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Lisa Anne Smith is an education docent at the Museum of Vancouver and a curator for the Old Hastings Mill Store Museum (the oldest building in Vancouver).
Utilizing extensive archival research and eye-witness accounts, Smith brings to life Vancouver's disastrous fire of 1886 in her book Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886 (Ronsdale 2014). SEE REVIEW BELOW. The catastrophe razed the fledgling city of Vancouver to the ground. In addition to revealing memories such as flames sweeping up wooden sidewalks 'faster than a man could run' Smith examines the ramifications of the fire, changes that ensued and reaches conclusions that are both positive as well as negative.
Smith, along with Barbara Rogers, also co-authored Our Friend Joe: The Joe Fortes Story (Ronsdale Press 2012). This is the first biography of Seraphim "Joe"; Fortes who became a Vancouver legend by teaching three generations of Vancouver children how to swim. Arriving in Vancouver in 1885, Joe was hired by the City as lifeguard, swimming instructor and special constable of English Bay beach in 1900. He would later be voted "Citizen of the Century."; On February 7, 1922, thousands of mourners lined Vancouver's streets to bid farewell to "our friend Joe."; One of Vancouver's libraries is named after him; some of the proceeds from this biography are being donated to the Lifesaving Society/Société du Sauvetage, Canada's national organization for lifeguarding and water safety expertise.
Smith has also published St. Roch: A Book for Kids (2001) about the RCMP ship at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. 978-155380-320-1
REVIEW:
EMILY PATTERSON: The Heroic Life of a Milltown Nurse by Lisa Anne Smith (Ronsdale $21.95) 2018
Reviewed by Joan Givner
The subject of Lisa Anne Smith's Emily Patterson: The Heroic Life of a Milltown Nurse was born in 1836 in Bath, Lincoln County, Maine. At the age of ten she refused to leave the room as a midwife delivered her mother's baby; instead she assisted at the birth, cutting the umbilical cord. The experience left her with a life-long interest in medicine and a sure sense of her vocation. She absorbed all the medical knowledge she could find and planned to attend the Geneva Medical College in New York to train as a nurse.
While marriage curtailed her plans for professional training, as it has done for many women, it did not end her career as a nurse. Wherever she lived, she adapted her skills and expanded her expertise. When she accompanied her seafaring husband, Captain John Patterson, on his ship to China, she cured scurvy, staunched injuries, and even used chloroform when pulling teeth. When her husband abandoned his career at sea for employment in the lumber industry, the change only expanded the scope of Emily's work. Nor did a growing family stop her from providing nursing services wherever needed. She eventually had seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood.
Having heard there was good harvest-able timber in the Pacific Northwest, the Patterson family moved west, and for the rest of their lives the couple lived in small, often isolated mill towns. The first of these was Alberni on Vancouver Island. Looking at the thickly forested mountainside John said, "You see that! That's what we're here for. Nothing in the entire state of Maine ever compared."
When the accessible stands of timber had been logged off, the family had to move. They went south to Willamette Valley in Oregon, then to a small operation in Butteville and finally north again to British Columbia. On arrival at the Burrard Inlet, they lived briefly at Hastings Mill before moving across the inlet to make a permanent home in Moodyville.
Emily was often the only person available in the area to provide the services of midwife, nurse, and doctor. The dining room table in the Patterson home was made to certain specifications in order to serve--protected by oil-treated canvas--as an impromptu operating table. Her reputation grew and even when a medical practice opened with a professionally trained physician, she was the healer of choice. One person she was not able to help was Gassy Jack who believed a shot of whiskey would do the job as well as any dose of medicine.
A feat for which she became famous was her legendary journey by canoe through stormy seas to answer a plea from the keeper of the Port Atkinson lighthouse to help his sick wife. On the hundredth anniversary of her death, a ballad, "The Heroine of Moodyville" was published. Inspired by such ballads as "The Inchcape Rock" and "The Wreck of the Hesperus" (but with a happier outcome) it ran to twenty-seven rhyming tercets and was published in Chatelaine magazine as well as the Vancouver General Nurses Annual.
Before she died, Emily asked her daughter to record her life for future generations. Alice honoured that request, working with Vancouver's city archivist, Major James Skitt Matthews to amass an impressive collection of material from local papers and interviews. That archive is the basis for the present book. Because there were few direct words from Emily--none of the letters and diaries that generally animate a biographical subject--Lisa Anne Smith decided to use "a smattering of creative licence." She combines the historical accuracy of a "life and times" biography with the narrative technique of a novel, inserting imagined conversations and dramatic scenes.
