Richard Moody
Infrastructure in a fledgling colony
When the Colony of British Columbia was established in the year 1858, British Colonial Secretary, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, dispatched a contingent of Her Majesty's Royal Engineers to the Pacific Northwest. “You go not as enemies but as the benefactors of the land you visit, and children unborn will, I believe, bless the hour when Queen Victoria sent forth her sappers and miners to found a second England on the shores of the Pacific.” Their job in the new colony was many-fold. The Royal Engineers under Colonel Richard Clements Moody surveyed the border from the Purcell Mountain range to the Pacific, they built roads and bridges into the interior, dredged channels through the mighty rivers, mapped a great deal of territory, and acted as our first military and police force.
Header Image - Sapperton in 1865. Sapperton takes its name from a reference to Royal Engineers being sappers and miners. Columbia Street is pictured here looking east from Begbie St. The white house on the left is the Custom House (built 1859)
*Courtesy of New Westminster Public Library (271
The British Government was not blind to the challenges facing British Columbia. The British Colonial Secretary, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, sent a contingent of Her Majesty's Royal Engineers to the area. Between 1858 and 1863, they planned towns, surveyed the land, settled disputes, diverted rivers, produced maps, established the International boundary and built quality trails and roads.
*Courtesy of British Columbia Provincial Archives (A-01721)
Richard Moody
In the year of our Lord, eighteen-and-fifty-eight
Lord Bulwer Lytton's Royal Engineers
Arrived at Esquimalt Quay
With officers handy, these men of esteem
Had come here to harness the virgin frontier, for Colony & Queen
With tales by the score of heroes in war
How daring adventurers have christened new shores
Give me Victoria's stouthearted lads
Who've served us well and truly
Here is a health to you Royal Engineers, and a cheer for Richard Moody!
Who surveyed the borderline from the Pacific on through?
Spanned raging rivers and quarreled through stone
Building roads to the Cariboo?
Who laid out each highway, townsite and city street?
Upheld the Queen's law when necessity called
As keepers of the peace
Architects, tradesmen these engineers all
Gentlemen scholars who answered the call
With shovel and pack, by compass and map
They tamed the wilds unruly
Here is a health to your Royal Engineers, and a cheer for Richard Moody!
On July the eighteenth, eighteen and sixty-three
That was the day that old England recalled her Royal Engineer
Besides the few officers, many left their career
To try out their hand at a parcel of land, our colonial pioneers
With tales by the score of heroes in war
Or how daring adventurers christened new shores
Give me Victoria's stouthearted lads
Who've served us well and truly
Here is a health to you Royal Engineers, and a cheer to Richard Moody
Words & Music by Bruce Coughlan (SOCAN)