d. 1868
William Robinson emigrated from
San Francisco, California, to
Salt Spring Island, to live in a
multi-racial settlement
that had been established there, sometime around
1858/9, by a group of “free” African-Americans.
Governor Douglas gave
pre-emptive rights
to the African-American colonists, allowing them acquire and cultivate land on
Salt Spring and then later purchase the “provincial Crown lands” that they had “improved” at
discounted rates.
Robinson was a
very devoted Sunday school teacher,
who was reportedly planning to leave
Salt Spring—to reunite with his wife—in the week before he was murdered in
1868 at his Vesuvius Bay cabin home. In
1869,
Ich-yst-a-tis (also known as Tshuanahusset), a Hul'qumi'num-speaking Indigenous man, was arrested,
convicted before an all-White jury, and then executed on July 24 for Robinson's murder. However,
Ich-yst-a-tis's hand in the murder has been challenged by historians who have re-examined the evidence
presented and withheld during the trial.
Although three African-American men were murder on Salt Spring Island, from 1868-9, only Robinson's murder was “solved;” but, all of the murders were blamed on [Indigenous] people,
fuelling indiscriminate suspicions toward, and contempt for, Indigenous peoples.
- 1. Ruth Sandwell and John Lutz, William Robinson, Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History: Who Killed William Robinson? Race,
Justice and Settling the Land.
- 2. Ruth Wells Sandwell, Reading the Land: Rural Discourse and the Practice of Settlement, Salt Spring Island,
British Columbia, 1859-1891, PhD Diss., Simon Fraser University, 1997, 51.
- 3. Sandwell and Lutz, William Robinson, Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History.
- 4. Sandwell and Lutz, The Murder, Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History.
- 5. Ibid.
- 6. Ibid.