Harry Foote: A British Settler
He arrived on the dock with a single bag, leather clasp closed carefully. A cold wind blew raindrops onto his face and soaked the corners of his hair. Piled high in burlap-covered stacks was the precious cargo – a cast-iron stove, two stacks of wood, roofing tin. Mary had the box with his lunch, two slabs of bread and ham, an apple from the pantry polished and clean. Today was the big day, the journey day.
In the next year he planned to build a house, a home, a place to call his own, on a small island off the coast of BC. It had been one of his first purchases, a whim of a moment – arriving fresh from the prairies, crisp black top hat on head and cash in hand. Mr. Stubbins, an early contact, said “It’s practically free – a chance to really start fresh”. Small enough to walk across, large enough to feel like home. A few conversations later, Harry made the buy – 3 islands ‘up the coast’, with the promise of fresh soil, untilled land with a gentle rise and resident goats. Mary called it his pipe dream – an irrational purchase at a time when the children needed clothes for school and Cecil’s shoes barely fit anymore. But time passes, and things change – just over 15 years after purchase, it was time to finally build.
Harry Foote wasn’t the only BC resident to build a house in rural BC at the time. British Columbia – the ultimate Western paradise for those who chose, those who qualified, those escaping elsewhere. Up the coast in Sointula, a small group of Finnish coal miners had purchased land and set up a utopian commune. Further up the coast, the colony of Cape Scott, with a school house and dance hall. By comparison, Harry’s dream was small and rather private – just a small island, just a single home, a mere day’s journey up the coast.
Yet here’s the question: who was he to stand on the dock as if he owned it, board a ship for another peoples’ land? What gave this man the privilege to go from place to place with ease? By what right did he own land and build homes on the territory of others? After thousands of years of Indigenous care for this land, the story was disrupted by a young man with a utopian dream, a man who in his own way was settling his imagined frontier.
Who was he? An early settler with a funny name. Who was he? Yet another white settler in early BC. It’s British Columbia, a British settler colony, and this British man was my great-great grandfather. His act of settlement started my family’s story – and that is the story I’m beginning to tell.