Editorially speaking...
Here’s an interesting letter passed on by Darrell Ohs of the Nanaimo Historical Society from Misty Bruns about a child who’s interred in a California cemetery and whose family moved to Gabriola Island. (There’s an Aitkens Road in the Morden Colliery Provincial Park area.)
“Hello, My name is Misty, I am an Interpretive student aide at Black Diamond Mines in Antioch California.
Black Diamond mines is a historic site where 5 different communities developed during the coal mining era of 1860-1906. What we have left are the mines; we give tours, a cemetery, and a story that continues to be told.
I am working on the people that are buried at Rose Hill cemetery and getting those stories into a social media presence. I am working on Katie Aitkens, daughter of James and Barbara. Katie was born in 1871 and passed in 1879. This is in between census records and the only reason we know she lived is that she is in our cemetery.
I spent a couple of months researching where her family went after she passed away, and that lead me to your neck of the woods [Nanaimo]. I have connected Katie to her family on Find a Grave. I would like to do a small segment on her and where her family went after leaving the Mt. Diablo Coalfields. That quest has led me to write you.
I would like to know if you [Nanaimo Historical Society] have a volunteer that would record themselves with Katie's family that are buried in [the] Gabriola [Islalnd] Cemetery, and briefly tell their story.
It would be lovely to see the transition from living in coal country here in California, losing a child, and then leaving that child in a cemetery and travelling so far away through Washington to settle in your area. (Also “coal country”—TW.]”
It will be interesting to see if Misty receives any helpful information.
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One hundred and 47 years later treasure hunters think they’ve found the wreckage of the SS. Pacific which foundered off Cape Flattery in 1875. The result of a collision with a sailing ship, it’s one of the worst marine disasters in Pacific Northwest history.
The sidewheel passenger steamer Pacific was old and tired—one of the so-called ‘floating coffins’ of the west coast in the so-called good old days—and she went down in minutes after receiving a glancing blow from the sailing ship Orpheus.
It’s a fascinating story of tragedy, of a message from the grave and, if one chooses to believe, a ghost that tormented the Orpheus’s captain to his grave.
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I’ve been posting historical nuggets on Facebook for several months now. Sometimes they resonate with readers, judging by the number of likes and comments. Certainly the one on Yukon poet Robert Service’s brief stay on a Cowichan Bay farm drew a mass response.
More recently, I wrote about Victoria’s Deadman’s Island, used by the Songhees First Nation as a cemetery until it was torched by vandals. Chronicles readers have met one of the perpetrators, Edgar Fawcett, who confessed to the crime in his retirement years when he wrote the classic semi-autobiography, Some Reminiscences of Old Victoria.
Among those who commented was Bill Eagle who wrote:
“Hard to piece together what actually happened back nearly 200 years ago. Some stories claim two men went by boat to the Island, both of whom were identified, and eventually faced the judge. One report from that time period states there was a $50 fine levied, and that amount was given to the local Songhees, who were satisfied with the compensation.
“Another story claims four men swam to it, and they remained loyal to one another, and never went to court. Some suggest that Fawcett added this tale of his involvement as merely a means to "spice" up his book.
There is still some question as to how many graves were actually on Hallkett Island at the time of the fire, being that the Songhees had established a new village on the inner harbor in the mid 1840's. Some reports of graves being there by 1850.
“This Island was known as Deadmans Island, which is the same name used for the Island near Stanley Park. Now that Island was a well established burial site, and had hundreds of the dead on it. Some may confuse the history of the two.”
I thanked Bill for his response and promised him (and myself) to dig into my archives and pursue it further. I’ll let readers know what turns up…
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