming. From Puget Sound to Sitka, that sentence emptied beaches.
In the letters: bloodthirsty. Faithless. A menace to honest commerce.
Same letters: the finest canoes on the Pacific. The hardest bargain on earth.
You cannot take a country from people you admire.
So they wrote it both ways. Ninety years of it.
Then the fur ran out and the gold came in, and only one of those descriptions was still useful.
They never won a war here. They never had to.
The Betrayal
1858. Gold on the Fraser. Thirty thousand men through Victoria in two months. The town had five hundred people in it.
None of them had been here. None of them had traded here, married here, buried anyone here.
But the men who had were still here. Men who took wives from these nations. Whose children were Tsimshian, Tlingit, Haida. Who had lived forty years on food these people gave them, learned the water from them, buried friends here.
Some of them helped when it came.
Some of them took their shot at what their grandfathers had come for and failed to get.
March 1862. The Brother Jonathan, out of San Francisco.
Three hundred and fifty gold miners. One of them had smallpox.
Ninety years of failing to take this coast. And now something that could.
Not a disaster. A decision.
They knew what the medicine was. Thirty years on this coast. The Company had used it before — on Indigenous people — back when it needed the trade.
1862, it went to the whites.
It went to the tribes who worked in Victoria's houses.
It went to a missionary's converts. Duncan vaccinated his followers at Metlakatla and closed the gate. Five dead in his village. Two hundred and sixty-six at the fort down the coast.
The Extermination
This was not one man's decision.
The Governor. The Assembly. The police commissioner. The judges. The Company. The bishop. The newspapers.
Nobody had to conspire. They wanted the land and the gold under it. And the people standing on it — some of them family, four generations in — were gone in the name of progress.
Then the newspaper went to work.
There were villages surrounding Victoria — the busiest seaport north of San Francisco. They had come there for generations, season after season, to trade. They built the trade that town ran on.
Burn the villages to ashes. Take any means, no matter what.
April 28: remove the entire Indian population.
The police commissioner ordered it that evening. The Governor gave permission.
One day to get out.
Leave, or we pull the roofs down. Gunboat in the harbor. Armed guards on the roads.
Then the evictions. Round up the sick. Drive them out at gunpoint, cannons trained on the camps, and force them north to carry it into every village on the coast.
June. A warship towed twenty-six canoes fifteen days up the water. Three hundred men, women and children, hauled home.
They said what would happen before they did it.
We should not be in the least surprised if the disease were to visit and nearly destroy every tribe between here and Sitka.
Printed before the canoes went north.
The authorities have commenced the work of extermination.
Never was there a more execrable Indian policy than ours.
Printed that June. While it was happening.
Then they counted.
Sixty Haida were sent north from Victoria in mid-May. A ship's captain came back and put the dead at forty.
Printed June 21.
Arthur Wellington Clah wrote it down.
Ninety years of trade. Over in a season. By design.
1864. Douglas retired. Joseph Trutch took over Lands and Works.
He said Aboriginal title did not exist.
He cut the reserves. He argued a family needed ten acres. A settler could pre-empt a hundred and sixty.
He held the office seven years. Then they made him the first Lieutenant-Governor.
No war took this coast. A betrayal did.
