Ozzie Hutchings, machinist by trade, historian and clock repairman by choice, was a born storyteller as you’ll see in this week’s Chronicles with his blood chilling story…
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I recently reported that a new book has been released across the line in Washington. Byron Riblet: Forgotten Engineering Genius by Ty A. Brown is the second book written in recent years of the man
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Romantic though it may seem to some today, Victoria’s famous sealing industry was a brutal business.
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Based primarily on Carlton Stone’s Hillcrest: A History of Vancouver Island’s Hillcrest Lumber Company by Duncan author/historian Ian MacInnes. This is the conclusion of two parts.
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Even today, 72 years after his death, Carlton Stone is a legend in the Cowichan Valley.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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?
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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).
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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...
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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.
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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.
(Part 1)
Police surmised that his attackers ‘dogged’ him for hours, awaiting their chance.
“Have you hiked the old Mount Sicker Railway grade?”
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Google the term ‘hell ship’ and you’ll find that it has come to be applied to the Japanese transport of American and Allied prisoners-of-war for slave labour in the home islands during the last two years of the Second World War.
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Can you even imagine downtown Duncan without its iconic City Hall?
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All these years later, I can see and hear him now. The late Jack Fleetwood, the man with the photographic memory, the man fellow local historians regarded as the Oracle of the Cowichan Valley, was addressing a small gathering of the Shawnigan Lake Historical Society.
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We’re following the incredible story of one of the most colourful mariners ever to sail out of Victoria. Capt. Jemmy Jones has gone down in history as, of all things, a pirate.
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