Talk:Fort Simpson (Columbia Department)

Some comments

Just made this, here's a few comments.

• I only have one source handy (Mackie) other than BCGNIS. More sources would be good. Mackie is silent on the fate of Fort Simpson, so I could not write anything about what happened to it after the 1840s.

• I put a link to Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories under "See also", but there should probably be a hatnote or disambig thing instead. Also, I'm unlikely to get around to putting links to this new page on other pages that ought to link here (many of which currently link to Lax Kw'alaams, British Columbia. Perhaps later, if not beaten to it.

• Mackie listed some indigenous people who traded at the fort or with the Tsimshian "homeguard", but I'm not sure how best to link these. He listed, for example, "Tongass, Haida, and Kaigani". I linked Haida but am not sure about Kaigani. Are they part of the Haida? I couldn't find anything about an indigenous people called "Tongass" on WP offhand. Also, I assumed that "Carrier", mentioned by Mackie, is the same as Dakelh. If these things could be checked/fixed that would be great.

• The coordinates are those given for Port Simpson / Lax Kw'alaams in BCGNIS.

That's it for now (my two free hours turned out to be one, ah well). Pfly (talk) 03:32, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

thanks for starting this; I'm going to (once again) try and get Stikine done over the weekend; I have a friend moving out here from the West next week so will be away from a lot of my usual obsessive wiki-time as life shifts around some...yes, the Carrier and Dakelh are the same; Kaigani currently just links to Haida but they deserve their own article at some point; they're exiles from the QCI where they'd been repeat victims of heavy raiding by other Haida and took refuse on PWI. The Tongass are the Cape Fox kwaan (tribe) of the Tlingit and were among those who raided Port Gamble, Washington and came into combat with the USS Massachuseetts; one of the sources about that says that they were Tsimshian but I checked with someone knowledgeable about NW tribes' history and he says for sure that particular raid was the Tilngit; Tongas Island is in their tribal area and became the site of a US post from 1867 onwards as a way to control access to the former-leased lands of the HBC in former Russian America, including charging tolls on Stikine-bound boats (headed for the Cassiar mines); there's some 1850s reference in BC/VI sources about a large party of Tongass returning northwards from raids in Puget Sound, I'd gather the same as those re Port Gamble, but typically the Tongass and a certain group of allied Haida raided Puget sound every few years ago, something like the "Wraith" in Stargate-Atlantis; the reference is from a ship's log, as the ship "hid out" waiting for them to pass as it was a large party of full-bore war canoes, a few hundred warrios and who knows who many captives...rough times, you'd definitely want to have been on a well-armed ship. While researching Ft Stikine I found a lot of material on Russian relations with the Tlingit, and Haida, so will assemble the links and put them somewhere useful, as some of it bears on all the northern fur trade including Ft. Simpson; if I see any Ft Simpson passages in particular I'll try and remember to put the links here....Alexander Begg an the Scholefield & Howay tomes I'm always referring to, which are on www.historica.ca and Begg is also in GoogleBooks, as it turns out, have various passages about hte machinations of hte company and its strategy re the northern forts; Ft Simpson was also meant as a counter to Sitka's operations, not just to the US ,and was partly an assertion of trading territory given the previous Russian attempt to advance their frontier southwards to 43 and, tenatively, to 51, before settling on 54-40, which was an "adjustment" of 55, which had been the original Russian territorial assertion from 1799; see the various Begg cites on Alaska boundary dispute. Next time you're in a good older bookstore, or if you've got university library access, look for the Akriggs' British Columbia Chronicle (two vols.) which has lots on the northern forts and a lot of vignette-detail...Scholifield & Howay cover material/notions/analysses I didn't see in any of the others...and there's always Pethick, in wahtever volumes; but a surprising amount of well0-wrttien stuff is on Googlebooks....the bibliography of such materials available online is remarkably large....there may also be something in Adrien-Gabriel Morice's books, although his focus is more on the Northern Interior (NB somewhere in the article overleaf you spell "interior" with a lower case; that's not the BC convention but since it's not actually BC at that point I guess I can live with it; I'm usually pretty picky; similarly a common BC convention is to capitalize "the Coast"....)....damn there's so much to cover; it's interesting to see the "line" from Mackie, it's quite different from stuff from up here, especially the older stuff (much more recent stuff tends to say things like "white empires ignored what native people thought" without actually telling you very much about anything; I've got some downloaded PDFs I'll send you which have some intersting stuff, sorry I may not have the URLs I got them from....gotta hit the hay, htanks for starting this; I'll tweak some of it tomorrow; some geographic places can be redlinked; Tsimpsean Peninsula for instance; oh, about Port Simpson, it was an important cannery town, one of the most impoertant, for a long time (hence its continuing large indigenous population)...and teh "homeguard" was a particular one of the Six Tribes (Seven?) which form today's community; same as how Chief Shakes resettled around Fort Stikine; after Ft Stikine was closed the HBC still operated a post there (not a fort) and teh place was known as Shakesville until it became Wrangell (actual precise locations shifted around a bit, though I think...); see Choquette Hot Springs Provincial Park about Buck Choquette, who was the HBC's agent there until he moved up the Stikine ocne the Yanks moved in; although apposite to the Bc-side accounts of him, I found omehting in the Wrangell paper which gave an entirely different view of him; integrating differing accounts from either side of the border about all this history, plus the Russian angle, could be a whole life's work....as we arleady know about Astorai/Thompson's River Post/Spokane House/fort, etc...Skookum1 (talk) 04:43, 9 January 2009 (UTC)