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It should go without saying that we live in a world of constant change.
One of those changes is profound, even in a world besieged by pandemic.
I’m referring to the recent tsunami wave of consciousness of our colonial past. For Americans, it’s acknowledging a groundswell of resentment for more than two centuries of mistreatment of indigenous and black people. Even the Confederate flag, revered by millions, has come into disrepute.
On the 22nd day of December, 1860, nearly forty-four years ago, I sat in the editorial rooms of the Colonist office on Wharf Street preparing a leading article. Mr. DeCosmos, the editor and owner, had contracted a severe cold and was confined to his room at Wilcox’s Royal Hotel, so the entire work of writing up the paper for that issue devolved upon me.
Read MoreOur own west coast claim to a momentous maritime tragedy, the 1945 explosion of the steamship S.S. Greenhill Park in Vancouver Harbour in March 1945. 2020, of course, marks that tragedy’s 75th anniversary.
Read MoreAt the time—Oct. 1, 1951—the crash of a Queen Charlotte Airlines Canso on Nanaimo’s Mount Benson was the worst aviation accident in British Columbia history. It’s now the 18th which shows you how far we’ve come in 70 years.
Although I’ve always been fascinated by old aircraft and plane wrecks are a natural extension of that interest, I’ve only managed to get to a few over the years. The one on Mount Benson, six miles west of Nanaimo, is the one that has intrigued me most of all. I first heard of it as a kid and was reminded of it in the mid-1970s as I came out of a north Nanaimo department store and saw the sun glinting on something on the southeast face of Mount Benson.
“Reporter packed a heater on the police beat,” is the sensational headline of one newspaper article about the legendary British Columbia journalist B.A. ‘Pinky’ McKelvie.
Other than the gang shootings in recent years, which seem to have died down now, it’s almost beyond our comprehension in this day and age that a newspaper reporter who covered the crime beat in Vancouver a century ago would pack iron.
We have, over the past several weeks, been reading Charles Herbert Dickie’s memoir, Out of the Past, that related his adventures as a
● Sheriff in Michigan
● Labourer and hobo in California
● Fireman and conductor on the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway, Victoria
● Hotelier in ‘Duncans Station’ and successful investor in Cowichan’s Mount Sicker copper mining boom
● Disenchanted Member of the Legislature for a single session
● Disappointed prospector in northwestern British Columbia
● World traveller
● And, finally, for three terms, Member of Parliament.
That’s quite a resume for any one man!
Read More
We’ve been following Charles Herbert Dickie’s memoir Out of the Past.
Last week we accompanied him on his almost round-the-world voyage as he recharged his mental battery after the stress of seeing the money he’d made from the sale of his shares in the Tyee copper mine on Mount Sicker all but disappear in unsuccessful mining ventures in the Stewart River area of northwestern British Columbia.
Ever the optimist, although he lost his money and changed careers, he never did lose the mining bug.
(Stressed and worn out by his unsuccessful mining explorations in B.C.’s northwest, Charles Dickie embarks upon a long sea voyage to recuperate. Readers, please note: Dickie was a man of his times and not above disparaging other races and ethnicities. I am letting him speak for himself at the risk of offending some Chronicles readers.—TWP.)
Read MoreLast week Charles Dickie recounted his hilarious days as the
co-host of the rough and ready Alderlea Hotel, in what was then known as Duncan’s Station.
(Ah, the good old days, when men were men, the booze, sometimes watered, flowed free, the steaks were tough as leather and fist fights and crude practical jokes were the order of the day.)
For most readers of the Chronicles this instalment of Charles Dickie’s colourful memoir will be much closer to home. After his all his wanderings and odd jobs in Michigan, California and Victoria, he arrives in the Cowichan Valley.
He becomes partners in managing Duncan’s first hotel, the ‘Miners’ and Loggers’” Alderlea where life was anything but dull. Fortuitously, his arrival coincided with the great copper strike on Mount Sicker, a short-lived boom that made fortunes for a few, set Duncan on the map and transformed Dickie’s career from that of an itinerant labourer to mining entrepreneur and politician...
Read MoreAs I noted last week, you’re not likely to find Charles Herbert Dickie’s memoir, Out of the Past, “by an M.P.,” in a used book store—or even online.
Dedicated to the memory of carefree friends, it’s small (128 pages) and just 20,000 words in length.
But make no mistake: It’s a great read and of particular interest to students of Cowichan Valley and British Columbia mining history.
