The Chronicles Blog

Yes, I’ve been writing the Chronicles for a long time now, first in the Cowichan Valley Citizen for 23 years and, since, here online.

But Nathan Dougan was way, way ahead of me. For years, from the 1950’s on, he wrote regularly of Cowichan’s colourful history in the Cowichan Leader. After his death, son Bob published many of these articles in a book, Cowichan My Valley, which has become a highly desirable—and expensive—collector’s item.

Nathan Dougan was the son of James and Annie Dougan, of the pioneering Cobble Hill clan for whom that little lake beside the highway, just before the Trans Canada and Cowichan Bay Road junction, is named.

Which would is a worthy legacy in itself. But Nathan Dougan did so much more—he literally saved much of the history of what was then Shawnigan region. And he did it from memory, having grown up with the pioneers who made it all happen—something that a latecomer such as I can never hope to do.

I’ll tell you more about this remarkable man in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Nathan Dougan is the man on middle left. —Family photo

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Does a mystery tunnel, complete with steps carved into a solid rock cliff—and a cache of gold bars—exist in a Vancouver Island rain forest? 

It’s one of our most fascinating legends.

The answer to this mystery would solve what must be one of British Columbia’s most intriguing tales of lost treasure—and the key lies within 25 miles of Victoria! 

I told the story of the so-called Lost Spanish Mine in my first book, Treasure, British Columbia, way back in 1971, based on articles I’d written for The Daily Colonist weekend magazine in the 1960’s.

Because my account has been pirated and published many times over the years. you may have read some or much of this elsewhere. But I wrote it first and, like any prospector worth his salt, I’m staking my claim to it!

That’s next week in the Cowichan Chronicles. 

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PHOTO: There has been considerable placer mining activity on Vancouver Island, also, to a lesser degree, lode (hard rock) mining—but a tunnel driven into the rock face with a series of hand-carved steps and gold ingots? —Author’s Collection

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Whoever John Sharp may have been, his death was as violent as that of William Clarke Quantrill’s. Shortly after the newspaper stories appeared stating Quantrill was alive, John Sharp died as a result of a brutal beating.

Then began the greatest myth of the “Mystery Man of Quatsino:” the tale of a 40-year-long grudge and murder of vengeance.

According to the legend two Americans who’d suffered at the hands of Quantrill’s raiders during the war, upon seeing newspaper claiming “Quantrill lives....!" journeyed northward on a mission of revenge.

With murder in mind, the pair, said to be “obviously Southerners,” found Sharp at isolated Coal Harbour.

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PHOTO: Unlike these ‘regular’ Union soldiers, Quantrill and his men—and those of Capt. Terrell who hunted him down—were civilian guerrillas. —Wikipedia Commons

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According to the history books, Capt. William Clarke Quantrill, the infamous Southern guerrilla leader of the American Civil War, died of his wounds in a Louisville, Kentucky military hospital.

That was in May 1865.

Yet, in August 1907–42 years later—John Sharp, an old watchman at isolated Coal Harbour, Vancouver Island, was “recognized” as Quantrill.

The resulting publicity cost him dearly—his life.

Part 3 of the amazing story of John Sharp aka W.C. Quantrill continues in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: William C. Quantrill was, perhaps, the most notorious participant in the American Civil War. —Wikipedia

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Would you believe that Confederate guerrilla leader William C. Quantrill has three headstones in three American states, including this one at Higginsville, Missouri?

So it’s generally believed.

Or is there a fourth grave for the man who led the raid on Lawrence, Kansas and the massacre of 150 men and boys? A grave, obliterated by air force bulldozers during the Second World War, at remote Coal Harbour, Vancouver Island?

How could that be, you ask? Because of claims that he escaped death in Kentucky and ended up as a watchman in the Quatsino area—where, in 1907, he was tracked down and murdered by two ‘Southerners’ with vengeance on their minds.