The historical backdrop encompasses the notable events of Emily's time.
These include a description of San Francisco in the aftermath of the gold rush, where the family arrived after a three-week journey on the Panama railway. Since two of her married daughters later settled in San Francisco, the 1906 earthquake and fire affected her personally and she raised funds for those less fortunate than her daughters. At the end of their lives, when the Pattersons moved from Moodyville to downtown Vancouver, the anti-Asian riots of 1907, fomented by the Asiatic Exclusion League, happened literally on their doorstep, with rioters breaking neighbourhood windows.
Smith's passionate admiration for her subject gives the book a somewhat eulogistic tone with Emily depicted as the heroine of one incident after another. Fortunately, the author's inclusion of robust dialogue rescues the book from hagiography, as when Emily tells an unruly patient hurt in a tavern brawl, "You dare move and I'll hit you over the head with a club."
Some readers might find the inclusion of text from archival sources to be jarring or clumsy by current standards. People "reside" rather than live, babies are "welcomed into the world."
John Patterson before his marriage transported "Negro slaves" to New Orleans, and later "seemed to bear no disgruntlement to working under the command of a younger sibling."
Nevertheless, Smith has shaped a vast amount of material, contextualized it with diligent research and produced an important addition to the annals of nursing.
978-1553805052
Joan Givner is a biographer and novelist based in Victoria.
*
Hastings Mill: The Historic Times of a Vancouver Community by Lisa Anne Smith
(Ronsdale Press $24.95)
Review by Mark Forsythe
A glimpse westward from the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing reveals massive orange cranes hoisting containers at the Port of Vancouver terminal, a fortress of glass towers that marks Canada’s highest density, and Stanley Park’s green forest rising above Burrard Inlet. Earliest European Vancouver was forged right in the centre of this view, at a small sawmill plunked atop pilings, surrounded by seemingly endless stands of timber.
In 1865 Captain Edward Stamp built his mill on 100 acres leased from the Colony of British Columbia (at 1 cent per acre). The Colony was all about expansion (at the expense of original inhabitants), and the mill’s cutting rights eventually extended up the coast. Water for its boilers splashed down a wooden flume from Trout Lake, often prone to freezing in winter. Sparing no expense, Stamp also commissioned a 146-foot steam tug to work the water. A store was added in 1868 to supply mill employees—from ham to horseshoes and seaman’s biscuits. Separated by race and class, most lived on mill property, although Indigenous people weren’t permitted to live there. Some dwelled beside the mill at a seasonal encampment of the Squamish people called Kumkumlye, meaning “Maple Trees.”
Stamp failed during a previous attempt at Port Alberni mill due to strong resistance from the Tseshaht people. He brought along two cannonades to this new venture, just in case. His only competition came from Sewell Moody’s more efficient mill at Moodyville on the North Shore. However, Stamp ran his mill deep into debt, and the search began for new owners and a capable manager. (The mill later became known as Hastings Mill when nearby New Brighton changed its name to Hastings.)
Lisa Anne Smith’s finely researched Hastings Mill: The Historic Times of a Vancouver Community is bursting with characters set against Vancouver’s defining moments. Her interest was kindled by the late historian Chuck Davis after hearing him speak at the Old Hastings Mill Store Museum: “I knew that I was going to become involved—hook, line and sinker—with Vancouver’s oldest surviving building and its remarkable past,” she says. Smith is a member of the Native Daughters of B.C. (founded in 1919 and still active more than a hundred years later), the group that rescued the iconic Old Hastings Mill Store from demolition in 1930 and barged it to the foot of Alma Street, winched ashore and turned into a museum.
Hastings Mill’s story includes the Great Fire of 1886 that devoured nearby Granville in about 45 minutes. Survivors congregated at the Hastings Store, the only building left standing. A plea from the mayor was carried on horseback to the telegraph at New Westminster: “To Sir John A McDonald. Our city is in ashes, three thousand people homeless, can you send any government aid.” Hastings Mill manager Richard Alexander offered free wood for people to rebuild and merchandise from the store; his wife Emma spearheaded a Women’s Relief Committee. Within six weeks the feisty frontier town had been rebuilt, destined to eclipse New Westminster and Victoria.
The mill was highly profitable, shipping lumber to Chile, Australia, Shanghai and other international markets. A schoolhouse was built in 1872, and Granville post office opened at the store two years later. Countless sailors came ashore—many drawn to nearby saloons and brothels; by 1881 there was also a campaign underway to build an Anglican church. The townsite around the mill expanded; CPR expansion was looming, and land speculators weren’t far behind.