You’re not likely to find Charles Herbert Dickie’s memoir, Out of the Past, “by an M.P.,” in a used book store—or even online.
Dedicated to the memory of carefree friends, it measures 3.5 inches by five, and 128 pages, it’s just 20,000 words in length, more comparable to an e-book than to a pocket book, and it’s stapled rather than bound. All in all, it’s pretty small and likely was printed on the cheap.
But make no mistake: It’s a great read and of particular interest to students of Cowichan Valley and British Columbia mining history.
Cowichan’s legendary Tzouhalem is in the news again.
Not the Quamichan war chief himself—he’s been dead for well over a century—but the fact that he's going to be the subject of a movie.
Reporter Robert Barron recently reported in the Cowichan Valley Citizen that documentary filmmaker Harold C. Joe, a member of Cowichan Tribes, and a film crew are making a television documentary that will “examine the near-mythic figure of Chief Tzouhalem through interviews and creative re-enactments".
The operative word here is “creative” as the only existing written records that refer to Tzouhalem are the hand-me-downs of non-Indigenous (i.e. white) contemporaries (some of them in positions of authority and therefore adversarial).
This special April 1955 issue of The Buzzer, entitled Rails-to-Rubber, “cordially invited” the public to “take a last ride FREE” aboard Vancouver’s street cars which were about to be retired.
This week I share this Buzzer with Chronicles readers who will, I’m sure, find the photos of this now long-gone mode of public transportation as fascinating as I have. Anyone who has ridden a bus lately will realize how far we’ve come in 65 years!
When Hayes Forest Services Ltd., an industry stalwart and one of the biggest contract logging companies on Vancouver Island, shut down in 2008, it ended the latest chapter in a forestry family tradition that went back three generations and left its hallmark on both logging and trucking.
Coincidentally, a showing of ‘antique’ logging trucks—not all of them really that old but most of them really, really big boys’ toys—at the Cowichan Exhibition grounds had included several Hayes logging trucks.
Long before there was an E&N Railway or the Island Highway over the Malahat, Maple and Cowichan Bays served as the gateways to the Cowichan Valley. Hence Maple Bay was a likely site for a Methodist church. Previously, Methodists had shared the Anglican chapel at Somenos, their minister attending from Victoria. In 1868 they held the first of three annual outdoor meetings at the site of today’s Maple Bay Inn. The Saanich-milled lumber from the ‘tents’ used for those occasions was recycled the following year in construction of a modest log church on 100 acres pre-empted by the Rev. E. White.
Read MoreI had no intention of following last week’s post on the Westwell’s tragedy with another tale of violent death by human hand.
And I wouldn’t want last week’s tale of a family tragedy brought on by mental illness to be equated with this week’s story—which is nothing less than a home-grown replay of the most infamous serial killer of all time, Jack the Ripper.
No, I must lay the blame on the ‘Visual Storytellers,’ an offshoot of the popular online nostalgic Facebook photo gallery, “You Know You’re From Duncan...” and their recent post about, of all sinister things, Duncan’s Holmes Creek.
The difference in journalistic style between a big city daily and a small town weekly newspaper couldn’t have been more different—even extreme.
The headline for the Mar. 26, 1949 edition of the Victoria Daily Colonist was wall-to-wall and set in type one and a-half inches high.
It’s the sort of headline that’s usually reserved for such extraordinary news events as wars, toppling governments, outrageous scandals and disasters.
Somewhere in the dense rain forests of the Pacific Northwest, particularly British Columbia, is North America’s version of the Abominable Snowman.
This mysterious creature is known throughout California, Oregon and Washington as Bigfoot or Mr. Bigfoot; in B.C., he’s Sasquatch although some First Nations tribes have christened him individually.
Described as being extremely shy and peace-loving, this mammal is said to be “related to both homo sapiens (man) and the Himalayan yeti (Abominable Snowman)”. Supposedly ranging, when fully grown, from eight to 18 feet in height, and weighing from 500 to 1200 pounds, the hairy vegetarian is one of the most persistent and tantalizing legends of the West Coast.
I’ve already told you how I became acquainted with right-in-my-own-backyard history thanks to neighbouring Miss Fawcett’s allowing me to read—not borrow—her father’s rare book, Some Reminiscences of Old Victoria.
Even then, when I was just a young teen, that book was highly collectible and it was a long time before I acquired a copy for myself from an antiquarian bookseller for what was, to me, an extortionate price.
