page_title: Ned McGowan (lawyer)
section_title: British Columbia: McGowan's War
hierarchical_section_title: Ned McGowan (lawyer) / British Columbia: McGowan's War
caption_attribution_description: The New Eldorado - A Complete View of the Newly Discovered Goldfields in BNA with Vancouver Island and the Whole of the Seaboard from Cape Flattery to Prince of Wales Island
context_page_description: Edward "Ned" McGowan was an American lawyer, Pennsylvania assemblyman, Judge of the California Court of Quarter Sessions, poet, Fraser Canyon gold seeker, adventurer, assistant sergeant-at-arms in the United States Congress, newspaper publisher and bon vivant instigator of the eponymous McGowan's War in colonial British Columbia.
context_section_description: Victoria in 1858 was a city that had seen itself transformed from a tiny village outpost of the British Empire to one of the principal staging centres for the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush.  Upon his arrival McGowan met in the street a member of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee (who tried to shoot him) and the colonial governor who warned him that he needed to obey Her Majesty's laws while in British territory.  Once on the mainland, in the newly created Colony of British Columbia, McGowan met up with Democrat friends and sympathizers at Hill's Bar, while the Vigilance Committee members gathered around the settlement at Yale up river.  It wasn't long before McGowan was in trouble with the law (another fight, with Dr. Max Fifer, a Vigilance Committee member) and implicated in sheltering a man wanted for murder of a British subject at Yale.  McGowan then became embroiled in the semi-comical dispute that broke out between the magistrates at Hill's Bar and Yale which saw the constable from Hill's Bar arrested by Peter Whannell, the magistrate at Yale, who was in turn arrested and convicted of contempt of court by George Perrier, the magistrate at Hill's Bar.  All of this took place against a backdrop of a summer that had been very tense, with a series of bloody clashes between incoming miners from California, who were mostly American but included Europeans and Britons and others,  and the Nlaka'pamux peoples of the Fraser Canyon, during events known as the Fraser Canyon War.  Parallel to this were a series of skirmishes along the route of the Okanagan Trail with the Okanagan people of that region, which are seen as an extension of the contemporaneous Yakima War in Washington Territory. Governor Douglas had had enough, and when Whannell sent word of his arrest, warning that the country was in an uproar, and the Victoria correspondents of the San Francisco press (with many papers run by Vigilance Committee members) printing tales of Ned McGowan's outrageous excesses, the Governor decided to send the newly arrived Royal Engineers under Colonel Richard Moody to restore the Queen's Peace.  This was accomplished in relatively short order, and without bloodshed, although McGowan's supporters at Hill's Bar did fire upon the Royal Engineers as they made their way up the Fraser River to Yale.  McGowan was convicted of assaulting Dr. Fifer before the colony's first judge, Matthew Baillie Begbie, but McGowan charmed everyone, the Colonel, the Judge and the future British Rear Admiral Richard Charles Mayne, then a young lieutenant, with toasts to Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan, (the latter a friend of McGowan's).  The incident is known in British Columbia history as McGowan's War.
caption: The New Eldorado: "A Complete View of the Newly Discovered Goldfields"
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