The Fort George Murders of 1823: Crisis and Co-existence in New Caledonia

In 1823, a series of violent events in northern British Columbia shattered the fragile trading relationship between the local Indigenous community and the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). In The Fort George Murders , best-selling author and historian Geoff Mynett delves deep into the HBC’s documentation about this exceptional period in BC history. Writers later in the century took the HBC stories and added invented details and imagined motivation like layers of paint and grime over an old painting. Unfortunately, there are few written records from the Indigenous point of view. With a keen and curious sensitivity, Mynett examines the records, always bearing in mind the likelihood of conscious or unconscious bias of the writers.

With the murder of two HBC workers following a situation rooted in personal relationships and complicated by tensions between the Indigenous and the settler communities, the future of New Caledonia’s trading district was thrown into crisis. Mynett wades through the imperfect historical record in search of what really happened, seeking to understand this period of dangerous tension: Was the HBC to blame? Would they withdraw from New Caledonia altogether? Would they capture the murderers? And if so, what then?

Bringing to life notable figures in British Columbia’s history such as Chief Kw’eh, James Murray Yale, John Tod, Sir George Simpson and Sir James Douglas, The Fort George Murders explores how simmering tensions between the HBC and Indigenous community upended a delicate trade alliance, in which many wanted to simply co-exist. In a startling account as gripping as it is uncomfortable, bestselling BC author Geoff Mynett brings us to a breaking point in Canada’s fur trade.