Was Thigh Bone the Remains of Lost Airman?
What puzzled Ildstad most was the absence of clothing or foot wear–just bone fragments. The Consolidated (Model 28) PBY Catalina was one of the most widely used seaplanes in the USA and Allied air forces during the Second World War. Those built in Canada were known as Cansos.—http://aviation-history.com/consolidated The west coast of Vancouver Island is honeycombed with limestone caves, many of which were used as natural mausoleums by First Nations peoples. But, sometimes, they contained non-Aboriginal remains that posed so many questions as to relegate them to the status of mystery. (Of the 179 airmen known to have been killed or gone missing while training to fly at Patricia Bay Airport during the Second World War, many still haven’t been accounted for. Their final resting places in the B.C. wilderness as yet unknown. –See also Mount Bolduc bomber wreck...
Read MoreTwo lost gold mines and ‘Jolly Jack’ Thornton
The soaring price of gold in recent years has sent many prospectors, amateur and professional, in search of legendary lost gold mines in British Columbia. They might give serious thought to these two lost gold mines in British Columbia which have long intrigued pioneer prospectors. The first, although it actually dates back almost a century and a half, didn’t gain notice until 1899 when legendary prospector R.A. ‘Volcanic’ Brown, the discoverer of Copper Mountain, told a “romantic story of the discovery of a rich free milling gold property” to a Grand Forks reporter. Move Paragraph block from position 7 up to position 6Move Paragraph block from position 7 down to position 8 He’d just returned from Princeton where he had been informed that two Swedes who had been prospecting between “Staggett and the coast” (probably between Rock Creek and...
Read MoreWhat of the Women Who Kept the Home Fires Burning?
It’s easy to think of war as a ‘man’s game,’ but what of the women who kept the home fires burning? In late October 1918 word was received that Nursing Sister Henriette Millet, formerly head nurse of the Nanaimo hospital, was among those lost when the passenger liner Leinster was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in the Irish Sea. Within weeks of Armistice, this latest tragedy claimed 564 passengers, British and American, 130 of them women and children. For four years of war nurse Millet had served King and Country in Mesopotamia, at the Dardanelles and in France, only to be killed in friendly seas when sailing for home. And the women who kept the home fires burning? It also became public knowledge that some women were suffering closer to home, too, it being reported that an...
Read MoreGranite Creek’s ‘White Gold’ Still Draws Treasure Hunters
Little did the miners realize that Granite Creek’s ‘white gold’ was platinum! Noted the Victoria Colonist noted in November 1885, “…There is associated with the gold on Granite Creek a very hard, heavy and whitish metal, which is probably platinum or iridium, perhaps a mixture of both. “There are no means of thoroughly testing it here, but Dr. G.M. Dawson, assistant director of the Geological Survey of Canada, has kindly offered to take it to Ottawa for examination in the laboratory there, after which it will be forwarded to London for examination at the Colonial and Canadian Exposition to be held next year….” The miners thought the ‘white gold’ was almost worthless and a nuisance According to Frank Bailey, “…In the early days the placer mines were greatly hampered with what they called ‘white gold’ in their sluice boxes,...
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