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In the fourth installment of our series marking
B.C.’s 150th anniversary, author and pastor Ed Hird profiles a man of war –
and worship.
HOW MANY of us have ever heard how Colonel Richard
Clement Moody ‘fought the good fight’ in B.C.’s first
war?
In 1858, Colonel Moody’s troops steamed north
along the Fraser River to Yale, on the Enterprise.
Ned McGowan had led a vigilante gang to falsely
imprison the Yale Justice of the Peace, P.B. Whannell.
McGowan had great influence with the vigilantes, as he
was both a former Philadelphia police superintendent implicated in a bank
robbery, and a former California judge acquitted on a murder charge.
Without Moody’s intervention, the fear was that
B.C. would be quickly annexed to the U.S. by McGowan’s gang.
Upon arriving in Yale, Colonel Moody and his force were
unexpectedly received with “vociferous cheering and every sign of
respect and loyalty,” according to one account of the day. No
shots were even fired!
Matthew Begbie (the so-called ‘Hanging
Judge’), in his first-ever B.C. court case, fined McGowan a small
amount of £5 for assault, after which the defendant sold his
gold-rush stake and promptly returned to California.
Journalist (and later B.C. premier) Amor de Cosmos
declared B.C. had “her first war – so cheap – all for
nothing,” adding: “B.C. must feel pleased with herself.”
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Moody left his mark spiritually, as well. At the
conclusion of ‘Ned McGowan’s War,’ Colonel Moody invited
40 miners to join him at the courthouse for worship.
As no clergyman was present, Colonel Moody led worship
from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
Moody wrote afterward: “It was the first time in
British Columbia that the liturgy of our church was read. To me God, in his
mercy, granted this privilege. The room was crowded with Hill’s Bar
men . . . Old grey-bearded men, young eager-eyed men, stern middle-aged men
of all nations knelt with me, before the throne of Grace.”
– from Ed Hird’s Battle for the Soul of Canada.
August 2008
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