1859 in Canada
events of 1859 in Canada
Events from the year 1859 in Canada.
Incumbents
Monarch — Victoria
Federal government
Parliament — 6th
Governors
Governor General of the Province of Canada — Edmund Walker Head
Colonial Governor of Newfoundland — Alexander Bannerman
Governor of New Brunswick — Arthur Charles Hamilton-Gordon
Governor of Nova Scotia — George Phipps, 2nd Marquess of Normanby
Governor of Prince Edward Island — Dominick Daly
Premiers
Joint Premiers of the Province of Canada —
George-Étienne Cartier, Canada West Premier
Antoine-Aimé Dorion, Canada East Premier
Premier of Newfoundland — John Kent
Premier of New Brunswick — Samuel Leonard Tilley
Premier of Nova Scotia — James William Johnston
Premier of Prince Edward Island — Edward Palmer
Events
Abraham Shadd is elected to the town council in Raleigh, Ontario and becomes the first Black elected to public office.
William Hall, becomes the first Nova Scotian and the first Black person to win the Victoria Cross.
The all-Black Victoria Pioneer Rifle Company is formed to defend British Columbia.
De Stoeckl returns to U.S. from Saint Petersburg with authority to negotiate the sale of Alaska.
McGowan's War, a juridical and political crisis in the Fraser River goldfields involving a spillover of San Francisco politics into British territory, has the potential to escalate into an annexationist uprising but is settled peaceably. Marines and Royal Engineers are dispatched to Yale, led by Colonel Clement Francis Moody and escorting Justice Matthew Baillie Begbie to resolve the matter, which ends amicably, and reassert British sovereignty over the fledgling Mainland Colony.
Lyman Cutlar, an American settler, homesteads on San Juan Island in defiance of British claims and triggers off the Pig War.
“1859 in Canada” enters the record as events of 1859 in Canada. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Canada and events can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q723124. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1859.
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This entry incorporates text from “1859 in Canada” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.