Signing a Blank Piece of Paper: Treaty Making on Vancouver Island

Douglas received Barclay's instructions in December 1849. Early the following summer, he called together the Songhee and Esquimalt, who lived at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, and negotiated the first land surrender with them. For a payment of 371 blankets valued at seventeen shillings each, he persuaded the chiefs to show their approval by making their signs on the bottom of a blank piece of paper. Douglas then wrote to Barclay and asked him to provide a text. The one the secretary supplied was a copy of the legal document that the New Zealand Land Company used to buy tracts from the Maori. Douglas copied Barclay's wording and added the details he needed to address local circumstances. It seems odd that a New Zealand document served as the pragmatic model for the first colonial land surrenders on the Pacific Coast of Canada, but apparently no one paid any attention to the well-established treaty-making traditions of Upper Canada.

--Arthur J. Ray, An Illustrated History of Canada's Native People: I Have Lived Here Since the World Began, 4th ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016), 186.