The Chronicles Blog

When, many, many years ago, I was interviewed by a radio announcer about my newest book, Outlaws of the Canadian West, he expressed amazement that we had ‘outlaws’ in British Columbia.

In the American Southwest, yes, but north of the 49th parallel? He could hardly believe it.

I had to convince him that we, too, had our own version of the Wild West.

Nothing like Dodge City, of course; we’re British after all. But we had some real shootin,’ tootin’ desperadoes just like we’ve always seen in American western movies. (We even have the equal of the OK Corral; now there’s a story for a future Chronicle.)

Take this snapshot of gold rush Yale as captured by our old friend, D.W. Higgins:

“All was bustle and excitement in the new mining town,” he wrote in 1904. “Every race and every colour and both sexes were represented in the population. There were Englishmen, Canadians, Americans, Australians, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese and Negroes–all bent on winning gold from the Fraser sands, and all hopeful of a successful season...

“In every saloon a faro-bank or a three-card monte table was in full swing, and the halls [saloons] were crowded to suffocation. A worse set of cut-throats and all-round scoundrels than those who flocked to Yale from all parts of the world never assembled anywhere.

Decent people feared to go out after dark. Night assaults and robberies, varied by an occasional cold-blooded murder or a daylight theft, were common occurrences. Crime in every form stalked boldly through the town unchecked and unpunished. The good element was numerically large; but it was dominated and terrorized by those whose trade it was to bully, beat, rob and slay. Often men who had differences in California met at Yale and proceeded to fight it out on British soil by American methods...”

I’ve already told you of the fatal duel, ‘High noon in Downtown Victoria,’ when as many as 15,000 gold seekers passed through on their way to ‘Fraser’s’ River.

The fact is that a wide-open Fort Yale as described was an aberration but the challenge that faced, first colonial, then provincial authorities, in trying to maintain law and order on the Canadian West frontier was immense.

Which brings me to next week’s Chronicle about a gentlemanly English businessman’s grim experience in trying to manage a store in the Boundary Country in 1897. Newly-born Cascade City had no provincial police officer, just a special constable with no training, and its ‘jail’ was a joke.

So it should have come as no real surprise when Stanley Mayall found himself plagued by a series of burglaries.

Petty crime, you say? So it began. But not when the shooting started!

See you next week.

* * * * *
PHOTO: Boisterous, brawling Cascade City in the 1890s; it’s gone now. But it was exiting while it lasted! —Wikipedia photo

Read More

Next week is a doubleheader of sorts to wrap up two recent Chronicles.

Last week’s post was the story of the legendary prospector R.A. ‘Volcanic’ Brown who, in his 80s, continued to brave the forbidding mountains of Pitt River alone in search of the equally legendary Lost Creek Mine.

That trip in 1931 was his last; searchers who risked their lives to find him, found only his camp—and a Mason jar of gold nuggets—but of Brown himself, not a trace.

But there’s another story about Volcanic Brown I didn’t get to: the night he fatally shot Bill Brown, who shared his name by coincidence rather than kinship. It’s a dramatic tale to say the least, one which I first wrote 40 years ago and which drew a letter with a firsthand description of the tragedy by an eyewitness.

I’ve never published Mr. Jepson’s letter. He was just a boy at the time and will be gone by now. It needn’t be said that, even in 1980, 56 years after that fatal night at Volcanic Brown’s cabin, he vividly recalled Bill Brown’s last, frenzied minutes and his last words before he was struck down by a .30.30 rifle slug fired by Volcanic Brown...

Previously, I’d told you of the bigger-than-life ‘Sea Wolf’ McLean who’s been immortalized—libelled is probably a better—by author Jack London.

He hardly needed London’s gifted pen to make him notorious.

McLean’s exploits as a seal hunter and poacher who defied the Russian and American coast guards to raid the Bering Sea rookeries, then thumbed his nose at the French while looting their pearl beds in the South Pacific, made newspaper headlines time and again.

In 1922, based upon a number of conversations he’d had with McLean several years before (which would have been shortly before McLean’s death), a writer named Noel Robinson wrote what he claimed to be the story of “The Real Sea Wolf” for Macleans magazine.

Among other things, he describes McLean’s reaction when he finally read London’s book and found himself portrayed as a seagoing hellion who beat and tormented his seamen while pirating the seven seas.

No wonder that Hollywood made a movie about “him”!

That and more in next week’s Chronicles while I gear up for Halloween and dig into my files for a good ghost story. Come to think of it, Remembrance Day is fast approaching, too...

