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Read MoreCranbrook’s Great Elephant Hunt of 1926
From far and wide they came, that hot summer of 1926. Expectant children and nostalgic adults, by car, train and wagon, they poured into Cranbrook for that greatest of occasions, Circus Day. But the colossal extravaganza that Sells-Floto Circus inadvertently staged was to make history and completely overshadow any of the acts it had headlined beneath its big-top. Those British Columbians who were there long remembered with affection and a smile that riotous time when seven grey monsters terrorized a countryside–the Great Elephant Hunt. For most of its western tour, Sells-Floto had been troubled by its 14 pachyderms. The nervous giants had created disturbances at Edmonton and Calgary, but it was the high altitude and smoke from forest fires–some maintain a barking dog was to blame–that triggered the stampede at Cranbrook when they were being unloaded from their boxcars. Instantly, the quiet community was plunged into bedlam as 14 trumpeting elephants charged through the streets in every direction, ears wide, trunks erect. Within seconds, doorways, culverts–anything that afforded cover–were crowded with scrambling circus hands and spectators. Several roustabouts who’d not jumped aside quickly enough were slightly injured and had to be rushed to hospital. The great chase was on! Hours later, reports of enormous footprints were flooding in from as far away as Yahk, 40 miles to the south, the lumbering fugitives having made good time by following the Canadian Pacific right-of-way and prompting what’s considered to be the most unusual telegraph message in North American railway history: All trains East. Keep lookout for elephants on track; advise if sighted from first telegraph office giving location. Seven were soon safely under wraps, some having been captured in the Cranbrook cemetery. But the remaining seven had scattered even farther as harried circus officials issued contradictory orders, charged madly off in all directions and swallowed aspirin by the bottle. Delighted newspapers gave the breathless details in glaring headlines: • Hundreds of men now hunting elephants in B.C. • Five hunters hospitalized, many others hurt • Another Indian [sic] has miraculous escape from being gored by rampaging female elephant Hampering the search most, according to the Cranbrook Courier, were “dense woods, deep ravines and steep hillsides… Luckily no one joining in the chase of the huge beasts has been seriously hurt so far, though several men have been more or less bruised in attempting their capture. In the first rush of their breakaway, Dooley, one of the trainers, received minor injury, and...
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Read MoreIdyllic Protection Island belies a violent past
Its Gallows Point (originally Execution Point) takes its name from the fact that two native murderers were hanged there in 1853. Sixty years later, just offshore in the same immediate area, the ill-fated dynamite carrier S.S. Oscar ruptured her innards in an explosion that damaged much of downtown Nanaimo. Miraculously, there was neither loss of life nor serious injury. And it was at Gallows Point, near today’s lighthouse museum, that the New Vancouver Coal Co. (later the Western Fuel Co.) had its Protection Island shaft, 1890-1938. Linked underground (and underwater) to the No. 1 Esplanade Mine and an airshaft on neighbouring Newcastle Island, its miners could hear steamships as they passed overhead. Miners could tell the time by ships passing overhead Years ago, one of them told me that it was just like in the movies, when a destroyer passed over a hiding U-boat, its churning propellers chilling the hearts of those who waited for the depth charges that were sure to follow. Such may have been the case for submariners; for Nanaimo coal miners it was almost a reassuring sound, one by which they could tell the time without a watch, by identifying the regular sailings of the CPR’s Princess boats. The two mines and their air shaft straddled an amazing subterranean network that extended for miles beneath the harbour and tapped both the shallower Douglas and the Newcastle coal seams. This was good business for the coal company but meant tough, tight working conditions for miners following the snaking, thinner Newcastle seam. Like all Nanaimo coal mines there were more than harsh working conditions to be endured underground. Dangers of explosion, fire, cave-ins and poisonous gas were constants that miners and their families had to take as their lot in life. 16 men went down with plunging elevator cage None of them could have foreseen the circumstances that, at 7:10 on the morning of Sept. 10, 1918, saw 16 men killed instantly when the elevator cage in which they were riding plunged 550 feet to the bottom, “cutting through 12-inch timbers as though they had been matchwood,” and splintering almost at the feet of 96 of their workmates who’d safely descended minutes before, and who, alarmed by the roar of the plunging cage, thought that the whole mine was caving in. Of all the terrors to be faced underground, this was so out of the blue that it stunned the community. Reported the Nanaimo Free Press on its front page the next day: “It was late last evening before the final tally of the...
