C.H. Dickie: Out of the Past (Part 4)

Last week Charles Dickie recounted his hilarious days as the co-host of the rough and ready Alderlea Hotel, in what was then known as Duncan’s Station.

(Ah, the good old days, when men were men, the booze, sometimes watered, flowed free, the steaks were tough as leather and fist fights and crude practical jokes were the order of the day.)

Until the rich copper strike on Mount Sicker, Duncan’s (Crossing) had been just a quiet cluster of stores and businesses at the strategic intersection of Trunk Road and the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway that served as the Cowichan Valley’s commercial centre.

That changed dramatically with the Mount Sicker copper boom. Short-lived though it was, it produced millions of dollars in profits, mostly for English investors, but local merchants also prospered while it lasted.

As did our hero, Charles Dickie, who, as we’ve seen, made a tidy sum from his investment in the nascent Tyee Claim which, after he’d sold out, went on to become Mount Sicker’s richest producer.

With money in his pocket for the first time and, having divested himself of his hotel interests, with time on his hands, he looked about for something to do. A chance conversation set him on a fateful course to enter politics. This is where we resume his story as originally told in Dickie’s self-published (and now extremely rare) memoir, Out of the Past.

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