* * * * *

PHOTO: Sea Wolf McLean

Read More

Of all the stories of lost treasure in British Columbia the legendary Lost Creek Mine has the most personal meaning for me.

It helped to set me on the path to becoming a lifelong writer/historian. All thanks to my growing up in Victoria in the 1950s on a diet of, first, American comic books, then American magazines, movies and TV.

That's because we Canadians didn’t celebrate our history then, didn’t even teach it in school, aside from a passing reference to the arrival of the French in Quebec; it was Grade 8 before I again encountered Canadian history, albeit in diluted form, but enough this time to kindle my interest.

All the while, my fascination for American history continued to grow; Gene Autry and Davie Crockett were my childhood heroes because I knew of no Canadians worthy of my boyish admiration.

In the course of all this I became intrigued by stories of lost treasure—in the United States, of course: in the Louisiana bayous, off the Florida Keys, in the American Southwest. I knew about the Lost Dutchman Mine but nothing about the Lost Creek Mine.

All that changed dramatically, again thanks to American TV. I’d become a fan of Bill Burrud's weekly documentary, Lost Treasure. All sites covered were within the United States—until the evening I heard Bill mention a lost murderer's mine in the forbidding mountains beyond New Westminster.

New Westminster! I almost fell out of my chair.

That was almost in my own backyard! The die was cast; I was off to the Provincial Archives to innocently inquire of the ladies on duty if they had anything on file on lost treasures in British Columbia.

Indeed they did, and I've been researching and writing about it ever since.

But what must be British Columbia's most legendary tale of a lost gold mine isn’t the subject of next week’s Chronicles. No, I’m going to tell you about one of the most colourful provincial prospectors of all time.

R.A. ‘Volcanic’ Brown was the discoverer of one of the richest copper mines in B.C. who became a living legend.

When, in his 80s, he vanished while searching for the Lost Creek Mine, he left a mason jar of nuggets and the question that tantalizes many today: had he found Slumach’s mine before falling victim of its curse?

The amazing story of the Lost Creek Mine has been told many times before; next week in the Chronicles, I’ll introduce you to the amazing man known as Volcanic Brown.

* * * * * *
PHOTO CAPTION: Even though Brown looks old, frail and lame in this photo, that didn’t stop him from braving the Pitt River mountains in search of a legendary lost mine. — https://www.westcoastplacer.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/VolcanicBrown.jpg

Read More

When we left off last week, California badman ‘Judge’ Ned McGowan had barely escaped a vigilante neck-tie for his alleged role in the murder of crusading San Francisco newspaper editor James King.

After laying low in Mexico he resurfaced in Sacramento then, with the help of influential friends, arranged for a farcical trial in wide-open Napa County. Once acquitted of complicity in King’s murder, it was time for a new start.

He chose to join the rush to ‘Fraser’s River’ in British territory north of the 49th parallel and, perhaps not unintentionally, beyond American legal jurisdiction.

At Hill’s Bar, site of the first and what would prove to be the richest gold producer of any of the Fraser’s sandbars, he somehow acquired a rich claim and set up court, so to speak, in a saloon with his fellow countrymen and fellow exiles.

To this point he’d done nothing to draw the colonial government’s attention.

But that would change dramatically after Governor James Douglas, from Victoria, appointed George Perrier as magistrate for Hill’s Bar and Henry Hickson as constable. For bustling Fort Yale he named Capt. P.B. Whannell justice of the peace, George Donnellan chief of police.

Both Perrier and Whannell had their own areas of authority; in cases where their jurisdictions overlapped, Douglas expected them to cooperate with each other for the common good. He appears to have been unaware of the spirit of rivalry which existed between the two camps.

Certainly, he didn’t foresee the lengths to which their respective keepers of the peace would go and the role that the infamous Ned McGowan would play.

* * * * *

PHOTO CAPTION: Hill’s Bar ‘antagonist’ and ‘belligerent,’ Ned McGowan could be a charming rogue—even some of his enemies couldn’t help liking him. —Wikipedia https://archive.org/stream/narrativeofedwar00mcgo#page/n14/mode/1up, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7613976

Read More

As Wikipedia so blandly puts it, “McGowan's War was a bloodless war that took place in Yale, British Columbia in the fall of 1858...at the onset of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush. It was called Ned McGowan's War after one of the conflict's main antagonists...”

Bloodless it may have been, a tempest in the proverbial teapot, a farce, even. But bland, never!

