There’s been something of a flap in Victoria this past week where contractors are excavating the site of the new Telus building at Humboldt and Douglas streets, once home of Kanaka Row.
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Prospector, packer and painted lady; merchant, gambler and thief; they all called rip-roaring Fort Yale home at the height of the Fraser River and Cariboo gold rushes.
Read MoreA lot’s happening on various historical fronts and, alas, I can’t pass the buck to guest columnist Bill Irvine this week, so here goes...
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Karma. It’s a curse, I tell you. Hard as it is for me to believe, it’s been almost 50 years since I wrote Ghost Town Trails of Vancouver Island and it’s still in print after several changes of format and cover, and a slight tweak of the title and byline.
Read MoreWell, it appears that summer has finally arrived—for awhile, anyway, if you go by our long, drawn-out wet, rinse-and-repeat spring weather.
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This is beginning to look scary. The April 28th headline of the Cowichan Valley Citizen was a stark reminder that time is running out for the E&N if it’s to be saved as a working railway and not be converted into a recreational trail.
Read MoreLet’s begin by congratulating Blake MacKenzie for his fine job of creating and nurturing Gold Trails and Ghost Towns, a Facebook page that just passed the 70,000-member mark.
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More than a century after he was immortalized in bronze, his honorary title is to be erased in the name of Reconciliation.
Read MoreFurther to my comments last week re: the recycling of building materials, in particular first-growth fir lumber, via controlled demolition rather than by pulverizing it with machines and adding it to the landfills…
Read MoreSome months ago, a shopper at Walmart asked me if I knew anything about the “piano” in the bush along the Cowichan Valley Trail. Was it the one, he asked, I’d once mentioned in a Citizen column?
Read MoreIt’s not often that I read the news these days and have a truly positive reaction, but today’s front page of the Times Colonist is a double-header.
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In February, the Royal British Columbia Museum acquired an 1883 oil painting of the entrance to Victoria Harbour by American artist, lithographer and cartographer Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918).
Read MoreThere’s lots happening so let’s start with the most time-sensitive…
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Even in death a ship does not sleep soundly. Timbers creak in eerie symphony with wind and wave, nesting pigeons converse in dark corners, ghostly shadows walk decks and passageways where, once, seamen ran to their stations in weather fair and foul...
Read MoreIf someone were to challenge me today with that old canard, “History is dull,” I’d whip out this recent article from the Times Colonist.
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The old made way for the new in October 2005 when much of what was left of Paldi, once home to one of the largest Sikh communities in Canada, went up in flames.
Read MoreRecently, the Chronicles noted that B.C.’s fifth oldest municipality revised its crest to include the Cowichan Valley’s original inhabitants and this theme of Reconciliation will be integral to 2023 anniversary events.
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(Conclusion)
So: who dun it? Readers may have drawn some conclusions of their own from the few facts ascertained by Victoria police and private parties acting unofficially as detectives in the fatal shooting of the young clerk, October 28, 1885.
If anyone really believes that history is about the past, the long ago, they’re not keeping up with current news.
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(Part 1)
Police surmised that his attackers ‘dogged’ him for hours, awaiting their chance.