Colonial Despatches

Neshaki McNeill was a prominent and high-ranking Nishga'a woman and an outstanding trader in her own right in the 1850s. She married Captain William H. McNeill at Fort Simpson in 1863 in a marriage that had diplomatic significance.1

McNeill rose to trading prominence during her and her husband's tenure at Fort Simpson. She often used her prestige and rank on the Nass River to gain large supplies of furs. In the 1850s there was an increase in Nishga'a trading which many accredited to Neshaki McNeill. She became a very wealthy trader and continued trading even after she and her family settled and moved to a 200 acre estate in Victoria.2

• 1. Sylvia Van Kirk, Tracing the Fortunes of Five Founding Families of Victoria, BC Studies, no.115/116, (Winter 1997/98), p.156; E. Palmer Patterson, Early Nishga-European Contact to 1860: A People for 'Those Who Talk of the Efficiency of Moral Lectures to Subdue the Obduracy of the Heart', Anthropologica, vol.25, no.2, (1983), p.205.
• 2. Van Kirk, Tracing the Fortunes, p.156; Patterson, Early Nishga-European Contact, p.211.