The mill burned down and was rebuilt. Innovation in mill technology and the transition from oxen to labour-saving steam donkeys are thoroughly detailed, as is the genesis of health care for coastal loggers when a hospital was built at the company’s lumber camp at Rock Bay, north of Campbell River. There are walk-on appearances by newspaperman and future premier John Robson, Joe Fortes, the CPR’s William Cornelius Van Horne, John Deighton, a.k.a. Gassy Jack (whose statue was recently toppled in Gastown), the city’s first mayor, Malcolm MacLean, and future lumber magnate H.R. MacMillan. Jericho Charlie delivered goods from the Hastings Store to logging camps aboard his giant Squamish freight canoe. The store manager Calvert Simson became fluent in the Chinook trade language and was invited to one of the last potlatches before they were banned.
The implications of Vancouver’s growth for Indigenous people are very much on the periphery of the Hastings Mill story—indeed, for most of BC’s pioneering history. Lisa Anne Smith recognizes this and concludes with an interpretation of what life may have been like at Kumkumlye, before a “cantankerous” Captain Edward Stamp arrived. “Widely diverse cultures were about to collide full force and, for the original inhabitants of Kumkumlye and other Indigenous communities, life would be drastically altered.”
Book proceeds will benefit the Friends of the Old Hastings Mill Store’s efforts to maintain and further restore the museum. 9781553806417
Mark Forsythe is author/co-author of four books and a former host of CBC Radio’s BC Almanac.
[BCBW 2022]
BOOKS:
St. Roch: A Book for Kids (2001)
Our Friend Joe: The Joe Fortes Story (Ronsdale, 2012) $21.95 ISBN 978-1-55380-146-7
Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886 (Ronsdale, 2014) $21.95 978-1-55380-322-1
Hastings Mill: The Historic Times of a Vancouver Community (Ronsdale Press, 2022) $24.95 978-1-55380-641-7
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Our Friend Joe: The Joe Fortes Story
[BCBW 2022]
Utilizing extensive archival research and eye-witness accounts, Smith brings to life Vancouver's disastrous fire of 1886 in her book Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886 (Ronsdale 2014). SEE REVIEW BELOW. The catastrophe razed the fledgling city of Vancouver to the ground. In addition to revealing memories such as flames sweeping up wooden sidewalks 'faster than a man could run' Smith examines the ramifications of the fire, changes that ensued and reaches conclusions that are both positive as well as negative.
Smith, along with Barbara Rogers, also co-authored Our Friend Joe: The Joe Fortes Story (Ronsdale Press 2012). This is the first biography of Seraphim "Joe"; Fortes who became a Vancouver legend by teaching three generations of Vancouver children how to swim. Arriving in Vancouver in 1885, Joe was hired by the City as lifeguard, swimming instructor and special constable of English Bay beach in 1900. He would later be voted "Citizen of the Century."; On February 7, 1922, thousands of mourners lined Vancouver's streets to bid farewell to "our friend Joe."; One of Vancouver's libraries is named after him; some of the proceeds from this biography are being donated to the Lifesaving Society/Société du Sauvetage, Canada's national organization for lifeguarding and water safety expertise.
Smith has also published St. Roch: A Book for Kids (2001) about the RCMP ship at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. 978-155380-320-1
REVIEW:
EMILY PATTERSON: The Heroic Life of a Milltown Nurse by Lisa Anne Smith (Ronsdale $21.95) 2018
Reviewed by Joan Givner
The subject of Lisa Anne Smith's Emily Patterson: The Heroic Life of a Milltown Nurse was born in 1836 in Bath, Lincoln County, Maine. At the age of ten she refused to leave the room as a midwife delivered her mother's baby; instead she assisted at the birth, cutting the umbilical cord. The experience left her with a life-long interest in medicine and a sure sense of her vocation. She absorbed all the medical knowledge she could find and planned to attend the Geneva Medical College in New York to train as a nurse.
While marriage curtailed her plans for professional training, as it has done for many women, it did not end her career as a nurse. Wherever she lived, she adapted her skills and expanded her expertise. When she accompanied her seafaring husband, Captain John Patterson, on his ship to China, she cured scurvy, staunched injuries, and even used chloroform when pulling teeth. When her husband abandoned his career at sea for employment in the lumber industry, the change only expanded the scope of Emily's work. Nor did a growing family stop her from providing nursing services wherever needed. She eventually had seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood.
