The Chronicles Blog

One of the simpler Chemainus murals shows a man in everyday clothes, wearing suspenders, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Obviously a working man—but who was he and why is he honoured among the world-famous murals?’

The artist identifies him as Robert Swanson. Bob who?

The key to his claim to fame is in the mural’s background—a brass steam whistle.

Ah, that Bob Swanson: the man who, after a career in the lumber industry became B.C.’s chief inspector of railways. Who, off-duty, wrote poetry about loggers and logging that’s again in print, invented things and made whistles–big whistles–for railways, for ships, for lighthouses, for at least one major Nanaimo coal mine, and the Duke Point pulp mill.

And, although born in the romantic age of steam, he’s credited with (or cursed for) having invented the air horn ‘chime’ used by diesel locomotives.

Robert Swanson’s was a truly remarkable career as you’ll see next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: The Chemainus mural shows Bob Swanson in working clothes; this photo shows him as he preferred to be—well dressed—according to a close business associate __ photo WIKIPEDIA

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In his prime John Wood was hailed as an actor who “stood alone on the Pacific Coast”.

But when he died he became an embarrassment to almost all who knew him. And the circumstances surrounding his death touched off a furor in the Victoria medical community.

Was he the victim of medical malpractice—or of a self-administered drug overdose?

Everyone had an opinion but no one was sure, and the coroner’s jury, equally mystified, returned a verdict of “death from a dose of opiate, taken while in a diseased state of health, but by whom administered, there was not sufficient evidence to show”.

Few were satisfied with the vague verdict—least of all Wood’s attending doctor who had to sue Wood’s estate for services rendered. The resulting trial was brief but acrimonious—and a great story for next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Although she’d divorced him shortly before his final ‘illness,’ the former Mrs. John Wood bought him what was said to have been the most expensive headstone in Victoria’s Quadra Street Burying Ground (today’s Pioneer Square).

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Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (in the 1960s), I had the good fortune to interview and to tape two former senior officers of the CPR coastal liner Princess Marguerite.

She and her sister Princess Kathleen were requisitioned as troopships during the Second World War. The Kathleen made it home (to die on the rocks in Alaskan waters just a few years later) but Marguerite, torpedoed, went down in flames in the Mediterranean in August 1942.

Both officers survived her sinking, one earning an MBE, and provided me with more than enough great material for a two-page article in the Colonist’s Sunday magazine.

All that was long ago, as I said. But, last September, I received an email via the Cowichan Valley Citizen, from Paul Campbell, England. He wanted to contact me as he’d researched the story of the Marguerite’s dramatic end because his father had been a soldier on board her and had, thankfully, survived.

Making Mr. Campbell’s family connection with the Marguerite even more personal—and incredible—his “long-term partner’s father was also on the ship at the time”!

Mr. Campbell has researched the story of the final hours of S.S. Princess Marguerite to the point of acquiring a transcript of the U-boat’s logbook and photos.

He and I shall share them and the story of the final voyage of S.S. Marguerite with Chronicles readers next week.

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Photo caption: Smoke fills the sky as the torpedoed ex-passenger liner Princcess Marguerite nears the end.

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We’re a year into the online Cowichan Chronicles and I have more story ideas to choose from than when I started. Often, because of time and energy considerations, I take the line of least resistance.

For which I thank the Heavens for my vast Archives and the wonders of the internet!

Almost every day, it seems, there’s something in the news that suggests an event or a personality of the past or that has its roots planted firmly in our history.

The latest example is the horrendous news that more than 200 bodies have been located at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School which closed 50 years ago. The ‘chips’ just keep falling in the story of the residential schools and reopen wounds for its surviving victims and their families...

Fortunately, most history is more fascinating than grim and as a professional storyteller and (so-called) historian I try to balance, hopefully successfully, the good, the bad and the ugly.

