James Dunsmuir

James Dunsmuir

James Dunsmuir (born July 8, 1851 in Fort Vancouver , † June 6, 1920 at Cowichan Bay ) was a Canadian politician and industrialist . He was Prime Minister of the Province of British Columbia from June 15, 1900 to November 21, 1902, and Vice-Governor from May 1906 to December 1909 . The son of Robert Dunsmuir , who had built up a coal, shipping and railroad empire, dominated economic life on Vancouver Island at the turn of the century and was the richest man in the province.

Studies and business management

Dunsmuir was born in the Fort Vancouver trading post of the Hudson's Bay Company when his parents Robert Dunsmuir (1825-1889) and Joan Olive White (1828-1908) emigrated from Scotland to Vancouver Island. He spent his school days in Nanaimo . His father got rich with the discovery and development of coal deposits , which enabled him to give his son a good education. James Dunsmuir attended boarding school in Dundas and studied mining at the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College in Blacksburg . He married Laura Surles and returned to Nanaimo with her in 1876.

Dunsmuir became a mine manager in his father's rapidly expanding company. He and two employees also designed the first telephone in British Columbia using a diagram in Scientific American magazine . In the second half of the 1880s, Dunsmuir gained more and more skills and began to develop new coal deals with Comox . The father died in April 1889; he had bequeathed most of the stake to his wife. For the next 17 years, James Dunsmuir took legal action against his mother and sisters. He succeeded in bringing the family company step by step under his control. In 1899 he founded the city of Ladysmith on the southeast coast of Vancouver Island.

Political offices

In July 1898, Dunsmuir was elected to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia as a member of the Comox constituency (until 1903 there were no political parties in the province). He quickly gained great influence and Lieutenant Governor Thomas Robert McInnes appointed him the new Prime Minister on June 15, 1900.

The government resisted widespread calls to restrict Asian immigration. However, it did so not for humanitarian reasons, but to enable the rapidly expanding economy to employ cheap labor. The government encouraged the construction of railroads and implemented a redistribution of the constituencies to take account of the population growth on the mainland. Dunsmuir did not like politics and resigned on November 21, 1902, to devote more time to his company. Reluctantly, he was persuaded to take over the office of lieutenant governor on May 26, 1906. He exercised this until December 11, 1909.

Further life

In 1905 Dunsmuir sold the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway founded by his father to the Canadian Pacific Railway . In 1906, after becoming lieutenant governor, he bought a large piece of land in Colwood , a western suburb of Victoria. There he had Hartley Castle built, a neo-Gothic property with 40 rooms in the style of a Scottish mansion. In 1910 he sold his coal mines and other industrial properties for $ 11 million and spent the rest of his life hunting, fishing and sailing on his 66- foot yacht Dolaura . He died at the age of 68 in his fishing hut on Cowichan Bay.

On July 5, 1876, Dunsmuir married Laura Miller Surles (1858-1937) in Fayetteville, North Carolina . They had three sons and nine daughters. His eldest son became addicted to alcoholism, and the second oldest son, James, died in May 1915 when the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. One of his daughters, Muriel, was the first wife of fashion designer Edward Molyneux from 1923 to 1924 . She and her siblings squandered the entire family fortune within a generation.

literature

• Terry Reksten: The Dunsmuir Saga. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver 1991, ISBN 0-88894-742-9 .

Web links

• James Dunsmuir . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).
• James Dunsmuir ( English, French ) In: The Canadian Encyclopedia .