Innholdsfortegnelse for 56.2 Summer 2023 i British Columbia History

A chance donation of an unwanted garden ornament that “looked like it had some thing to do with railroads” turned out to be a rare velocipede in dilapidated condition which, when fully restored by Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society (FVHRS) director and master woodworker Harry Taylor became one of the most popular ride attractions we have. This odd-looking machine, our smallest piece of rolling stock, is a three-wheeled, hand-powered vehicle that was used for track inspection at a time before there were internal combustion engines to drive a small speeder. In those early days, the distance between stations or service points was only eight miles; the velocipede was easy for one person to operate as well as to lift off and on the track. Originally brought in by FVHRS volunteer…

William A. White, B.A. (University of Victoria), is a Cultural Historian, traditionally trained Snuneymuxw Elder, and a cultural teacher. He recently weighed in at the public engagement session in Nanaimo for the Royal British Columbia Museum (RBCM), a process designed to gather input from across BC to plan the museum’s future. The representation of Coast Salish People in this provincial institution has been on his mind for many years—since the opening of the First Peoples galleries, on January 18, 1977. Since then, millions of people have visited this “world-class” facility, and hundreds of thousands of students have learned about Indigenous Peoples through its displays. White worries about the ongoing and legacy impacts of their teachings about Coast Salish People in terms of their relative worth as Indigenous People on the…

No, not that Cariboo. In the mid-1890S there was a brief placer gold rush on Cariboo Creek, which emptied into the Columbia River close to Burton, not far from Nakusp, in West Kootenay. The silver riches of West Kootenay were vast, but silver did not have the same allure as gold. There had been scattered placer gold excitement in the years leading up to the Cariboo Creek rush, for example, on Hall Creek southwest of Kootenay Lake and on Forty-Nine Creek on Kootenay Lake. Forty-Nine Creek yielded a decent amount of gold, but most of the other strikes did not pan out. It was hoped that Cariboo Creek, the newest Kootenay “El Dorado,” would prove more productive. The Sinixt First Nation had roamed the lands around Cariboo Creek in the…

It’s one of the most traumatic events in BC’s recent history: the instant destruction of an entire village. June 30, 2023, marks two years since a wildfire tore through the village of Lytton, killed two people, and consumed 90 pecent of the community. Hundreds of people fled for their lives; homes, businesses, and village infrastructure (roads, hydro, and water systems) were destroyed. Lytton essentially vanished. Others living in adjacent areas who relied on the village for health care, groceries, and other services were forced to travel much further afield. Many are still scattered across BC, living in motels, or staying with relatives. It has been two years of frustration for residents waiting to rebuild homes and lives. They’ve faced multiple delays: debris removal, remediation of soils, and navigating multiple agencies…

Just in: Burnaby Village Museum Truths Not Often Told: Being South Asian in Burnaby is a new exhibit at the Burnaby Village Museum highlighting the stories of Burnaby’s South Asian Canadian communities as they migrated to Burnaby in the early 1900s to find jobs, experienced restrictive policies, and worked together to build community supports The exhibit evolved from a multi-year research project to record and present the diverse experiences of Burnaby’s South Asian Canadian communities and features recorded poetry and plays, family photographs, cultural belongings, and the commissioned art by renowned South Asian visual artist Jag Nagra. Truths Not Often Told was produced in close consultation with the Museum’s South Asian Advisory Committee and curated by Burnaby Village Museum’s curator Jane Lemke and Simon Fraser University visiting faculty Dr. Anushay Malik…

As a cultural leader and interpreter from the Snuneymuxw First Nation, I work on Saysutshun Island (Newcastle Island) and Gabriola Island, both accessed by ferry from Nanaimo. I am a cedar weaver and copper weaver, and I work in the community teaching youth about awareness of Snuneymuxw culture and the Coast Salish region. Hands-on learning in my workshops gives youth an opportunity to work with and to feel cedar bark while they hear stories and teachings about cedar. Stiil'nep (Departure Bay) and Te'tuxwtun (Mount Benson) Many visitors come to Nanaimo via BC Ferries to Stiil’nep (Departure Bay), our largest village site. Stiil’nep means water runs deep. One row of houses was often considered a village, but in Stiil’nep, the village was so large there were three rows of houses, some-thing…

Sointula is synonymous with utopias in British Columbia. The future commune’s charismatic leader, Matti Kurikka, was invited to Vancouver Island by a group of “culturally and politically active” Finns, including Matti Halminen, who worked in the Extension coal mines near Nanaimo.1 The miners had read Kurikka’s writings and hoped he could form a self-sustaining Finnish farming colony based on equality for men and women, fair treatment of workers, equal distribution of wealth, and communal property. Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company In 1900, the miners paid for Kurikka’s passage to Vancouver Island and began fundraising and recruiting settlers for the colony.2 Matti Kurikka became the president of the Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company, which leased land from the provincial government in Kwakwaka’wakw territory on Malcolm Island, off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island.…

