*British Columbia Chronicles special bonus section for Members Only.*
If there is a single name that is synonymous with lost treasure in British Columbia that would have to be Neville Langrell (Bill) Barlee, school teacher, politician, entrepreneur, environmentalist, historian, writer, publisher, prospector and treasure hunter extraordinaire.
By all appearances, he scored at almost everything he did or touched.
Read MoreFeuding Governors: The Grand Inquisitor versus the Monopolist.
Recent notice of this talk by acclaimed historian Barry Gough as one of the Marion Cumming Lecture Series hosted by the Oak Bay Heritage Foundation, reminded me yet another great story within a great story.
In this case, how the northern Deserter Islands near Port Hardy got their name.
Read MoreConclusion
While serving yet another sentence for bootlegging, John was stricken with paralysis from the waist down and taken to the hospital in a hand cart. There, he was again examined to ensure that he wasn't faking. Upon being satisfied that he was indeed paralyzed (a test involving needle pricks, no doubt), hospital staff gave him every attention.
Part 1
So who is Victoria's most outstanding character?
Such a distinction might seem to be a difficult one to assign, given the many weird and wonderful individuals who’ve walked our Capital’s streets during the past 160-plus years. But there is one man who stands head and shoulders above all the others.
Without doubt, the most fabulous character ever to call Victoria home port is John Butts. Or John Charles Butts, ‘town cryer to her Britannic Majesty,” as this rogue preferred to call himself. A newspaper of the day expressed the view of many citizens when it declared John to be “a greater scourge than cholera or smallpox.”
Read MoreToo late, as I admitted last week, did I realize I had the perfect play on the popular Spaghetti western movie title, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
With a difference—women.
By too late, I meant the correct sequence: I’d already led with Belle Castle, The Bad (in the sense that she was a ‘fallen’ woman who redeemed herself too late for love). making Nellie Cashman, The Good, the second instalment by default.
But now we’re back on track with Agnes, The Ugly.
Read MoreThis week, it’s the turn of The Good - The Miner’s Angel whose name was synonymous with warmth and generosity in every mining camp from Mexico to Alaska.
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Nine years ago, Victoria's old Cemetery Society established a special Nelly Cashman Fund to raise money for a centennial stone to be placed on her grave in Ross Bay Cemetery. “Nellie Cashman deserves our recognition,” the Society’s Patrick Perry Lydon and Donna Chaytor told the Times Colonist.
Read MoreHer real name and where she came from, no one knew. But that she’d been beautiful and a lady, all were agreed. Upon her death in a lonely B.C. mining camp, forsaken by all but the man who loved her—and the rose tree she’d nurtured and cherished with a mother’s devotion—her secret went with her to the little cemetery on the hillside.
Today, even her grave site is unknown and the mystery of Belle Castle, as she called herself, remains safe with the ages.
Read MoreFrom the man who brought us those memorable eccentrics, Messrs. David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Mr. Pickwick and Company—there came to Victoria in 1868 the slight figure, in flesh and in fact, of one Acting Lieut. Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, RN.
Read More(Conclusion)
As we saw in last week’s Chronicles, John A. ‘Cariboo’ Cameron pickled his dead wife then then set out to haul her body 400 miles over the snow and ice by sled to take her, first to Victoria, then back home to Upper Canada.
(Part 1)
Anybody who’s ever read anything about the Cariboo gold rush has heard of John Angus Cameron.
Not by his formal name, maybe, but by the moniker by which he’s still remembered, ‘Cariboo’ Cameron.
Read MoreIconic explorers and the builders of the Canadian Pacific Railway aside, not many Canadian land surveyors have achieved national stature.
In his day, Victoria-based Frank Swannell (1880-1969) was the exception, nationally recognized for his incredible feats with both a transit level and a camera. Over 40 years, on foot, on horseback and by canoe, he probably covered more British Columbia terrain than any other man before or since.
Read MoreAlthough totally unlike the characters in the 1970s TV sitcom, William and Amelia Copperman must be regarded as Victoria’s very own Odd Couple. Their strange and stormy marital partnership amused, amazed and outraged fellow citizens for 15 incredible years.
They’re yet another reminder that they just don’t make real characters like they used to!
Read MoreTimes had indeed changed for John King Barker, back in 1906.
Gone was the fortune he’d spent a lifetime wresting from the soil; gone were his youth and his health. Old, bent and feeble, the miner hoped to visit an old friend one last time before joining those of his comrades who’d passed on before him.
Read MoreFame can be a fleeting thing—today’s “celebrity,” tomorrow’s nonentity. It can get worse than that—yesterday’s hero, today’s heel!
Even though he has a British Columbia mountain named for him, if you google Andrew Onderdonk, he gets little mention beyond the first two listings of several pages of other Onderdonks which include members of his own family, and doctors and lawyers, etc.
Read MoreIn 50 years before the bench, from prime minister's drawing room to frontier jail cell, he never turned down a case. He was a legend in his own lifetime, celebrated from the Maritimes to the Klondike as the greatest criminal lawyer of his age: Stewart William Henderson.
His death, aged 81, made the front page of the New York Times.
Read More“A man out west is a man, and let him be the poorest cowboy he will assert his right of perfect equality with the best...”
Author, sportsman, dreamer. Such was William Adolph Baillie-Grohman.
Read MoreWhile at Ross Bay Cemetery recently, I checked out a subject long of interest to me: Billy Barker, the namesake for Cariboo’s Barkerville.
I had to smile—Billy’s an RBC ‘star,’ having an end-of-the-row marker denoting his final resting place. Better yet, he has a handsome and expensive retro bronze marker giving a brief biography. What a far cry from the time of his death in Victoria’s Old Men’s Home for indigents.
Read MoreDuring a recent tour of Victoria’s beautiful Ross Bay Cemetery, Old Cemeteries Society guide John Adams pointed out the headstone for onetime U.S. Consul Allen Francis.
Coincidentally, in his latest bestselling book, Untold Stories of Old British Columbia, friend and fellow historian Dan Marshall pays tribute to a mutual hero of ours, David Williams Higgins, whom I’ve introduced to Chronicles readers on several occasions.
There’s a strong and fascinating connection between Francis and Higgins.
Read MoreTragedy was an inevitable part of pioneer life and the Alberni Valley had its share.
The late Charles Taylor, introduced in last week’s Chronicles, was the first person I ever interviewed—initially at the urging of my employer, the Victoria Colonist, then, when he and I became unlikely friends, by choice.
Read MoreWhere are they now, those wonderful patent medicines that promised to relieve every ailment, human and otherwise, from “female complaints” to fallen arches and falling hair?
Alas, they’ve gone, gone the way of the old-fashioned drugstore and the dinosaur. Victims, for the most part, of advances in medicine and tightened drug laws, they’re now part of our vanished heritage.
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