The Chronicles Blog

In last week’s Chronicles the late Ozzie Hutchings, machinist and liquor store clerk by trade, told the suspenseful tale of Old Growler, the ‘Phantom of the Unuk.’

Ozzie, retired when I met him in 1970, was an historian by choice and a born storyteller. I’m blessed to have his files and 100s of photos of the ghost town of Anyox and of Stewart, B.C.

With my help in the early ‘70s Ozzie wrote a series of articles for the weekend magazine section of The Daily Colonist, telling of the mining activity in the province’s northwestern corner and the colourful characters he’d met before moving to Victoria where he eventually retired after years with the B.C. Liquor Control Board.

I also published a couple of his articles in Canada West magazine when I was its co-owner and editor.

One of his best stories is that of Anna Ullman, a young woman who unwittingly took a page from the legendary solo trek of Lillian Alling, overland through B.C. and Alaska to Siberia. (Another story for another time.)

Anna wasn’t quite so ambitious; she merely set out to hike the abandoned Collins Overland Telegraph line from Hazelton to Telegraph Creek in 1932.

Her yen “to see what she could of the country and its people” almost cost her her life. Foolish she may have been, but no one questioned her courage when they heard her incredible story while she was recuperating in hospital.

Next week, guest columnist Ozzie Hutchings will tell you of the amazing Anna Ullman.

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PHOTO: A matched team of horses hauling a wagon on the main street of Stewart, B.C., 1911. It was still wilderness country, 20 years later, when young Anna Ullman set out on the overland hike that would almost cost her her life. —Courtesy Ozzie Hutchings

I recently introduced you to the late Ozzing Hutchings who, during the last years of his life in Victoria, laboured to compile the history of the ghost town Anyox where his father was the provincial policeman and Ozzie a machinist for the Granby Consolidated Mining, Smelting and Power Co.

This was during the 1920s and ‘30s. Thirty-plus years later, by then retired, Ozzie still believed passionately that the story of Anyox and that of the mining history of the northwestern corner of the province had yet to be told and must not be allowed to be forgotten.

My writing weekly in the Sunday magazine of what was then the Daily Colonist brought us together and I was able to help him have several articles published in The Islander.

All the while, Ozzie continued to work on his Anyox anthology and a companion history, the story of Anyox’s northern neighbour, Stewart. This was later published in book form by that community’s chamber of commerce under the title, Stewart: The B.C.-Alaska Border Town That Wouldn’t Die.

However, Ozzie’s Anyox history was scooped by a professional journalist who’d been born in Anyox but who, too young to have memories of his own, borrowed Ozzie’s extensive files to tell the story of Anyox for which he was able to find a publisher.

But it wasn’t the story of Anyox that Ozzie wanted to tell and he was disappointed, almost heartbroken.

Which is about where I entered his world, by invitation, resulting in our collaboration in a series of reminiscences in The Islander and his self—published version of the Stewart book that was later reprinted by the Stewart C-of-C.

Which, you might think, is the end of his story. But not quite.

Ozzie Hutchings, machinist by trade, historian and clock repairman by choice, was a born storyteller. I prove it in next week’s Chronicles with his blood chilling story, ‘The Phantom of the Unuk,’ and a second fascinating tale, this one of a remarkable woman’s foolhardy but incredible gamble with death.

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PHOTO: British Columbia’s far northwestern corner could be deceptively peaceful on a chill winter day. But not always for trappers who lived alone and had to rely upon their wits and nerve to survive. —Ozzie Hutchings photo from Author’s Collection

Last week, I reported that a new book has been released across the line in Washington. Byron Riblet: Forgotten Engineering Genius by Ty A. Brown is the story of the man who perfected the tramlines that are in use and identifiable, today, as ski-lifts.

But they started out as tramlines to carry ores from isolated and mountainous mining operations. Mr. Riblet brought one of his effective and economical cable systems to the Cowichan Valley just after the turn of the last century.

