*British Columbia Chronicles special bonus section for Members Only.*
(Conclusion)
Last week, I introduced you to the George Medal, one step short of the George Cross which is the non-combat equivalent of the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the British Commonwealth.
To date, 77 Canadians, military and civilian, have earned this distinguished recognition of valour. I’ve been trying to nail down one in particular that was awarded for heroism in the deadly crash of an RCAF bomber at Comox airbase in the early 1950s.
Read More"The KING has been graciously pleased to approve the award of the George Medal in recognition of conspicuous gallantry in carrying out hazardous work in a very brave manner."
Read MoreOkay, hands up, those of you who think that history is dull.
If you raised your hand—why are you reading this?
Read MoreLast week marked another workers’ memorial day when we honoured the 1000s of men and women who have been killed or injured on the job. During the past year, in BC alone, there were 138 workplace deaths.
In Nanaimo, the National Day of Mourning also commemorates the May 3, 1887 No. 1 Esplanade Mine disaster that killed 150 men in a single disaster.
News reports of both events coincided with my writing my newest book about the coal mines of the South Wellington area. In the course of research, I’d found myself checking the Department of Mines’ Annual Reports for 1959 and 1960.
Read More(Conclusion)
In last week’s BC Chronicles, banker David Doig and his Mountie escort successfully arrived in boomtown Dawson City with $1 million in cash. The young Scottish banker had been entrusted with opening Canada’s most northerly branch of the Bank of British North America.
This was at the height of the fabled Klondike gold rush.
Read More(Part 2)
Last week, banker David Doig and his Mountie escort evaded the notorious Soapy Smith’s gang in Skagway and made it over the dreaded Chilkoot Pass to Lake Lindemann, BC.
They were delivering more than $1 million in cash to open the most northerly branch of the Bank of British North America in Dawson City during the Klondike gold rush.
Read More(Part 1)
It’s hard to think of bankers as being colourful; I’ve never met one who was.
But, fortunately for storytellers such as I, there’s always that exception to the rule.
Read MoreEmilio Picariello could have served as a role model for fellow immigrants. He came to Canada with few worldly goods and the added handicap of speaking English as a second language at a time when visible minorities were treated as second class citizens.
Many of them, sad to say, were tragic, sometimes the authors of their own misfortune, others the victims of circumstance. Some of them simply marched to different drummers.
All of them had stories to tell and some, if only briefly, caught the attention of newspaper reporters who were ever on the alert for the out-of-the-ordinary.
Read MoreEmilio Picariello could have served as a role model for fellow immigrants. He came to Canada with few worldly goods and the added handicap of speaking English as a second language at a time when visible minorities were treated as second class citizens.
Read MoreFor this week’s historical ramble we’re going back to 1968 and an article written by Ainslie J. Helmcken, 1900-1987. The grandson of legendary Hudson’s Bay Co. surgeon John Sebastian Helmcken, he served as the first curator of the Victoria City Archives, 1967-1983. Here’s what he wrote, almost 60 years ago. He begins with a lengthy preamble so I’ll cut to the quick.
Read MoreFor most of a lifetime, pioneer of pioneers ‘Blackjack’ Ranold J McDonnell moved with the BC frontier, always with a keen eye for opportunity.
He’s one of a legion of remarkable frontiersmen who are virtually unknown to us today. Fifty years ago, the late O.J. Hutchings decided to correct this oversight by setting down ‘Blackjack’ Ranold McDonnell’s story for posterity.
Read MoreAs you read this, there’s renewed interest in the three times abandoned ore dumps on Mount Sicker. The first time was a century ago when the three producing copper mines shut down; in the 1940s when they were worked for base metals; then again in the 1960s when an attempt was made to recover discarded ore values by a chemical leaching process.
Read MoreViolent death—accidental or otherwise—has always played a grim role in our past. Time and again, newspaper headlines have heralded tragedy.
Certainly one of the saddest cases on record is that of the ‘Westminster Horror.’
Read More(Conclusion)
Last week, the late Guy Ilstad began to recall his adventures in 1910 when, at the height of a land boom precipitated by the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, he and two teenage friends were hired to stake out 10,000 acres in northern BC for an American company.
To my regret, I never met the late Guy Ilstad. We corresponded for several years, beginning back when I was working for The Daily Colonist in Victoria at the start of my journalistic career.
Our friendship began by my playing a long shot after his name came up while I was researching the intriguing story of Quatsino’s John Sharp. The watchman for a dormant coal company, Sharp’s mysterious death had long intrigued historians because of rumours he’d really been William Clarke Quantrill.
Read MoreThey’re a curse, I tell you!
I defy anyone to pore through old newspapers and documents on a daily basis as I do and not be pulled down, down, down by these unforeseen, unavoidable and irresistible sirens.
You can hardly turn a page, it seems, that there isn’t another story crying out, “Read me.”
Read MoreAfter defying German guns and the stormy North Atlantic during the Second World War, a veteran halibut boat vanished off BC’s wild coast in October 1963. There were no survivors.
Five years later, the discovery of wreckage on an Alaskan shore shed new light on yet another of the province’s marine mysteries.
Read MoreCertainly the career of Gustav Alvo von Alvensleben was one of extremes—from German aristocrat to BC developer extraordinaire to enemy alien, imprisonment and financial ruin.
Anyone researching provincial history in the years immediately preceding the First World War is sure to see this name celebrated in press stories; some even credit him with founding the Vancouver stock exchange.
Read More(Conclusion)
Last week, courtesy of the Nov. 22, 1950 Vancouver Province, we learned of the horrendous head-on collision in the Rockies between a westbound Canadian Army troop train and an eastbound passenger express. Today, the conclusion to this tragedy which ended up in a courtroom and, in its own way, made Canadian judicial history...
Read More(Part 1)
To railway history buffs British Columbia's second worst railway disaster is known as the Canoe River train wreck; to lawyers studying Canadian legal precedent, it's the Canoe River case.
Neither term even hints at the fact that it was the Korean War, then raging, that precipitated this tragedy...
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