James “Jimmy” Longmore Detweiler had criss-crossed North America since the dawn of the twentieth century, chasing opportunities for adventure and fortune. His August 1919 homecoming to Vancouver’s Coal Harbour was shrewdly calculated. Dreams of an impending, unsurpassable golden (liquid) opportunity-rum-running-circulated in the salted air of this floating village and would soon be taken to sea. More whisky a-go-go, than rum-running, the business involved smuggling alcohol by ship to the United States, into a quenchless, black market.1 That demand was ignited by the US Congress’s enactment of the National Prohibition (Volstead) Act, on January 17, 1920.2 Like trying to stop a torrent with a rake, wife Hannah could only watch as Jimmy hit the water running. Lucrative, exhilarating, secretive, seductive, rum-running became Jimmy’s mistress. Not a clandestine affair: Hannah knew things,…

RESEARCHER-IN-RESIDENCE Terry has accepted BC History’s invitation to sit as Researcher-in-Residence throughout 2023 as he continues to learn about the story of his great-grandmother and the personal legacies of colonial and federal policies. This is the second of four parts. Who was she? Who was she to me? Few people in history are considered representative of their culture, yet my great-grandmother Mejade’sse is one such individual. She was born between 1871 and 1873, of Kaska Dena-TahltanTlingit ancestry. Personal correspondence documents her migrating throughout the territory, north to Ross River, Yukon, south to Fort St. James, east to Fort St. John, and west to the coast throughout the 92 years of her life. Her belongings are held today by the Canadian Museum of History and multiple other museums and private collections…

1 Film Treasure The steamship slices through the water on its approach to Fintry Estate on Okanagan Lake. Passengers are seen walking near the bow, and the camera soon cuts to a huge piston and flywheel that power a massive paddlewheel. Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp would be right at home in the gears, à la Modern Times. These images are among two minutes of rare 16-millimetre footage of the SS Sicamous during the winter of 1932. Restored, scanned, and digitized by the Okanagan Archive Trust Society, the original film was donated by a man whose family collection included more than 300 films created by Louis and Rudolph Pop. The Vancouver brothers travelled the province as taxidermists and furriers, always with a camera in tow. They also created dioramas for the Royal…

Thank you to Darrell Bell, my colleague at the Nanaimo Museum, for his ongoing Brother XII research support. Brother XII established one of the most infamous cults in Canadian history on Vancouver Island. He claimed to be a benevolent spiritual leader who channelled ancient Egyptian gods, but Brother XII promoted conspiracy theories, treated his followers poorly, and was embroiled in high-profile court cases and scandals. The story of Brother XII and his cult, the Aquarian Foundation, still resonates today with its complex tangle of fact and fiction, search for lost gold, conspiracy theories, and the enduring question: Who were his followers? In 1878 Brother XII was born Edward Arthur Wilson in Birmingham, England. As a young man, Wilson worked as a telephone inspector and lived in Birmingham with his parents,…

A Finnish immigrant at the turn of the last century, Matti Halminen became one of the few people to experience the establishment of the Malcolm Island settlement from its earliest stages to its ultimate ideological demise. He was a true believer in the socialist ideals espoused by Matti Kurikka. In 1936, Matti Halminen published Sointula: Kalevan Kansa ja Kanadan Suomalisten Historia (Sointula: Kalevan Kansa and the History of Finns in Canada), in Finland, more than three decades after the initial founding of the settlement. He had no formal education, but Halminen believed he was qualified to write the account as “a member and worker of the Kalevan Kansa from the beginning right to the end.” He saw Sointula as “a unique collective social experiment by Finnish workers.”8 Sointula: A Utopian…

A company town is a place dominated by an individual business or industry, which employs the majority of the town’s workers. This company owns the businesses and buildings in the town, making the community completely dependent on it for housing, goods, schools, and every other aspect of town life. When the company ceased operations, citizens had little choice but to leave and seek their livelihood elsewhere, turning the community into a ghost town. Company towns were once common in BC, and we profile several that became lost towns. These photographs that depict their prosperity encourage readers to reflect on the true cost of these towns, not just to those who worked there and their families, but to Indigenous Peoples, the environment, and the legacy of resource extraction. Anyox Owned by…

In the fall of 1895, the mining camp of Trail Creek Landing was teeming with hopeful prospectors and ragged-trousered industrial workers who had rushed to the British Columbia mining boomtown. They were looking to either strike it rich in the ore-laden hills of the West Kootenay district or find a job at the new smelter, due to open the following year. Joining them were fortune seekers of another kind, including bakers, brewers, launderers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, and several prostitutes. Among the flood of newcomers was a thirty-year-old newspaperman named William Fentress Thompson, Jr., Trail Creek’s first newspaper publisher. Thompson would seek his riches not in the local mines but by starting, in Trail historian Elsie Turnbull’s words, “the only home-print newspaper in the Kootenay country!”1 It was the beginning of a…