Innholdsfortegnelse for 52.2 | Summer 2019 i British Columbia History

A male driver in a flatbed truck loaded with oversized logs threatens all in his path, a sensation British-Canadian artist Sybil Andrews actually experienced on the Vancouver Island highway in 1952. “We met the great load coming up toward us, up the steep hill into Campbell River,” Sybil later wrote. “We got out of the way in our little Mini until it was safely past before we went down the hill.”1 Her linocut print, Hauling, inspired by the highway scene, evokes the heyday of BC’s logging industry. Many of Sybil’s eighty-seven linocuts have been exhibited internationally beginning in the 1930s, their value escalating dramatically over time. When Sybil died in 1992, aged ninety-four, she also left behind charcoal sketches, woodcuts, watercolours, oils, and a tapestry. This talented artist offers a…

No matter how many times I drive the Fraser Canyon, by the time I reach the first tunnel at Yale, I’m gobsmacked. Boiling waters, sheer granitic skyscrapers, and so much history are compressed into this craggy corridor. The canyon has supported life for Indigenous peoples at villages and spectacular fishing sites since time immemorial. Nlaka’pamux, Stó:lō, Stl’atl’imx, and others sought guardian spirits in its sacred places. Later came explorers, fur traders, and the miners who chased the “golden butterfly” from Hill’s Bar to Boston Bar and beyond with supplies carried on a gravity-defying Cariboo Wagon Road. Next came the Canadian Pacific Railway, forging steel and political links to Canada. Some 17,000 Chinese labourers carved out roadbeds and tunnels at half the pay of a white labourer, while many hundreds died…

Visitors to the charming Bear’s Paw Café in Wells, BC, population about 200, might wonder why there’s an enormous Gurney meat scale hanging behind the cash register. It’s an intimidating-looking bar of thick metal equipped with sharp hooks. The yellow label affixed to the bar of the scale reads “Sunnyside Meat Market—Original Scale—1939.”1 The building that now houses the rustic café was once home to the Sunnyside Meat Market, opened in 1938 by Lionel North — formerly of Chilliwack, BC, where he’d worked for the Jersey Dairy company.2 North’s brother Eric found work at the Cariboo Gold Quartz Mine in Wells. There, he worked underground in the dark tunnels that hard rock (or lode) miners drilled and blasted in order to harvest gold ore by the tonne. Mining was relatively…

Through the late 1850s, readers of the Honolulu Advertiser would notice large, front-page ads by future Coquitlam River settler Stephen Atkins selling several thousand acres of volcano-side, farm-quality real estate to pioneer settlers. The world-travelling Stephen Hastings Atkins, described as “a fine old Irish gentleman, who [was] driven away by the Encumbered Estates Act,” then emigrated with his family to Tazmania and Australia to live, farm, and sell land. In 1858, Atkins purchased lands near the Mauna Loa volcano, east of Kealakekua Hawaii, formerly “belonging to the Chiefess Keohokalole.” Then, he decided to try his luck selling land in colonial British Columbia. The Atkins family arrived in Victoria British Columbia, from Hawaii, in December 1859. They continued on to colonial New Westminster, where Stephen Atkins, or “Atkiso” as the Coast…

Founded in 1931 as the Vancouver Art Gallery Association, the Gallery is a private, non-profit membership-based society that will celebrate its eighty-eigth anniversary on October 5, 2019. The founders’ committee, led by local businessman Henry Athelstan Stone (1861-1943), envisioned that the Gallery “will not only prove to be the centre of enjoyment of the permanent collection, but a home for friendly intercourse, discussion and lectures on art matters; for the exhibition of travelling collections; for student study and art appreciation by the young.”1 Although the original Art Deco building at 1145 Georgia Street is now long gone, the memory of that early history lives on in the Vancouver Art Gallery Archives, located in the former provincial courthouse buildings in the heart of downtown Vancouver. Despite the Gallery’s position as Vancouver’s…

Mennonites, Hutterites, and Doukhobors who emigrated to Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries faced challenges with federal and provincial laws that sometimes conflicted with their desire to practice communal living, educate their children in their own schools, and remain true to their nonviolent beliefs by avoiding military service. Mennonites and Hutterites, with origins in Switzerland and Italy at the time of the Protestant Reformation in the early 1500s, and Doukhobors, originating in Russia about 1700, have much in common, including pacificism, a strong belief in the Bible, preference for communal living (Mennonites less so than the other two groups) and a long history of persecution that forced them to migrate many times. Russian Connection Another commonality is their long residence in Russia, a country many families from these three…

Born in Wales in about 1830, James “Jemmy” or “Jimmy” Jones was “one of British Columbia’s most noted characters whose celebrity extended down to Washington, San Francisco, and Mexico.”1 He left Wales at an early age to search for his father who he located working in a coal mine in Pennsylvania. His adventurous spirit led him overland to Salt Lake with a group of Mormons. From there he went to California in 1849, part of their great gold rush. After a few years he ended up at Bellingham working in a coal mine. Eventually he earned enough money to purchase his first vessel, the schooner Emily Parker.2 With this vessel he entered the trading business between Puget Sound and Vancouver Island. This venture was short lived. In 1856 this schooner…

A line of apple trees on the grassy corner of 64th Avenue and 181A Street — recently named Henry Houston Scott Park — is all that’s left on the land to mark the life and work of a black pioneer family in Surrey. That the story came forward nearly fifty years after the death of the final Scott family member is testament to the work of the Surrey Historical Society (SHS) and the research of many people, notably Jim Foulkes. Born in Fannin County, Texas in 1854, Henry Scott was born in an era in which slaves made up nearly one-third of the population of the state. He was still a child when President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, and barely a teen when slavery was abolished statewide…