Having heard there was good harvest-able timber in the Pacific Northwest, the Patterson family moved west, and for the rest of their lives the couple lived in small, often isolated mill towns. The first of these was Alberni on Vancouver Island. Looking at the thickly forested mountainside John said, "You see that! That's what we're here for. Nothing in the entire state of Maine ever compared."
When the accessible stands of timber had been logged off, the family had to move. They went south to Willamette Valley in Oregon, then to a small operation in Butteville and finally north again to British Columbia. On arrival at the Burrard Inlet, they lived briefly at Hastings Mill before moving across the inlet to make a permanent home in Moodyville.
Emily was often the only person available in the area to provide the services of midwife, nurse, and doctor. The dining room table in the Patterson home was made to certain specifications in order to serve--protected by oil-treated canvas--as an impromptu operating table. Her reputation grew and even when a medical practice opened with a professionally trained physician, she was the healer of choice. One person she was not able to help was Gassy Jack who believed a shot of whiskey would do the job as well as any dose of medicine.
A feat for which she became famous was her legendary journey by canoe through stormy seas to answer a plea from the keeper of the Port Atkinson lighthouse to help his sick wife. On the hundredth anniversary of her death, a ballad, "The Heroine of Moodyville" was published. Inspired by such ballads as "The Inchcape Rock" and "The Wreck of the Hesperus" (but with a happier outcome) it ran to twenty-seven rhyming tercets and was published in Chatelaine magazine as well as the Vancouver General Nurses Annual.
Before she died, Emily asked her daughter to record her life for future generations. Alice honoured that request, working with Vancouver's city archivist, Major James Skitt Matthews to amass an impressive collection of material from local papers and interviews. That archive is the basis for the present book. Because there were few direct words from Emily--none of the letters and diaries that generally animate a biographical subject--Lisa Anne Smith decided to use "a smattering of creative licence." She combines the historical accuracy of a "life and times" biography with the narrative technique of a novel, inserting imagined conversations and dramatic scenes.
The historical backdrop encompasses the notable events of Emily's time.
These include a description of San Francisco in the aftermath of the gold rush, where the family arrived after a three-week journey on the Panama railway. Since two of her married daughters later settled in San Francisco, the 1906 earthquake and fire affected her personally and she raised funds for those less fortunate than her daughters. At the end of their lives, when the Pattersons moved from Moodyville to downtown Vancouver, the anti-Asian riots of 1907, fomented by the Asiatic Exclusion League, happened literally on their doorstep, with rioters breaking neighbourhood windows.
Smith's passionate admiration for her subject gives the book a somewhat eulogistic tone with Emily depicted as the heroine of one incident after another. Fortunately, the author's inclusion of robust dialogue rescues the book from hagiography, as when Emily tells an unruly patient hurt in a tavern brawl, "You dare move and I'll hit you over the head with a club."
Some readers might find the inclusion of text from archival sources to be jarring or clumsy by current standards. People "reside" rather than live, babies are "welcomed into the world."
John Patterson before his marriage transported "Negro slaves" to New Orleans, and later "seemed to bear no disgruntlement to working under the command of a younger sibling."
Nevertheless, Smith has shaped a vast amount of material, contextualized it with diligent research and produced an important addition to the annals of nursing.
978-1553805052
Joan Givner is a biographer and novelist based in Victoria.
*
Hastings Mill: The Historic Times of a Vancouver Community by Lisa Anne Smith
(Ronsdale Press $24.95)
Review by Mark Forsythe
A glimpse westward from the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing reveals massive orange cranes hoisting containers at the Port of Vancouver terminal, a fortress of glass towers that marks Canada’s highest density, and Stanley Park’s green forest rising above Burrard Inlet. Earliest European Vancouver was forged right in the centre of this view, at a small sawmill plunked atop pilings, surrounded by seemingly endless stands of timber.
In 1865 Captain Edward Stamp built his mill on 100 acres leased from the Colony of British Columbia (at 1 cent per acre). The Colony was all about expansion (at the expense of original inhabitants), and the mill’s cutting rights eventually extended up the coast. Water for its boilers splashed down a wooden flume from Trout Lake, often prone to freezing in winter. Sparing no expense, Stamp also commissioned a 146-foot steam tug to work the water. A store was added in 1868 to supply mill employees—from ham to horseshoes and seaman’s biscuits. Separated by race and class, most lived on mill property, although Indigenous people weren’t permitted to live there. Some dwelled beside the mill at a seasonal encampment of the Squamish people called Kumkumlye, meaning “Maple Trees.”
