The Chronicles Blog

During a recent tour of Victoria’s beautiful Ross Bay Cemetery, Old Cemeteries Society guide John Adams pointed out the headstone for onetime U.S. Consul Allen Francis.

Coincidentally, in his latest bestselling history book, Untold Stories of Old British Columbia, friend and fellow historian Dan Marshall pays tribute to a mutual hero of ours, David Williams Higgins, whom I’ve introduced to Chronicles readers on several occasions.

There’s a strong and fascinating connection between Francis and Higgins.

During the 1860s, the time of the American Civil War, Francis served as Consul in Victoria where and when Higgins worked as a journalist. In these professional capacities, their paths often crossed.

Perhaps surprisingly to us today, their connection was that dreadful conflict then raging below the border. Supposedly neutral Victoria was a hotbed of Northern and Southern sympathizers. Besides open rivalry and occasional acts of violence, there was a conspiracy by the pro-Confederates to outfit a privateer with which to hijack a Federal payroll ship.

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PHOTO: One of the worst civil wars in history began with the firing by Confederates on Fort Sumter, in South Carolina's Charleston Harbour, on April 12, 1861. Hostilities soon spilled over the U.S.-Canadian border, particularly in western outpost Victoria. —Currier & Ives print, Wikipedia

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Probably few British Columbians have ever heard of Steamboat Mountain. How can that be? After all, it once was the site of the richest gold strike in provincial history!

At least, that was the claim of its promoters.

Alas, it was all a pipe dream, a bubble—a fraud.

When it all came crashing down, 1000s—shades of Bre-X!—were heartbroken to learn the sad truth: that it had never existed except in the minds of two American confidence men.

What a story! That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Of the 1000s of placer and hardrock mines that have been staked, worked and developed throughout British Columbia over the years, that of Steamboat Mountain was unique. —Author’s Collection

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Probably few of the 1000s of commercial and pleasure craft annually plying British Columbia waters have much fear of navigating Seymour Narrows.

True, this 2500-foot-channel between Vancouver, Maud and Quadra islands is still hazardous.

But, within living memory, this was the dreaded lair of the worst marine hazard of the entire West Coast—Ripple Rock.

100s—that’s 100s—of vessels, large and small, came to grief here. Removal of the threat of Ripple Rock, one of the great engineering feats in Canadian history, involved many years, millions of dollars and several lives.

The story of Ripple Rock and its de-fanging, next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: The hydrographic survey ship William J. Stewart was one of the many of Ripple Rock’s victims. —BC Archives

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Victoria and lower Vancouver Island were in a state of emergency, 156 years ago.

Members of the Volunteer Rifle Corps and special constables patrolled city streets as British men-of-war stood at the alert in Esquimalt Harbour and cruised Juan de Fuca Strait.

All were on guard against a threatened invasion by the outlawed Irish nationalist Fenian Brotherhood.

If it all seems rather hysterical, a century and a-half later, there was no dismissing the Fenians as an empty threat at the time.

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: The Fenians had already spilled blood in eastern Canada at the Battle of Ridgeway. —Wikipedia

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Last week, when Charles Taylor reminisced about some of the colourful characters of Alberni Valley history, he mentioned the tragic shooting death of a man stealing potatoes from the Anderson sawmill’s vegetable garden.

It was an accident, swore Henry, the farm overseer. He’d loaded his musket with peas not shot. He’d just meant to scare the man and his companions.

Accident or no, mill manager Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, who doubled as justice of the peace, had no choice but to hold an inquest. The problem was, the only men who qualified to serve as jurors were Henry’s workmates and friends.

The result, as could almost be expected, was anything but justice!

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Pioneer lumberman and author Gilbert Malcolm Sproat for whom Vancouver Island’s Sproat Lake is named. —Wikipedia

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Tragedy was an inevitable aspect of pioneer life and the Alberni Valley had its share.

The late Charles Taylor, introduced in last week’s BCChronicles, was the first person I ever interviewed—initially at the urging of my employer, the Victoria Colonist, then, when he and I became unlikely friends, by choice.

I say unlikely because he was 85, I a very green 19.

