The Two Dollar and Fifty Cent Coffin

Inside the 1872 ledgers of the Department of Indian Affairs, where a child’s burial cost ten times less than the cigars smoked by the Commissioners.

On August 4, 1871, a clerk for the Department of Indian Affairs sat down to record the expenses of Mr. Wemyss M. Simpson, the Commissioner tasked with securing treaties in the North West. The entry, buried on page 47 of the 1872 Annual Report, is a mundane column of figures, a receipt for the cost of doing business on the frontier.

The list begins with the machinery of survival and diplomacy: “1/4 lb vermillion” for fifty cents, likely for ceremonial face paint; “5 yds white cotton” for a dollar and five cents; and “29 bbls mess pork” at a staggering cost of $1,450.00 to feed the entourage.

But then, the ink records two items, separated by only four lines, that inadvertently capture the entire moral architecture of the Canadian colonial project.

The first is for the comfort of the Commissioner:

“2 boxes cigars... $25.00.”

The second is for a tragedy he oversaw:

“Coffin for Indian child... $2.50.”

In the stark mathematics of the 1872 ledger, the leisure of a government agent was valued at exactly ten times the dignity of an Indigenous child’s death.

The Dying Architect

When this report was published in early 1873, Joseph Howe, the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, was a dying man. A legendary figure in Nova Scotian politics, Howe had spent his final years in Ottawa, presiding over a department that was rapidly outgrowing its own bureaucratic imagination.

In his final submission to the Earl of Dufferin, Howe’s prose vibrates with a discordant mix of imperial hubris and personal regret. He famously described the administration of Indian Affairs as the “crowning glory of Canadian policy”. It was a line intended for the history books—a claim that Canada, unlike its violent neighbor to the south, had achieved a bloodless expansion through “good faith” and “paternal care.”

Yet, in the very same paragraph, the mask slips. Howe confesses to a deep, gnawing shame regarding the treatment of the Micmacs in his home province. He recalls finding them “reduced... by the neglect of the Government and the indifference of the whites,” forcing him to spend two years sleeping in their camps and fighting for their lands. He admits that after he left, the system degraded into “eleemosynary gifts”—charity designed to foster “idleness and dependence” rather than independence.

This was the paradox of 1872: The Superintendent General was writing eulogies for a “crowning glory” while simultaneously admitting that the “Old Machinery” of his department was broken. The bureaucratic methods that kept the peace in the “civilized” reserves of Ontario and Quebec—where “Indian gentlemen” wore suits and ran municipal councils—were utterly useless in the vast, terrifying silence of the North West.

Sherry, Gunpowder, and “Civilization”

If Howe provided the philosophy, the accounts provided the reality. The 1872 report is not just a policy document; it is a receipt for the invasion of the West. “Return E,” the statement of expenditure for Manitoba and the North West Territories, offers a forensic accounting of how treaties were bought and enforced.

The disparity between the colonizer and the colonized was not just political; it was caloric. While the “Coffin for Indian child” cost $2.50, the supplies for Governor Archibald’s kitchen during the treaty negotiations read like a banquet menu for the aristocracy. The ledger lists “8 galls sherry wine” purchased on July 25 for $56.00—a sum that could have paid for twenty-two children’s coffins.

A few days later, the accounts show “1 sheep” bought for $10.00 and “37 lbs beef” for $6.29. Meanwhile, the “presents” distributed to the Indigenous signatories were cheap, mass-produced trinkets: “3 common striped shirts” for $3.18, and “2 pairs blankets” for $6.00. The government was feeding its agents steak and sherry while wrapping its new subjects in cotton and wool, all paid for from the same “Indian Fund.”

Fear also had a price tag. The ledgers are heavy with the weight of munitions. On July 19, the Department purchased “3 kegs gunpowder” for $100.00 and “6 bags Shot” for $90.72. These were not just for hunting; they were the insurance policy of a government that knew it was outnumbered. The “idle rumors” of unrest that Howe dismissed in his report were, in the accounts, treated as very expensive realities.

The Savage Economists of the Coast

While treaties were being signed in Manitoba, a different kind of confrontation was taking place in British Columbia. The report includes the first major survey of the Pacific tribes by Dr. J.W. Powell, the newly appointed Indian Superintendent. Powell’s writing is a fascinating, horrifying study in cognitive dissonance.

He viewed the Indigenous peoples of the coast with a mixture of Victorian revulsion and industrial jealousy. He described the Aht Nation as “savages” prone to “atrocious cruelties” and shipwreck massacres. He was particularly offended by the “Patlatches” (Potlatch), a ceremony of wealth redistribution he described as a “strange feature” where chiefs gave away blankets, food, and firearms “with profusion”. To Powell, this was economic heresy—a custom that “encouraged idleness” and needed to become “obsolete”.

Yet, Powell could not deny the economic genius of the people he sought to dismantle. He marveled that the “lines of the first clipper-ship built in Boston were taken from a Nootka canoe”. He admitted that Indigenous jewelers could fashion “ordinary gold or silver coin” into works that would “do credit to first-rate artists”. Most tellingly, he reported that Indigenous miners on the Fraser and Thompson Rivers were contributing between $15,000 and $20,000 annually to the province’s wealth, washing gold from the bars in the “coldest weather”.

The Department’s goal was clear: they wanted the “mechanical genius” and the gold, but they wanted to strip away the culture that produced it. They wanted the Indian to be a worker, not a Potlatch-giver.

The Agricultural Trap

The mechanism for this transformation was agriculture. Deputy Superintendent William Spragge’s report outlines a ruthless logic: the destruction of hunting grounds was not a tragedy, but a necessary pressure to force Indigenous people into the “occupations of civilized men”.

But there was a catch. The Department found that when Indigenous bands did own valuable land, they often acted too much like “civilized” white men—by leasing it out and living off the passive income. Spragge complained that the “favourable position” of some reserves allowed Indians to “subsist upon... rents” rather than “arduous labour,” inducing a state of “indolence”.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. The Department wanted Indigenous people to be farmers, but they forbade them from being landlords. When a white man lived off his rents, he was a gentleman; when an Indian did it, he was lazy. The Department moved to “decidedly discourage and prohibit” these leases, effectively forcing Indigenous landowners to work the soil with their own hands or lose the revenue entirely.

The Receipt Remains

Joseph Howe died in April 1873, just weeks after this report was printed. He did not live to see the full implementation of the machinery he set in motion. He did not see the Residential Schools that would rise from his “crowning glory,” nor the generations of poverty engineered by the “civilization” policies of his deputies.

But the ledger remains. It is a document that refuses to blink. It tells us that in the summer of 1871, as the Dominion of Canada was drawing its new borders across the continent, the men in charge sat in their tents, drinking $56 sherry and smoking $25 cigars, while outside, in the “wild” territory they claimed to protect, a child was buried in a box that cost two dollars and fifty cents.

If you believe in the importance of unearthing these forgotten ledgers and holding history accountable to its own receipts, please consider subscribing to the Hansard Files.

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Source Documents

• Howe, J. (1873). Annual Report on Indian Affairs for the Year Ending 30th June, 1872. Department of the Secretary of State for the Provinces.

• Spragge, W. (1873). Report of the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Department of the Secretary of State for the Provinces.

• Powell, J. W. (1873). Abstract of the Report of J.W. Powell, Esq., M.D., Indian Superintendent for British Columbia. Department of the Secretary of State for the Provinces.

• Walcot, C. T. (1873). Return E: Statement of Special Payments, Contingent and Incidental Expenditure. Department of the Secretary of State for the Provinces.