The Chronicles Blog

We’ve seen how, just after midnight of Christmas Day, 1890, David Fee Jr. was gunned down on a city street as he and friend Frank Partridge were returning to a Christmas celebration after attending midnight mass.

It was a shocking and apparently senseless crime: a case, it seems, of mistaken identity.

Or was it a mistake?

Was there more—much more—behind this fine young man’s cold blooded slaying than was obvious?

We’ll find out in next week’s conclusion to the fascinating story of one of Victoria’s most sensational murders—this one, sad to say, committed on Christmas morning.

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PHOTO: St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Victoria. Now a National Historic Site of Canada, in December 1890 it was under construction when its watchman, who  supposedly was guarding the site, shot and killed young storekeeper David Fee. —Wikipedia

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“A crime as dark, cowardly and mysterious as ever disfigured the history of the province.”—Victoria Colonist

Dec. 24, 1890 – Christmas Eve in Victoria. Despite predictions of clear skies, evening brought rain.

For East Wellington storekeeper David Findlay Fee Jr., in town to visit his family and friends, midnight brought sudden, violent death.

It all began innocently earlier that evening with a masquerade party in the Philharmonic Hall on Fort Street. Among the celebrants were David Fee and Frank Partridge. Resplendent in their white costumes with red braid, they slipped away from the party to attend midnight mass in St. Andrew’s Cathedral.

Minutes later, as they headed back to the party, they were accosted by a man standing in the rain beneath an umbrella and apparently leaning on a walking stick. As they came abreast of him, he said something to the effect of, “I challenge you.”

To their horror they saw him raise what they’d thought to be his cane—a double-barrelled shotgun—aim it point blank at Fee and fire.

Next week in the Chronicles, the story of one of Victoria’s most sensational—and senseless—crimes.

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PHOTO: Bad news travels fast; this appeared in the San Francisco Call the day after.

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The recent passing of HRH Queen Elizabeth II and numerous comments made online and in letters to the editor about the British influence on our history, coming at a time of truth and reconciliation, set me to thinking.

There are 350,000 place names on Canadian maps, 50,000 of them in British Columbia. Of the 1000s that identify our Pacific Coastline, most—indeed, almost all—were coined by officers of the Royal Navy.

It was a daunting task even for the vaunted “iron men in wooden ships”.

The B.C. coast, as the crow flies, is approximately 954 km (593 miles). But when you allow for its indentations and over 40,000 islands, it’s over 25,725 km or 15,985 miles—a tenth of all of Canada’s coastlines.

Charting and naming these 10s of 1000s of features—bays, inlets, islands, rivers, reefs and on and on—took decades of dedicated, often dangerous, work and is, in fact, an ongoing task. But it was the officers and crews of the Royal Navy’s handful of survey ships that did the heavy lifting at incredible personal expense.

The result of their work still stands.

Most of their pioneering navigational charts continue in use today; work that’s vital to the safe navigation of some of the most treacherous waters to be found anywhere. Thanks in great part to their efforts, coasts that were notorious for shipwreck are no longer threats to life and limb when navigated with due diligence.

All thanks to these British tars who, for the most part, are unnamed and unsung. I’ll tell you about some of them and the stories behind some of their more interesting christenings next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: The modest Sir George Henry Richards, KCB, FRS, who surveyed and named 1000s of features of the British Columbia coastline, never named a single geographical feature after himself. —Wikipedia

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It was said of the Eliza Anderson that “no steamboat ever went slower and made money faster”.

During her 40-year-long career she was a fixture of the maritime traffic between Puget Sound, Victoria and the Fraser River, carrying passengers and freight.

But it’s her last voyage, this one all the way to the Klondike gold rush when she was old and decrepit, for which she’s most remembered. A hellish voyage that ended on the very brink of shipwreck and destruction—at which moment a ghost-like figure in white beard and oilskins miraculously appeared on her bridge and directed her to a safe anchorage.

It’s an amazing story—as you’ll see next week in the Chronicles,

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PHOTO: The sidewheel steamer Eliza Anderson, shown here as she was in 1880, was every bit ungainly as she looked. —Wikipedia

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Chronicles readers who’ve visited Lake Cowichan’s Kaatza Station Museum, in particular the old Mesachie Lake schoolhouse building, will recognize the name, Wilmer Gold.

Victoria-born but raised in Alberta, Gold (1917-1992) moved to out-of-the-way and (almost) off-the-map Youbou in 1934. For the next half-century he chronicled the Cowichan Lake region’s logging scenes—which is why enlargements of his fabulous logging photos form the main display in the school building.

BC Bookworld has termed his portfolio, “one of first comprehensive studies of B.C. logging”.

But there’s nothing scholarly about Wilmer Gold’s work, just fine photography. His camera was his artist’s easel and the scenes he has captured for all time are nothing less than priceless.

Personal note: I’ve visited Kaatza dozens of times and always find myself studying his photo gallery in the school, sometimes giving it more time than the exhibits in the museum itself. Always, I see something new. Many of the photos are late 1930s; I study the faces and wonder what became of them? Did they go off to war or—?

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: The cover of Wilmer Hazelwood Gold’s photo book, Logging As It Was.

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The story of Doris Gravlin has travelled world-wide over the years, mostly thanks to the internet and an almost insatiable interest in the supernatural.

As we’ve seen, the finding of husband Victor’s body with Doris’s shoes in his pockets closed the police investigation, it being accepted that, depressed, he’d strangled her when she refused to return to him then drowned himself.

But Doris doesn’t sleep.

Within months of her death there were reports of sightings of a lone woman walking the beach of the Victoria Golf Club, usually dressed in an old fashioned brown suit...

