1865: Chief Ahan of the Tsilhqot’in
Add comment July 18th, 2009 Headsman
“The Indian Ahan,” read the dispatch in the British Columbian this date in 1865, “will have expiated his crime upon the gallows ere these lines meet the public eye. The execution will take place in the rear of the jail early this morning.”
Ahan and another Tsilhqot’in (or Chilcotin) were of the party of Klatsassin, whom we have already met in these pages. Months after the Chilcotin War’s salutary mass execution, the luckless pair were arrested trying to pay what would have been a routine-for-them bit of blood money.
Both were condemned; Lutas received clemency, and his freedom. (”I eagerly availed myself of some favorable circumstances in the case of Sutas and sent him back pardoned to his tribe. A sufficient number of Indians has now perished on the scaffold to atone for the atrocities committed last year.”)
Documents related to this proceeding are archived at a canadianmysteries.ca page on Klatsassin.
Ahan’s execution in New Westminster, now part of the Vancouver, B.C. metropolis, isn’t dead, though — and isn’t even past.
Over the course of the past year, a public school project in the city that had been built over an old pauper’s grave that might have become the hanged man’s resting place was gravely (ahem) complicated by the continuing Tsilhqot’in search for Ahan’s remains. While Ahan’s own situation remains unresolved, the suit on his behalf eerily outlined the macabre past lurking everywhere beneath our workaday feet.
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Entry Filed under: 19th Century, Canada, Capital Punishment, Death Penalty, Disfavored Minorities, Execution, Guerrillas, Hanged, History, Murder, Occupation and Colonialism, Power, Public Executions, Racial and Ethnic Minorities, Soldiers, Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1860s, 1865, ahan, chief ahan, chilcotin, first peoples, july 18, klatassine, klatsassin, lutas, new westminster, tsilhqot'in, vancouver
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