British Columbia Had Its Own Wild West

‘A worse set of cut-throats and all-round scoundrels than those who flocked to Yale from all parts of the world never assembled anywhere…’—D.W. Higgins

Little did I realize when growing up in Victoria on American comic books, American movies and American magazines–in other words, American history–that the Wild West that so enthralled me and my friends had occurred right here in British Columbia.

Almost underfoot, really. That was in 1858 when, almost overnight, Victoria became a tent city, its few hundred permanent residents literally overwhelmed by between 10- and 20,000 fortune seekers passing through on their way to the sandbars of the Fraser River.

Did I say that staid Victoria, known up until the 1960s as a little bit of olde England, as a cemetery with a business section where they rolled up the sidewalks at 9:00 p.m., was once part of the Wild West?

Yer darn tootin,’ partner!

Why, there was even a fatal shootout between two arrivals over the affections of a girl they’d met on the ship while coming up from San Francisco. John Liverpool, the bad guy in the drama, drilled the gentlemanly George Sloane through the heart in what’s today downtown Victoria.

Before he could be arrested, he beat it back to ‘Frisco where he killed again. This time there was no escaping and he died, as they used to say, dancing on air–at the end of a rope.

Few of the gold seekers stayed long in Victoria before proceeding to Yale and taking with them their baggage, in more ways than one. The result, before the colonial government with the strength of the Royal Navy and the Royal Engineers could impose law and order, was the rootin’-tootin’ equivalent of a Dodge City or a Tombstone–the really wild, Wild West.

How do we know?

There are numerous historical and newspaper sources to draw from. Undoubtedly one of the most colourful accounts is that offered by David W. Higgins, a Nova Scotia journalist who joined the mad exodus to New Caledonia in 1858 and who, almost half a century later, published his reminiscences in two eminently readable (and highly collectible) volumes, The Mystic Spring and Passing of a Race.

(See also: The Saint and the Sinner, Monster in Buckskins.)

I have both books and they’re among the very few in my library that I’ve read more than once. But to get back to 1858-1860 Yale, as remembered by Higgins:

“All was bustle and excitement in the new mining town,” he wrote in 1904. “Every race and every colour and both sexes were represented in the population. There were Englishmen, Canadians, Americans, Australians, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Mexicans, Chinese and Negroes–all bent on winning gold from the Fraser sands, and all hopeful of a successful season…

“In every saloon a faro-bank or a three-card monte table was in full swing, and the halls [saloons] were crowded to suffocation. A worse set of cut-throats and all-round scoundrels than those who flocked to Yale from all parts of the world never assembled anywhere.

“Decent people feared to go out after dark. Night assaults and robberies, varied by an occasional cold-blooded murder or a daylight theft, were common occurrences. Crime in every form stalked boldly through the town unchecked and unpunished. The good element was numerically large; but it was dominated and terrorized by those whose trade it was to bully, beat, rob and slay. Often men who had differences in California met at Yale and proceeded to fight it out on British soil by American methods.”

He recounted the case of a “young man named Walton [who] camped near my tent. He was apparently well disposed and quiet, and about the last person whom I should have thought would do anything wicked. He left his tent one morning and strolled to town…

“In about an hour he returned and, walking to the river bank, washed his hands. Then he took from a sheath attached to a belt that encircled his waist a knife and washed it, too. He dried the weapon on the sleeves of his grey shirt, and returning it to the sheath, walked towards his tent. As he passed me he said, without the slightest tremor in his voice or the least excitement in his manner:

“‘I’ve had a fight up-town.’

“‘Did you kill your man?’” I asked, not for a moment imagining anything serious had occurred.

“No,” he said, “I did better–I maimed him for life.”

A year before, Walton explained, he’d “had a row” with a man named Dalton in Calaveras County, California. That morning, they’d run into each other in Yale. The other man raised his shotgun but Walton rushed in and pushed the barrel upward.

The charge, he informed Higgins with a smirk, “went into the air. Then I took my razor-edged Bowie-knife and cut his right wrist, the tendons of it, clean across; then I reached down and cut the knee tendons of his right leg, and he will be a cripple for life. He won’t shoot anyone else, I guess.”

This was confirmed by the surgeon who dressed the victim’s arm and leg. The man “might as well have had his hand and leg cut off for they would be useless for the remainder of his days,” Dr. Fifer–who would himself be shot down in cold blood three years later–told Higgins.

Higgins also told of a man who, while leaving a saloon without paying for his drink, was shot dead, in the back, in the street, by the bartender.

All of which explains why most of Yale’s citizens, including Higgins for a time, wore a Colt revolver and/or a Bowie knife on their hips for self defence. At least once, he recalled, the weapon of choice was a straight-edge razor. He was referring to the day a notorious gunfighter strode into the town’s barber shop.

“Barber,” I want yer to shave me. And barber,” he ordered as he drew his Colt and placed it across his knees, “If yer draw so little as one drop of blood I’ll shoot yer.”

As ‘Ikey’ later told Higgins after successfully shaving the desperado, “If I’d a cut that man ever so little I made up my mind that I’d cut his throat from year to year. It would ha’ been my life or his’n, and I was shore it wouldn’t a been mine.”