But we clicked and the result was a brief series of historical articles on little-known people and events of Alberni Valley history. More of Charles Taylor’s enjoyable reminiscences in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Life was hard on the frontier in the ‘good old days,’ as these loggers could surely have attested. But who was there to take down their stories? Fortunately for posterity, Charles Taylor began to record Alberni history during the final years of his retirement in Victoria in the early 1960s. —BC Archives

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Everyone has to start somewhere, to state the obvious.

In my case it was in the lowly capacity of copyboy with The Daily Colonist long before its merger with the Victoria Daily Times—two years of my doing everything and anything but writing, at least on company time.

Any writing I did was on my own dime.

But knowing and getting along well with editor John Shaw no doubt helped me make my first freelance sale to the paper’s Sunday edition, The Islander. This led to assignments—interviewing people suggested to Shaw and to the city desk but who weren’t considered newsworthy enough to justify a reporter’s time.

Victoria was a retirement Mecca in those days and many seniors could tell of incredible experiences and adventures, including service in both world wars—if only they had a way to share their stories. Some actually tried writing their memoirs.

But they’d spent their working lives as loggers, sea captains, army officers...they weren’t professional writers.

Neither was I but, yet, but I was better at it than they were. So came the day that I girded my young loins and made my first contact with an elderly gentleman.

Next week in the Chronicles, some of Charles Taylor’s great stories about his childhood and the colourful pioneers of the Albernis of a century and more ago.

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PHOTO: Many 1960s Victorians were retired and a treasure trove of great stories for those willing to seek them out and to listen. —www.flickr.com

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(Conclusion)

As we’ve seen, to Joseph Camille Claus goes the dubious honour of committing “the first cold-blooded premeditated murder...in the frozen north,” in this case the Stikine River country.

According to the Victoria Colonist, anyway. Claus, it should be noted, had yet to face trial let alone be convicted by a jury of his peers.

But the circumstantial evidence, so far as was known in Victoria in the spring of 1898, was pretty damning. The bodies of Claus’s prospecting partners, Charles Hendrickson and James Burns had been found axed and shot to death, and a man matching Claus’s description had been seen fleeing the scene.

Just a month before, the partners had left Nanaimo to seek their fortunes in the Klondike gold rush. Soon Claus would be back in Nanaimo to stand trial and, if found guilty, face a hangman’s noose.

Next week in the British Columbia Chronicles, the conclusion to this fascinating mystery of a century and a-quarter ago.

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PHOTO: The mighty Stikine River where gold seekers risked life and limb in 1898 has become a tourist Mecca. —peakadvisor.com

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Whatever possessed Joseph Claus to think he’d get away with murdering and robbing his prospecting partners in the frozen Stikine River country in 1898?

Sure, they were out of sight of prying eyes. But, whichever direction he chose to flee, he had miles to go through winter snows. And it wasn’t as if he had the wilderness to himself, there were others on the trail—including officers of the B.C. Provincial Police.

We can only conclude that he weighed his options and acted accordingly. Too bad for partners Hendrickson and Burns whose brutal demise earned them the dubious distinction of being victims of “the first cold-blooded premeditated murder...in the frozen north”.

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PHOTO: Accused murderer Joseph Claus went from Nanaimo to the Stikine River then back to Nanaimo and a jail cell. —BC Archives

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‘I am camped on the scene of a double murder committed this week.’

If it seems to be a long way from the frozen reaches of northwestern British Columbia’s Stikine River to Nanaimo, Vancouver Island, it is. But no greater than the fabled long arm of the law, as was amply shown in June 1898 when 12 good citizens took their places in the jury box in a Nanaimo courtroom.

They were there to try Joseph Camille Claus for murder. As it happened, the trial’s taking place in Nanaimo brought the case full circle–Claus was from Nanoose and that’s where his story begins.

It’s one of B.C.’s lesser-known (by which I mean, least written about) homicides of old. Which is strange, given its Klondike gold rush backdrop and remarkable police work.

I’m sure you’ll agree after you read next week’s Chronicle.

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PHOTO: How many who visit Nanaimo City Hall today realize that they’re walking over where once stood a gallows that saw considerable use over the decades? —Courtesy of Belinda Wright

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Last year, when telling the saga of the Leech River gold rush of 1864, I referred to it as Vancouver Island’s only real gold rush.

By that I meant gold rush in the generally accepted sense of a wild stampede of fortune seekers converging from all directions in a frenzy upon some designated location.

