Trading Fate: How a Little-known Company Stopped British Columbia from Becoming an American State

by Graeme Menzies

Overview

This uniquely west-coast take on Canada's origin story focuses on a long-forgotten event that nearly led to British Columbia becoming part of the United States.

Long before a certain American president took to social media to express his desire to make Canada the fifty-first state, the west coast of what is today called British Columbia found itself in the crosshairs of two imperial powers, faced with the very real possibility of being ceded to the United States.

In the summer of 1789, a political and trade dispute between the Nuu-chah-nulth Nation, imperial Spain, Great Britain, and the USA converged in Nootka Sound, off Vancouver Island. If not for the intervention the King George’s Sound Trading Company, Vancouver Island and British Columbia’s fate could have turned out very differently, and the concept of a Canada that extended from Atlantic to Pacific would have been finished before it even began.

With clear, engaging prose, author Graeme Menzies lays out the setting, intrigue, and dynamic cast of characters that ultimately determined Canada’s geographical fate. Released at a time when imperialism, sovereignty, and national identity are more relevant than ever, this book asks us to ponder the events that shaped a nation and established a relationship between neighbouring countries that has once again become precarious.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781772035483
Publisher:	Heritage Group Distribution
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Graeme Menzies is a writer, researcher, storyteller, and an international marketing and communications professional, whose experience includes serving as the director of communications for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. He is the author of the historical biography Bones: The Life and Adventures of Doctor Archibald Menzies and co-author (with Dave Doroghy) of several books in the 111 Places series of guidebooks, including 111 Places in Victoria That You Must Not Miss, 111 Places in Whistler That You Must Not Miss, and 111 Places in Vancouver That You Must Not Miss. He is the recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal, awarded to those who have made a significant contribution to Canada at home or abroad. Graeme Menzies lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Read an Excerpt

Preface

When I began writing this book I had no idea the United States would start a trade war with Canada, and float the idea of making it the fifty-first State, just as the book was about to go to press. My goal was simply to present a west-coast perspective of the Canadian origin story.

I wanted to show, contrary to the many oversimplified histories which suggest both countries were created virtually overnight—in the USA, with a Declaration of Independence in 1776 and in Canada with a conference in 1867—that the true backstory is much more complex and also much more interesting. I also wanted to show that, while heroic personalities like Sir John A. Macdonald and George Washington certainly played their part in big events on the eastern side of the continent, there were many other less well-known personalities making history on the west coast and with equal impact. Key among these was a brief and now mostly overlooked incident at King George’s Sound (Nootka Sound), involving ordinary people seldom heard of, which saved British Columbia and stopped Canada from becoming America.

This backstory unfolds in four parts. The first part covers events in the 1700s, and the third covers those in the 1800s. Between these two centuries is an important second part, which reviews the earliest known encounters between Europeans and west coast Indigenous peoples. The fourth and final part of the book imagines how the history of British Columbia, and Canada, might have unfolded had the King George’s Sound Company never existed.

I have tried to include as many original sources as possible, and have presented the reader with the authentic texts wherever practical to do so. There is one drawback to using two-hundred-year-old texts, however: Spelling and punctuation were varied and inconsistent back then. Readers will find that Nootka is also spelled Nutca, Nutka, and Nuca. I have taken some small liberties, such as changing an “f” to an “s” or adding the occasional comma or period, to make sure authenticity is not provided at the cost of clarity. Those changes have been put in square brackets. For the most part, currency values are in their original form (Spanish dollars, American dollars, British pounds) and unconverted to present-day values.

I hope that by the end of the book readers will have gained a deeper appreciation for the backstory behind the common history of the continent’s two countries, and will have enjoyed reading the tales of history’s less celebrated characters.

With regard to events of the present day, readers may rightly conclude from this book that the recent tensions between Canada and the United States are not really anything new. America’s desire for continental domination goes back a long time and continues to unfold. The popular narrative today, as before, remains focused on the east and on the big personalities in Ottawa and Washington. But, if there is a lesson to this book, it is that the fate of nations is as likely to be shaped by common people, tangled up in unforeseen and unscripted events in some remote area of the country, as by the powerful policy-makers at the centre of the drama.

Graeme Menzies

Vancouver, Canada

 

Part One: The 1700s

 

Chapter 1.
America, 1776

We cannot understand how British Columbia was saved, and Canada stopped, from becoming a part of the United States of America without first having some appreciation for what, initially, an absurd idea that was.

Today, we think of the United States as a big and powerful country. And so we should: it has the largest economy—and defence spending—in the world. We know its independence movement was fuelled by various taxation and policy grievances and by the output of intellectuals stimulated by the age of Enlightenment. Its political discourse was shaped by people like David Hume, Edmund Burke, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, with exciting ideas about governance, justice, rights, property, and so on. Thomas Paine, for example, an emigrant to America from England, became one of the best-known of these thinkers when he published his pamphlet Common Sense in 1776. The work, which advocated American independence, proved a major intellectual stimulus to the colonies’ secession from Britain. These people were intellectual giants.