The story of John Sharp aka William Quantrill is one of British Columbia’s most intriguing legends. Part 2 in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Third and ‘final’ grave of Captain William Quantrill in Higginsville, Missouri. —By KNexus - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12199069

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Google William Clarke Quantrill and you’ll find reference after reference to a man who’s immortalized not as a hero or great Confederate general of the American Civil War but as what we term today, a war criminal.

From school teacher to “butcher” in a matter of just a few years, his was quite a career, one that ended violently at the age of 27 during a skirmish with Federal troops.

At least, that’s the accepted version of Quantrill’s death.

But there were those who strongly disagreed. Including two Americans who allegedly travelled all the way to Vancouver Island’s isolated Coal Harbour, where the fugitive guerrilla was living under cover as a watchman by the name of John Sharp. Their mission: to settle old scores.

Or so that version goes.

The fascinating story of John Sharp alias William Quantrill is one that intrigued me at the start of my writing career. How fortunate I was to follow it up and make contact with the last living man who’d known Sharp on Vancouver Island.

He’d been just a boy at the time, a neighbour and friend of the old caretaker, and it was he who found Sharp as he lay, dying, in a pool of blood.  

If ever I’ve had doubts as to my choice of career, it’s stories like the mystery of John Sharp that quickly put them to rest.

You’ll see why in next week’s Chronicles

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PHOTO: William C. Quantrill was, perhaps, the most notorious participant in the American Civil War. —Wikipeida

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After generations of resistance, the dominoes are falling almost weekly, it seems.  

I’m referring to the sometimes reluctant return of artifacts to their creators, ancient and more modern, in this New Age of cultural awareness and ethnic sensitivity.

In Canada we’re driven by the tsunami that has resulted as one of the key consequences of Truth and Reconciliation—a belated admission that our colonial mindset and governance of two and a-half centuries must change.

You’re seeing this again and again in the news so I’ll not dwell on it here.

My intent in the Chronicles this week is to focus on the growing trend of museums to surrender the priceless antiquities of the ancient worlds—treasures often held by museums far from their creators and countries of origin—but also much closer to home, right here in British Columbia.

To set the stage, here are the latest news items by their headlines:

• B.C. First Nation arrives in Scotland, asks museum to return totem pole taken in 1929

• Royal B.C. Museum returning museum to remote First Nation

• After 138 years, house post returning to Gitxaala Nation

• Nuxalk Nation celebrates return of totem pole from Royal B.C. Museum

Farther from home, some of these returns, or repatriations as they’ve been termed, are momentous:

• Mi’kmaq regalia to return home to Nova Scotia after 130 years in an Australian museum

• Museum: London, Athens could share Parthenon Marbles in deal

• Swiss museum returns Indigenous relics

• Chief Poundmaker’s pipe, saddle bag returning from Royal Ontario Museum to descendants

• Rare, centuries-old jewelry returns to Cambodia

• With eye on Britain, Greece welcomes back artifacts

In short, we’ve come a long way from banning, seizing and looting.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: ‘Coppers’ were among the most prized of B.C. First Nations. The Canadian government confiscated them under threat of criminal prosecution. —Author’s Collection   

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The Royal BC Museum has certainly been in the news lately—most of it bad, unfortunately.

You’ve needed a program to follow recent developments: resignations; charges of in-house racial discrimination; a much beloved exhibit demolished then, oh, cancel that, it’s still here and we’ll reopen it after making it more multi-culturally palatable;

The buildings are in danger of sinking into the sea mud if there’s a serious earthquake so we’re going to tear them down and rebuild over seven years at the cost of billions of dollars while we strangle the vital Inner Harbour area with demolition and construction activity. No, cancel that, we’ll make do with what we have while we take a few years to think and talk this out...

Have I overlooked anything?

At least this month’s climate action protest with red paint daubed on the iconic mastodon’s tusks couldn’t be blamed on RBC mismanagement.