That’s when he was commissioned to connect the Tyee Mine on Mount Sicker to the E&N Railway at Tyee Crossing, the copper ores being carried in aerial buckets.

It was far more efficient and less costly to build and to maintain than the competing Lenora Mine’s narrow gauge railway to Crofton. With the Tyee’s closure, the tramline hardware was recycled at a mine in the Barkley Sound area.

Sadly, until recent years, two of the wooden towers had survived, tall and firm, but were downed by loggers.

Sadly, too, although there’s an entire chapter on the Riblet tramlines in B.C.’s silvery Slocan, not a mention of the Tyee on Mount Sicker. A slight that I correct in next week’s Chronicle.

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PHOTO: Looking up from the Lenora townsite on Mount Sicker to the ore pile of the competing Tyee Mine which Byron Riblet successfully linked to the E&N Railway with his aerial tramline.

Romantic though it may seem to some today, Victoria’s famous sealing industry was a grim business.

Not only for the poor seal, slaughtered almost to extinction, but for the seamen who braved distant and dangerous seas to follow their elusive prize. It took men—real men—like Capt. Viktor Jacobsen, to name one.

Then there were the sealers of a different cloth who sailed from Victoria.

This tiny fraternity thumbed their noses at more than storm and killing fog: little obstacles like international law and three navies!

Rogues like Capt. Alex McLean, the legendary ‘Sea Wolf’ whom we’ve met before in these pages. And Capt. Gustav Hansen who also achieved notoriety if not lasting fame as the ‘Flying Dutchman’.

He’s the second outlaw to carry this title in British Columbia. And, like Henry Wagner, his fellow ‘Flying Dutchman,’ he, too, came to a sad end.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: From Victoria Harbour they sailed to the northern seal rookeries, risking storms and the navies of three nations.

This week we follow Carlton Stone’s big move to Mesachie Lake. That mill, too, is now history, as is Carlton Stone himself.

But his legacy lives on, former Hillcrest employees and their families still holding annual summer reunions after all these years. That’s quite a testament to a lumber tycoon who earned the respect of his employees through a career of caring and consideration for their wants and needs as well as his own.

What a far cry from some Vancouver Island robber barons of old!

Stone left other legacies, too, including this one that’s a highlight of the B.C. Forest Discovery Centre, the beautiful No. 9 locomotive.

What a beauty!

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Well, another year and another reunion have gone by.

The 23rd reunion for the former employees of the Hillcrest Lumber Co., in fact.

Coincidentally, I and friends recently paid a return visit to the Chinese cemetery at Hillcrest, Sahtlam, to take more photos of this little-known Cowichan Valley landmark. Of the Hillcrest Lumber Co. Itself, however, little survives other than the two-storey concrete vaults which stand beside the driveway at the entrance to a modern private residence.

But the story of Carlton Stone’s pioneer lumber company lives on, not only in the memories of former employees, but thanks to the gifted ‘pen’ of local historian Ian MacInnes who wrote the story of Hillcrest Lumber 15 years ago.

Next week, the Chronicles recall Hillcrest as it was in its glory and as it is today.

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PHOTO: Jennifer stands at the entrance to the little-known Chinese cemetery at Hillcrest, Sahtlam.

Prospector, packer and painted lady; merchant, gambler and thief; they all called rip-roaring Fort Yale home at the height of the Fraser River and Cariboo gold rushes.

Here, on the Fraser’s western flat, bonded in restless union by their quest for gold, 9000 men, women and children from every quarter of the globe toiled, fought and died for the elusive metal.

Of this motley populace, one man towered above his fellows.

The proudest grew humble before his command, brave men faltered, women fainted, dogs and children flew terror-stricken from his rage. Undisputed monarch of all he surveyed through eyes bloodshed red, he was Big Jim McLaughlin, the terror of the tenderloins.

