*British Columbia Chronicles special bonus section for Members Only.*
Fame can be a fleeting thing—today’s “celebrity,” tomorrow’s nonentity. It can get worse than that—yesterday’s hero, today’s heel!
Even though he has a British Columbia mountain named for him, if you google Andrew Onderdonk, he gets little mention beyond the first two listings of several pages of other Onderdonks which include members of his own family, and doctors and lawyers, etc.
Read MoreIn 50 years before the bench, from prime minister's drawing room to frontier jail cell, he never turned down a case. He was a legend in his own lifetime, celebrated from the Maritimes to the Klondike as the greatest criminal lawyer of his age: Stewart William Henderson.
His death, aged 81, made the front page of the New York Times.
Read More“A man out west is a man, and let him be the poorest cowboy he will assert his right of perfect equality with the best...”
Author, sportsman, dreamer. Such was William Adolph Baillie-Grohman.
Read MoreWhile at Ross Bay Cemetery recently, I checked out a subject long of interest to me: Billy Barker, the namesake for Cariboo’s Barkerville.
I had to smile—Billy’s an RBC ‘star,’ having an end-of-the-row marker denoting his final resting place. Better yet, he has a handsome and expensive retro bronze marker giving a brief biography. What a far cry from the time of his death in Victoria’s Old Men’s Home for indigents.
Read MoreLast Sunday marked the 128th anniversary of the worst streetcar accident in North American history—the collapse of Victoria’s Point Ellice bridge from the weight of a trolley carrying more than twice its legal limit of holidayers. Within minutes, 55 people were dead, 27 injured.
Read MoreShe made naval history—only to die on a Vancouver Island beach.
But she hasn’t been forgotten.
Read MoreDuring a recent tour of Victoria’s beautiful Ross Bay Cemetery, Old Cemeteries Society guide John Adams pointed out the headstone for onetime U.S. Consul Allen Francis.
Coincidentally, in his latest bestselling book, Untold Stories of Old British Columbia, friend and fellow historian Dan Marshall pays tribute to a mutual hero of ours, David Williams Higgins, whom I’ve introduced to Chronicles readers on several occasions.
There’s a strong and fascinating connection between Francis and Higgins.
Read MoreOvernight, 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.
Read MoreProbably few of the 1000s of commercial and pleasure craft annually plying British Columbia waters have much fear of navigating Seymour Narrows.
True, this 2500-foot-channel between Vancouver, Maud and Quadra islands is still hazardous.
But, within living memory, this was the dreaded lair of the worst marine hazard of the entire West Coast—Ripple Rock.
Read MoreVancouver Island was in a state of emergency, 156 years ago.
While members of the Volunteer Rifle Corps and special constables patrolled Victoria streets, British men-of-war stood at the alert in Esquimalt Harbour and cruised Juan de Fuca Strait.
This is the little-known chapter of Vancouver Island's exciting history when it was feared to be the intended invasion target of the outlawed Irish nationalist society, the Fenian Brotherhood.
Read MoreIn last week’s Chronicle, based upon my first interview as an aspiring young journalist, the late Charles Taylor recounted some of the Alberni Valley’s colourful, often tragic history.
This week, we cut out the middleman and go straight to the horse’s mouth, so to speak...
Read MoreTragedy was an inevitable part of pioneer life and the Alberni Valley had its share.
The late Charles Taylor, introduced in last week’s Chronicles, was the first person I ever interviewed—initially at the urging of my employer, the Victoria Colonist, then, when he and I became unlikely friends, by choice.
Read MoreEveryone has to start somewhere, to state the obvious.
In my case it was in the lowly capacity of copyboy with The Daily Colonist before its merger with the Victoria Daily Times—two years of my doing everything and anything but writing, at least on company time.
Any writing I did was on my own dime.
Read MoreConclusion
As we’ve seen, to Joseph Camille Claus of Nanoose Bay goes the dubious honour of committing “the first cold-blooded premeditated murder...in the frozen north,” in this case the Stikine River country.
Read MorePart 2
As we’ve seen, to Joseph Camille Claus goes the dubious honour of committing “the first cold-blooded premeditated murder...in the frozen north”.
According to the Victoria Colonist, anyway. Claus, it should be noted, had yet to face trial let alone be convicted by a jury of his peers.
Read MorePart 1
If it seems to be a long way from remote northwestern British Columbia’s Stikine River and the Yukon-Alaska border to Nanaimo, mid-Vancouver Island, it is.
But no greater than the fabled long arm of the law, as was amply shown in June 1898 when 12 good citizens took their places in the jury box in a Nanaimo courtroom.
Read MoreLast 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.
Read MoreCommunities—villages, towns, sometimes even cities—can come and go. Then we call them ghost towns.
British Columbia has had its share—100s of them, in fact. That said, hands up Chronicles readers who can name, say, six of them. Two? One?
Of the province’s many lost communities, two have achieved legendary even mythic status: Phoenix, which, unlike its namesake, never did rise from the ashes, and Wahlachin.
Read MoreWhere are they now, those wonderful patent medicines that promised to relieve every ailment, human and otherwise, from “female complaints” to fallen arches and falling hair?
Alas, they’ve gone, gone the way of the old-fashioned drugstore and the dinosaur. Victims, for the most part, of advances in medicine and tightened drug laws, they’re now part of our vanished heritage.
Read MoreAs a lifelong practitioner of the written word, it galls me to have to admit the truth of that old expression, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
But, as that more modern saying goes, “It is what it is.”
Read More