Like the Fraser River and Cariboo gold rushes, for example.

Certainly, the Island’s west coast Zeballos excitement of the 1930s had most of the ingredients of a rush, a stampede. The biggest difference was that, unlike the Leech and Fraser rivers and the Cariboo, which were placer mining (panning, sluicing, dredging gold from rivers and alluvial gravels), Zeballos required hard rock mining—drilling, blasting and tunnelling into solid mountainsides.

This, of course, cost money. It required manpower and expensive materials that exceeded the skills and pocketbooks of the classic lone prospector with his gold pan and burro.

But it was exciting, all the same, as you’ll see in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: ‘Downtown’ Zeballos with its plank main street in the 1930s. —BC Archives

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Communities—villages, towns, sometimes even cities—can come and go. Then we call them ghost towns.

British Columbia has had its share—100s of them, in fact. That said, hands up Chronicles readers who can name, say, six of them. Two? One?

Of the province’s many lost communities, two have achieved legendary even mythic status: Phoenix, which, unlike its namesake, never did rise from the ashes, and Wahlachin.

Phoenix, because, unlike most of the province’s here today, gone tomorrow communities, it was in every sense of the word—size, population and infrastructure—a city.

Wahlachin, because it was built upon, of all things, a dream. It literally defied commonsense and paid dearly when changing circumstances and harsh reality finally kicked in.

The story of ill-fated Wahlachin in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Digging an irrigation ditch at Wahlachin. —Wikipedia

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Over the years I’ve collected, among other things, trade cards (see below) and bottles.

Trade cards drew my interest as examples of the printing and advertising arts, and bottles, well, bottles were fun—digging up history—and they complemented trade cards because they’d contained patent medicines and liquor.

Bottles, trade cards, labels and liquor all went together in the heyday of patent medicines which—so their makers claimed—could cure all that ailed you. This was mostly blarney at best, and an outright lie that could have lethal results at worst,

Mrs. Winslow’s soothing syrup, for example, contained so much morphine that it killed an unknown number babies whose mothers had trustingly dosed them.

It’s a fascinating subject as we’ll see in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: This “medicine” has gone down in medical history as “the baby killer”. —artefact.museumofhealthcare.ca

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As a lifelong practitioner of the written word, it galls me to have to admit the truth of that old expression, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

But, as that more modern and wretched saying goes, “It is what it is.”

I’ve been thinking about what photography has meant to recording history and how it has ultimately changed our lives. After primitive beginnings such as the daguerreotype came the cumbersome large-format camera that required a tripod to hold it still for its slow exposures, followed by messy wet processing in a darkroom.

All of this required a strong work ethic not to mention artistry.

Today, it’s a cultural phenomenon: mini-cameras, smart phones and computers with their instantaneous, effortless imagery—just point and click. Absolutely anyone can take a decent photo today and capture not just scenes and portraits but events as they’re occurring.

But, of course, it has been a long road and many of the greatest photographs of the past century and a-half were taken with difficulty, sometimes at great personal risk, and involved not only talent and skill but intensive thought and effort. Thus it’s only right that some pioneer photographers have achieved near-legendary status.

One of them is British Columbia’s own Hannah Maynard, a true photographic innovator who broke new ground with her artistic experimentation. Also a truly remarkable lady, as we’ll see in next week’s British Columbia Chronicles.

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PHOTO: The amazing Hannah Maynard on two wheels. She probably was more comfortable in her studio and darkroom. —BC Archives

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This French-American character was right out of a dime novel.

In his less than 60 years he was everything from dishwasher, pimp and Foreign Legionnaire to the friend of British royalty and the fifth richest man in the U.S.

Yet, for all these achievements, he died, supposedly by his own hand, in a prison cell while awaiting trial for treason.

Something that neither he nor anyone else could have foreseen in 1934, when he came to British Columbia in charge of his grandly named Bedaux Canadian Sub-Arctic Expedition. It was really a promotional tour for Citroen half-track cars, but an incredible tour through virgin wilderness of northern B.C. all the same.

The saga of the Bedaux overland expedition in next week’s Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Rich adventurer Charles Bedaux, left, watches as a film crew documents his overland expedition in northern B.C. —Frank Swannell photo, BC Archives

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Pioneer British Columbians could be a weird and wonderful lot, as the Chronicles have often illustrated in the past.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that some of the earlier chroniclers who recorded for posterity the exploits of our more colourful pioneers were every bit as intriguing—sometimes even more so—than many of their subjects.

