‘High Noon’ in Downtown Victoria

Believe it or not, there was a time (as recently as the 1960s) that Victoria, that little bit of olde England, aka the Garden City, aka the City of Flowers, was known for its quietude.

So quiet, it was said, that they rolled up the sidewalks at night. So quiet that it was described as a being a cemetery with a business section!

Well, times have certainly changed.

Problems with homelessness and drugs have dominated the news in recent years; even to walk down a Victoria street in daytime is to navigate an obstacle course of panhandlers. Not that panhandling is criminal, but it’s the tip of an iceberg of social disharmony that has come to characterize most cities in this modern age.

But enough of Victoria today.

Let’s go back to 1858 when what had been a sleepy Hudson’s Bay Co. fort was transformed, almost overnight, by the magic word, “Gold!” Gold in “Fraser’s” River that drew 10s of 1000s north from the tapped-out diggings of California to the new El Dorado in the wilds of the future British Columbia.

Besides California, as word quickly spread, they came from around the world, from all walks of life, all drawn by the hope of finding their fortunes in Fraser River sandbars. From there they moved northward and deeper into what became the Cariboo. Yale, gateway to the Interior, was flooded with the flotsam and jetsam of humanity.

Journalist D.W. Higgins, whom we’ve met before in these pages, painted a colourful and unflattering portrait of some of these arrivals: “A worse set of cut-throats and all-round scoundrels than those who flocked to Yale from all parts of the world never assembled anywhere…”

But we’re talking about Victoria not Yale. It was through Victoria that most adventurers, the good and the bad, made their way to the gold fields. Upon arrival from San Francisco they camped in the future capital until they could board steamers (those who could afford to) or by hook or by crook make their way to the Lower Mainland then up the Fraser River to what they hoped was fame and fortune.

Not all of them made it. Accidents were inevitable. So was misadventure. George Sloane died in a gunfight at high noon—not at the OK Corral, but in what’s now downtown Victoria.

You’ll read all about this shades-of-the-American-Wild-West tale in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: This is what we’ve come to recognize through movies and TV: Wild Bill Hickock, after fatally wounding Dave Tutt in the chest in a street shoot-out, warns off Tutt’s friends. But in ‘downtown’ Victoria? —Illustration from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1867.