C.H. Dickie: Out of the Past (Part 5)

Our hero C.H. Dickie has come a long way since he left home in Ontario: to Michigan, to California and on to the Cowichan Valley then the Stewart region.

Having become disenchanted with his first term of office as a Member of the Legislature, and with money in hand from his successful investment in a copper mine on Mount Sicker, he was now smitten with mining and the hope, however remote, of striking it rich. With others, as the Mount Sicker boom began to dim, he was drawn to the wilds of British Columbia’s isolated northwestern corner.

For the rest of his life, even when serving as a Member of Parliament, he’d be irresistibly drawn to the search for precious minerals. Although he did so with little to no success, he never gave up hoping: “I continued,” he tells us in his memoir, “at divers times and in various places to put down ‘damn-fool’ holes in the landscape, shaking dice, as it were, with the mountains, but with ill success.

“Every mineral deposit I worked on was wrong side up. The deeper I went, the leaner the metallic contents...”

Did he quit? No. But he did “decide it was advisable to take a rest and give my Jinx time to leave me.” This is where we resume Out of the Past, Part V.

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