Web recasts century-old murder mystery

Abstract

In 1869, a judge and an all-white jury convicted a native man of killing the black settler who was found shot to death in his log cabin on Saltspring Island. Starting today, students of Canadian history can use a unique World Wide Web site to decide for themselves whether justice was done and whether the real story about life on a seemingly idyllic island in colonial British Columbia has ever been told. The Web site wanders through hundreds of pages of original documents, including letters, court documents and newspaper accounts, about a case that involves racism, land, and frontier notions of justice.