The Chronicles Blog

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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One of the joys of publishing what really amounts to an online magazine is that it often draws a response from a reader, either as a brief comment or as something much more ambitious.

In my previous life as a weekly columnist in the Cowichan Valley Citizen, I condensed a chapter from my book, Outlaws of the Canadian West, which is a compilation of new chapters and ones originally published in 1974 as Outlaws of the Canadian Frontier then, again, in 1977, as Outlaws of Western Canada. (Don’t tell me I don’t recycle.)

Fast-forward to 2019 and Outlaws’ third incarnation as explained above. It was my weekly Chronicles column in the Citizen that drew a wonderful email from John McNab.

I’d been inspired, if that isn’t too strong a word, to run the story, “Intensive Manhunt Isn’t B.C.’s First,” by the fact that for two weeks the news media had been reporting a murder spree by two Vancouver Island teenagers who at first were thought to be among the victims, then identified as the killers.

It reminded me of another manhunt that dated back to 1911—the one I’d written about in Outlaws. The story of Moses Paul and Paul Spintlum is right out of a Louis L’Amour novel, when the British Columbia frontier was almost as wild as the American Wild West. The big difference was that we on the north side of the 49th parallel had British justice, the RCMP and the Provincial Police vs. the Hollywood-style anarchy that prevailed in many American states.

But we did have our outlaws, too, and Paul and Spintlum as they were known were as rootin’-tootin’ as anybody below the line. John McNab spotted a connection between these desperadoes and his family and generously shares it next week with Chronicles readers.

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Photo caption: What did Lucie (Bones) Truran do that made Paul and Spintlum, wanted for three murders and on the run for over a year, want to kill her?

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One of the nuisances of driving is having to keep your eyes on the road, a real problem for me sometimes.

A case in point happened last week when, driving south from Chemainus, I cleared the intersection at the Island Highway and Mount Sicker Road that I’ll always know as the “Red Rooster.”

I always watch for and think of two things. At night I look up at the blackness that is Mount Sicker and marvel at the thought that, 100 and more years ago, an estimated 2000 people lived up there in the copper mining communities of Lenora and Tyee. Now, not so much as a candle light. All gone, gone, gone...

By day, immediately south of the intersection, I look to the right, just above eye level. Now it’s field, with what appears to be a gently-curved fence line skirted by broom bushes. But it’s not a fence. It’s one of the few surviving stretches of the Lenora & Mount Sicker Railway, the narrow gauge shortline that the ill-starred Henry Croft built to ship copper from his mine on Mount Sicker to the newly-established deep water port and smelter at Crofton.

Several adjoining properties on the high (west) side of the Highway share what looks like a driveway paralleling the Highway in their front yards. That’s more of the LMSRR before it crossed the Highway, E&N Railway tracks and farm fields to climb Mount Richards on its winding, roller coasting ride to salt water.

What caught my eye last week was dramatic. The property owner is building a new house or outbuilding and has bulldozed a new driveway, using the old railway grade. Unfortunately (I just had a quick glance) it appears that the historic grade has been dug down three or four feet.

Meaning, in effect, that it has been destroyed. God, how I hate ‘progress’ sometimes!

Which is precisely why I try to ‘save’ history is print and in photos if I can’t in fact. Sometimes we actually do save something significant—take the Kinsol Trestle, as good an example as you can get. But, alas, the Kinsols are few and far between and the sporadic battles to save history for posterity more often than not end dismally.

But enough of that: next week I tell you the story of the remarkable Lenora & Mount Sicker Railway. It was an engineering marvel in its day, and I’m pleased I’ve been able to hike much of it. The famous switchbacks on Mount Richards are still there, much as when the little railway was abandoned and its rails torn up for scrap. But, sadly, not much else.

On that happy note I leave you until next week!

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As I’ve said so many times before, history just keeps on coming.

Everywhere I go, every time I open my mail, every time I read the paper, there’s something ‘old’ in the news. So often lately that they’re ganging up on me. So, next week I open my mail bag and my clippings and email files and share with you some of these news stories whose roots are firmly in the past.

Some of them may surprise you. I promise they will entertain you.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

PS: Speaking of email, some of my best leads over the years have come through suggestions of Chronicles readers, over the 23 years of publication in the Cowichan Valley Citizen, and in the months since they’ve been online. Often they arrive as a comment to a published post, sometimes they’re requests for specific subjects and, often, they’re requests for information.

I do my best to respond and I remind readers that I’m always open to queries, suggestions, even (grrrr) corrections. Just keep in mind that I’ve never made a mistake in print—that I’ve admitted to.

Photo: The coastal CPR liner SS. Princess Victoria. Renowned B.C. artist E.J. Hughes' painting of the Victoria entering Nanaimo Harbour recently sold at auction for almost $1 million. Another nugget in the news.

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Back in 2007 the Nanaimo Star ran a look-back piece on the city’s ‘Costco Caper’ robbery of Mar. 7, 1996.

This was a rather ingeniously planned heist of Loomis Armoured guards as they made a delivery of cash to Costco’s ATM machine. The lone robber escaped with seven cassettes of currency; the amount stolen has never been released to the public.

As of 2007 the file remained open, according to RCMP but now, 24 years later, it seems highly unlikely that this ‘cold case’ will be solved.

Not so Nanaimo’s great bank robbery of December 1924, one of the province’s all-time classic heists. In this remarkable case the bandits, all Americans and professional criminals, were soon identified and arrests began to follow.

But, as you’ll see next week, this audacious hold-up with its connections to notorious gangsters of the Roaring ‘20s remains one of the more outstanding cases in our criminal annals.

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By some freak of nature you won’t find jade on Vancouver Island. But you can find plenty of it—some of it really valuable—on the British Columbia mainland, particularly in the Fraser River country between Lillooet and Hope.

In China and Japan jade is valued even more than gold. Which explains why pioneering Chinese prospectors kept their eyes open for this gemstone which has been used for carving objects of art for centuries.

B.C. jade, more technically known as nephrite, has been in the news lately thanks to the theft of a 1300-kilogram (that’s over a ton!) jade boulder from its place of display in front of Cache Creek’s Cariboo Jade and Gifts store.

The massive green stone had been there since 1985, its owners aware that it had more sentimental than cash value because it was low-quality. Apparently the thieves didn’t know that because they went to the trouble of hauling it away with the use of an excavator and flat-deck trailer.

The monster jade stone has since been recovered and, at last report, the RCMP have identified two suspects but no arrests have been made.

Next week I’ll tell you all about the ongoing hunt for B.C.’s green gold...

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For years I’ve been a devoted fan of garage sales, flea markets and thrift stores, always watching for the useful, the exotic and the unique—at least as I define the terms.

One of the more outstanding treasures turned up in a community 'free store' on Gabriola Island years ago. It’s a framed colour photo of a church memorial window. Not in itself a real turn-on for me.

But that changed when I read the penned caption. It identified the window as a memorial for Michael F.A.Ney, RCN. RCN stands for Royal Canadian Navy, of course.

According to the caption, he was killed “while serving against the Mau Mau, October 31st, 1954”.

What they hey? The Mau Mau were an independence movement in Kenya!

I knew there had to be a story here so the photo was worth the $10 asking price.

But it was only last year, thanks to faithful Chronicles reader and avid researcher Jim La Bossiere that I was able to learn more about the enigmatic Michael Ney, RCN.

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