Biographies/Characters — Members Only Blog — British Columbia Chronicles

Eric Duncan is remembered for having written what has been described as “the most important document for the history of the Comox Valley,” From Shetland to Vancouver Island: Recollections of Seventy-Five Years.

Published in Edinburgh in 1937, it’s a fine read but long out of print. Happily, I’ve had a copy—a first edition, to boot—for years and have read it twice. It was, in fact, one of my earliest antiquarian book finds.

Recently, I scanned it again and found a chapter which I’m sure will please Chronicles readers.

Six Weeks of Death

April 1925 marked the highlight of a lifetime for 86-year-old prospector Bill Brown of Barkerville.

For those who don’t recognize his name, B.A. McKelvie was a leading provincial journalist and the foremost historian and writer of ‘popular’ B.C. history in the 1920s-’50s. He was gone when I, a kid, history buff and aspiring author/historian, discovered him during my first visit to the BC Archives while looking for such serious topics as lost treasures, shipwrecks, stagecoach robberies...

Bill Brown of Barkerville

April 1925 marked the highlight of a lifetime for 86-year-old prospector Bill Brown of Barkerville.

The Man With the Touch of Gold

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.

Deserter Islands Murders Cost Governor His Job

Feuding 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.

Featured MembersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerFebruary 13, 2025Mining, Biographies/Characters

John Butts, King of Knaves

Conclusion
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.

Featured MembersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerJanuary 30, 2025Biographies/Characters

John Butts, King of Knaves

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.”

Featured MembersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerJanuary 23, 2025Biographies/Characters

Evil Agnes – The Ugly

Too 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.

Featured MembersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerJanuary 16, 2025Mining, Biographies/Characters

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Women’s Style

This 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.

* * * * *

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.

Love Came Too Late for Beautiful Belle Castle

Her 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.

In the Shadow of Greatness

From 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.

Featured MembersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerDecember 5, 2024Biographies/Characters

The Real Story Behind the Cariboo’s Greatest Legend

(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.

Featured MembersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerOctober 10, 2024Mining, Biographies/Characters

The Real Story Behind the Cariboo’s Greatest Legend

(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.

Frank Swannell

Iconic 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.

Featured MembersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerSeptember 12, 2024Biographies/Characters

Victoria’s Odd Couple

Although 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!

Featured MembersPatricia MacGregor Graphic DesignerSeptember 5, 2024Biographies/Characters

John King Barker

Times 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.

He tamed mountain of horror – but at what cost?

Fame 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.

British Columbia’s Champion of the Courtroom

In 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.

Fulfillment of Dream Came Too Late for Wealthy Dreamer

“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.

The Ballad of Billy Barker

While 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.

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