Certainly the good Rev. Matthew MacFie, FRGS, qualifies in this category.

He was smart, learned and travelled. He wrote a massive book on Vancouver Island and British Columbia and captured the tempo of gold rush Victoria.

With eagle eye MacFie observed, analyzed and criticized all those with whom he came in contact during his five-year-long residency, from the highest office in the land to the lowest of 1860s frontier society.

What a shame that this man of the cloth with so much to work from chose to look at the world through a very small glass...

That’s next week in the Cowichan Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Rev. Matthew MacFie even looked the part of a grumpy old man.— www.pinterest.com

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The box car rolled with the increasing motion of the barge, each gust of wind rocking it more violently in its bed of rails. Then it began to roll—through the guard rails and into the dark depths of the lake...

That was in the winter of 1904.

But the boxcar, long gone and deep in the depths of Slocan Lake, has never been forgotten because of its reputed cargo—a fortune in silver bullion.

Several attempts at salvage have been made over the years, some partially successful. But the legend lives on, inspiring film makers in recent years to explore the eerie dark of Slocan Lake, not just for silver bars but for a ‘ghost’ locomotive.

It all adds up to B.C. history in technicolor, and it’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: The CPR tug Rosebery and barge breaking the ice on Slocan Lake. —BC Archives photo courtesy of Lost Kootenays

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Men wept unashamedly, women swooned and young gentlemen about town threw kisses and flowers when Madame Anna Bishop, the toast of three continents and perhaps the most widely travelled opera singer of the 19th century, sang.

With her wistful Home Sweet Home, her heartrending My Bud in Heaven, and the carefree Dashing White Sergeant, she captivated legions from London to Melbourne to San Francisco for half a century.

When, finally, this famous lady of song visited Victoria in 1873, the old Theatre Royal was packed for 10 glittering nights. No one in the audiences had an inkling as to what she was really thinking—that outpost Victoria meant the sorrow of a lifetime

That’s next week in the Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Mme. Ana Bishop, the toast of three continents. —Wikipedia

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Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Utopia as “a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government and social conditions; an impractical scheme for social improvement; an imaginary and indefinitely remote place.”

The Cambridge Dictionary is much more informal: “Try and imagine a perfect society, a utopia, in which the government really got everything right...”

Alas, Merriam-Webster is closer to the mark with “an impractical scheme for social improvement; an imaginary....place.” So it proved, time and again, to the bitter disappointment of all parties concerned, the records show.

There have been innumerable attempts at founding the perfect society in provincial history, probably the best known being Sointula, the ill-fated Finnish colony on Malcolm Island. Northwest coast Vancouver Island’s Cape Scott colony was a more pragmatic approach to achieving social and economic independence but it, too, failed, albeit for reasons other than internal discord.

There were others. One of them, a century-plus ago, attracted young William Kipling of Victoria who passionately believed “in all schemes having for their object the betterment of the condition of the workingman”.

Noble sentiments, indeed. What a shame that they cost him his life. That’s next week in the British Columbia Chronicles.

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PHOTO: Malcolm Island’s controversial commune founder Matti Kurrika. As did so many other ‘Utopias,’ his Sointula failed. —https://sointulamuseum.ca/sointula-history

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I’ve always been drawn to autobiographies—life stories spoken from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

One can argue that a potential flaw is their self-serving lack of objectivity, even to the point of being completely dishonest. (As long practised by retired politicians and generals, if I may allow my cynicism to intrude.)

But how many people keep diaries or journals with anything but a factual record of their experiences and observations in mind?

This is when their reminiscences become invaluable: historic events witnessed or experienced firsthand. No one—I say this as one who’s written 1000s of third hand biographical texts—can tell us what it really was like better than someone who was there, someone who didn’t just observe from the side but who actively participated.

Someone who walked the talk.

Someone like pioneer mariner and businessman James Nealon Thain, the subject of our first Chronicle for 2024.

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PHOTO: Even today, surveying can be gruelling work. But never more so than it was back in James Thain’s day during the laying out of the Canadian Pacific Railway across Canada to its westernmost province, British Columbia. —www.pinterest.com

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