The Chronicles Blog

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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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Can you even imagine downtown Duncan without its iconic City Hall?

It’s been there, originally as the federal building and post office, for more than a century. Its image of clock and bell tower has been used as a marketing logo for Duncan for years.

City Hall is downtown Duncan.

So what would make anyone even consider tearing it down? The answer to that is a very big and real concern: earthquakes.

Older brick structures, alas, are at great risk of failure in such catastrophic events. In the case of City Hall, moreover, there’s the significant heritage factor to be considered.

There are two ways that City Hall can be quake-proofed, one purely pragmatic the other offering protection to its heritage vales, but both are expensive. Duncan taxpayers are going to have to choose one of these options or opt for a new City Hall.

Which would mean, in effect, demolition of their 1913 landmark.

I tell the story of City Hall in next week’s Chronicles.

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“Gold! Gold! Gold!”

All these years later, I can see and hear him now. The late Jack Fleetwood, the man with the photographic memory, the man fellow local historians regarded as the Oracle of the Cowichan Valley, was addressing a small gathering of the Shawnigan Lake Historical Society.

An audience so small that it could fit in a lakeside boat house, the SLHS having just been founded by the late Brownie Gibson and several fellow history buffs.

Resting on his good hip, hand on the other, Jack began slowly, pausing between each exclamation for dramatic effect. His subject, gold mining on the Island, held his audience spellbound for there’s nothing more guaranteed to catch a listener’s ear.

Particularly when it’s a tale of gold being lost and found in years gone by...

Gold, to varying degrees, is in virtually every stream on Vancouver Island and many are the tales of its having been found in quantity then ‘lost’ again through the discoverer’s death or by some other misadventure.

A century and three-quarters ago, the first whites to settle in the Cowichan Valley were, for the most part, settlers, here to farm. Sam Harris came to found a township at Cowichan Bay. But he wasn’t all business.

Not when he heard the stories of gold nuggets from a cave near the head of Cowichan Lake, nuggets moulded by the local Natives for use as bullets! Off he went in search, but he didn’t find the cave nor, so far as is known, did others who tried.

But the legend of Cowichan Lake country’s Lost Bullets Mine lives on, as we’ll see in next week’s Chronicle.

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Her only known photo is fascinating in itself. She’s young, fair skinned, somewhat plainish bordering on attractive, without makeup and neatly coiffed. She isn’t looking into the camera but slightly upward to her right, as if at something across the room.

Her high-collared dress has a pattern of conflicting stripes and swirls, with puffed-up shoulders.

But it’s her God-awful hat that pulls the eye. It’s a cornucopia of flowers, lace and ribbons. It most resembles a bowl of wax fruit dumped upside down.

It’s black and white, of course, because her photo was taken in 1898, and it’s high-res as it was shot with a large format camera by the pioneer Victoria photographer, Hanna Maynard.

But Belle’s isn’t your ordinary photographic portrait, she isn’t Hannah’s client and she isn’t posing by choice.

No, Hannah’s client for this photographic assignment was the Victoria Police Department and the photo in question is one of the VPD’s earliest mug shots.

Belle, you see, was in trouble, deep trouble with the law—the result of what was described as “unbridled passion and mad jealousy”.

I’ll tell you the sad tale of Belle Adams in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Pioneer Victoria photographer Hannah Maynard. —Wikipedia

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As I reported two weeks ago, the Cowichan Station Area Association, operators of the Hub, is looking at taking possession of the deconsecrated St. Andrew’s Church. Negotiations are underway with the Anglican Diocese of B.C. Apparently the beautiful century-old church beside the Koksilah River needs serious and expensive repairs and funding remains to be determined.

Should a deal be struck the CSAA wants to use the former church as a non-denominational community centre, “a place for weddings and funerals or a quiet place for contemplation,” said spokesperson Melanie Watson. The fact that it comes with a wraparound cemetery obviously narrows down its potential options.

Ten years ago I published Tales the Tombstones Tell: A Walking Guide to Cemeteries in the Cowichan Valley, the culmination of 100s of hours of boots-on-the-ground research, 100s of photos, miles and miles of driving, and the drawing upon decades of archival research.

I love cemeteries. To me they’re oases of peace and quiet even when situated beside busy thoroughfares. A sense of peace transcends all, at least it does for me. Morbid? Hardly!

St. Andrew’s, Cowichan Station, is one of my favorites. Situated beside the Koksilah River and our last surviving wooden truss road bridge, within yards of the original sandstone E&N overpass, it and its surrounding cemetery is worth a visit at any time, particularly on a spring morning. Be sure to check out the headstone that shows in the left foreground of the above photo—this has to be one of, if not the, most distinctive grave markers in all of B.C.

Anyway, the news of its possible new lease on life set me to thinking that many Chronicles readers (for shame!) won’t have read Tales the Tombstones Tell. Which explains why the chapter on St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, Cowichan Station, is next week’s Chronicle.

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PHOTO: St. Andrew’s Anglican Church, Cowichan Station. —www.templelodge33.ca

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“Great excitement has been recently produced in Victoria by the exhibition of a nugget of pure gold weighing 14 ounces, procured by the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company from the Indians of Queen Charlotte’s Island. There is a generally prevalent impression founded on the discovery of gold in that island in the year 1851, that it will yet become a productive gold field.”

Note the reference to 1851.

That’s a full six years before the first reports of the discovery of placer gold by First Nations prospectors began to seep out of the B.C. Interior and, in turn, start one of history’s greatest gold rushes to ‘Fraser’s River’ the following year.

The resulting rush, and an even greater treasure hunt in the Cariboo, placed virtually unknown mainland British Columbia on the world map, and set it on course to becoming Canada’s westernmost province.

But who remembers the Queen Charlotte (Haida Gwaii) gold rush of 1850, with its reports of fabulously rich gold deposits that were jealously guarded by its fierce residents?

White prospectors were persona non grata—the Haidas guarded their seaside ‘mines’ to the point of committing piracy. It’s a great story as you’ll see in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: It was a gold nugget such as this that sparked an unwelcome rush to the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1850. —www.coinnews.net

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To his superiors he was a rebel, a troublemaker and a bore; to his students he was a stern taskmaster whose word was law and whose temper, uncertain at best of times, was to be avoided at all costs.

Still, he left his name on our maps. You’ll meet him in next week’s Chronicles.

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(Conclusion )

In this week’s conclusion to the saga of the On-To-Ottawa Trek, the B.C. Camp Relief Workers have arrived in Regina where they are met with an offer to meet with Prime Minister R. B. Bennett.

All believe that it’s a trap, that he’s just stalling while police and militia reinforcements are rushed to Regina.

But they’ve gone all that way with the proclaimed intention of dealing directly with the prime minister—for all their mistrust, they have no choice but to agree.

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PHOTO: Prime Minister R.B. Bennett. —Wikipedia

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