How Métis scrip moved through buyers, banks and investment networks -- and why British Columbia must confront that history.
Vancouver classified advertisements show half-breed scrip offered for a car and sought by a buyer operating from the Lotus Hotel.
Historian Paige Raibmon has described every non-Aboriginal person in British Columbia as a beneficiary of the province’s “original sin of dispossession.” She was writing about Indigenous dispossession in BC broadly, not Métis scrip specifically. Her words help explain how colonial advantages were created, passed through ordinary institutions and inherited over time. The history of Métis scrip reveals one part of that inheritance.
In 1910, a Vancouver newspaper advertised a “half-breed scrip agreement,” good for 240 acres of land, in exchange for a “good automobile.” Three years later, another advertisement announced: “Wanted - South African and half-breed scrip. Room 500 Lotus Hotel.” These were not harmless curiosities. They show Vancouver operating as part of a secondary market where Métis entitlement paper could be bought, resold and exchanged far from the communities whose rights had produced it.
A document meant to settle Métis land rights had become something that could be traded for a car.
To understand that market, we need to begin with Treaty No. 8. First negotiated in 1899, the treaty covered a vast northern territory that included northeastern British Columbia. Canada wanted greater access to the region for mining, transportation, settlement and development.
First Nations were asked to enter treaty. Métis people were dealt with through a separate but closely connected scrip commission. Instead of negotiating with Métis communities collectively, Canada offered individuals certificates for money or land and treated broader Métis interests in the land as extinguished. Scrip was therefore more than a government benefit. It turned land-based rights and relationships, including access to land and resources, into paper that could be purchased, assigned, discounted and used to acquire land somewhere else.
British Columbia was part of this process from the beginning. The Treaty No. 8 and related scrip commissions reached the Fort St. John area. Métis claims were heard, scrip was delivered, and later federal records confirmed that Métis scrip grants had been located in the Peace River Block. This is not only a Prairie story. It belongs within British Columbia’s history.
Commercial buyers did not simply wait for scrip to arrive in Edmonton or Winnipeg. They followed the commission into the North. In September 1899, the Edmonton Bulletin reported that Charles Alloway had “followed the commission throughout, buying scrip.” The same report said Richard Secord bought on the Upper Peace River, the Athabasca and at Wapiscow. On the Lower Peace, Alloway reportedly “had the market to himself.”
Alloway was a junior partner in the Winnipeg banking house of Alloway & Champion. Secord was already becoming an important Edmonton businessman and land dealer. Their activity points to an organized pursuit of Métis scrip across the Treaty No. 8 region. Certificates worth $240 or 240 acres were reportedly selling for only about $70 or $75.
Métis families had understandable reasons to accept cash. They needed food, supplies and transportation, and a certificate tied to a distant land system might offer little immediate help. But this was not an equal market. Professional buyers had cash, information and access to banks, lawyers and land offices. They knew where valuable land was, and understood how scrip could be turned into valuable land.
Marie Fabien, later known as Marie Balsillie, spent nearly twenty-four years trying to learn what had happened to her scrip. She said she applied in 1900 and expected Inspector H. Conroy to deliver it to her at Fort Nelson, British Columbia. It never arrived. In 1921, officials told her that papers in Edmonton supposedly showed that she and her husband had signed the scrip over to a man named Taylor in Fort Nelson.
Marie denied it completely. She said she had never received the scrip, never signed transfer papers and that no white man had even been at Fort Nelson when the documents were supposedly signed. She swore an affidavit, applied again and insisted that the signatures would prove to be forgeries.
The disputed papers had already entered Edmonton’s legal and banking system. Walter Taylor witnessed an order directing Marie’s scrip to the Merchants Bank of Canada and then swore an affidavit before F. E. Moroney, who appears in Edmonton records close to the Secord–York business network. This does not prove that Taylor, Moroney or the bank knowingly took part in fraud. It does show Marie’s missing scrip moving through a world where land dealing, scrip buying, banking and private business overlapped.
Inspector Conroy later concluded that the delivery order had been forged, that the supposed witnesses were not at Fort Nelson when it was allegedly signed, and that the transaction was fraudulent. Even so, his superiors in the Land Patents Branch denied Marie’s claim. After a quarter century, the government trusted a disputed paper trail more than the Métis woman who said she had never received or transferred her entitlement.
Marie’s case shows that dispossession could happen through delay, conflicting records and bureaucratic refusal - not only through a sale.
Edmonton became a centre for turning scrip into land and wealth. Richard Secord and John McDougall of McDougall & Secord Ltd. became major purchasers and users of Métis scrip and became millionaires while operating inside wider networks of law, banking, politics and real estate. Scrip helped build their fortune, while Métis people were denied the lasting benefit of their own land and entitlements.
The firm’s influence lasted for generations. John F. McDougall, a later president of McDougall & Secord Ltd., eventually sat on the boards of the Royal Trust companies. This does not prove that Royal Trust received the proceeds of specific scrip deals. It shows that wealth and influence built partly through Métis dispossession endured, while Métis claimants were left behind.
This did not require one grand conspiracy. Ordinary deals among well-connected people were enough. Those relationships also reached Vancouver. In 1909, Richard Secord’s brother-in-law, Archibald York, became president of the Vancouver-based General Securities Company. York’s son, Lorne Martin York, connected the company back to Edmonton through his real-estate and financial brokerage firm, York & McNamara.
General Securities openly marketed half-breed scrip. Its October 26, 1909, Vancouver advertisement stated: “Half-breed Scrip–We have 12,000 acres for sale at $7 per acre.” The company had been incorporated only weeks earlier. From the start, this company placed Métis scrip inside Vancouver’s real-estate and finance market.
