*British Columbia Chronicles special bonus section for Members Only.*
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.
Read MoreCoincidental to my reading a great book, Last Man Out, the story of the Springhill Mine disaster of 1958, there was a news story in the Times Colonist about Indian construction workers trapped in a collapsed tunnel.
Their rescue with modern mining equipment took two weeks but all were saved and, it appears, were in good health and spirits.
Read More(Part 2)
As we’ve seen, the aged and decrepit steamship Clara Nevada appeared to be doomed from the moment she cleared her Seattle dock in February 1898. But, somehow, bound for the Klondike gold rush with passengers and freight, she managed to make it to Skagway.
A Seattle newspaper termed her safe but eventful arrival as nothing less than a miracle.
Read MoreOne of the challenges of researching and writing B.C. history on a regular basis isn’t—usually—finding quality content, but finding quality photos to support that content. 100’s of 1000’s of wonderful photos exist in various vaults (archives, libraries, historical societies, private collections, etc.) but tracking them down is quite time-consuming.
Fun for the most part, but time-consuming.
Read MorePart I
Honestly, folks, I don’t make this stuff up. I don’t have the imagination. Take this story, for example:
“The Clara Nevada is probably America’s coldest cold case file. It is also the largest robbery in American history, twice the size of the Brink’s Job, and was the largest mass murder in American history until the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995...”
Well, another year and another Christmas Chaos, the annual mid-November mega craft sale in the Cowichan Community Centre.
It must be almost 30 years that I’ve had a table with my books at Chaos. It’s a chance to show the corporate flag, so to speak, and to meet new and old readers.
Some of us have grown grey together!
Read MoreGold!
It’s one of the most powerful words in the English language, able to—literally—move mountains.
Read MoreWriting is, as I’m sure most people will accept, a solitary craft. I once used a lighthouse for a company logo and named my first publishing/printing firm, Solitaire Press.
The name said it all!
But, being solitary by nature, doesn’t necessarily mean one is non-, let alone, anti-social. Not a party animal, but hardly a hermit, either.
Read MoreConclusion
Today, a wrap-up of my tribute to the lost airmen of Pat Bay Airport during the Second World War.
As we’ve seen, no fewer than 179 young trainees from Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand were killed, 1940-1945, without ever getting overseas. Fifty-eight of them have graves in Saanich’s Royal Oak Burial Park, Section D. Others are interred in collective graves at the crash sites. Some have never been found.
Read MoreI can still recall the shock, followed by rage, all these years later.
The shock that a former soldier had died in a veteran’s hospital where he’d been laid up since the First World War. And the rage at the thought that he’d spent two-thirds of his lifetime, disabled and suffering in a hospital bed—far, far from the trenches, and long, long after Armistice.
It wasn’t right! It was so unfair!
Read MorePart 2
As we’ve seen, during the Second World War, Patricia Bay (today’s Victoria International) Airport was part of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan in which 1000’s of Canadian, British, Australian and New Zealand airmen were trained.
179 of Pat Bay’s young airmen never made it overseas.
Read MoreAnother Remembrance Day is upon us. It’s a day of great importance to me; more important, in fact, than any other day of the year.
Both my grandfathers came home disabled from the First World War; Great Uncle Jim didn’t come home at all.
Read MorePart 1
During the Second World War, Patricia Bay (today’s Victoria International) Airport was part of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan in which 1000’s of Canadian, British, Australian and New Zealand airmen were trained.
179 of those young airmen never made it overseas.
Read MoreBritish Columbia has long had statutes legislating the disturbance of Indigenous anthropological sites. On paper, anyway. I still remember when they realigned the Island Highway in the Fanny Bay area and contractors cut right through middens that were 30 and 40 feet deep.
The mix of artifacts, clam shells and gravel made good ballast for road construction.
Read MoreThe old store at the corner of Quadra and North Park Streets, for 80 years a Victoria landmark, is long gone, another victim of progress. But it wasn’t forgotten by its former owners who cherished memories of barley sugar sticks, hooped skirts, hand-blended teas–and of locked doors that slammed in the night when no mortal walked its darkened hallways.
Read MoreHave you ever studied faces in old photos and wonder whatever became of them?
I sure have, this photo in particular. These young boys were coal miners, doomed to work underground for the whole of their lives. Pulled from school to help put bread on the table for their families, they had no hope whatever of improving their lot. They were trapped, just as their fathers and grandfathers had been before them.
Read MoreThe study, revival and use of British Columbia’s various First Nations languages is steadily gaining ground today, along with the inevitable challenges posed by spelling and pronunciation.
So it was for the explorers, fur traders and Native tribes of old: how to converse effectively in a multitude of European and Indigenous languages.
Read MoreI frequently receive queries which I try to answer reasonably promptly.
But it isn’t always easy. If I have to dig into my files it can be a while as my days are programmed—and long.
Read MoreThree-quarters of a century later, she’s still there—a rusted, broken hulk on the exposed, rockbound shore of Hippa Island, Haida Gwaii.
Read MoreI’ve been researching, off and on, the lost airmen of Pat Bay for 20 years, a motivation for my third visit to the B.C. Aviation Museum, Sidney, last week. Then on to, for the first time, the new memorial on Mills Road, on the opposite side of Victoria Airport.
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