The Chronicles

Last week marked another workers’ memorial day when we honoured the 1000s of men and women who have been killed or injured on the job. During the past year, in BC alone, there were 138 workplace deaths.

In Nanaimo, the National Day of Mourning also commemorates the May 3, 1887 No. 1 Esplanade Mine disaster that killed 150 men in a single disaster.

News reports of both events coincided with my writing my newest book about the coal mines of the South Wellington area. In the course of research, I’d found myself checking the Department of Mines’ Annual Reports for 1959 and 1960.

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(Conclusion)

In last week’s BC Chronicles, banker David Doig and his Mountie escort successfully arrived in boomtown Dawson City with $1 million in cash. The young Scottish banker had been entrusted with opening Canada’s most northerly branch of the Bank of British North America.

This was at the height of the fabled Klondike gold rush.

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(Part 2)

Last week, banker David Doig and his Mountie escort evaded the notorious Soapy Smith’s gang in Skagway and made it over the dreaded Chilkoot Pass to Lake Lindemann, BC.

They were delivering more than $1 million in cash to open the most northerly branch of the Bank of British North America in Dawson City during the Klondike gold rush.

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(Part 1)

It’s hard to think of bankers as being colourful; I’ve never met one who was. 

But, fortunately for storytellers such as I, there’s always that exception to the rule. 

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“Been out of food for two months. For God's sake pick us up."

Whenever tragedy struck the west coast of Vancouver Island during the years immediately preceding the Second World War, it usually was a Ginger Coote Airways plane to the rescue. Sometimes, however, even its dauntless pilots couldn't help.

So it was for Vancouver trappers James H. Ryckman, 56, and Lloyd Coombs.

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Of the innumerable attempts at founding the perfect society which have been recorded in provincial history, probably the best known is Sointula, ‘Place of Harmony,’ the ill-fated Finnish colony on Malcolm Island near Port McNeill. Northwest coast Vancouver Island’s Cape Scott colony was a more pragmatic approach to achieving social and economic independence but it, too, failed, albeit for reasons other than internal discord.

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Almost a century has passed since the initials ‘J.N.T.’ last graced the pages of the Victoria Colonist. It was back in the winter of 1881 that James Nealon Thain, popular Victoria businessman and member of an illustrious pioneer family, was “struck by paralysis of the brain” and died in hospital the same day.

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(Conclusion)
For more than 30 years, respected civil engineer Robert Homfray kept his promise not to publish his account of a dangerous surveying expedition in search of a shortcut to the Cariboo in 1861.

Finally, in 1894, at the insistence of friends, he agreed to tell of his epic ‘winter journey of 1861’. That was when he and six others had suffered innumerable hardships and near-death during an attempt to survey a new, shorter route to the gold fields of the B.C Interior by way of Bute Inlet.

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(Part 1)
For more than 30 years, respected civil engineer Robert Homfray kept his promise not to publish his account of a dangerous surveying expedition to the Cariboo in 1861.

Finally, in 1894, at the insistence of friends, he agreed to tell of his epic ‘winter journey of 1861’. That was when he and six others had suffered innumerable hardships during an attempt to survey a new, shorter route to the gold fields of the B.C Interior by way of Bute Inlet.

Read More