Western Canadian migration before the CPR: the 1860 voyage of Susan Moir Allison

I’m curious about how European settlers emigrated to western Canada. One possible route is via the U.S. Another is via Hudson’s Bay. A third is sailing around Cape Horn. It depends on the time period. In this post I map out how a British settler to British Columbia made the journey in 1860, before both the Canadian Pacific Railway (1885) and the Panama Canal (1904).

Susan Allison

Susan Louisa (Moir) Allison (1845-1937) is said to be “the first woman to write a memoir of pioneer life in interior British Columbia.”¹ Born in Sri Lanka to Scottish tea planter Stratton Moir and Susanna Mildern, she was four when her father died. By seven, she was living with her widowed mother and two siblings in London.² In “A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia: The Recollections of Susan Allison,” we have a first-hand account of what it was like to travel from London to the western coast of pre-Confederation Canada.³

In 1860, then fourteen-year-old Susan Moir emigrated with her family. Departing “in June, when England was at its loveliest,” and arriving on “my fifteenth birthday on the 18th of August,” the journey took about six weeks. Here are the travel details she provided:

1. Euston Station, London, England
2. Southampton, England
3. Aboard the Atrato, to St. Thomas, West Indies (now US Virgin Islands)
4. Change to the Tamar, to Colon, Panama
5. From Colon to Panama City by train, from the Atlantic to the Pacific
6. Aboard the John L. Stephens to Acapulco then to San Francisco
7. Aboard the Hudsons’ Bay Company (HBC) ship The Otter to Portland and then Victoria
8. After a rest in Victoria, take the HBC ship The Otter to New Westminster
9. Change to The Reliance to Hope, the end of the journey

Here’s the route, running from right to left. [Move the map around to see more.]

The family left from London Euston Station. They would have seen the Great Hall, erected in 1849, featuring a ceiling that was 62 feet / 19 m high.⁴

According to Susan, they took the Atrato from Southampton, England to the West Indies. This would be the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s steamship the Atrato, which, when she was built in 1853, was the world’s largest passenger ship.⁵ Susan said, “The Atrato was a floating palace – I have a distinct recollection of the beautiful stained glass in the stateroom windows.”

Outside the West Indies, the party changed steamers from the Atrato to the Tamar. In 1860, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company also had the contract for the West Indies. There are four ships named Tamar – Susan’s ship was possibly the 1,850 ton Tamar built in 1854 as transport for the Crimean War and decommissioned in 1871.⁵

Susan wrote,

The July weather was most terribly sultry and the air round us was shimmering the day we landed in Colon or Aspinwall… we got into the quaintest concern with a funnel shaped smoke stack that was called a train and crawled across the isthmus to Panama…”

Susan Allison, abt. Jul 1860, Panama

This would be the 1855 Panama Canal Railway, almost 48 miles / 77 kms, which runs from Colón to Balboa, just south of Panama City.⁶

From Panama, they took The John L. Stephens up the Pacific coast to San Francisco.⁷

After a rest in Victoria, Susan and her party took the Hudsons Bay Company ship The Otter to New Westminster.⁸

From New Westminster, the family took the Reliance up the Fraser River to Hope. This is the end of the journey, six weeks in total.

Afterword

Genealogists suffer from equal parts insatiable curiosity and squirrel syndrome. I can’t now recall why I picked up “A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia,” but it wasn’t for this purpose. As soon as I read Susan’s account of her journey, I dropped the bio and picked up my computer. With this post, I gained insights about possible British and European emigration routes to western Canada.

Next week: Tracing the voyages of the Princess Royal, London to Fort Victoria (1858-59)

Thank yous

To Kendra Gaede and Bruce Popham, of the SE & Winnipeg Branch, Manitoba Genealogical Society, for hosting me in Winnipeg May 6-10, 2024. To the Archives of Manitoba, for answering my many questions, guiding me through the records, and giving me a last minute appointment with the map collection.

References

¹“Susan Louisa Moir Allison, National Historic Person, Princeton, BC,” directory, Government of Canada, abt 2006.

²Sunny Clark, “Susan Louisa (Moir) Allison (1845 – 1937),” wiki, WikiTree, accessed October 15, 2023.

³Susan Allison and Margaret A. Ormsby, “A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia: The Recollections of Susan Allison,” 1st ed. (Vancouver, British Columbia: University of British Columbia Press, 1976).

⁴“Euston Railway Station,” in Wikipedia, July 31, 2021.

⁵“RMS Atrato 1853,” in Wikipedia, June 17, 2021; Ted Finch, S. Swiggum, and M. Kohli, “Royal Mail Line / Royal Mail Steam Packet Company,” Online database lookup, The Ships List, accessed August 8, 2021

⁶Edward White, S. Swiggum, and M. Kohli, “New York to British Columbia, Across Panama in 1859,” Online database lookup, The Ships List, January 21, 2005; Panama Canal Railway,” in Wikipedia, July 5, 2021.

⁷Pacific Mail Steam Ship Company’s Steamer John L. Stephens, print, Call No. priJHK 00358, about 1855, John Haskell Kemble Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

⁸“Otter (Steamship),” in Wikipedia, July 15, 2021.