BOOKS
T.W. Paterson
Since his early teens T.W. Paterson, the author of 38 books and thousands of magazine and newspaper articles on British Columbia history, has been researching the forgotten, dramatic, humorous, tragic, heroic—and sometimes not so heroic—events of our past, and the men and women who made them happen.
Mystery, Murder & Mayhem really is “a walk on the wild side of British Columbia’s colourful past”.
Hollywood characters pale alongside some of the characters who have trod the B.C. stage over the past 180 years. Even fiction writers would be challenged to surpass some of the outrageous events that have really happened.
19 amazing stories of British Columbia history they never taught in schools.
Even readers who “don’t like history” will be intrigued by Mystery, Murder & Mayhem. Guaranteed!
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Canadian outlaws? The American interviewer was dumbfounded. The very idea that Canada had its own Wild West and its own outlaws and lawmen astounded him. But the record speaks for itself. We were every bit as rootin', tootin' as anything you've ever read about in American magazines and books or seen in the movies. The proof is here in Outlaws of the Canadian West.
Bigger than all of California, half of Nevada and a slice of Oregon combined, Canada’s westernmost province British Columbia was largely uninhabited and unexplored, a century and more ago. But thanks to an effective justice system and a good working relationship with bordering Washington, most murder cases were solved and resolved with a trial, conviction and punishment. There were exceptions, of course, and Capital Crime covers both solved and unsolved crimes—all of them fascinating.
152 pages.
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This treasury of Victorian eccentrics celebrates the pioneers who marched to their own drummers–straight into oblivion, for they’ve been all but ignored by ‘straight’ historians. You’ll meet
The ‘worst’ character ever to walk earlyday Victoria streets
The man who claimed to own all of Esquimalt
The woman who sang with a broken heart
The man who was literally haunted by his past
Madame Bendixen, ‘Pilly Parlow,’ ‘Whisky John,’ ‘Billy the Bug’ and a host of other colourful and outrageous pioneers
170 pages.
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You’ll never learn the real story of Nanaimo, or about the colourful men and women who made it all happen, from a textbook or in a classroom.
Indeed, Nanaimo has changed over a century and three-quarters, not just in size, population and prosperity, but in ways few of us, today, can even imagine. Read all about it in Unknown Nanaimo!
270 pages.
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Tag along with well-known historian T.W. Paterson as he guides you to some of the outstanding graves and monuments in the Cowichan Valley’s 13 public cemeteries.
Chapter highlights include:
Vice-Admiral Edmund Rollo Mainguy was ‘father of the modern Royal Canadian Navy’
The Chemainus sawmill shut down and stores closed to mark Fred Veitch’s funeral
Gentle-born Gertrude Halhed dutifully followed her husband to the middle of nowhere
‘Lord’ William Probyn Thompson stepped into path of an oncoming locomotive
Mildred Maude Lilley–was she a murder victim or suicide?
Artist Edward John Hughes is now as famous as Emily Carr
Nigel Kingscote’s headstone is one of the most outstanding in all of British Columbia
War casualties Allan and Geoffrey Hook are buried overseas but their headstones are in St. John’s, Cobble Hill cemetery
276 pages with 70 colour photos.
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A name is a name is a name, Shakespeare tells us. But what if there’s a story behind that name? Often there’s much more than meets the eye behind the christening of the Cowichan Valley’s mountains, streams and other geographical features.
Chapter highlights include:
History’s injustice to the Hul’qumi’num (Cowichan), the first mapmakers
Shawnigan’s Camp Pringle honours the father and son, George C. and George Robert Pringle
Few know that the ‘last spike’ of Canada’s trans-continental railway was driven at Shawnigan’s Cliffside
Fairbridge Drive recalls the once world-famous Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm
Named for a WW1 battlefield, Hill 60 was the site of Canada’s only manganese mine
And hundreds more historically significant place names of the Cowichan Valley
150 pages.
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It's hard for us to visualize, a century later, a state of world war. But that's the way it was, as of August 4, 1914. Over the next four years the Cowichan Valley would do its part: the highest enlistment per capita for all of Canada. This is the story of all those names on the Duncan cenotaph.
220 pages.
All aboard! with the hikers’, cyclists’ and equestrians’ companion to Historic Hikes ‘n’ Sites with map and directions for exploring historic spots along the Cowichan Valley and Trans Canada Trails and the Kinsol Trestle.
With map and colour photos.
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The hikers’ and cyclists’ guide to the Cowichan Valley’s historic logging railways, the Kinsol Trestle and the Trans Canada Trail: ‘An indispensable guide for those who wish to discover Vancouver Island’s scenic and colourful past.’–Cowichan Valley Citizen.
