Thomas Crosby

Thomas Crosby (21 June 1840 – 13 January 1914) was an English Methodist missionary known for his work among the First Nations people of coastal British Columbia, Canada.

Biography

Thomas Crosby was born in 1840 in Pickering, Yorkshire, to (Wesleyan) Methodist parents. His father was a farmer. When he was sixteen, he emigrated with his parents to the vicinity of Woodstock, Ontario. Economic circumstances forced him to go to work at a tannery.

In 1861 he answered a call in a Methodist newspaper for missionaries to go to British Columbia. Soon after arriving in B.C. in 1863, he was sent to teach at the Native school in Nanaimo, B.C. In 1866 he became an itinerant preacher, accompanying the Rev. Edward White on a preaching circuit covering Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, and the area around Vancouver. In 1869 Crosby was appointed a stable position preaching and teaching in Chilliwack, B.C. He was ordained in 1871 and began intensively missionizing throughout the province.

In 1873, at a revival meeting in Victoria, he converted Elizabeth Diex, a Tsimshian matriarch from Lax Kw'alaams (a.k.a. Port Simpson) on the northern coast of B.C., and later also converted her son Chief Alfred Dudoward and daughter-in-law Kate Dudoward. At that time, Lax Kw'alaams was without a minister and oriented around a Hudson's Bay Company fort with its attendant social problems. The Church of England had abandoned the community in 1862 when the local Anglican lay missionary, William Duncan (coincidentally, like Crosby, a former tanner from Yorkshire), had taken a portion of his Tsimshian flock to found the nearby utopian Christian community of Metlakatla, B.C. Alfred and Kate Dudoward pressed the Methodist church to commit a missionary to their village, and in 1874 Crosby was sent there. Initially, his arrival caused Duncan to intensify his efforts to convert Lax Kw'alaams people from his new home base at Metlakatla.