James Maddison Alden painted this watercolour looking down the Fraser River from the Hudson’s Bay Company fort at Fort Langley. He was part of the British American Boundary Commission when he created the painting in 1860, two years after the colony of British Columbia was declared at the fort. You can just make out an Indigenous canoe, possibly Kwantlen, near a steamer on the far shore (the Kwantlen occupied a village directly across from the fort). The HBC had a strong trading relationship with the Kwantlen and other Coast Salish peoples; many employees married Indigenous women. This began to change with the decline of the fur trade, followed by a frenzied race for gold and the imposition of the reserve system. You can see the Golden Ears on the far left, and a small fire on the shoreline in the middle of the painting. (Image: BC Archives) This image is inverted from the original.