Next week, the conclusion to Doris Gravlin who has become British Columbia’s most famous ghost of them all...

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Working on the premise that late is better than never, and with Halloween fresh in memory, I’m going to access my files for another ghost story, this one Victoria’s most famous of all.

In September 1926 attractive, 30-year-old Doris Gravlin was reported missing by her parents with whom she was living with her young son since she’d separated from husband Victor. At his pleading, she’d gone to meet him to discuss their strained marriage but failed to return home.

Her body was later found at the water’s edge of the Victoria Golf Course; she’d been strangled. Days later, Victor drifted in on the tide, an apparent suicide.

What should have been the end of a sad story was just the beginning because Doris still walks the golf course, 80-plus years later!

Of the many who’ve claimed to have seen her on the links, an unnamed fisherman told how he’d watched a woman as she “suddenly hurried down as if she were going to meet someone, and on the way, she vanished. I saw her just kind of melt into thin air.’”

His is only one of many such sightings, as you’ll see in next week’s Chronicles.

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Human error. It has always been with us, always will be.

For the 19 miners of the Pacific Coast Coal Mine on the morning of Feb. 9, 1915, someone’s slip-up cost them their lives.

19 men died because someone screwed up; because someone misfiled the plan showing the conversion of scales between the abandoned and flooded workings of the Southfield Mine, and the working PCC Mine.

The plans that clearly showed that the miners weren’t 440 feet from danger as they believed, but within just a few feet of disaster.

Clearly, someone was responsible for an oversight that bordered upon criminal negligence. But if not PCC Mine manager Joseph Foy, one of the victims, who?

The B.C. Attorney-General’s office was sure enough where the fault lay that it pressed criminal charges against two of the principles involved in the tragedy. That one of them was the PCCM’s Managing Director J.H. Tonkin probably came as no big surprise to many.

But the Chief Inspector of Mines, Thomas Graham?

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PHOTO: Sam Wardle, one of the miners drowned when they broke into the abandoned Southfield Mine. —Courtesy Helen Tilley

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Of all the coal mining disasters in Vancouver Island’s history that of the Pacific Coast Coal Mine in South Wellington stands out on two counts.

First, that it was caused not by the usual suspects, gas, explosion or cave-in, but by flooding.

Second, that, for once in an industry that all but accepted dangerous workings conditions and their consequences as the cost of doing business, criminal charges were laid.

Someone had screwed up.

19 men had died.

Someone had to pay.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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Today, it’s a farmer’s field, the right-of-way for a gas line, and patches of third-growth forest and wild fruit trees bisected by the E&N mainline.

Other than a concrete tower-like structure in the middle of a pasture, some concrete foundations of the powerhouse in the trees, and evidences of scattered and mounded coal waste, the once famous—perhaps infamous--PCC Mine has all but vanished. Little, besides a sign warning hikers of “possible toxic gas and collapse,” to even suggest that this was a busy coal mine.

Nothing at all to suggest that here is where, 107 years ago and 100s of feet below the surface, 19 men were drowned.

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Of all the coal mining disasters in Vancouver Island’s history that of the PCCM in South Wellington stands out on two counts. First, that it was caused not by the usual suspects, gas, explosion or cave-in, but by flooding. Second, that, for once in an industry that all but accepted dangerous workings conditions and their consequences as the cost of doing business, criminal charges were laid.

Someone had screwed up.

19 men had died.

Someone had to pay.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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As many of you will have seen on Facebook, this year’s Extension Miners Memorial service, Ladysmith’s “annual tribute to the 32 miners whose lives were lost in a tragic explosion on Oct. 5, 1909,” was held this week in front of the Metal Collage on the corner of First Avenue and Gatacre Street.

But, to my knowledge, there never has been a latter-day memorial service for the lost men of the Pacific Coast Coal Mines colliery operation at South Wellington.

Today, it’s a farmer’s field, the right-of-way for a gas line, and third-growth trees intersected by the E&N mainline. Other than a concrete tower-like structure in the middle of a pasture, some concrete foundations of the powerhouse in the trees, and evidences of scattered and mounded coal waste, the once famous—perhaps infamous--PCC Mine has all but vanished.

Nothing to even suggest that this was a busy coal mine. Nothing to suggest that that here, 106 years ago, 100s of feet below the surface, 19 men were drowned.

Their deaths should never have happened, were totally preventable. Their families’ sole consolation was that, for one of the very few times in the history of the Island coal industry, some of the principles involved were charged with criminal negligence.

The story of the PCC Mine is a sad but a fascinating one, as I’m sure you’ll agree when you read next week’s Chronicles.

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I remember, years ago, a mayor of North Cowichan saying, “People come first.”

Meaning, human wants and needs trump environmental values every time.

As you may have seen in the news, and last week’s Chronicle, North Cowichan Municipality is looking to expand Mountain View Cemetery into an adjoining forest of mature fir and maple trees—proving that even dead people come first.

As should surprise no one, I’m a dedicated fan of cemeteries, even having written the history of the Valley’s public graveyards, Tales the Tombstones Tell. Which inspired me to check North Cowichan’s website and to go along to the open house, last Thursday afternoon.

There weren’t many there besides Municipal staff, most of them immediate neighbours on Drinkwater Road who are concerned for the loss of their forested backyards. There’s still room for burials in the Valley’s only non-denominational cemetery, and more and more people are choosing to be cremated, which allows for up to six headstones in place of a single traditional grave.

But, for all our New Age environmental enlightenment, people come first and you can bet your life that the cemetery’s expansion, to be done over a period of years, whatever the cost to trees and wildlife, is a go...

Next week, the stories of Mountain View Cemetery and of some of its more fascinating occupants.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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

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

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

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

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

What a beauty!

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