So, inspired (if that’s the correct word) by the Kamloops tragedy, I’m going to look at another longstanding government policy that trampled First Nations tradition, the potlatch. To quote thecanadianencyclopedia.ca “a potlatch was commonly held on the occasion of important social events, such as marriages, births and funerals [and] might last for several days and would involve feasting, spirit dances, singing and theatrical demonstrations”.

All of which sounds innocuous enough. But the colonial authorities of the day saw it from a different viewpoint: that the cost of holding a potlatch, which they viewed as a pagan practice, invariably impoverished the host (usually a chief) with long-term consequences to himself, his family and his tribe, and therefore must be outlawed for their own good.

All of which set the stage for conflict, some of it violent, and the subject of next week’s Chronicles.

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Photo caption: For years, HMS Forward enforced what was euphemistically termed ‘gunboat justice’ along B.C.’s coast. —Wikipedia

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Even though he’s been dead for almost a century, one of British Columbia’s most infamous con men is back in the news.

Edward Arthur Wilson, aka Brother XII, may be long gone but the legends of the religious cult he founded at Cedar-by-the-Sea (Cedar) and on DeCourcy and Cortez Islands in the 1920s, and of their tales of buried gold, black magic, slave labour, sadism, torture—even murder—live on.

The latest development is the advertised sale, for the second time in five years, of his Cortez Island acreage, described as his “headquarters”: 99.6 sylvan and waterfront acres for $2,795,000 CD.

Currently owned by press mogul David Black the historic property has been “getting lots of calls” according to Mark Lester of Colliers International. He attributes the widespread interest not just to the buoyant realty market but to the property’s exotic provenance.

I’ll leave the sales promotion to Mr. Lester (who needs no help from me, I’m sure) and tell you the fabulous story, in full, of the former professional mariner cum messiah who (mis)led his devoted and naive followers to a state of mental, physical and financial ruin. When he fled the country, just ahead of the police, leaving human and physical devastation in his wake, he and his whip-wielding mistress Madame Zee took with them a fortune in gold coins.

It’s the prospect that he didn’t have time to empty all his caches of their jars filled with $20 U.S. gold pieces that helps to keep his legend alive for many.

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Photo caption: In the 1920s, through his Aquarian Society, the spiky-bearded mystic Edward Arthur Wilson enriched himself at the expense of his deluded followers. —Dictionary of Canadian Biography photo

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I’m becoming a believer in coincidence.

Time and again, lately anyway, I no sooner commit to the subject of my weekly Chronicle than something in the news totally relates.

In last week’s post, “Cowichan Lake Children Fought Cougar to Standstill,” I told you how one of those heroic kids, Tony Farrar, became a lieutenant in the Canadian Army and was accidentally killed on the firing range. The same day this post was published, it was reported in the Times Colonist that the Canadian Army had charged one of its members in the death of an army reservist who’d been fatally shot while participating in live-fire training at Camp Wainwright in 2019.

Uncanny.

And again: I’d no sooner decided to write on beachcombing and secrets that have been given up—or withheld—by the sea than an article in the TC caught my eye. Researchers from Universite du Quebec a Rimouski are trying to determine if a letter that washed up in a bottle onto a New Brunswick beach in 2017 is genuine.

It purports to be written by Mathilde Lefevbre, a 13-year-old school girl from France who, with her mother and three siblings, went down with the Titanic. Did her eerie letter from beyond the grave float about in the Atlantic for more than a century before it was picked up on a beach in the Bay of Fundy?

We’ve had similar spooky missives from the Twilight Zone turn up on B.C. beaches. I’ll tell you about some of them next week.

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Photo caption: For decades, beachcombers have reaped a harvest of the attractive Japanese glass fishing floats on west coast Vancouver Island beaches. They’ve become highly prized—this one is posted on ebay for a mere $1750 U.S. But not all finds have been as desirable; some, in fact, have come from another world.

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You could say that today’s story began at the foot of my driveway last week.

That’s when, while returning from my daily walk along the old CNR Tidewater Line by my house, I saw a man standing by my mailbox. As I approached it became apparent that he was waiting for me.

