The ‘Fighting Coplands’ Fall From Grace – September 9, 2021

With my book on Vancouver Island ghost towns and mining camps in its 46th year of print, many people identify me with, surprise, ghost towns.

I started out researching lost treasures and shipwrecks. They offered excitement and drama to a callow youngster who’d grown up on American movies, magazines and TV. How can anyone argue that history is dull when it’s about lost gold mines, usually accompanied by a curse and a string of missing seekers, and ships in peril on the high seas?

As the years passed and (I like to think) I matured, it became apparent to me that at the very core of every drama was the human element—take out the people and there was no event, colourful and exciting or otherwise.

That’s when I realized that I’d been writing about people all along—the stories about the shipwrecks, the stagecoach robberies, the train wrecks were really about the people who were involved, the events themselves were the stage.

In short, it’s the human drama that makes a good story, be it historical or otherwise. This belated awareness of the human factor prompted an almost new career path for me as a social historian, one who writes about people.

A result of which was a new-born fascination with Victoria’s eccentrics—of which there have been many!—a several years-long weekly column, Capital Characters, in the Victorian tabloid, then a compilation of columns as a book with the same title. These were in addition to longer, more in-depth character studies in the weekend magazine of The Daily Colonist.

All that’s a long time ago but some of the characters I wrote about were so outstanding, so outrageous, that they’re still in my memory bank, and in shuffling files this week, I came upon one that still makes me chuckle.

I promise you, you’ll chuckle, too, when I tell you the story of the “Fighting Coplands” in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO CAPTION: Victoria, the future capital of British Columbia, was still a Hudson’s Bay outpost when the Coplands inadvertently entertained its citizens with real-life comedy and drama. —Author’s Collection