*British Columbia Chronicles special bonus section for Members Only.*
In February, Chronicles readers met guest columnist Tom W. Parkin (TW2 here at the BCCs.ca) who wrote about hiking a stretch of the beleaguered E&N Railway.
I’m pleased to say that he’s back this week with a photo feature on the little-known B.C. ghost town of Donald, a construction camp during the building of the CPR.
Read MoreIn the year and a-half since his arrival in Victoria, George Tomline Gordon had been appointed treasurer for the Crown Colony of Vancouver Island, elected the member for Esquimalt in the Legislative Assembly, and elected commanding officer of the No. 1 Company, Vancouver Island Volunteer Rifle Corps. He had a beautiful wife, a large, loving family and a fine farm.
Read MoreOfficially, the Second World War ended with Japan’s surrender, 80 years ago. In at least one sense, however, the war goes on.
Although no hostile action was fought on Canadian, let alone British Columbia soil, we, too, have a history of live ordnance—so-called ‘friendly fire’—turning up, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places; several times, it has killed.
Read MoreIf there is a single name that is synonymous with lost treasure in British Columbia that would have to be Neville Langrell (Bill) Barlee, school teacher, politician, entrepreneur, environmentalist, historian, writer, publisher, prospector and treasure hunter extraordinaire.
By all appearances, he scored at almost everything he did or touched.
Read MoreAs told in last week’s Chronicles, Morris Moss was as colourful an adventurer as they come. Fur trader, mining speculator and customs officer, he survived shipwreck, at least one murder attempt, chased bootleggers, became embroiled in the aftermath of the Chilcotin War, was caught up in the Pelagic Sealing controversy, then— disappeared.
Read MoreWe don’t cherish our heroes in Canada.
Oh, briefly perhaps, at the moment of their celebrity, but as the years pass so do they—into the mists of time and forgetfulness.
I can’t offer a better example than Morris Moss who once was described as “one of the most colourful figures this coast has ever seen”.
Morris who?
Read MoreFeuding Governors: The Grand Inquisitor versus the Monopolist.
Recent notice of this talk by acclaimed historian Barry Gough as one of the Marion Cumming Lecture Series hosted by the Oak Bay Heritage Foundation, reminded me yet another great story within a great story.
In this case, how the northern Deserter Islands near Port Hardy got their name.
Read MoreInterest in the Bridge River Valley’s mineral potential dates all the way back to 1865 when a government-sponsored mining exploration party reported having found gold in “that part of the country lying between the Chilcoaten and Bridge Rivers,” specifically on Cadwallader Creek on the South Fork of the Bridge River.
Read MoreConclusion
While serving yet another sentence for bootlegging, John was stricken with paralysis from the waist down and taken to the hospital in a hand cart. There, he was again examined to ensure that he wasn't faking. Upon being satisfied that he was indeed paralyzed (a test involving needle pricks, no doubt), hospital staff gave him every attention.
Part 1
So who is Victoria's most outstanding character?
Such a distinction might seem to be a difficult one to assign, given the many weird and wonderful individuals who’ve walked our Capital’s streets during the past 160-plus years. But there is one man who stands head and shoulders above all the others.
Without doubt, the most fabulous character ever to call Victoria home port is John Butts. Or John Charles Butts, ‘town cryer to her Britannic Majesty,” as this rogue preferred to call himself. A newspaper of the day expressed the view of many citizens when it declared John to be “a greater scourge than cholera or smallpox.”
Read MoreToo late, as I admitted last week, did I realize I had the perfect play on the popular Spaghetti western movie title, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
With a difference—women.
By too late, I meant the correct sequence: I’d already led with Belle Castle, The Bad (in the sense that she was a ‘fallen’ woman who redeemed herself too late for love). making Nellie Cashman, The Good, the second instalment by default.
But now we’re back on track with Agnes, The Ugly.
Read MoreThis week, it’s the turn of The Good - The Miner’s Angel whose name was synonymous with warmth and generosity in every mining camp from Mexico to Alaska.
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Nine years ago, Victoria's old Cemetery Society established a special Nelly Cashman Fund to raise money for a centennial stone to be placed on her grave in Ross Bay Cemetery. “Nellie Cashman deserves our recognition,” the Society’s Patrick Perry Lydon and Donna Chaytor told the Times Colonist.
Read MoreHer real name and where she came from, no one knew. But that she’d been beautiful and a lady, all were agreed. Upon her death in a lonely B.C. mining camp, forsaken by all but the man who loved her—and the rose tree she’d nurtured and cherished with a mother’s devotion—her secret went with her to the little cemetery on the hillside.
Today, even her grave site is unknown and the mystery of Belle Castle, as she called herself, remains safe with the ages.
Read MoreI really wanted to begin the new year with more of an upbeat story. But...
I also didn’t want to do another shipwreck so soon after the S.S. M.G. Zalinski, either. But...
Read MoreIt should come as no surprise that the yuletide spirit has influenced our mapmakers. In British Columbia it can be found, in variations, at least 18 times.
Read MoreMore than three-quarters of a century after she sank in B.C.’s remote Grenville Channel, an American army transport is back in the news.
Oil is leaking from the wreck of the S.S. Brigadier General M.G. Zalinski, posing an immediate environmental threat that must be dealt with, according to the Canadian Coast Guard. This, despite the fact that 44,000 litres of heavy oil and 319,000 litres of oily water were extracted from the wreck nine years ago.
Read MoreFrom the man who brought us those memorable eccentrics, Messrs. David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Mr. Pickwick and Company—there came to Victoria in 1868 the slight figure, in flesh and in fact, of one Acting Lieut. Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens, RN.
Read MoreConclusion
It’s one of the Cariboo’s greatest mysteries—whatever became of the Halden family, Arthur, Adah and Stanley?
Part 2
As we’ve seen, in October 1920, Arthur, Adah and Stanley Halden appeared to have abandoned their Quesnel farm and left a number of outstanding debts around town. The biggest one, all of $1250, a large sum at that time, was a promissory note made out to their hired hand, David Arthur Clark. It was Clark who told those who asked that the Haldens had left for Spokane to attend Arthur’s brother’s funeral, but he’d had no word from them since.