Henry van Hell (“It’s spelled just like it sounds,” he said with a grin), who lives at Cowichan Station and has passed me many times as I walked along Koksilah Road, began with the familiar question, “Are you T.W. Paterson?”

A longtime fan of the Chronicles when they appeared in the Cowichan Valley Citizen, he wanted to tell me about an old mine in the Cowichan Lake area. His brother Walter, a retired professional forester, had found it in 1995 and had taken Henry to see it a month before.

Henry found it to be so intriguing that he wanted to tell me about it. To make his point, he showed me several photos on his smartphone. Instantly, I, too, was hooked.

The equipment on the ground, two boilers, a rock drill and a winch, looked as if they’d been placed there yesterday. Yes, they were rusty, but they looked great despite who knows how many years’ exposure to the weather in our Island rain forest.

What Henry wanted to know was, which mine is it and what were the miners after?

He promised to email me copies of his photos and to take me and Jennifer there. In turn, I told him I’d dig into my mining archives and see if I could identify the mine—I, too, wanted to know the who, the when and the why.

Within a week Henry and Walter very graciously fulfilled Henry’s promise to visit the mine and I was able to take several photos of my own. Since then I’ve researched its brief history and I’m going to tell you more about it next week in Cowichan Chronicles.

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Talk about coincidence!

I’d just decided on next week’s Chronicle when I read this morning’s Times Colonist. A headline on page 5 confirmed my choice of subject: “Woman airlifted to hospital with serious injuries from cougar attack.”

This latest cougar confrontation occurred west of Agassiz in the Fraser Valley, about 110 km east of Vancouver.

I can only hope that the unnamed victim recovers from her injuries—as did the protagonists of my tale, which occurred in 1916.

Now I have told the story of Doreen Ashburnham, 11, and Tony Farrer, 8, before—in pieces because of the realities of having my column published in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. Finally, with www.CowichanChronicles.com, I have a chance to stitch them together with an entirely new, intriguing and unknown angle from Victoria. Plus several wonderful photos of Doreen and Tony, the cougar and Doreen’s lifesaving medal which is on exhibit in the British Imperial War Museum (a story in itself).

As is the case of most stories, this one is layered; the attack on the children is the opening act but it’s the “sequel” that most intrigues me.

I’m sure that even those of you who read my columns in the Citizen will only remember highlights of the cougar attack that made international headlines, 105 years ago.

It’s a story well worth retelling and, with some refinements and the great photos, I’ll do just that in next week’s Chronicles.

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Usually, in a case of murder, the biggest question is the identity of the killer(s). But not always.

One of my favourite pioneer storytellers, D.W. Higgins, whom we’ve met before in the Chronicles, wrote two books during his retirement. Both The Mystic Spring and Passing of a Race were based upon his 40 years as a journalist and newspaper editor during the province’s eventful founding. In the latter book, published in1905, he tells a fascinating tale of a brutal robbery and murder in B.C.’s Cariboo gold fields.

A crime that left him wondering, half a lifetime later, about a man who’d astonished one and all—including ‘Hanging’ Judge Begbie—by going, not just calmly, but almost willingly to the scaffold.

Taking with him to the grave, it seems, the shame of his real identity.

William Armitage, as he called himself then, had earlier used the name George Storm, but neither was the real name of this mystery man whose noble family, Higgins had been told privately and on the best of authority, dated back to William the Conqueror.

In fact, “it was more than suspected that [he] was closely related to a duke...” How could a man of such illustrious background find himself, half a world from home, facing a hangman’s noose in the Cariboo?

D.W., with a little help from me, will tell you all about it next week...

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Photo: ‘Downtown’ Barkerville. Of the 10s of 1000s of adventurers from around the world who participated in the Cariboo gold rush, there had to be those who never meant to seek their fortunes by hard work but who chose instead to prey upon their fellows. Thanks to the newly created B.C. Provincial Police and the legendary ‘Hanging’ Judge Begbie, however, serious crime was kept to a minimum. —Wikipedia photo

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In 1913 the Cogger family—father, mother and four children—left their comfortable English home for the wilds of Cobble Hill, a community they couldn’t even find on a map.