You’ll meet Big Jim in next week’s Chronicle.

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PHOTO: For years, Fort Yale, originally a Hudson’s Bay trading post, was British Columbia’s own Dodge City.

Karma. It’s a curse, I tell you.

Hard as it is for me to believe, it’s been almost 50 years since I wrote Ghost Town Trails of Vancouver Island and it’s still in print after several changes of format and cover, and a slight tweak of the title and byine.

I also wrote two other B.C. ghost town books, on The Lower Mainland and Okanagan-Similkameen. There were to be several more: on the Cariboo, the East and West Kootenays, the Boundary Country and northern B.C. But life took a turn and, with the exception of some magazine articles, newspaper and online columns, and Riches to Ruin, my history of the copper mining boom on Mt. Sicker, I’ve drifted from a subject that has intrigued me since childhood.

But life, it seems, has taken another turn and here I am, looking into my vast archives on B.C. ghost towns again, thanks in part to Blake MacKenzie’s virulently popular Facebook website, Gold Trails & Ghost Towns.

All of which reminded me of the late Ozzie Hutchings, the unofficial historian of the northern coastal community of Anyox. Back in the 1960s, Ozzie set out to record the history of this copper smelting town on Alice Arm, just below the Alaskan border, which was abandoned by its owners in the 1930s.

The amazing thing is, because the Granby Co. built everything to last of concrete, much of the town is still there in the wilderness. You can even book a tour of the old town site which, for the most part, stands like a ghost from the past.

Ozzie Hutchings is long gone now but he left me his files and photos. Next week in the Chronicles, he and I will tell you the story of Anyox, The Town That Got Lost.

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PHOTO: Anyox, B.C. —Courtesy Ozzie Hutchings

Passenger rail on Vancouver Island has been in the news recently; in fact, on an off, it’s been in the news for over 10 years—ever since the E&N Railway discontinued its Dayliner service.

But it’s finally coming to the boil because of a court-ordered deadline to restore service or face relinquishing a stretch of its Victoria-Courtenay right-of-way to a mid-Island First Nation.

This would, in fact, be the death knell to an Island railway going back to 1886, other than, possibly, as has long been touted, being downsized to a commuter shortline in Victoria’s West Shore area.

But freight and passenger service as was originally the railway’s bread and butter would become history and the old grade and trestles, if many recreationists have their way, a hiking trail.

Next week, the Chronicles looks back at the golden era of passenger service on both the E&N and the Canadian National Railways in the Cowichan Valley.

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PHOTO: Today’s phenomenally popular and well-used Galloping Goose Trail in Saanich takes its name from the Cowichan Valley’s first self-propelled rail car that long predated the E&N’s famous Dayliners. —Courtesy Kaatza Museum

More than a century after he was immortalized in bronze, his honorary title is to be erased in the name of reconciliation.

A cliche 140 years ago, it’s politically incorrect today.

Nevertheless it was meant as a tribute to the man who earned his place in Vancouver Island history as the true discoverer of the coal fields that put Nanaimo on the map.

So, when he died, ‘Coal Thyee’ (even the spelling has changed over the years) as he’d become known to First Nations and Whites, was off to, in the words of a newspaper headline, the Happy Hunting Ground.

Great Coal Chief, as he became known, (Che-wech-i-kan or Tee-a-Whillum or, as most recently given, Ki-et-sa-kun) was treated deferentially by the men of the HBC and as something of a celebrity by his own Snuneymuxw First Nation.

In later years he was honoured by the naming of Coal Tyee Elementary School.

But that was then and this is now—he’s being demoted into anonymity, the Nanaimo-Ladysmith School District having decided to rename the elementary school. A leading contender so far is Syuw’eb’ct, meaning, “our traditions,” or “our history”.

Next week in the Chronicles, the story of how the man known as the Great Coal Chief sparked the founding of what became the Hub City, for 80 years one of the greatest coal producers in the province and, today, one of British Columbia’s largest metropolitan cities.

