Peter O'Reilly
Irish (born England)
1827 – 1905
Peter O'Reilly was a colonial magistrate and gold commissioner in British Columbia, keeping order at Rock Creek, the Cariboo, Wild Horse Creek and the Big Bend. He later spent 18 years as the province's Indian Reserve Commissioner.
Biography
Peter O'Reilly was born on 27 March 1827 at Ince, Lancashire, England, to an Irish father and English mother, and was raised in Ireland, where he served as a lieutenant in the Irish Revenue Police. He emigrated to British Columbia in 1859, joining the small corps of British and Anglo-Irish officials whom Governor James Douglas relied on to govern the gold colony.
O'Reilly served as magistrate and gold commissioner in nearly every major rush of the era: at Rock Creek after the 1860 strike on the Boundary, in the Cariboo from 1862, where as chief gold commissioner at Richfield he adjudicated the endless disputes of Williams Creek, at Wild Horse Creek in the East Kootenay in 1865, at the Big Bend of the Columbia in 1866, and in the remote Omineca in 1871. Riding circuit over vast distances, he embodied the colony's determination that its goldfields would not descend into the vigilante justice of California.
In 1880 O'Reilly was appointed Indian Reserve Commissioner, and over eighteen years he laid out the boundaries of hundreds of reserves across British Columbia. His allocations were small, and his work has been strongly criticized for dispossessing First Nations of land and fisheries. Married to Caroline Trutch, sister of Lieutenant-Governor Joseph Trutch, he settled at Point Ellice House in Victoria, where he died on 3 September 1905.