James Cogger, a professional dairyman, had been hired by wealthy gentleman farmer Sam Matson to tend his purebred Jersey herd on Hill Farm. Today’s 1200 Fisher Road, Cobble Hill, is still a working farm more than a century later.

One result of the Coggers’ brief stay, which was short circuited by the outbreak of the First World War, was that Charlie Cogger, just seven years old at the time, later wrote a fascinating, Tom Sawyeresque memoir of his year at Hill Farm.

Inspired by his dad’s writings, son Robin Garratt and his wife visited the Cowichan Valley in 2010 and were put in touch with me. Robin has since graciously shared his father’s memoir with Chronicles readers.

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Photo: Children enjoying a ride on a hay wagon, just as the Cogger kids would have done at Hill Farm. —Photo: Author’s Collection

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By now it should be apparent to readers that history is all about research via old newspapers, archives, libraries, government agencies, genealogy, surfing online, correspondence, interviews, etc., etc.

Happily for me, thanks to the wonders of the internet and the wealth of information I’ve amassed in my own archives over my career, I can do much of this in the comfort of my own library, at my computer with a cup of coffee beside me and filing cabinets within easy reach.

What a change from the early days when, to write a magazine or newspaper article, let alone a book, meant Mohammed having to go to the Mountain every time. Every blue moon, however, even with the conveniences cited above, it gets even better—the Mountain comes to Mohammed.

By which I mean that a story, fully researched, comes to me.

Such is this week’s tale by Robin Garratt of England. In 2010, by which time he and his wife were in their 70s, they visited the Cowichan Valley for two weeks. Robin wanted to learn more about his maternal grandfather’s brief employment at Hill Farm in Cobble Hill just prior to the First World War.

Its owner, J.H.S. Matson, is a story in himself.

Dave and Beth Keith, proprietors of Sahtlam Lodge B&B, very kindly passed the Garratts on to me and Robin shared with me the part of his family history that pertains to his grandfather’s sojourn at what’s now the Braithwaite farm at 1200 Fisher Road.

Next week I share this enjoyable story of a young English dairyman who brought his family halfway round the world to outpost Cobble Hill (they couldn’t even find it on a map) with Chronicles readers.

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Photo: Children enjoying a ride on a hay wagon, just as the Cogger kids would have done at Hill Farm. —Photo: Author’s Collection

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It isn’t Halloween but writing last week’s post, ‘Ghosts on the Grade,’ put me in the mood for another ghost story.

I’d just clipped an article from the Times Colonist about an 1880s Oak Bay farmhouse whose owner wants to move it so he can re-develop his property. The story noted that the old farmhouse was once part of 406 acres owned by Hudson’s Bay Co. chief factor John Tod.

I knew that the house in the news wasn’t the original Tod House but it reminded me of the great ghost story of that Oak Bay landmark; I’d researched and written about it for the Colonist then became friends with its owners in the 1960s. Fred and Waveney Massie are gone now but Tod House, haunted or no, is still there.

I’ll tell you its spine-tingling tale next week.

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Photo: John Tod house, Victoria, looks peaceful enough now.—HistoricPlaces

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I’ll start by flat out admitting that I’ve ‘borrowed’ this great title from authors and historians Ian Baird and Peter Smith. Several years ago, under this title, they published a ‘hiking and biking’ guide book to abandoned railways on southern Vancouver Island.

These included the two major former railway grades in the Cowichan Valley which are now the Cowichan Valley and Trans Canada Trails, formerly the E&N Railway extension from Duncan to Lake Cowichan, and the Canadian National Railways mainline from Sooke to Lake Cowichan.

This excellent book is, inexplicably, currently out of print and many outdoor recreationists have consoled themselves with my own contribution to this field, Historic Hikes, Sites ‘n’ Sights of the Cowichan Valley, which is currently undergoing remake.