The timing matters because historian Jesse Donaldson writes that in 1909 Vancouver, and the province, “descended into speculative insanity.” Overseas capital poured into BC real estate, land prices rose quickly, and political and business elites helped drive the boom. General Securities was embedded in this boom economy.
However, this economy was fragile. Donaldson describes a boom that gave “the appearance of economic growth” while allowing “speculative profits to replace actual labour and industry.” When investors pulled back in 1913, building permits collapsed, commercial rents fell, Dominion Trust failed and South Vancouver went into receivership. As R. E. Gosnell put it, “There was everything to sell and nothing to buy.”
The file on General Securities Company in the BC Archives shows a substantial securities company, not a fringe dealer. It had a registered office in the Metropolitan Building, formal bankers, solicitors and auditors, and a London office. Its board linked Vancouver capital to Edmonton real estate, Prairie law, insurance, railways, mining and overseas investment. Its leadership connected the company to powerful networks: Archibald York tied it to the York–Secord network; Lorne York linked it to Edmonton; and Harry Wright, a Conservative member of the British Columbia legislature from Nelson, sat on its board.
That is what makes the advertisement important. A company connected to respectable financial and political networks was openly offering 12,000 acres of Métis entitlement paper as investment land. Scrip was not hidden at the margins, but was folded into the ordinary business of securities, loans, real estate and western expansion.
A separate classified advertisement called for “Scrips, scrip, scrips; $520 cash on delivery.” It did not name General Securities, but it captures the wider market: scrip was being bought and sold quickly for cash.
General Securities reinforced its public image under the headline “EXPANSION!” The advertisement listed $200,000 in subscribed capital, $100,000 in paid-up capital and reserves, a Vancouver head office and a European office in London. In its own materials, the company described Vancouver as being on the “great northern highway of commerce” and on its way to becoming a “world’s commercial metropolis.” This was an uncritical view of progress. Progress meant more development, more infrastructure, more capital, more land transactions and stronger ties to global markets. Growth itself was treated as proof of success. Vancouver’s expansion appeared natural, desirable and inevitable.
What disappeared from view was the harder question: whose land rights were being converted, whose losses made these opportunities possible, and who was being left outside the promised future?
Métis loss was erased, while speculators and outside syndicates treated land as opportunity. In Donaldson’s account, land supposedly available to ordinary settlers had often already been “gobbled up” by investor syndicates from New York, Chicago and London - syndicates he describes as “in bed with the government.”
Half-breed scrip was not presented as the product of Métis dispossession. It appeared simply as land for sale. We cannot yet trace one specific Métis certificate into one specific Vancouver property. But the evidence shows Métis scrip moving through the same corporate, political and financial networks that promoted Vancouver’s real-estate boom. Métis communities carried the loss, while speculators were invited to profit.
An 1899 Kamloops advertisement urged buyers not to pay cash for Dominion land, but to use discounted scrip through Alloway & Champion or western bank branches.
The banking names connected to this history did not disappear. Alloway & Champion’s business later entered the Canadian Bank of Commerce and eventually CIBC. The Merchants Bank of Canada, used as the delivery point in Marie Balsillie’s disputed transaction, was acquired by the Bank of Montreal. The Union Bank of Canada was eventually absorbed by the Royal Bank.
An 1899 advertisement in the Kamloops Sentinel made the sales pitch blunt: “DO NOT PAY CASH!!” It told readers to “Pay in SCRIP for Dominion Lands and Save 20 per Cent. Discount,” and directed them to Alloway & Champion or to branches of the Merchants Bank of Canada and the Union Bank of Canada. The advertisement did not say that every certificate offered was Métis scrip, but it shows scrip being promoted in British Columbia by Alloway and Champion as a cheaper route to Dominion land.
The banking connection was not created later by corporate mergers. It was already there in 1900. In December of that year, the Bank of Montreal wrote directly to the Department of the Interior enclosing “Half Breed Commission Certificates.” A side note appears to ask that scrip be forwarded for a like amount. However those certificates reached the bank, the document shows Métis entitlement paper moving through mainstream banking channels at the time.
This does not make today’s BMO, RBC or CIBC automatically responsible for every action connected to the scrip trade or to businesses they later acquired. It also does not prove that modern banks still hold money from specific Métis certificates. But institutions should not celebrate only the proud parts of their history. These banks should support independent, Métis-led research, open their historical records, and explain what roles they or their predecessors played in buying, transferring and financing scrip.
British Columbia was not a passive observer. Treaty No. 8 extended into the province. Métis scrip was located in the Peace River Block. Vancouver became a market for entitlement paper, and discounted scrip was advertised to land buyers in Kamloops and New Westminster. The history crossed provincial boundaries because the people, paper and money crossed them.
We need to ask more than whether a Métis claimant technically agreed to sell a certificate. We need to ask who controlled the information, who approved the transfers, which institutions handled the paper and where the value eventually went.
Rights became paper. Paper became land and capital. The original claimant disappeared from view.
These were the “microtechniques of dispossession” Raibmon describes: the ordinary interactions through which policy became practice and loss accumulated over time. Métis scrip was one of them. The transaction did not end the dispossession; it redirected the value. The scrip changed hands, but its value continued moving through the banks, companies and land markets that helped build western Canada.
What was dispossession for some became profit for others.
British Columbia, and the institutions that inherited those advantages, must now recognize this history as part of their own.
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Joe Desjarlais, M.A., is Director of Research at the BC Métis Federation. He can be reached at J.Desjarlais@BCMetis.com.