Vancouver Island’s Great Forest Fire of August 1938
It’s the smoke that people most remember of that horrific forest fire in the summer of 1938. A mile high, it enveloped almost two-thirds of Vancouver Island and was reported as far south–400 miles (640km)–as Portland, Ore. Its fly-ash was so thick that two ships collided off Port Angeles. This was the lethal by-product of Vancouver Island’s worst forest fire ever, the Great Fire (so-called). At one point it was feared that flames would consume everything between Campbell River and the Malahat. Only a whim of weather saved us The summer of ‘38 was marked by the longest drought in 64 years. Everywhere in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and B.C., it was the same: So hot and dry that when a forester accidentally dropped his pick on a rock, a resulting spark ignited the grass...
Read MoreWestholme Tree Update
Well, so much for protecting the last of our endangered landmark trees. Not long after I wrote my post on the Great Westholme Tree and some of its sister giants, most of them long gone, it was reported that the B.C. Supreme Court had dismissed an application by the Western Canada Wilderness Committee and ForestEthics Solutions Society. They’d sought a ruling that the B.C. Government “fails to,” in the words of the Times-Colonist (May 10, 2014), “adhere to its own laws in protecting endangered coastal Douglas fir trees”. But Justice Gordon Weatherill “sided with the province that…the groups should have first applied to the Forest Practices Board, which conducts independent audits and investigations to determine if the province is complying with laws to protect endangered forests”. Neither audit nor investigation, by the way, is binding on the government. Nevertheless,...
Read MoreCowichan’s Old Stone (‘Butter’) Church
Its stained glass windows and doors long gone, the empty shrine of grey sandstone gazes sightlessly over the valley and bay below. Well over a century has passed since Cowichan’s famous Old Stone, or ‘Butter’ Church hosted religious services within these silent walls. Below, to the east, Cowichan Bay is shrouded in early morning mist and no sounds reach here from the road below. To the right of the front door (until it was stolen), a plaque, dated 1966, told the church’s history in a single paragraph: “This landmark was built in 1870 by Father Peter Rondeault, pioneer Oblate missionary to [the] Cowichan Indians [sic]. Helpers were paid through the sale of butter churned by the priest. It was abandoned in 1880 in favour of St. Ann’s at Tzouhalem. Restoration was a 1958 Centennial project of the Cowichan Indians,...
Read More‘Hanging Judge’ Matthew Begbie Fought Discriminatory Laws
So said a Victoria Times-Colonist ‘commentary,’ in January. In addressing B.C.’s heritage of racial prejudice (see Chinese Head Tax Got Off to a Slow Start), professors Hamar Foster and John McLaren (ret’d), of the University of Victoria faculty of law, noted that Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie, “B.C.’s first judge,” was a staunch defender of human rights. This, in 1884, when such views were totally out of sync with the province’ s general (white) population. Begbie defended Chinese immigrants by highlighting their well-known “prominent qualities” of industry, economy, sobriety and law abiding-ness. It was these qualities which so put them at odds with the majority of the population that was the real basis of their being discriminated against, he said. He also walked the talk by striking down repeated attempts by the B.C. Government to draft racially discriminatory legislation and...
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