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PHOTO: Ever-growing Nanaimo owes it all to the Indigenous man who became known as the Great Coal Chief.

Some months ago, a shopper at Walmart asked me if I knew anything about the “piano” in the bush along the Cowichan Valley Trail. Was it the one, he asked, I’d once mentioned in a Citizen column?

The one that its owner and neighbours had desperately tried to save from fire?

I could have answered, yes, but I hedged my bets and said, probably.

He was referring to an intriguing artifact that’s still clearly visible, should one know where to look, within 30 feet of the CVT, formerly the E&N Cowichan Lake Subdivision. I’ve noticed it during several visits to the former site of a 1920s sawmill community that has all but disappeared.

First, there was the fire, then the mill, rebuilt, closed and everyone moved away. Lumber salvagers, vandals and Mother Nature took care of the rest and what was, ever so briefly, known as Yellow Fir, became just another historical footnote.

Except to those who, like myself, like to haunt these vanished sites with a camera, notepad and, sometimes, a rake and a metal detector.

But you sure don’t need a detector to find the piano, as I’ll show you next week in the Chronicles.

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In February, the Royal British Columbia Museum acquired an 1883 oil painting of the entrance to Victoria Harbour by American artist, lithographer and cartographer Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918).

The canvas was used as part of the museum’s collaboration with the University of Victoria during February, Black History Month.

Entitled “Go West Young Man,” an accompanying lecture explored Brown’s career and his relevance as a painter today.

One art auction listed him as “the first black painter in California. He was the only known black lithographer in America during his time, and in San Francisco he was considered the most artful. He later went on to have a successful career as a landscape painter travelling throughout California and the Pacific Northwest.”

The newly-acquired canvas Entrance to the Harbour is said to be among the RBC’s highlights of the more than seven million objects in its possession.

Next week, the story of Grafton Tyler Brown, pioneer artist, in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Black American painter Grafton Tyler Brown staged what’s believed to have been Victoria’s first art exhibition in 1883. —Wikipedia

Even in death a ship does not sleep soundly. Timbers creak in eerie symphony with wind and wave, nesting pigeons converse in dark corners, ghostly shadows walk decks and passageways where, once, seamen ran to their stations in weather fair and foul...

Her lofty masts, white sails and graceful bowsprit were long gone when I first set eyes on her, but the sleeping Melanope remembered the distant day when she was one of the most beautiful clipper ships ever to ply the seven seas.

By the 1970s she was derelict, her ravaged iron hulk standing watch with other seagoing ladies of the past whose skeletons formed the Royston logging grounds breakwater.

Quite unwittingly, her owners had been blessed with prophecy when they christened her, Melanope being derived from ‘melanic,’ which is translated from the Greek ‘melas, melanos’– meaning black, or belonging to a black class.

When black she did become, from years of carrying coal, Melanope already had a black past...

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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The old made way for the new in October 2005 when Paldi, once home to one of the largest Sikh communities in Canada, went up in flames.

The remains of the 88-year-old community which housed as many as 1500 workers and residents in its heyday, were razed in preparation for a proposed 120 mixed-housing units and a re-born commercial centre.

Over three weekends regional fire departments “practice burned” a dozen old homes in the once thriving township between Duncan and Lake Cowichan. Only the second Sikh temple, built in 1959, and town founder Mayo Singh’s home (the latter only temporarily) were left standing.

That was 17 years ago. Now the building of new homes is finally underway. Existing residents and those who’ll make the reborn Paldi their home have a rich multi-cultural heritage in the onetime sawmill town originally known as Mayo Siding.

(Speaking personally, Mayo Singh is one of my few real heroes of Cowichan Valley history and it will be a joy to tell his story and that of the community he founded in the Chronicles.)
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So: who dun it?