To diss Ned McGowan as being just “one of the main antagonists” is an insult, not just to the man himself but to anyone who enjoys a good story. In reality, colonial administrators feared Ned McGowan, who’d barely escaped a hangman’s noose in California, as a direct threat to British sovereignty of mainland British Columbia.

In response, Governor of Vancouver Island James Douglas called out the army, in this case the Royal Engineers, under the command of Colonel Richard Moody. With ‘Hanging’ Judge Matthew Begbie, his orders were to put down the anticipated uprising of American interlopers at all costs.

Even with these historical heavyweights playing lead roles in the ensuing drama, it was disgraced ‘Judge’ Ned McGowan who stole the show.

As you’ll see in next week’s Chronicles.

* * * * *

PHOTO CAPTION: Hill’s Bar ‘antagonist’ and ‘belligerent,’ Ned McGowan could be a charming rogue—even some of his enemies couldn’t help liking him. —Wikipedia https://archive.org/stream/narrativeofedwar00mcgo#page/n14/mode/1up, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7613976

Read More

I have no idea what young boys read today.

Assuming, of course, that they read at all and it isn’t just computer games and watching videos and playing with their phones. (Mind you, they still play cowboys and Indians/cops and robbers, except that they call it paint ball.)

It’s nothing, I’m sure, like when I was young. Mind you, that was a few years ago. Back then (I’m speaking for myself) reading was it. Without the need of any encouragement from my parents or teachers my head was always buried in a book, and I don’t mean comic books.

My favourites were Mark Twain (in particular Tom Sawyer which I’ve read a half-dozen times) and Robert Louis Stevenson. There had to have been others besides The Hardy Boys; I remember reading stories about Canadian explorers, even enjoying my father’s monthly issue of Mechanix Illustrated.

I do recall Jack London’s White Fang but not The Sea-Wolf. That one didn’t come until many, many years later when, as a B.C. historian, I learned that London had based this infamous character on a real-life Victoria-based mariner, Capt. Alex McLean.

McLean never forgave him, by the way.

The irony is that McLean was a living, breathing legend in his own time whereas Wolf Larsen, the Sea-Wolf, was the product of London’s vivid imagination and gifted pen. Hollywood even made a movie about him in 1941, starring Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield.

Alex McLean, the real ‘Sea-Wolf,’ for those who believed him to be London’s role model, was long gone by then. But if London’s fictional character is still with us in literature, Alex McLean still resonates with those who know their B.C. maritime history and who enjoy a rollicking good sea story.

I’ll you about Alex McLean next week in the Chronicles but, thanks to a friend of his of 30 years’ standing, from a totally different slant than you’re likely to read elsewhere.

As a bonus, it’s from MacInnes’s 1926 book, Chinook Days which, long out of print, would otherwise cost you up to $100 for an original copy.

* * * * *

PHOTO CAPTION: Capt. Alex McLean and his famous handlebar moustache was a living legend without any need of Jack London’s fictional ‘Sea-Wolf’ character. —Author’s collection

Read More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

Read More

One of the downfalls of having to work most of the time is the number of lost opportunities. Over the years there have been many.

One I truly regret is not having known Gerry Wellburn, father of the B.C. Forest Museum, today’s B.C. Forest Discovery Centre—100 acres of trees, forestry artifacts and trains on the western shore of Somenos Lake, at Drinkwater Road and the Trans Canada Highway.

Anyone who has visited the BCFDC knows its fascination for adults and particularly for children—where else can they ride a real steam (and diesel) train on the Island? The Christmas trains in open cars under the stars is an experience to be enjoyed and treasured.

As one who grew up beside the CNR tracks in Saanich in the last days of steam, the BCFDC train is a blast from the past.

Back in the 70s when I was still writing weekly historical articles for the Colonist I had an invitation to meet with Gerry and the museum curator, Hall Mackenzie. I can’t remember why other than, probably, Gerry was hoping for publicity for what was then the B.C. Forest Museum.

They gave me a guided tour which impressed me but nothing came of it because I was committed elsewhere.

It was only years later, after Gerry’s passing, that I came to know son Vern to some degree and learned more about his dad’s dedication to forest history.

I’ve visited the Forest Museum/Discovery Centre many times over the years, always with my camera and I’ve shot 100s of photos, viewed the exhibits and ridden the trains, just like any other visitor and tourist. I’ve also done a lot of research into provincial forestry history and invariably the name Gerry (or Gerald) Wellburn would come up.

He was both and historian and an antique collector par excellence. What few people today realize is that he was also one of the best known philatelists in the world, his stamp collection being internationally renowned.

