Letter to Provincial Archivist E.O.S. Scholefield from Anthropologist James A. Teit regarding Simon Fraser's identifications of the Shuswap, Chilcotin and Thompson River Indians.
This series consists of one volume titled “Waddington Massacre : Minutes of the Evidence” related to the Tsilhqot'in War, also historically referred to as the Chilcotin uprising and Bute Inlet massacre. The notebook is mostly blank but was used to record several kinds of information, including: diary entries; draft letters; transcriptions of hearings and statements; sketches and diagrams; accounting information relating to expenditures; and an unrelated County Court schedule for 1868.
The diary entries cover the period June 6 to July 12, 1864. The creator is unclear, but it may have been written by William George Cox, Gold Commissioner and Magistrate for the Cariboo region, or someone in the group of men who travelled with him from Alexandria in an attempt to apprehend the Indigenous men allegedly involved in the deaths of several settlers. This group was referred to as the Alexandria expedition. This estimation is based on the events and dates in the diary and their similarity to Cox’s expedition as described in related colonial despatches. The expedition resulted in the arrest and execution of six Tsilhqot’in Chiefs.
The notebook also includes several sworn statements from witnesses related to events of the Tsilhqot'in War.
