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The Chronicles Online

Here’s a sampling of articles for you to enjoy. When you subscribe to the British Columbia Chronicles, The Chronicles will arrive in your mailbox each Thursday, bigger, bolder and better than ever before!

Highlights of coming posts…

In its heyday the name Hayes stood for what probably was the most durable heavy-duty (particularly logging) truck of its time. Even more notably, it was conceived and built right here in British Columbia. The mighty Hayes is the subject of a rich photo feature up and coming in the British Columbia Chronicles.

I’ve already told you about extraordinary sightings of extra-terrestrial visitors—UFOs—to the Cowichan Valley in recent years. Well, there are numerous equally unexplained sightings of a more domestic marine phenomenon in regional waters. We call them sea serpents.

Speaking of unexplained phenomena, do you know that the Cowichan Valley reputedly has a surprisingly high incidence of Sasquatch sightings? You don’t believe in Big-Foot, you say? You might change your mind when you read these accounts, some of them firsthand, of man-monster encounters locally and elsewhere on Vancouver Island and around B.C.

A landmark leasehold residential building overlooking Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park is in the news because of legal wrangling between the building’s owners and its leaseholders. But that’s not the subject of this Chronicle. The Orchard House of today stands on the site of a pioneer mansion of the same name. A mansion built by a man who amassed a banking fortune in a few short years then lost everything to a daring robbery believed to have been an inside job. Has Alexander Macdonald’s jinx attached itself to present-day Orchard House?

When the first Europeans arrived in British Columbia and Oregon Territory they faced the daunting challenge of trying to converse with native peoples who spoke scores of different dialects. The solution that evolved and ultimately became the language of the land was called the Chinook Jargon. Some Chinook words—i.e. skookum and tyee—are in popular use today.

70 years ago an amphibious Canso patrol bomber converted to a passenger airliner by Queen Charlotte Airlines slammed into Mount Benson, just west of Nanaimo, killing all 23 persons aboard. At the time it was B.C.’s worst air accident. Early this June, Chronicles author TWP fulfilled a career-long desire to visit the wreck site and take photos.