Three books in one with easy-to-follow directions and over 60 colour and historic photos.
The guide to 122 km (75 miles) of logging and mining history; the story of the building, abandonment and reconstruction of the world-famous Kinsol Trestle, highest and longest wooden structure of its kind in North America, perhaps the world; and the saga of the building of the E&N Railway and the Canadian Northern Pacific–meant to be Canada’s ‘other’ trans-continental railway.
138 pages. Full colour.
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The boom to bust saga of Mount Sicker, Vancouver Island’s greatest copper mine, 1895-1908.
Chapter highlights include:
Building the Lenora, Mount Sicker Railway and the Tyee tramway
Crofton, the ‘new smelter centre of the Pacific’
Mount Brenton’s mine manager was a sentimental softie
On the mountain and in the bowels of the earth
The missing teamster who was suspected to be Victoria’s Jack the Ripper
A freak of explosives
‘Oh, come quick, Mr. Beech is trying to kill my mother!’
298 pages.
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For 23 years, the Cowichan Chronicles entertained readers of the Cowichan Valley Citizen with the dramatic, the humorous, the tragic, the heroic–and sometimes the not-so-heroic–events of Cowichan’s past and the men and women who made them happen.
Chapter highlights include:
Gordon River’s ‘big-footed devil’
The story behind Mill Bay’s Tozier Rock
Swallowfield was a perfect Eden
Lost silver mine of the Koksilah
Capt. Barkley died trying to save grandmother’s diary
160 pages.
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"My husband hates history but he reads you every week."–the wife of a faithful reader of the Cowichan Chronicles in the Cowichan Valley Citizen.
Chapter highlights include:
Toma Antoine, history’s ‘invisible man’
Cowichan Lake children fought cougar to standstill
Ashdown Green was no idle braggart
Margaret Sutton forsook fame and fortune for family
Cowichan cleric split Victoria congregation
‘When I get out, I’ll eat you up’
Gold, gold, gold....
Bonus Chapter:
‘We’re looking for the hangman, my dear’. The amazing story of the ‘massacre’ of Jim Miller and Bill Dring at Crofton.
160 pages.
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From the Old World they came to Cowichan, the rich and poor, the scions of aristocracy and labourers, the erudite and the dropout, the regimental and the individualist, the poet, the ploughman and the artist...
Chapter highlights include:
‘Go to Cowichan. Stop.’
A Hallowe’en kind of Christmas
Marriner diaries are portals to the past
‘Fighting’ Joe Martin was no match for Cowichan’s Charles Dickie
Mad dogs and Englishmen in the noonday sun
Dying miner’s friends were too late to save him
Bonus Chapter:
‘The Murder of Joe Dougan’. The full, previously unpublished story of the shooting of this Cobble Hill pioneer by his ‘loving’ cousin and lover Mary Ann Routledge.
160 pages.
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‘Cowichan Country gave them the sanctuary and the assurance that they could live as they saw fit, undisturbed by required protocol and convention...’
Chapter highlights include:
Treachery among the timber cruisers
Ho! for the Koksilah silver mines
‘California off, we’re settling on Vancouver Island’
Janet Goodall left ‘lungs’ for future generations
Cowichan Lake’s legendary Jesse James
Natasha had the strength of a man and the courage of a legion
When commandos struck at dawn
Bonus Chapter:
‘No Mercy for Camp Six Sweetheart.’ Ironically, Mabel Jones’s death by suicide benefited hundreds of schoolteachers, mostly young women, throughout the province.
160 pages.
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In September 2017 the Cowichan Chronicles entered their 20th year of publication in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. Almost 2000 columns, more than 1 million words. But, for all those stories, there was no end in sight of rich material. They just kept coming!
160 pages.
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For 23 years, the Cowichan Chronicles appeared weekly and bi-weekly in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. Almost 2000 columns, 1.6 million words. And now online as www.britishcolumbia.chronicles.ca.
Historically speaking, the Chronicles have hardly scratched the surface. Hence Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 6 which is more ambitious than its predecessors with longer, more in-depth stories about Cowichan Valley events and the people who made them happen.
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From the author's extensive archives and a lifetime of researching old records, conducting interviews and making field trips, 29 exciting stories about lost—and found—treasures in British Columbia. A gold mine for armchair and active treasure hunters alike!
Chapter highlights include:
Treasures found in the oddest places
Treasure in the Boston Bean jar
'Lukey's lost ledge' of silver
Green gold, white gold
Forbidden Plateau's lost lard pail of gold nuggets
160 pages.
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