About British Columbia Chronicles

Where Do I Get My Ideas? It’s a Long Story...

The question readers have asked me most often over the years is, Where do I get my “article ideas”? Often followed by a quick, “You must have a massive archives.”

They’re right about my archives but I wouldn’t be much of a storyteller if I didn’t go back—way back—to the beginning. Growing up in postwar Victoria (specifically, Saanich’s Swan Lake area, then as yet unspoiled by urban sprawl) seems like another world to me now.

It was, to some degree, a Tom Sawyeresque childhood, with its farms, lakes, woods and miles of railway tracks to play on—and the Mark Twain parallel isn’t all that inaccurate.

You see, when I was a boy we didn’t have, as I saw it, any visible Canadian history. My parents’ generation had come through the Great Depression and just fought the Second World War as equal partners with their allies—Canada had had, ever so briefly, the world’s third largest navy.

Yet there seemed to be no visible national identity; at least, as seen through the eyes of a child.

After all, John Wayne and other American screen heroes won the war (almost single handed, and in technicolor to boot), each Saturday at the matinee. I grew up on Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Jimmie Stewart and Gary Cooper. For me and my friends it was cowboys and Indians, Hollywood style. Every Sunday evening, television brought us Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, the Alamo and other tales of adventure—all of them American.

“Hanging” Judge Begbie? Never heard of him!

Classroom history lightly wandered from prehistoric times through the Middle Ages to the Elizabethan period. We learned about the War of Roses, Joan of Arc and the Spanish Armada—hardly anything about Champlain, Riel or McClung. In fact, it wasn’t until grade eight that we encountered Canadian history at all, and high school before we were introduced to British Columbia history.

Such as it was: there was no real colour, there were no bigger-than-life pioneers, no blood-and-thunder dramas to catch and to hold a student’s interest. Say to me, today, “History is dull,” and them’s fighting words. But, back then, history, presented under the euphemism Social Studies, really was a bore.

For me, the discovery that B.C. has a heritage that’s every bit as exciting as (I would argue, even more so) than much of that below the 49th parallel came not in class, but in a neighbour’s kitchen.

Miss Fawcett lived next door to my chum, Bruce. She was your quintessential elderly spinster of English literature, and every bit as humourless, distant and daunting to us young teens. Formidable not in physical stature or appearance, but in her eyes. Long before laser beams, she could wither steel with a disapproving glance.

But there was another side to her, one probably kept hidden from view. Related to Edgar Fawcett, author of the classic Some Reminiscences of Old Victoria, even then long out of print, she shared his passion for B.C. history.

And when she learned that a friend of her neighbour’s youngest son was seriously interested in stagecoach robberies and ghost towns (albeit of the American West) this old lady of the harrumphh! and laser-sharp stare, who so often had forcibly expressed her despair for wayward youth (this one included), said that I could read Edgar’s book.

Not borrow it—but I could sit in my friend’s kitchen, under his Mom’s watchful eye, and read it in instalments.

I approached the red hardback with the same enthusiasm I had my school texts. After all, if Old Firebrand’s father wrote it, and it wasn’t about the American West, how good could it be? Almost reluctantly I chose a chapter at random and began to read. And read and read.

Old Miss Fawcett, whom I’d always avoided, had just opened the door to a whole new world. The chapter which captivated me (for a lifetime, as it turned out) recounted the blowing up of the sidewheel steamer Cariboo in Victoria Harbour in the 1860’s.

That’s downtown Victoria, not some faraway American port!

Ironically, it was an American television documentary that completed my conversion to “Canadiana”. For a season I avidly followed Bill Burrud’s weekly Lost Treasure as it re-staged accounts of lost mines and buried treasure, all of them below the border. Until the momentous day that they recounted the fascinating legend of Pitt River country’s Lost Creek Mine.

That’s our Pitt River, back of New Westminster. It probably was the series’ only Canadian locale, but it was enough for me. I was hooked!

The good ladies of the Provincial Archives, likely bemused by their youngest researcher, went out of their way to show and to explain how the priceless wealth of our province was all there before me, in two moderate-sized rooms on the second floor of the Parliament Buildings.

Bound and yellowing volumes of old newspapers, clipping files (“the verticals”) and 100’s of small drawers filled with index cards. (All these predated microfiche, microfilm and computer disks.)

In reply to my eager query, they pulled out several index cards entitled “Treasures, Lost.” The first to catch my eye was also the best, in a sense: the story of “Rattlesnake” Dick Barter’s gold, some $40,000 in dust said to have been buried and never recovered in Leechtown, a ghost town just north of Victoria (less than 10 miles as the crow flies).

Lost treasure and a ghost town, in my very own backyard!

It was almost too good to be true. But true it was (up to a point, anyway). That story and others inspired me to purchase (through an American magazine, of course) a metal detector. It was cheap and crude, but it worked. The historic Leech River area, scene of a short-lived gold rush in the 1860s, and of continuing interest to weekend prospectors, was a gold mine of enjoyment for me and my friends who devoted 100’s of free hours to “bushwhacking”.

We didn’t find Barter’s gold (although I’ve successfully mined it for its literary value over the years), nor did we find the murder weapon from a brutal turn-of-the-century Victoria slaying. But the joys of unearthing coins, old tools, cartridges and household relics from the remains of miners’ cabins and abandoned homesteads was treasure beyond dollar value.

There were summers spent digging for bottles, an education in the Island’s social history. There was Cumberland proper, then ‘Coontown,’ ‘Japtown’ and ‘Chinatown’ as they were crudely known, in descending topographical order and social standing. (It’s reassuring that we’ve changed for the better.)

Old ruins were all but irresistible.

I’ve clambered through caves, abandoned mines and tumbling-down buildings around Vancouver Island and throughout southern and central B.C. I’ve wandered blissfully through scores of old cemeteries, from the Island to Crowsnest Pass. The things you can learn from old headstones!

Best of all, I’ve been paid for it. (Modestly, you understand.) It really was having my cake and eating it, too. Come Monday, my friends would return to their 9-5 jobs and I’d hit my darkroom to develop and print the photos I’d taken over the weekend, then spend half a day before my typewriter describing our adventures for a weekly Victoria newspaper and American magazines (who loved Canadian stories, by the way).

Millions of words and more than 34 books have followed, all of them on “popular” B.C. history.

So I—and www.BritishColumbiaChronicles.ca readers, I hope—really have Gene Autry, Davy Crockett, Bill Burrud and old Miss Fawcett to thank for what became a career as an historical writer (more storyteller than historian).

For those who’ve taken the trouble to phone or to mention my column when we meet at the store or the gas bar or the bank (I’ve never been able to hide from my weekly mugshot in the paper, not even in Washington State), or to offer the use of family papers and photographs, I thank you all for allowing me to entertain and, I hope, inform you.

I’m grateful, too, for the privilege of being allowed to write about ofttimes forgotten people and events, thus being able to, if but momentarily, spotlight the men and women who built this province. We of the 21st century take so much for granted. It’s so easy to forget that the British Columbia, the Canada, in which we live is the envy of much of the world.

And it was all made possible through the efforts of those who came before us—the men and women of the First Nations and of every nationality who followed—who pioneered the way.

Which seems to be the perfect note upon which to conclude this ramble. Where do I get my story ideas? From my field research, my library, my lifetime collection of files, from local and provincial archives, from newspapers—and from loyal readers who’ve shared with me some of the otherwise forgotten nuggets of British Columbia history.
—T.W. Paterson