Stamp failed during a previous attempt at Port Alberni mill due to strong resistance from the Tseshaht people. He brought along two cannonades to this new venture, just in case. His only competition came from Sewell Moody’s more efficient mill at Moodyville on the North Shore. However, Stamp ran his mill deep into debt, and the search began for new owners and a capable manager. (The mill later became known as Hastings Mill when nearby New Brighton changed its name to Hastings.)
Lisa Anne Smith’s finely researched Hastings Mill: The Historic Times of a Vancouver Community is bursting with characters set against Vancouver’s defining moments. Her interest was kindled by the late historian Chuck Davis after hearing him speak at the Old Hastings Mill Store Museum: “I knew that I was going to become involved—hook, line and sinker—with Vancouver’s oldest surviving building and its remarkable past,” she says. Smith is a member of the Native Daughters of B.C. (founded in 1919 and still active more than a hundred years later), the group that rescued the iconic Old Hastings Mill Store from demolition in 1930 and barged it to the foot of Alma Street, winched ashore and turned into a museum.
Hastings Mill’s story includes the Great Fire of 1886 that devoured nearby Granville in about 45 minutes. Survivors congregated at the Hastings Store, the only building left standing. A plea from the mayor was carried on horseback to the telegraph at New Westminster: “To Sir John A McDonald. Our city is in ashes, three thousand people homeless, can you send any government aid.” Hastings Mill manager Richard Alexander offered free wood for people to rebuild and merchandise from the store; his wife Emma spearheaded a Women’s Relief Committee. Within six weeks the feisty frontier town had been rebuilt, destined to eclipse New Westminster and Victoria.
The mill was highly profitable, shipping lumber to Chile, Australia, Shanghai and other international markets. A schoolhouse was built in 1872, and Granville post office opened at the store two years later. Countless sailors came ashore—many drawn to nearby saloons and brothels; by 1881 there was also a campaign underway to build an Anglican church. The townsite around the mill expanded; CPR expansion was looming, and land speculators weren’t far behind.
The mill burned down and was rebuilt. Innovation in mill technology and the transition from oxen to labour-saving steam donkeys are thoroughly detailed, as is the genesis of health care for coastal loggers when a hospital was built at the company’s lumber camp at Rock Bay, north of Campbell River. There are walk-on appearances by newspaperman and future premier John Robson, Joe Fortes, the CPR’s William Cornelius Van Horne, John Deighton, a.k.a. Gassy Jack (whose statue was recently toppled in Gastown), the city’s first mayor, Malcolm MacLean, and future lumber magnate H.R. MacMillan. Jericho Charlie delivered goods from the Hastings Store to logging camps aboard his giant Squamish freight canoe. The store manager Calvert Simson became fluent in the Chinook trade language and was invited to one of the last potlatches before they were banned.
The implications of Vancouver’s growth for Indigenous people are very much on the periphery of the Hastings Mill story—indeed, for most of BC’s pioneering history. Lisa Anne Smith recognizes this and concludes with an interpretation of what life may have been like at Kumkumlye, before a “cantankerous” Captain Edward Stamp arrived. “Widely diverse cultures were about to collide full force and, for the original inhabitants of Kumkumlye and other Indigenous communities, life would be drastically altered.”
Book proceeds will benefit the Friends of the Old Hastings Mill Store’s efforts to maintain and further restore the museum. 9781553806417
Mark Forsythe is author/co-author of four books and a former host of CBC Radio’s BC Almanac.
[BCBW 2022]
BOOKS:
St. Roch: A Book for Kids (2001)
Our Friend Joe: The Joe Fortes Story (Ronsdale, 2012) $21.95 ISBN 978-1-55380-146-7
Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886 (Ronsdale, 2014) $21.95 978-1-55380-322-1
Hastings Mill: The Historic Times of a Vancouver Community (Ronsdale Press, 2022) $24.95 978-1-55380-641-7
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Our Friend Joe: The Joe Fortes Story
[BCBW 2022]
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Vancouver is Ashes
Review 2014
Vancouver is still a frontier town at dawn on June 13, 1886. Its main street is dirt. Residents don't have to walk far to head into ancient-growth forest. Boardwalks wind around stumps and brush.
Mountains of slash have accumulated on the outskirts, often piled as high as three storeys. The smells of fresh-cut lumber mingle with nostril-tingling smoke. A few thousand people are used to it.
Shortly, much of this town will disappear in less than a half a day when a small brush clearing fire will turn into a blazing inferno. Most citizens will lose everything except for the clothes on their backs.
