Colonial Despatches

Sophia Tod, née Lolo, was born, approximately, in 1825 at Thompson River, British Columbia. She was the daughter of Chief Lolo who was said to be the most celebrated Indian Chief in British North America and a Secwepemc mother and grew up in Fort Kamloops with her family.1

In 1843, she married John Tod in a country marriage, they moved to Fort Victoria in 1848, eventually moving onto an 100 acre estate in Oak Bay. It was there that she raised her children — five boys and two girls.2 Lolo-Tod died on 8 February 1883; her brief obituary in the Daily Colonist, reduced her to nothing more than a wife and widow: Mrs. Sophia Tod, widow of the late John Tod, died yesterday.3

Nonetheless, she was a remarkable woman that had to cope with Victoria's racist colonial society.4

• 1. Sophia Lolo, Geni; Secwepemc, First Nations: Land Rights and Environmentalism in British Columbia.
• 2. Secwepemc, First Nations; Sylvia Van Kirk, Tracing the Fortunes of Five Founding Families of Victoria, BC Studies, no.115/116, (Winter 1997/98), p.156.
• 3. What Some People Say, Daily Colonist, 9 February 1883, p.3.
• 4. Secwepemc, First Nations; Van Kirk, Tracing the Fortunes, p.176.