It was a colourful career that Thomas Herbert Murphy reflected upon in the summer of 1930. A lifetime that had been seen him in the mixed roles of sailor, blackbirder, prospector and Justice of the Peace.
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So soon we forget; it’s almost part of the Canadian character, it seems.
How many times have I encountered cases of true heroism, often to the point of supreme sacrifice, during my extensive historical research. But even war heroes come and go in memory; civilian heroes rising to the call at home and in peacetime rarely rate more than a momentary ripple.
Monuments? Hardly. Immortalized in school textbooks? Not a chance.
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A wander through the Ladysmith Cemetery and you see it, not once, not twice but again and again: the date, October 5, 1909.
That was “Ladysmith’s Day of Horror” of 116 years ago when, as B.A. McKelvie wrote in the Vancouver Province in 1957, The Mine Blew Up.
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“May Day, May Day, May Day—!”
The distress call pierced the grey stillness of Feb. 18, 1965. Then the voice was cut off, and static reigned the airwaves.
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Back in 1861, the Crown Colony of British Columbia was hindered by a shortage of money of all types.
At that time, the future Pacific province was supposed to be on the pound sterling of the Old Country. In reality, there was a shortage of coins and almost any coin of almost any realm was accepted if of gold or silver.
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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.
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Interest in the Bridge River Valley’s mineral potential dates all the way back to 1865 when a government-sponsored mining exploration party reported having found gold in “that part of the country lying between the Chilcoaten and Bridge Rivers,” specifically on Cadwallader Creek on the South Fork of the Bridge River.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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(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.
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It happened in an instant, with a single flash of flame like that of a lightning bolt.
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We know that more than 600 miners were killed on the job in Nanaimo area coal mines over that industry's 80-year history. If we take into account those who died later, sometimes much later, from their injuries or from work-related illnesses, the death toll must be much greater.
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Conclusion
As we have seen, this was no Wild West town of false-front buildings lining a single street with a scattering of shacks. The Boundary Country’s Phoenix was nothing less than a city in every sense of the word: modern, substantial buildings, services, fine homes, a hospital, brewery, skating rink, and rail connection to the outside world—all the latest amenities of the first two decades of the 20th century.
Then—it was gone, just a man-made lake on top of a mountain in the wilderness.
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Part 1
This was no Wild West town of false-front buildings lining a single street and a scattering of shacks. The Boundary Country’s Phoenix was nothing less than a city in every sense of the word: modern substantial buildings and services, fine homes, a hospital, even a skating rink, and not one but two rail connections to the outside world—all the latest amenities of the first two decades of the 20th century.
Then—“the highest incorporated city in Canada” was gone, just a man-made lake on top of a mountain in the wilderness.
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Overnight, progress and prosperity came to Steamboat Mountain and environs, with not one but three township springing up where, but weeks before had been virgin wilderness...
Few British Columbia will have heard of Steamboat Mountain. Yet, a century and a-quarter ago, it was the site of the richest gold strike in provincial history.
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Last year, when telling the saga of the Leech River gold rush of 1864, I referred to it as Vancouver Island’s only real gold rush.
By that I meant gold rush in the generally accepted sense of a wild stampede of fortune seekers converging in a frenzy and from all directions upon some promised El Dorado.
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When we glance at history, be it that of British Columbia or anywhere else, it’s easy to think that it involved mostly men. And so it did.
Going simply by numbers, B.C. was indeed a man’s world well into the 19th century. Perhaps this was never more so than during the fabled Cariboo gold rush of the 1860s.
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Gold!
It’s one of the most powerful words in the English language, able to—literally—move mountains.
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(Conclusion)
It’s hard to believe now, so many years and worldly experiences later, that I once was young and innocent.
I actually believed those photos I saw in the travel magazines, National Geographic, books and on TV: photos of abandoned buildings standing tall, proud and intact.
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