Despite the magnitude of this intellectual thought, however, at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, the United States of American was a small country. In fact, it was hardly a country at all. The thirteen colonies whose representatives had signed the Declaration of Independence in Pennsylvania seven years earlier held an impressive total population of 2.5 million people¹ (half of whom were slaves), but they were spread over a region of over a million square kilometres, giving them a population density of about two-and-a-half people for every square kilometre. Philadelphia, the city where the declaration was signed and the largest city in the American colonies, was home to some 40,000 people, big by North American standards of the day but falling far short of European cities like Paris (about 500,000) or London (over 750,000). The new republic’s second-largest city, New York, was home to just 25,000 persons.²

The newly formed USA, affirmed in the Treaty of Paris in September of 1783, was small in other ways too. Despite having just won a war, it had no military to speak of. The feisty and effective Continental Army that George Washington led, with help from France and Spain, melted away to nothing when he disbanded it in November of 1783. The following year Congress, skeptical of governments with permanent armies, rejected his appeal for a force of around two thousand troops and authorized a new professional standing army of just seven hundred men. In comparison, the British army was about fifty times that size, the French army had about 160,000 men and the Austrians about 150,000.³

The new republic’s navy was also comparatively insignificant. While their wartime Continental Navy had scraped together a handful of schooners and brigs to harass and disrupt the British Navy, it was the French and Spanish ships that did the heavy lifting for the revolutionaries’ battles at sea. As Washington expressed so clearly in a letter to his comrade the French aristocrat Lafayette in 1781, “As certain as night succeeds the day, that without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive,” and further that “no land force can [act] decisively unless it is accompanied by a maritime superiority.”⁴ He was absolutely right, and perhaps no better example of this truism exists in the American context than the 1781 Battle of Chesapeake. This match between twenty-four French ships and nineteen British ships near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay–the entrance to the estuary leading to Yorktown–was critical to Washington’s success there. Without the French ships blocking access to the British, the British would have either reinforced the troops of General Cornwallis or evacuated them and prevented their surrender to Washington. As it was, the blockade enabled Washington’s Continental Army to prevail, Cornwallis was unable to hold out longer, and the Battle of Yorktown is remembered now as a decisive battle that led to ultimate victory for the revolutionaries. But it was the French navy, not the American, that won the day.

A follow-up naval conflict between the French and British navies, the Battle of the Saintes, occurred the following year and, though it had no immediate tactical impact on any land-based operation, it deprived the revolutionaries of any possibility of repeating the success of Chesapeake and helped bring peace negotiations to a quick resolution. In this case, the battle in the Caribbean Sea was a match between thirty French ships and thirty-six British ships (and zero American ships). The conflict saw the British suffer fewer than a thousand dead or wounded while the French lost about three thousand, dead or wounded, with another five thousand captured. The human loss for France was substantial, and so was the loss of treasure: all the surviving French vessels were confiscated by the British navy, along with twenty-six chests of gold and silver that were aboard the French admiral’s flagship.

Washington knew that without a navy—the French navy—there was little more to be accomplished with his army, and the peace negotiators in Paris were motivated to draw the conflict to its conclusion. When that came to pass, the Continental Navy, like its Army, was disbanded, having served its purpose. The new republic could not afford, and would not authorize, a professional navy until ten years later, in 1794, when it approved construction of just six frigates, mostly just for the purpose of protecting trade ships from pirates. Meanwhile, the European forces continued to dominate the world’s oceans: The British navy at this time had about 127 battleships and carriers⁵ (and growing), while the French and Spanish navies each had about forty-five ships-of-the-line,⁶ and Russia and Denmark had thirty-four and twenty-one, respectively.⁷

The United States’ economic size was also small at this time, and somewhat unstable. The thirteen colonies were barely coordinated, with each managing its budgets and trade relationships separately and using different currencies. In 1789, the colonies had only three banks, the oldest just eight years old. Financial markets crashed in 1791 and again in 1792.⁸

The new republic had gained control over an impressive export commodity, tobacco, worth an average annual value of about £750,000. But this compared poorly to Britain’s sugar exports from its Caribbean colonies, worth nearly six times that amount.⁹ Britain had other sources of trade around the world as well, including spices, tea, and other goods from India and China.

During the wartime period of 1774 to 1781 the colonies’ economy, once generating a per-person GDP higher than that enjoyed in Britain, declined by 15 percent as production and exports were reduced and disrupted.¹⁰ The immediate post-revolutionary economy was no better, with both high inflation and huge debt. In the words of James Madison, writing to Richard Henry Lee in 1785: “We have lost by the Revolution our trade with the West Indies, the only one which yielded us a favorable balance, without having gained new channels to compensate it.” And “In every point of view indeed the trade of this Country is in a deplorable Condition. A comparison of current prices here with those in the Northern States, either at this time or at any time since the peace, will shew that the loss direct on our produce & indirect on our imports, is not less than 50 Per Ct.”¹¹

Footnotes:

1. Moore, “Fun Facts: From Counties Named Liberty to $368.6M Worth of Fireworks Sold.” 
2. Alexander, “The Philadelphia Numbers Game.” 
3. Stephen Conway, “The British Army and the War of Independence,” p. 185. 
4. Letter from George Washington to Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, 15 November 1781, Founders Online (National Archives), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/99-01-02-07408.
5. Historic UK website, https://www.historic-uk.com/Blog/British-Navy-Size-Over-Time/.
6. A “ship-of-the-line” is a battleship of usually no less than seventy-four guns (cannons).
7. The British Royal Navy website, https://www.napolun.com/mirror/napoleonistyka.atspace.com/navy.htm. 
8. Scott C. Miller, “Ten Facts About the American Economy in the 18th Century,” Mount Vernon website, https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/colonial-life-today/early-american-economics-facts/. 
9. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, “The American Revolution Part 1.” 
10.  Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, “The Economics of the Revolution,” online presentation (University of Pennsylvania), https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/PEEA_9_Economic_Costs_Revolution.pdf. 
11. US National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0168.