My own take on hiking and cycling these railway grades had its genesis in my interest in trying to save the Kinsol Trestle from demolition. That, happily, came to fruition and the result is, according to the latest report from the Cowichan Valley Regional District’s parks department, half a million TCT users last year!

But my introduction to the CNR goes way back, to my childhood in Saanich. I grew up one house removed from the Saanich spur; originally it run all the way to Patricia Bay as the mainline but in my day it had been cut back to Cedar Hill Crossroad to, occasionally, accommodate the Sidney Roofing Co. Then it was cut back to Borden’s Mercantile and Growers Winery on Quadra Street.

Today this stretch of the CNR (originally the Canadian Northern Pacific) is part of the phenomenally successful Galloping Goose Trail.

But for me and my friends, just hiking or biking the old grades, and I’m including logging and mining railways, isn’t enough. Sure, the great outdoors, fresh air, exercise and scenery are great—icing on the cake—but what we’re looking for is treasure.

By which I mean, we’re looking for history. And if it’s there to be found, it isn’t in the middle of what’s now a well travelled trail! It’s in the bush, off to each side of the grade.

Of the half million hikers, cyclists and equestrians who enjoyed the TCT last year, how many had so much as a clue that, a century ago, there were small logging communities scattered along much of its length to Lake Cowichan? Bennalleck, to name one, even had a school. It and the others—Camscot, Scottish Palmer, Camsell, Chanlog, to name just five—are long gone now; not even the second- and third-growth trees were there in the ‘20s.

So, yes, these historic sites are overgrown with little in the way of ruins to show for their passing. But they still have their stories to tell and that’s what our ‘bushwhacking’ is all about—seeking them out and learning about them firsthand.

In short, we’re following what Baird and Smith have called the Ghosts of the Grade. I’ll tell you more next week.

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Photo: Doug McLeod and Bill Irvine check out date of culvert (1947) on abandoned E&N Crofton Spur.

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It’s natural to think that a cemetery is sacrosanct—a place where time virtually stands still amid an oasis of marble headstones, shading trees and quiet, all of them impervious to time and change.

If only such were the case.

It’s also natural to think that desecration by neglect and vandalism are a phenomenom of this modern and jaded world. Again, it isn’t so.

A case in point, and one that’s startling because of its prominent location and its historical and cultural significance, is Victoria’s historic Quadra Street Cemetery which is now a park known as Pioneer Square. There’s more human drama packed beneath the soil of this grassy square with its canopy of massive chestnut trees than can be found almost anywhere else on Vancouver Island.

Before I moved to Cobble Hill, I spent many a sunny Sunday photographing the Victoria waterfront. Ogden Point held special attraction for me with its busy docks where Ross Carriers jostled in and about the piles of lumber at breathtaking speed as they loaded the freighters moored alongside with B.C. lumber. Then, invariably, it was up the hill past St. Joseph’s Hospital and Christ Church Cathedral to the Quadra Street Cemetery aka the Quadra Street Burying Ground, what I’ve always known as (appropriately) Pioneer Square.

It was a mystery to me the first time I saw it—most of the headstones were lined up against the back fence, the grass interrupted by only along the south and western edges by a few larger, time-worn monuments. What kind of cemetery was this? Why weren’t the grave markers set out, as is the usual case, in a grid like candles on a birthday cake?

It turned out that there was more to it than my first suspicion—that the city works department just wanted to cut the grass quicker and cheaper. The sad reality was that the cemetery had been neglected for so long, and the work of vandals was so extensive, that it had reached a point that many of the headstones, before they were gathered up and put against the fence, couldn’t be matched to their graves!

How in heaven’s name, one might ask, could this have come to be?

I’ll tell you that and more next week.

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Photo: Pioneer Square as it appeared in recent years.—Old Cemeteries Society

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The accused would have “signed a paper to the effect that he had murdered his wife, if asked to do so, he was in such a state of mental imbecility.”–Dr. Trimble.