So I’ve finally done some research into the great man himself. I’ll share my findings with you next week in the Chronicles.

* * * * *

PHOTO CAPTION: They say you can tell the real boys by their toys. For Gerald Wellburn, only the real thing would do and his B.C. Forest Museum (today’s B.C. Forest Discovery Centre), is the priceless result. —Author’s Collection

Read More

You won’t find this in Bob Dougan’s book, A Story To Be Told. It’s something he told me personally; of growing up on the family farm on Telegraph Road, Cobble Hill, and of knowing ever so vaguely, even as a child, that there was a skeleton in the family closet.

Whispers, sometimes, between adults, and hints, even smirks, from his schoolmates—but nothing substantial, nothing he could really grasp in his young mind: just something sinister in his father’s past...

There was more to it than that. Every so often when he was very young and playing in the yard with his brothers and sisters, a big man in a big car (as both seemed to small children who seldom saw either one close-up) would sometimes visit his father. Nathan Paul Dougan would invite him in and the two would talk for hours.

But for days after each visit, Nathan would be quiet, “down” as Bob put it.

So who was the big man in the big car?

It wasn’t until he was an adult that his father told him of his short-lived career as a telegrapher-dispatcher for the E&N Railway. A career cut short when Nathan made a fatal mistake and allowed two trains on the same track at the same time and four men died.

Without denying his own culpability, Nathan explained how the railway’s traffic system was also at fault, how improvements were made after the fatal crash and after Nathan was convicted of manslaughter.

And the big man in the big car? Nathan’s jailer with whom he’d become friends.

* * * * *

Read More

“I’ve written a book.”

This statement, from almost anyone else, would have been no outrageous thing in itself. I heard if often when wearing my publisher-printer hat.

But from this humble man of the soil who’d told me in previous conversations that he’d had but Grade 3 form education...!

What would possess him to begin such an undertaking? That old myth-devil of self-publishing, ‘vanity’? Dreams of writing the Great Canadian Novel?

The answer proved to be much much deeper. There was neither ego nor ambition at work here. The man had a story to tell, one that had driven him since childhood; hence his very personal, almost simplistic, but meaningful title, A Story To Be Told.

And what a story it is.

I’ve told a few stories myself over the years. But in all my historical meanderings, I think this one is unique and among the most poignant and intriguing of them all.

I’ll tell you about it next week in the Chronicles...

* * * * *

Read More

One of my true regrets of having earned my journalistic spurs back in the ‘60s is that newspapers and magazines at the time were mostly black and white.

Meaning no, or rarely, colour photos because they were too expensive to process and to print.

Meaning that I took 1000s of photos in black and white—and we now live in an age of full colour reproduction! For example...

This sad reality of changing times came home with a jolt today with my intention to revisit the historic shipwrecks of the Royston Breakwater. How many times I toured those ghostly ladies of the sea when, with permission of breakwater owner, Crown Zellerbach, I was allowed to clamber over, in and around them to my heart’s content, shooting photos—black and white photos, alas—all the while.

Think of it—the current owner’s insurance company would probably have a fit. But all that was required then, courtesy of CZ, was that I check in with their watchman on the rare occasions that he was on duty.

Besides my camera I carried a small tool kit—to rescue bits and pieces that weren’t too rusted or otherwise corroded to come free with a little effort. I didn’t even need a wrench or a crowbar to access a flag locker on the Second World War navy tug Sea King to retrieve port and starboard lamp lenses and some brass fittings which had been left when she was scrapped in Victoria.

But instead of being cut up she and her sisters—other tugs, sailing ships including one of the famous clippers, destroyers, and a frigate—were placed on duty at Royston to protect the log booms from storms.

Somewhat to my amazement, they’re still there although no longer on duty and in a much reduced way since my visits of long ago. I’ll tell you some of their fascinating stories next week in the Chronicles.

* * * * *

Read More

Up until recent years, Penelakut Island, east of Chemainus and midway between Saltair and Ladysmith, was known as Kuper Island. It was originally named, as were 100s of other B.C. geographical place names, after a British naval officer.

In this case that officer was Admiral Sir August Leopold Kuper, Knight Grand Cross of the Bath (GCB) of the Royal Navy. Illustrious, indeed, but no more.

Today, it’s easy to criticize the British naval cartographers from Captain Vancouver on for having supplanted geographical names that had long been used by the Indigenous peoples of the coast. Most of these topographical features took their cues from a specific feature’s physicality.