Readers of last week’s Chronicle may have drawn some conclusions of their own from the few facts ascertained by Victoria police and private parties acting as detectives in the fatal shooting of the young clerk, October 28, 1885.

Let’s review the facts: While walking back to James Bay from downtown Victoria, when within 50 feet of the Capt Hamilton Moffatt residence where he’d been staying with his bride Mary since their honeymoon two weeks before, the 35-year-old was accosted by two men.

Four shots are fired and Hicks dies 36 hours later. But the story doesn’t end there and the mystery of John Hicks’s death remains one of Victoria’s most fascinating cold cases of all time.
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Shot down at his friend’s door.

Such was the grim fate of young John Hicks, the tragic protagonist of a drama that plunged Victoria into mystery, 137 years ago.

For Hicks, the outcome was death; for Victorians, a puzzle which has never been satisfactorily explained.

It is, in fact, one of Victoria’s most fascinating ‘cold’ crime cases.

Who dun it? I really don’t know although I have my suspicions. I’ll tell you all about it in next week’s Cowichan Chronicles.
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“Have you hiked the old Mount Sicker Railway grade?”

Or: “How do I find the old Mount Sicker Railway grade at Crofton?”

It’s a question put to me from time to time, more frequently lately, as more and more people embrace hiking, with its great outdoor scenery, fresh air and the joy of exploring the Cowichan Valley afoot.

We are truly blessed with the Trans Canada and Cowichan Valley trails, the former Canadian (Northern Pacific) National Railway and the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Cowichan Lake Subdivision, respectively.

According to the CVRD, the Kinsol Trestle alone draws an estimated 100,000 visitors a year; I don’t know if they’ve ever tried to calculate the numbers of hikers, cyclists and horseback riders who use the rest of these two major trail systems.

But how many know about, let alone have tried hiking, the narrow gauge railway that linked the Lenora copper mine atop Mount Sicker to the deepsea harbour at Crofton?

Obviously, the Trans Canada Highway interferes with the old grade as have scores of property owners, some of whom have obliterated all signs of it on their lands.

But there are stretches, in particular the famous “switchbacks” and the Chinese navvies’ cribbing, that are almost pristine—if you know where to find them.

Next week in the Chronicles I’ll take you back in time and, together, we’ll hike Henry Croft’s dream.
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PHOTO: Jennifer Goodbrand and Sophie inspect some of the cribbing of the Lenora, Mt. Sicker Railway grade on Mount Richards. —Author’s Collection

Google the term ‘hell ship’ and you’ll find that it has come to be applied to the Japanese transport of American and Allied prisoners-of-war for slave labour in the home islands during the last two years of the Second World War.

But the term goes back much longer than the mid-1940s.

All the way back to the American Revolution, in 1776, in fact, when the British rather than the Japanese were the villains. Old ships’ hulks, no longer seaworthy, made cheap and easy to guard floating jails for prisoners-of-war in America and for convicted criminals in the Mother Country.

But, between the 1760s and right up into the 20th century, ‘Hell Ship’ was a term used time and again in newspapers of the Pacific Northwest in reference to ships whose masters and mates brutalized their crews.

It was accepted internationally that a ship’s captain was little short of God—he was to be obeyed instantly and without question, period. Some masters, a minority, happily, ran not only a ‘tight’ ship but became notorious for enforcing their orders with anything that came to hand—a belaying pin, brass knuckles, a whip, even a gun.

Upon such aptly-named hell ships reaching port, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle and San Francisco newspapers reported harrowing tales of shipboard brutality that sometimes made it to a courtroom where the odds and the law favoured the accused master or mates.

As if going to sea before the mast wasn’t life-challenging enough, to find yourself in effect a captive aboard a ship with a sadistic master or mate with no chance of relief or escape must indeed have been hell afloat.

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PHOTO: This prison ship is transporting British felons to Australia. Stealing a loaf of bread to survive could earn you deportation for life.—www.Pinterest.com