I’m taking this long to tell the story of George Cruickshank being charged with stealing $5000 in American gold coin from the safe of the bank where he was employed as accountant because of the story’s curious twists.

And the fact that from the start his lawyer R.B. Ring raised the issue of Cruickshank’s mental state at the time of the alleged theft, in 1863, and his signing a confession in 1865. This was almost virgin ground for colonial Victoria. Insanity was a rare defence in criminal trials, one not to be applied frivolously before the reserved magistrates in an age when criminal sentences were often harsh.

We’ve seen how Cruickshank signed a notarized confession to the theft then, upon being formally charged, recanted in a second statement. Which is where we left off, with Att.-Gen. George Cary prosecuting for the Crown and D.B. Ring acting as Cruickshank’s defence counsel before Chief Justice David Cameron.

Cary wanted to produce the first statement in court; Ring objected, insisting that Cruickshank’s mental state at the time of signing be established, and citing two precedents.

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Some months ago I told you the story of one of Victoria’s most enduring mysteries, the robbery of Macdonald’s Bank. It has never been solved, at least not officially.

It was Victoria’s first bank robbery but certainly not its last.

If there were suspicions that Macdonald’s was an inside job, there never was any doubt whatsoever that the theft of $5000 in American gold coins from the Bank of British Columbia in 1865 was the work of an employee.

He’d admitted it without even being asked!

So the real question was not who or why, but was he sane at the time?

Today, mental illness is recognized as just that—an illness that, like most organic diseases, is usually treatable. In a courtroom, particularly in cases of murder, sanity can determine a defendant’s sentencing to a prison or a hospital, even acquittal.

But this is all new ground even though Victoria established its own ‘lunatic asylum’ as early as 1876. (It was an abysmal failure: instead of helping its patients, the so-called asylum became the subject of public scandal when the public learned that patients had been verbally and physically abused, and robbed of their few possessions by its director and staff!)

What makes this week’s story bank robbery fascinating is that, during the subsequent trial, defence counsel based his case entirely upon the accused’s state of mind at the time of the theft. In short, his guilt wasn’t the issue but his sanity.

Consequently, the case of the Crown vs. George Cruickshank is almost precedent-setting in the British justice system as it was practised in the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island 150 years ago.

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Photo caption: Victoria, 1862, as it was at the time of George Cruickshank's trial for bank theft. --Wikipedia photo

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The sinking of the American steamship Clallam while en route to Victoria is one of the worst in provincial record. But, more than a century later, there’s so much more to this tragedy than just the date, place and circumstances of her foundering in a storm in Juan de Fuca Strait.

From a storyteller’s viewpoint, there are two equally compelling sidebars: How her company agent spotted her in distress from the rooftop of Victoria’s Driard Hotel and how he tried, in growing desperation, to send help by way of ships berthed at Esquimalt.

How he finally persuaded the captain of the Gulf Islands steamer Iroquois to brave the gale, only for him to have to turn back for fear of losing his own ship.

How, 14 years later, the circumstances of the loss of the Clallam’s passengers had a direct bearing on a captain’s decision not to abandon his own ship during a lull in the weather; a decision that led, only hours later, to the greatest loss of life in British Columbia maritime history.

You can bet that not a single shopper in downtown knows the eerie connection between the Clallam disaster and one of the city’s leading department stores.

I’ll tell you all about it next week.

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Photo caption: The small passenger liner Clallam was only six months old when she was lost with great loss of life in January 1904.—Wikipedia photo

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Dear Perry, would you be so kind, to fill a request and sing a song we love best...?

There’s a blast from the past for you!

They talk about ear bugs, songs that stick in our minds that we sometimes just can’t shake. This one goes way back to the Dark Ages of black and white, 17-inch screen television and the Perry Como Show, one of my father’s favourites.