Survivors will retain vivid memories of the catastrophe. They will celebrate its anniversary, gathering every year until those who had lived through it, pass away.
Now Lisa Anne Smith has scoured the city's archives for eyewitness accounts and photos from the era to produce Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886 (Ronsdale $21.95), the first detailed account of that disaster. It's a 'you-are-there' narrative that documents the Before and After of a largely under-recognized tragedy in Canadian history.
Vancouver, originally named Granville, was little more than a work camp serving the logging industry. "For over twenty years, the steady rasp of the crosscut saw has cut a wide swath into the thick stands of ancient-growth forest flanking the inlet. An ingenious system has been developed for speeding up the pace of work. The tallest trees are sawed strategically to knock down partially-axed surrounding trees as they fall, like a giant line of dominoes.
"Try anything, but 'get it down,' is the prevailing mindset.... Felling, slashing and burning continue relentlessly from dawn to dusk.";
Logging continued at such speed that it outpaced the burning of the slash and stumps left over. The slash piles amounted to a calamity waiting to happen. "Vancouver is sweltering. Late spring has been abnormally hot for the past three weeks. Puddles, normally knee-deep along busy Carrall Street, have long since dried up. The few remaining mud holes are blistered and cracked like paint on an ancient canvas.";
It was a Sunday when the clearing fire near the end of Davie Street at False Creek (close to the present-day Roundhouse Museum in Yaletown) flared out of control, whipped by a rogue wind from the waterfront. Many were at church ahead of sitting down to the best meal of the week.
Smith, Lisa Anne 145"In elite residences on the eastern side of the city, servants are hard at work throughout the morning preparing the meal while their employers attend church. From the cavernous interiors of wood-burning stoves, a mouth-watering array of courses emerges - new spring potatoes nestled alongside a roast beef dripping with gravy, freshly caught salmon, duck with currant jelly and croquettes of rice - all to be placed upon oak dining tables spread with fine Irish linen, silverware polished to a glossy sheen and the most extravagant of English bone china.
"Other households tuck into simpler fare - slices of homemade bread with spring lettuce or home-cooked strawberry conserve, slices of cheese - all washed down with a cup of hot tea or coffee from the kettle permanently occupying the stove back burner.";
One of the men fighting back the flames, George Cary, is sent downtown for help. Rushing into one of the many Water Street saloons, he confronts the Chief of Police with the news. The Chief of Police, perhaps in an early state of inebriation, waves his hand dismissively. George Cary runs from the Cambie and Cordova clearing site towards Burrard Inlet, more concerned with staying alive than joining efforts to save the Regina Hotel...
Having rowed to the safety of the dock at Hastings Mill, Mayor MacLean is relieved to find his city clerk, Thomas McGuigan, alive and able-bodied. He writes two telegrams for McGuigan to take to New Westminster, galloping on horseback. One will be sent to mayor of Toronto; the other will go to Ottawa:
To: Sir John A. Macdonald. Our city is ashes. Three thousand people homeless. Can you send any government aid?
By 11 a.m. on the following morning, under the supervision of New Westminster coroner Josias Charles Hughes, a jury of twelve men gathers in a makeshift morgue to attempt to identify the bodies. "Owing to the largely transient population of Vancouver,"; Smith writes, "a precise count of the dead and missing will prove to be a hopeless task.";
Some bodies are charred beyond recognition. A woman's body is found at the corner of Powell and Columbia with her torso still encased in the steel frame of a corset. More bizarre, a blackened skeleton was discovered in the ashes of the McCartney brothers' drug store. It's the remains of a Swede who hung himself in Moodyville two years previously.
"Desiring to set up a display skeleton for the small school of anatomy that he had recently established in his office and surgery above the drug store, Dr. Henri Langis had rowed over to a small graveyard on Deadman's Island and quietly exhumed the remains... 'Jimmy,' along with other unfortunate souls having no known family or friends, will be solemnly buried in a unmarked grave.";
-
Lisa Anne Smith is an education docent at the Museum of Vancouver and a member of Native Daughters of B.C., owners and operators of the Old Hastings Mill Store Museum (the oldest building in Vancouver), at the foot of Alma Street in Kitsilano. That's where the book launch was held for Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886 in late May. Many Vancouverites in 1886 fled to this same building for refuge during the fire when it was in its original location on Burrard Inlet near present-day Gore Street. The literary event event included some descendants of Vancouver settlers who survived the blaze.
by Beverly Cramp