But the Chronicles isn’t meant to be a soapbox and this isn’t even my weekly editorial. So let’s go back to the very beginning of our senior museum and archives. It all started in October 1886 in a room just 15 by 20 feet—the size of a single-car garage!

The man who did so much to create today’s RBC by donating his personal collection of stuffed and mounted birds and animals was Jack Fannin, a noted naturalist of his day.

These latest fumbles by management and government must have him spinning in his grave.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Would you believe, looking at it, that the Royal BC Museum is at risk of collapsing in a major earthquake? No problem!—Wikipedia photo

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Until I embraced the digital age and all that it offers, including finger-touch research capabilities, my most thumbed reference books were the Oxford Dictionary, the B.C. Department of Mines’ Annual Reports, the British Columbia Gazetteer and Capt. John T. Walbran’s British Columbia Coast Names, 1592-1906.

(Not necessarily in that order when I think about it...)

First published by the federal government printing office in 1909, Walbran’s mini-histories of how many of our place names, in particular our coastal features, were named (or renamed from their original Indigenous appellations) was reprinted in 1971 by B.C.’s J.J. Douglas Ltd.

That’s the copy I work from as the original was (is) way too expensive for this struggling scribe. Even $45 was serious change to me in those days!

Since the start of Truth and Reconciliation some of our landmark names that date from the colonial period are being replaced with their original Indigenous names.

One more reason to learn about the man who spent his retirement years researching and writing about how our inlets, bays and other coastal geographical features got their names.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Capt. John Thomas Walbran, longtime master of the Canadian Coast Guard ship Quadra. His classic book about B.C. coastal place names is all of 546 pages! —ABC Bookworld

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It’s uncanny how history mimics if not actually repeats itself.

Last month’s excitement over a series of so-called scientific research balloons from China provided an eerie reminder of the Second World War. That’s when the Japanese attempted to ignite our forests with incendiary bombs delivered via the air currents of the aptly-named Japanese current.

Hundreds were launched and many of them made it to the Pacific West Coast, from Oregon north through B.C., even as far east as Kansas. They caused the death of a picnicking family but, amazingly it seems to us today, little in the way of forest fires.

It’s a fascinating story and I’ll tell you all about it next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: A collapsed Japanese fire-balloon that landed near Bigelow, Kansas, Feb. 23, 1945. —Wikipedia Commons

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Throughout the 1850’s, Iroquois guide and interpreter Tomo Antoine was in the thick of every major exploration and naval police action that occurred on Vancouver Island.

He was, in fact, Chief Factor/Governor James Douglas’s right-hand man in the field.

For all that, he’s been all but forgotten.

It’s Tomo Antoine’s pivotal role in what became known as Cowichan’s ‘Hanging Tree’ that we’re following in this latest edition of the Cowichan Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Qumutsun Village, 1912—Wikipedia (Edward Curtis)

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As we’ve seen, two men were pivotal to the events leading up to the Cowichan Valley’s only recorded hanging.

The first one is well known; in fact, Sir James Douglas is remembered as ‘the father of British Columbia’.

Such can’t be said for Tomo Antoine, the phantom-like Iroquois-Chinook woodsman whose skills as an interpreter and spy were essential to every major exploration of Vancouver Island and naval police expedition in the 1850s.

He has, alas, become provincial history’s ‘invisible man.’

Which isn’t to say that he didn’t leave his own indelible mark on Vancouver Island history even if it has, for the most part, been forgotten.

That’s next week, in Part 2 of Cowichan’s ‘Hanging Tree’ in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Fur trader, colonial governor and “statesman” Sir James Douglas. —www.biographi.ca 

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With Truth and Reconciliation has come a new awareness of and sensitivity to our colonial history.

Everything about British Columbia’s formative years, once taken as gospel, is now under review.

