Happy Tom Schooley
Genealogists have a field day with Vital Statistics; they’re a treasure chest for family researchers and historians alike.
But, of course, they really don’t tell you much beyond the barest of bones. Take, for example, this one:
BIRTH 1826
DEATH 22 May 1874 (aged 47-48)
Victoria, Capital Regional District, British Columbia, Canada
BURIAL Unknown
Now what’s an author/historian/storyteller supposed to do with that?
Not a heck of a lot, obviously, unless you have access to other sources. So, to answer the old puzzle, which comes first, the chicken or the egg, the answer is to seek out details like vital statistics after we’ve discovered a story.
Often that source is a newspaper. Which is how I chanced upon the fascinating man whose statistics are given above. When I worked for The Daily Colonist, as it was when I was still a lad, I’d spend my evening supper break in the morgue, or library, digging through what were known as the vertical files—clipping files of old news stories, some of them going back decades.
Or straining my eyes on the microfilm machine with its green light and purple print.
How I cursed the genius who came up with that colour combo; an hour or so was almost sure to bring on the start of a headache even for young eyes.
But the point of the exercise, after all, was to access the wealth of old Colonists and Victoria Daily Times with their millions of stories on those rolls of 35mm film. To a newbie such as I, who was just beginning to grope my way into the incredible repository that is our provincial history, that microfilm machine, for all its crudity, was the key.
So I carried on, straining my eyes, making notes then advancing to using a typewriter alongside. To get to the point, one of those great discoveries came when, working my way through the British Colonist a year at a time, I came to 1904—and to D.W. Higgins.
I’ve introduced you to D.W. several times in these pages, even letting him tell you about the Christmas dinner that almost cost him his life, in his own words. What I found in those 1904 Colonist’s were a series of articles, reminiscences, he later compiled in two books. Highly collectible today are The Mystic Spring and The Passing of a Race.
Modern researchers such as the late, local David Ricardo Williams have criticized Higgins’ claim to have been on the inside of almost every major news story over his 50-year-long journalistic and political career, most of it in Victoria.
In particular, they fault him for his use of reconstructed dialogue.
So be it. I accept that Higgins was, in fact, privy to details of the great political events, many of the leading pioneer personalities and details of the major crimes of his day. I do acknowledge that he isn’t always 100 per cent accurate (who is?) and that he likely embellished his own role in them.
But I refuse to look a gift horse in the mouth. To read Higgins’ stories, for all their purplish prose, as judged by our contemporary standards, has been a joyful voyage of discovery for me. The subject of this week’s Chronicle was one of the very first of D.W.’s stories that I found and I’ve been following in his shadow ever since.
The story of ‘Happy’ Tom Schooley, as told here, is as much mine as it is D.W.’s but he experienced and recorded it first, a fact I respectfully acknowledge.
Speaking of cold statistics, as I did earlier, I’ll give you a hint from another clerical entry relating to Thomas Schooley: Miner, age 38 (sic), executed for the murder of Henry Foreman.
Ah, now we’re getting somewhere!
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PHOTO: A foggy fall shot of the historic Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria B.C. So wrote Sheryl Walker of this moody scene used as a cover photo for the Old Cemeteries Society’s Stories Beyond the Graves in Victoria, B.C. It’s that imposing dark headstone on the left that prompted me to dig into my archives for this week’s Chronicle.