The Chronicles Blog

You’re not likely to find Charles Herbert Dickie’s memoir, Out of the Past, “by an M.P.,” in a used book store—or even online.

Dedicated to the memory of carefree friends, it measures 3.5 inches by five, and 128 pages, it’s just 20,000 words in length, more comparable to an e-book than to a pocket book, and it’s stapled rather than bound. All in all, it’s pretty small and likely was printed on the cheap.

But make no mistake: It’s a great read and of particular interest to students of Cowichan Valley and British Columbia mining history.

A member of the B.C. Provincial Legislature for a single term, then a Member of Parliament for Nanaimo for 14 years, his background as a sheriff in Michigan, as a fireman with the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway, as a saloonkeeper in Duncan, as the principal owner of the Richard III copper mine on Mount Sicker, and as a fortune hunter in the Stewart River wilds of northern B.C., his is a fascinating story.

Best of all, he tells it well. Dickie was smart, shrewd, enterprising and never seems to have lost his sense of humour, not even when he all but lost most of the small fortune he’d, ever so briefly, acquired during Cowichan’s copper boom.

Towards the end of his full life, he joked that every mine he’d ever invested in had proved to be a bottomless pit, money-wise.

What follows is the first instalment of Dickie’s rare memoir. I’ve left editing to a minimum so as to let him tell you his story in his own words. I’ve added footnotes where I felt it necessary, either to make more understandable to the modern reader, or to fill in what I considered to be blanks in certain chapters.

In one chapter only, I’ve deleted references to people of other races which, today, would be considered racist. Dickie wasn’t perfect. He was a man of his times, when the British Empire was largely built at the expense of its coloured dominions and the attitudes of white supremacy prevailed.

That said, I really like C.H. Dickie. And I think you will, too, when you read his look back at an amazing and adventurous career. He wasn’t perfect—who is? But, overall, he’s one of our pioneers who’s worthy of remembrance and respect.

Caption: Charles Herbert Dickie, MLA, MP and adventurer fit right into British Columbia's Wild West.

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Cowichan’s legendary Tzouhalem is in the news again. Not the Quamichan war chief himself—he’s been dead for well over a century—but the fact that he's going to be the subject of a movie.

Reporter Robert Barron recently reported in the Cowichan Valley Citizen that documentary filmmaker Harold C. Joe, a member of Cowichan Tribes, and a film crew are making a television documentary that will “examine the near-mythic figure of Chief Tzouhalem through interviews and creative re-enactments".

The operative word here is “creative” as the only existing written records that refer to Tzouhalem are the hand-me-downs of non-Indigenous (i.e. white) contemporaries (some of them in positions of authority and therefore adversarial).

Meaning that Tzouhalem is seen today through a racially and colonially tinted lens—the very lens that’s now under critical scrutiny across Canada.

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I have a single, very vague memory of Victoria’s street cars.

It would have been when my father was away in the navy as Mom and I boarded a street car in the Cloverdale Road area of Saanich to go to town. (A long walk from our home on Brett Avenue for someone my age, I can tell you.)

I remember the driver at the front and the glass-sided box filled with coins and paper tickets, and a well-worn floor and hard seats, but not a whole lot more. Then, for years after motorized buses had taken over public transit, several downtown Victoria streets with their flush-mounted iron rails yet intact, and the giant, corrugated iron barn on Cloverdale where the trolleys were kept and repaired. It stood, unused, until into the 1960s or so when the Hudson’s Bay Co. finally razed it to build a warehouse.

And, even after that, two of the old trolleys retired to private acreages, one in Saanich, one in Colwood, for use, I suspected, as chicken houses.

But that’s it.

I have two books been written about Victoria’s and Vancouver’s street cars in my library and now, thanks to friend and reader Lorelei Rondeau, an illustrated booklet published by the B.C. Electric Railway Co.

This special April 1955 issue of The Buzzer, entitled Rails-to-Rubber, “cordially invited” the public to “take a last ride FREE” aboard Vancouver’s street cars which were about to be retired.

Next week I share this Buzzer with Chronicles readers who will, I’m sure, find the photos of this now long-gone mode of public transportation as fascinating as I have. Anyone who has ridden a bus lately will realize how far we’ve come in 65 years!

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When Hayes Forest Services Ltd., an industry stalwart and one of the biggest contract logging companies on Vancouver Island, shut down in 2008, it ended the latest chapter in a forestry family tradition that went back three generations and left its hallmark on both logging and trucking.

Hayes trucks weren’t just all brawn, they were the penultimate image and fact of macho motive power.

It all started in 1920 when the Hayes-Anderson Motor Co. Ltd. built its first logging truck. Over the years, and with several corporate reorganizations and changes of brand, logging trucks continued to be the ‘Hayes’ heavy-lifters that achieved fame for their durability and revolving bunk (log trailer) system.

Even the die-cast chrome-plated or bronze hood ornament of a bear was skookum like the truck it graced, weighing no less than five pounds...

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Edgar Fawcett spent his boyhood days in and around Fort Victoria when the future capital of B.C. was still a Hudson’s Bay Co. outpost.

His memoir, Some Reminiscences of Old Victoria, has become a highly priced collector’s edition.

It was Edgar Fawcett’s classic Reminiscneces that inspired me to write about British Columbia history.

But Edgar Fawcett was no saint. At least one of his boyhood pranks had long lasting repercussions for which he, much of a lifetime later, expressed neither regret nor remorse.

You can read all about it in next week’s Chronicles.

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