(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.
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Emilio 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.
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Emilio 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.
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For 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.
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For 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.
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As 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.
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Violent 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.’
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(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.
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They’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.”
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After 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.
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Certainly 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.
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(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...
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(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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(Conclusion)
This week, the conclusion to Noel Robinson’s 1922 profile of Capt. Alex McLean, the “real” Sea Wolf of literary fame in Macleans magazine:
While Captain Alexander McLean never owned or sailed the Casco—a boat always associated with Robert Louis Stevenson because the novelist sailed in her and wrote at least one of his novels aboard her—McLean had a strong desire to possess her and at one time tried to buy her.
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Four years ago, I told the story of the amazing Capt. Alex McLean who was made immortal—and infamous—by novelist Jack London. The source for my Chronicle was an author much closer to home, Tom MacInnes, in his 1920s book Chinook Days.
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Another Christmas, and time to reach into my archives for another Yuletide BC Chronicle.
This year, I’m sharing from a book that I found years ago in my travels, an original printing (it’s now available online as a reprint) of F.A. Robinson’s book Trail-Tales of Western Canada, published in 1914.
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Like dominoes, they keep falling—traditional geographical, so-called place names, long rooted on our maps which have come to be challenged by today’s moral and ideological standards.
Places and topographical features which were named to honour pioneers who played pivotal roles in BC history but who now find themselves under the glass for their beliefs, in particular their publicly expressed or demonstrated stands on racial issues. Sometimes, too, and more and more often lately, not for reasons of moral judgment but to belatedly acknowledge First Nations precedents.
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(Part 1)
To Englishman John (Jack) Green goes the honour of being Savary Island's first permanent resident. After years as a placer miner in the American Southwest, followed by some successful real estate ventures on Vancouver Island, he first set eyes on the island in the Strait of Georgia, northwest of Powell River, as a seagoing trader.