Not so their British usurpers which range from royalty to peers to politicians to actresses to family members and friends, even race horses. Anything, it seems, to fill the charts of B.C.’s lengthy and indented coastline.

We’re talking 1000s of features and 1000s of names. (Try it sometime.)

And they didn’t do this while sitting behind a desk. They actually sailed and charted, often at personal risk, every foot of the coastline they drew on paper. Professional mariners and recreational boaters today entrust their lives to Admiralty charts that are known to be as accurate in the age of satellite navigation as when they were drawn in that age of wooden ships and iron men.

So, when reading about Penelakut/Kuper Island, it struck me to look at some of the names on our maps that we take at face value without giving any thought as to their origins. In other words, the stories behind the who and the why.

You’ll learn more about them in next week’s Chronicles.

* * * * *

PHOTO: This British naval officer probably named more coastal geographical features in British Columbia than anyone. Who was he? —Wikipedia

Read More

Believe it or not, there was a time (as recently as the 1960s) that Victoria, that little bit of olde England, aka the Garden City, aka the City of Flowers, was known for its quietude.

So quiet, it was said, that they rolled up the sidewalks at night. So quiet that it was described as a being a cemetery with a business section!

Well, times have certainly changed.

Problems with homelessness and drugs have dominated the news in recent years; even to walk down a Victoria street in daytime is to navigate an obstacle course of panhandlers. Not that panhandling is criminal, but it’s the tip of an iceberg of social disharmony that has come to characterize most cities in this modern age.

But enough of Victoria today.

Let’s go back to 1858 when what had been a sleepy Hudson’s Bay Co. fort was transformed, almost overnight, by the magic word, “Gold!” Gold in “Fraser’s” River that drew 10s of 1000s north from the tapped-out diggings of California to the new El Dorado in the wilds of the future British Columbia.

Besides California, as word quickly spread, they came from around the world, from all walks of life, all drawn by the hope of finding their fortunes in Fraser River sandbars. From there they moved northward and deeper into what became the Cariboo. Yale, gateway to the Interior, was flooded with the flotsam and jetsam of humanity.

Journalist D.W. Higgins, whom we’ve met before in these pages, painted a colourful and unflattering portrait of some of these arrivals: “A worse set of cut-throats and all-round scoundrels than those who flocked to Yale from all parts of the world never assembled anywhere…”

But we’re talking about Victoria not Yale. It was through Victoria that most adventurers, the good and the bad, made their way to the gold fields. Upon arrival from San Francisco they camped in the future capital until they could board steamers (those who could afford to) or by hook or by crook make their way to the Lower Mainland then up the Fraser River to what they hoped was fame and fortune.

Not all of them made it. Accidents were inevitable. So was misadventure. George Sloane died in a gunfight at high noon—not at the OK Corral, but in what’s now downtown Victoria.

You’ll read all about this shades-of-the-American-Wild-West tale in next week’s Chronicles.

* * * * *

PHOTO: This is what we’ve come to recognize through movies and TV: Wild Bill Hickock, after fatally wounding Dave Tutt in the chest in a street shoot-out, warns off Tutt’s friends. But in ‘downtown’ Victoria? —Illustration from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1867.

Read More

Everyone, of course, knows of Ladysmith, the Cowichan Valley Regional District’s northernmost community and winner of international awards for its heritage-themed main street.

Most people have some idea of its being named for a major battle in the second Boer War. But town founder and coal baron James Dunsmuir also paid homage to the South African campaign by naming 14 of his new coal port’s streets after British generals who led the charge, with varying degrees of ability and success, for Queen and Country.

What a mixed bag.

It’s not so much a matter of the good, the bad and the ugly, but more that of the competent and the not-so-competent. Not all senior officers are created equally. As an American general once said, in effect, being great is fine but being lucky is better.

And God help the general who snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

It seems that everyone these days is in the mood to second guess our pioneers. For me, this contagion of skepticism coincides with my finishing one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, The Scramble For Africa by Thomas Pakenham that sent me into my files on our local connections to the Boer War.

I invite readers to join me in a virtual tour of some of Ladysmith’s more fascinating streets and the historic figures they honour.

* * * * *

PHOTO: The relief of Ladysmith by John Henry Frederick Bacon. —Wikipedia

Read More

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.

* * * * *

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

Read More

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.

* * * * * *
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).

Read More

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.

* * * * *

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

Read More

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.

* * * * *

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

Read More

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.

* * * * *

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

Read More

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.

* * * * *

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.

Read More