Not all of it has been objective; some of it is revisionist to the point of insult. Does any sensible person really believe that it was B.C. colonial policy to arbitrarily impose its authority with fire and sword?

Ironically, there have been occasions, well recorded, when the Royal Navy did administer “justice” with cannon fire, destroying entire villages and inflicting death and injuries while serving as police.

Was this rule by terror? Or, as British colonial authorities believed, was it the only practical way to impose law and order throughout the future province when Indigenous peoples, most of them armed and militant, outnumbered settlers by the 10’s of 1000’s?

Chronicles readers will have the opportunity to judge for themselves over the next several weeks as they read the amazing story of ‘Cowichan’s Hanging Tree.’ 

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PHOTO: A grotesque memento of the American Wild West’s violent history of law and order, the ‘hanging tree’ of the appropriately named Vulture City, Arizona. —Wikipedia

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Many are the pitfalls awaiting the unwary history student.

Even the experienced researcher can be lured off course by these sirens of our colourful past. To a writer of ‘popular’ history, these detours can be profitable as well as pleasant; oftimes, research of one story can uncover another. And another and another.

Which is why I liken studying history to digging a hole—the more you dig, the bigger it gets.

Sometimes these yellowing newspaper pages can lead to a dead-end, being too brief or sketchy to provide more than the skeleton of an article.

So, today, some of these intriguing—sometimes infuriating—diversions of Victoria’s early day from the pages of the old British and Daily Colonist.

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PHOTO: This logo of the website Fallen Heroes – VicPD.ca recalls some of the fascinating criminal cases in Victoria’s history, as recorded in the pages of the Colonist. The British Bobby-style helmet was VPD issue until about 1950.

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I’ve written before how, as the son of a career Royal Canadian Navy man, my first collection as a nine-year-old was my father’s kit; he gave me everything but his tools and his medals.

By the time I was in my 20’s I was deep into writing about British Columbia and Canadian history, including, of course, stories about the RCN.

But until my first visit to the Royston booming grounds breakwater, which was made up of derelict ships, I had no idea that one of the RCN’s most illustrious veterans was among what I came to term the Royston death-watch which was composed of the hulks of sailing ships, warships, tugboats and a whaler.

Sadly, there was little to see of what had been HMCS Gatineau whose career began in 1934 as the Royal Navy’s HMS Express.

As such she’d participated in the Dunkirk evacuation, escaped being sunk by a German mine, then rescued almost 1000 survivors from the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales when it was sunk off Malaya by the Japanese.

Transferred to the RCN in February 1943, she assisted in sinking a U-boat and participated in the D-Day landing. She was paid off into reserve in 1946 and, two years later, stripped down to her decks and scuttled at Royston.

It was a truly sad end for such a courageous ship with so many battle ribbons and I’ve wanted to tell her story for years.

Next week I finally pay homage to HMCS Gatineau.

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PHOTO: HMCS Gatineau, the former HMS Express. —Canada.ca

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Like many an aspiring author I set out to write the Great Canadian Novel.

Very quickly, however, the harsh truth sank in: I didn’t have what it takes.

But there was a soft landing for me. Even before this sad fact hit home, I’d discovered non-fiction—writing about real people and real events. There was nothing, it seemed, that I could invent in my imagination that hadn’t already been done—and better—in real life!

There’s no getting around it: people and their actions—the good, the bad and the ugly—are fascinating. And the treasure trove of documented history available even to casual researchers is beyond calculation.

I was reminded of this recently while reorganizing my library: a story I’d researched way back when I was writing weekly for the Victoria Colonist. It’s a sad tale, one so unlikely that I defy any fiction writer to make it up.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Beautiful Veterans’ Cemetery, Esquimalt, B.C. —Commonwealth War Graves Commission  

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In last week’s Chronicle we saw how Frank Hulbert aka Frank Pepler appears to have gotten away with murdering 15-year-old Molly Justice in 1943.

