Editorially speaking...
Let’s begin by congratulating Blake MacKenzie for his fine job of creating and nurturing Gold Trails and Ghost Towns, a Facebook page that just passed the 70,000-member mark.
70,000!
Who says that history is dull and boring?
For Chronicles readers who are unfamiliar with Gold Trails, although I’ve mentioned it here before, it’s an open-forum that pays homage to the late B.C. historian and onetime Minister of Tourism, Bill Barlee, while covering all aspects of B.C.’s wild and woolly past.
Bill’s books on lost mines, ghost towns and placer creeks sold 100s of 1000s of copies in his lifetime—and they’re still in print.
The late Bill Barlee who did much to popularize B.C. history. — Bill Barlee Historian (Google)
Just Google Bill Barlee historian and you can watch the great videos he made with interviewer Mike Roberts who remains vivid in my memory for the time he interviewed me during a provincial-wide tour.
I was promoting my latest book, Canadian Battles & Massacres. in his radio studio in Kelowna. Too bad it wasn’t videographed!
As I sat in my chair, almost dumbfounded, Mike, inspired by a chapter in my book that had caught his fancy, was in a crouch on top of his desk and bobbing up and down and whooping as he led a horse charge. What a sight that made!
He was that kind of interviewer, so unlike Jack Webster who used to scare me.
Again, that’s Gold Trails and Ghost Towns on Facebook.
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I’ve been having fun on Facebook myself lately, beginning with three spur-of-the-moment videos I, Blake and Dan Marshall shot in May. Last week, I and friends revisited the Mount Sicker Hotel site for the first time in years. What used to be easy is now a challenge because of locked gates and deactivated roads.
But we made it to the hotel site!
These photos show it in its prime, as a derelict in the 1920s or early ‘30s, and the site as it is today with a quadders’ road running right over top of it.
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My fascination for this site is because it’s where miner Fred Beech met his end after attempting to murder Mrs. Campbell, widow of his former mining partner. In a previous attempt on her life, his friend and Mount Brenton Hotel proprietor Joe Bibeau had tried to intervene and Beech had shot him in cold blood.
After he eluded an intensive manhunt he circled back to the Mount Sicker Hotel in the Lenora townsite where Mrs. Campbell was being guarded by a posse. He fired several shots to draw her to the window then fired again. He was reputed to be a crack shot but his bullet just creased her hair and she fainted; Beech probably thought he’d killed her that time.
When Provincial Police Constable Halhed and members of the posse charged out of the hotel, Beech, realizing it was over, turned his Winchester on himself.
As we sat on the log atop the hotel site on Canada Day last, it occurred to me that, 117 years ago, Mrs. Campbell was in her second-floor room, probably pacing nervously, right above our heads!
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You don’t hear much about the Women’s Institute, once a part of most B.C. communities, but they recently celebrated 125 years. Obviously, they’re alive and well, and, according to the news report, “a community-based organization for women whose purpose is to promote women’s voices and fellowships”.
Go back into old newspapers such as the Cowichan Leader and you’ll find that the WI was a major player that always made the news. To name a single significant contribution that comes to my mind, they championed pre-natal and infant medical care, dental hygiene and home economics in public schools.
Something worthy of an anniversary celebration, don’t you think?
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