The Chronicles

I’m taking this long to tell the story of George Cruickshank being charged with stealing $5000 in American gold pieces from the safe of the bank where he was employed as accountant because of the story’s curious twists.

It wasn’t as if George Cruickshank was the first citizen or colonial administrator to be charged with dipping into the till in those early years of Vancouver Island as a crown colony.

Victoria’s famous Dallas Road waterfront has always been a ‘high rent district’. It wasn’t necessarily the houses that made these properties so expensive as most of them, 50 years ago, were older, some of them pretty modest if you went by appearances. It was that mantra of real estate, location, location, location (if you focused on the sweeping views of Juan de Fuca Strait and the Olympic Mountains and ignored the Ogden Point lumber wharves). Since then cruise ships (pre-pandemic) have taken the place of lumber piles, freighters and a grain elevator, and succeeding years and upgrading have made Dallas Road more popular and ever more expensive.

Many of you will know that the copper mining activity on Mount Sicker at the turn of the last century has intrigued me from even before I moved to the Cowichan Valley. I’ve since written about it in newspaper articles, columns and even a book, Riches to Ruin: The Boom to Bust Saga of Vancouver Island’s Greatest Copper Mine, from which much of today’s story is taken. To tell the incredible story of Mount Sicker in as few words as possible (my 2007 book is 300 pages)!

As I’ve said so many times before, history just keeps on coming.

Everywhere I go, every time I open my mail, every time I read the paper, there’s something ‘old’ in the news. So often lately that they’re ganging up on me. So, next week I open my mail bag and my clippings and email files and share with you some of these news stories whose roots are firmly in the past.
Some of them may surprise you. I promise they will entertain you.
That’s this week in the Chronicles.

It took well over a century but the hardy Chinese miners who helped to carve a province from wilderness enjoyed the last laugh.

Today, decades later, thousands of recreationists throughout British Columbia are participating in a modern-day boom in their eager search for that once derided ‘green gold,’ jade.

Today’s prospector are called rockhounds but the name of the game is the same—the thrill of the hunt and the pride of achievement that comes from transforming a piece of stone into a beautiful gem.

For years I’ve been a devoted fan of garage sales, flea markets and thrift stores, always on the lookout for the useful, the exotic and the unique—as I define the terms.

One of my more outstanding treasures turned up in a community 'free store' on Gabriola Island years ago. It’s a framed colour photo of a church memorial window. Not in itself a real turn-on for me.

But that changed when I read the penned caption. It identified the window as a memorial for Michael F.A.Ney, RCN. RCN, of course, stands for Royal Canadian Navy.

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.

Our 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.

“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.