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Read MoreMolly Justice – Murder
‘In ever loving memory of Molly Justice, January 18, 1943.’ Friday, January 18, 2013 marked the 70th anniversary of Molly’s murder beside a Saanich railway track. To mark the occasion my friend Jennifer and I placed a wreath and a card on a tree within feet of what I believe to be the murder scene, just north of where Darwin Road crosses the old CNR line (today’s popular Galloping Goose Trail). I grew up with Molly Justice’s slaying although it happened before I was born. But she was part of my family lore. How many times had I heard mention of her by my parents, aunts and uncles, how many times had I walked, wide-eyed, past the very spot where she bled to death, how many times had I begged for the gory details? But I’d had to wait until I was thought to be old enough for the answers, as unsatisfying as they proved to be. There were suspicions and rumours but much about her killing beside a Saanich railway track remains unexplained these 70 years later. My grandmother remembered Molly Justice every January For my grandmother Ellen Green the heartache only ended with her own death in 1989. Even after Molly’s own parents were gone, Grannie kept the faith. Every January she placed a small In Memoriam notice in the Victoria Colonist: “JUSTICE–In ever loving memory of Molly who was taken from us…years ago today, 18th January. Gone but will never be forgotten. Always remembered by Mrs. Tom Green, RR1, Parksville, Vancouver Island.” “I said I would put it in as long as I live and I will,” she told Colonist reporter Ted Shackleford in 1964. “She lived opposite us when we were in Victoria. She was my youngest daughter’s best friend. A finer girl you couldn’t meet anywhere…” Snow was threatening when 15-year-old Molly (Anita Margaret) Justice stepped from the bus after getting off work, that January evening. It was wartime and stringent ‘dim-out’ regulations forbade any friendly lights to guide her. Although she didn’t like to walk alone at night along the CNR grade that passed right by her home, this route was considerably shorter and she invariably used it. Described as being “mature for her age,” her striding figure was observed by the driver as she disappeared into the darkness. Saanich Police found Molly’s bloodstained body When next seen, by Saanich Police officers after a couple, returning from skating on Swan Lake, reported finding blood-stained parcels, Molly was dead. She lay face down in the snow...
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John Cowley Preferred Flowers to Gold
John Joseph Cowley was one of the legion of hopefuls who sought to make his fortune in one of British Columbia’s several gold rushes. Few, in fact, of the tens of thousands who tried even recovered their expenses before having to go to work for those who’d been “lucky” or return to their previous occupations. Among these for the most part anonymous also-rans was John Cowley whose diary, today in possession of the British Columbia Archives, provides fascinating insight...
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Colourful Cataline was One of a Kind
With his Spanish sombrero, drooping Napoleon III mustachios and goatee, silk bandana, heavy wool shirt held in place by a bright-coloured sash, frock coat (on formal occasions), suspendered trousers, riding boots and spurs, Jean Jacques Caux—Cataline—was right out of a Frederick Russell painting. But Cataline as he was known to one and all was real. Not only that, he was bigger than life. Barrel-chested, with arms that seemed too long for his short body, he carried himself with the...
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Deathbed Promise Made History
The story of Cariboo’ John Cameron, more than a century and a half later, remains every bit as fascinating and is so much bigger-than-life that it bears repeating. Almost unusual in the B.C. goldfields in that he was a Canadian, this descendant of Scottish United Empire Loyalists who’d moved north during the American war for independence, John Cameron was 25-years-old when he left the family farm near Glengarry, Ontario (Canada West as it was then) in 1852. With his...
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Forest Ranger Oliver G. Clark Died in the Line of Duty
Although he served in the trenches in the First World War, it’s not for his military heroism that Oliver G. Clark is recognized. Rather, his “deed of heroism unsurpassed in British annals,” as it was glowingly described at the time, occurred almost a decade after Armistice, and half a world away from the battlefields of Europe. In possession of niece Lorna Clark when I originally wrote this piece for the Cowichan Valley Citizen in 1999, was the framed citation...
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