Beardmore, Owen Charles
Owen Charles Beardmore had a short-lived career with the Hudson's Bay Company as a service clerk.1 After being stationed in Montreal in 1846, he was transferred to Temiskaming and eventually to Fort Rupert where he stayed until his dismissal in 1851.2
Beardmore was to be second in command to George Blenkinsop at Fort Rupert while Captain W. H. McNeill was away, but ran into difficulties with his superiors because of his penchant for finding faults in others and comparing his education with them.3
Perhaps his most noteworthy experience was his involvement in the investigation of a murder of three sailors who deserted near the Fort: apparently, Blenkinsop ordered a group of local Indigenous men, likely from the Kwaguʼł Tribe, to return the men dead or alive.4 This incident would evolve into a complex and dramatic court-case in which Beardmore would give testimony, which Pelly mentions in this letter to Grey.
Beardmore was dismissed from HBC service in 1851 and moved to Australia, where he successfully owned and ran a sheep ranch.5
  • 1. BC Metis Mapping Resarch Project, HBC employee 1848-1851, Metis Nation British Columbia, 172.
  • 2. Ibid.
  • 3. Ibid.
  • 4. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 32, History of British Columbia 1792-1887 (San Francisco: The History Company, 1887), 273.
  • 5. J. S. Helmcken, ed. D. B. Smith, The Reminiscence of Doctor John Sebastian Helmcken (UBC Press, 1975), 319.
Mentions of this person in the documents