I say one of my father’s favourites (along with the, shudder, likes of Lawrence Welk—“Wunnerful, wunnerful”—God, I hated that show), as Perry Como was pretty square for my generation. Elvis was just coming into fashion although I never became a fan of his either, even though I tried to because all my friends and schoolmates were enthralled with the new rock and roll. So why does that introduction to Perry Como’s viewers’ requests remain indelibly embedded in my mind, most of a lifetime later?

Not that it matters. I’m just using it as a roundabout lead to next week’s Chronicles when I turn the tables on my readers—that’s you—and, instead of doing all the work of researching and writing a new post, I’m going to let you do most of the work for me.

Never a week goes by but I receive fascinating emails from both regular readers and from those who track me down online with queries and, not as common but best of all, offers to share their family histories and scrapbooks. These come from close to home and from afar, two of the most recent and most promising being from the Maritimes and the United Kingdom. I shall be sharing them with you next week and in due course.

I know you’ll find them every bit as intriguing as I have.

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Photo caption: A descendant of Duncan Dr. Watson Dykes who has inherited the family archives and scrapbooks has kindly offered to send me photos of Dr. and Mrs. Dykes. Dr. Dykes served his patients at all hours and served as community health officer during the Spanish 'Flu epidemic of a century ago. This is a great example of what sometimes comes to me through the joys of email.

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I’ve never understood the human fascination with crime but there’s no denying its universal appeal. Crime stories, particularly those about true murders, unsolved and otherwise, are the subject of movies, plays, books, magazines and websites, they’re on television and radio, and among the headliners of daily newscasts.

While none of us favours criminal activity within our own communities, most of us enjoy a “good murder story,” me (heaven help me) included. Crime and romance, polar opposites are, in fact, the two most popular entertainment genres of all.

Certainly British Columbia has and has had its share of criminal activity, some of it so bizarre as to almost defy belief. But the facts speak for themselves and the Chronicles simply wouldn’t be complete without an occasional crime story.

That said, next week I introduce you to David Chenoweth. He may not be British Columbia’s youngest murderer but he’s the youngest British Columbian to be convicted of murder—a particularly cold blooded one at that. He was just eight years old when he pulled the trigger then stood in the prisoner’s dock as a jury pronounced him guilty.

It’s quite a story and you can read it all here in the Chronicles next week.

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Photo: Ernest Chenoweth was tried in the Rossland where he lived. His two-day trial actually was held in Nelson whose beautiful courthouse is shown here.--www.geocaching.com

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The recent discovery of a primitive rock carving on a Dallas Road beach prompted two front-page stories in the Times Colonist; the first to describe it as being ancient and of Indigenous origin, the second to report the claim of a Victoria artist that he carved the sandstone icon.

The carving’s beachside proximity to Beacon Hill Park initially added credence to its having been used in rituals by the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, as burial mounds in what’s now Victoria’s premier park confirm that it was once home to an ancient and little-known aboriginal culture.

I’ll leave it to the anthropological experts at the Royal British Columbia Museum and artist Ray Boudreau to sort out the face-in-stone’s provenance. My interest in the story was piqued because of my research of years ago of the fascinating father and son team of anthropologists, Dr. Charles Frederick Newcombe and son William (Billy) Arnold Newcombe. (Coincidentally, they lived on Dallas Road just west of the park.)

Between the two of them they amassed what became known internationally as the “Newcombe Collection” of First Nation arts and crafts, private papers, documents and rare photographs now in possession of the RBC Museum. Billy then went his father one better—a friend of the eccentric Emily Carr, he saved almost 100 of her paintings from destruction.

In fact, it’s been estimated that, between the two of them, they compiled one-fifth of the Museum’s collections which also include botany, marine biology and paleontology!

In recent years there has been a ground-shift in attitude towards some world-famous museum collections of North American First Nation artifacts (which often included human remains) and how they were acquired, and the Newcombes have come under the glass of this new awareness, too.

I tell you all about the remarkable Newcombes in next week’s Chronicles.

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Photo caption: One of Dr. C.F. Newcombe's priceless photos in possession of the Royal British Columbia Museum, this one ca 1901. -- Wikipedia

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