He ended his life as a recluse, living in a converted bus. According to his obituary he died “peacefully,”  53 years later.

Which begets the question, did he suffer remorse? In other words, did Hulbert’s conscience trouble him in later years—or not?

We’ll never know.

But there are case histories of men who—so it’s surmised—were driven to the brink of despair and madness, even self destruction, by the inner demon of a guilty conscience. A century and a-half or so ago, Victoria City Police detective John George Taylor was convinced he was on the trail of just such a man.

It’s a fascinating story as you’ll see next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Pioneer Victoria was the last stop for many a man on the run... —Sun Life Insurance

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I’ve always felt that I grew up with Molly Justice, that she was family even though we weren’t related and she was gone before I was born.

Nevertheless, she is part of my DNA.

My Aunt Ada’s best friend, she’d lived one house down and across the road from our home on Brett Avenue, just east of Swan Lake, in Saanich. Ada and Uncle Cec lived next door to us; she was expecting when Molly Justice died and named her daughter, my cousin Molly, for her.

This January 18th will be the 80th anniversary of Molly Justice’s murder beside the railway tracks, just two blocks from her home.

Ten years ago, for the 70th anniversary, Jennifer and I made the trip to my childhood stomping grounds of Saanich to pay homage to Molly by attaching a poster to a tree beside the former CN Railway tracks, what’s now the Galloping Goose Trail, where her mutilated body was found in January 1943.

It was my way of keeping alive a family tradition. For over 40 years until her death, my grandmother, Ellen Green, placed an In Memoriam ad in the Victoria Colonist:  “In loving memory of Molly Justice, taken from us...”

I’ve told the story of Molly Justice several times over the years but not here in the Chronicles and it has recently been retold in a book on unsolved B.C. crimes. In answer to a Times Colonist reporter years ago, when he asked me whether I thought there was merit in their printing yet another story on Molly, I replied that I’d prefer that Molly Justice be remembered as a murder victim than that she be a murder victim and forgotten.

So I’ll tell her story again, next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Fifteen-year-old Molly Justice photographed in front of my Aunt Ada’s house, 870 Brett Ave., Saanich, Victoria. —Family photo

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On the cusp, as we are, of another New Year, it occurs to me to lighten up a little. In the course of the past year the Chronicles has covered numerous tragedies, from criminal to shipwreck. All great stories if I may be so modest as to say, but...

To begin a brand-new 2023, let's take a walk on the light side, with a chuckle or two from my archives. We have all year to get back to the grimmer side of our history...

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A professional peril, if you will, of researching history, particularly in old newspapers, is the lure of distractions. These sirens of print can take you temporarily, even completely off course.

Even if only momentarily, the danger is always there and time counts if you're researching in, say, a library.

Back in the old days of the typewriter and, worse, scribbling notes, I'd have to make the hard decision whether to actually record these nuggets, make a note for future reference or pass them by. Happily, this isn't a problem with today's technology which takes just a couple of commands to archive them for another day.

So, for the first Chronicle of a new year, a random sampling of some cheerier news stories from the pages of the Victoria Colonist.

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PHOTO: Victoria in the 1860's. It wasn't all bad news that made the pages of the Colonist and other newspapers. After all, we do refer to them as the good old days?

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As I noted in a recent editorial, 147 years later treasure hunters think they’ve found the wreckage of the SS. Pacific which foundered off Cape Flattery in 1875.

The result of a collision with a sailing ship, it’s one of the worst marine disasters in Pacific Northwest history—two survived of an estimated 250 persons aboard.

It’s a fascinating story of tragedy, complete with a message from the grave—and, if one chooses to believe, of a ghost that tormented the Orpheus’s captain to his grave.

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PHOTO: The sidewheel passenger steamer Pacific was old and tired—one of the so-called ‘floating coffins’ of the west coast in the so-called good old days—and she went down in minutes after receiving a glancing blow from the sailing ship Orpheus.

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