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British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas (D&M $59.95)
Derek Hayes' thirteenth large-format atlas, British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas (D&M $59.95), is another labour of love from Hayes-an extraordinarily detailed account of British Columbia history, profusely illustrated-as has become his trademark-with 914 historical maps, all reproduced in original colour, along with 222 old photos and images, and 43 photos he took himself.
It's easy to predict it will become a required reference work, stored on the same shelf as the Encyclopedia of B.C., Chuck Davis' Vancouver volumes, Robin Inglis' Historical Dictionary of the Discovery and Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America and Jean Barman's West Beyond the West.
In Hayes' words, it's a cornucopia of history-and he hastens to add it's not a new edition of his Historical Atlas of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest with which he made his debut in 1999. Only 33 of the maps were in that first atlas. He says 65 per cent of the maps in the new atlas have never been published before.
Highlights include an aboriginal-drawn map, of which there are remarkably few, and a newly discovered bird's-eye map of the entire colonies of British Columbia and Vancouver Island with so many egregious errors extant as to render it essentially useless for practical purposes, but highly amusing.
**
Hayes traces the complex story of how British Columbia obtained that adjective British, starting with the 1579 voyage of Sir Francis Drake. (There is still no proof that Drake reached British Columbia waters-and it's unlikely he did, according to the Drake Society of California-but we know the Brits and Spanish explored West Coast waters in the late 1700s after a Spaniard named Juan Pèrez got here first, in 1774.
Occupation by Britons began in 1805 when the North West Company, following Alexander Mackenzie's 1793 footsteps, crossed the Rockies and began to set up a fur trade network that was taken over by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821.
In 1799, the Russian American Company had been granted a charter by the tsar that gave it a monopoly of the fur trade and by 1804 it had established a headquarters at Sitka. In 1821 the tsar was persuaded to issue a ukase, or imperial edict, claiming Russian sovereignty south to 51°N which produced formal complaints from both Britain and the United States.
The Russian claim was negotiated back to 54°40´N by treaty with the United States and with Britain the following year. This is today the latitude of the southern extent of the Alaska Panhandle.
Fur traders were the first to make maps of the interior of the province, a number of which are reproduced in Hayes' book. Also shown are various boundary proposals as first Russia and then the United States flexed their muscles.
**
It is difficult to know where to begin to provide a synopsis of an atlas that covers aboriginal settlements, European exploration, fur trading, gold rushes, colonialism, railways, mining, agriculture, forestry and fishing.
Here are ten "stops of interest.";
1. Should we claim Blaine?
Back in 1846, it was agreed our southern boundary would be at 49°N, except for Vancouver Island. British proposals had generally showed a boundary at the Columbia River, which would have placed much of Oregon and all of Washington under the Union Jack. The United States had been posturing for 54°40´N as a northern boundary, which would have completely eliminated a British presence on the West Coast. Even after the 1846 agreement, the San Juan Islands were still in contention. It was not until 1872 that arbitration by the German Kaiser settled the boundary at where it is today. But Hayes tells us the surveying for the 49°N boundary line was incorrectly done. The boundary line for the 49th parallel actually runs through the middle of what is today Blaine, Washington. It took another treaty, in 1908, to agree to leave the boundary not at 49°N but where it was surveyed, about 300m north of that.
2. Murder on the Canadian Pacific
After contractor Andrew Onderdonk imported thousands of Chinese workers for the building of the transcontinental railway in the West, anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant among the European population. One of the worst incidents of violence took place as the track laying approached Lytton. On May 8, 1883 an American foreman, one Mr. Gray, fired two workers he believed were lazy and then refused to pay them for the work they had completed that morning. The rest of the gang then attacked the foreman and three others, injuring one of them.
That night twenty workers, all of them thought to be Americans, stole into the Chinese camp, severely clubbing and beating its inhabitants who tried to escape in the dark. The attackers set fire to the camp. Nine Chinese workers were left on the ground for dead, all with serious head injuries. One labourer, Yee Fook, died on the spot-a severe case, the Daily Colonist in Victoria reported the next week, where "the brain appeared to be oozing from the skull."; An extremely rare map from a private collection shows the location of a hole where the body was found, along with numerous other details that illuminate the way the railways construction gangs worked. The map is thought to have been drawn up as evidence for a trial.
3 The Chilcotin massacre
Hoping to build a railway to the Cariboo gold fields, Alfred Waddington began construction for a wagon road that would connect Vancouver Island to the mainland by island hopping and following Bute Inlet towards the interior. Hungry Tsilhqot'in (then known as Chilcotin), angered and frightened by deaths from smallpox, demanded food from a ferryman on the Homathko River and killed him when he refused, on April 29, 1864. Provisions intended for the construction works were taken. The next morning the Tsilhqot'in fell on the construction camp at dawn, killing nine workers; three escaped. Then they located William Brewster, the foreman, and three others farther up the trail and killed them too. Later they ambushed a pack train and killed more people.
Fearing a general uprising, Governor Frederick Seymour organized two parties to track down the killers. William Cox, a gold commissioner, made contact and persuaded the Tsilhqot'in leaders to surrender. The chiefs thought they had been given immunity, but they had not; Chief Klatsassin and four other chiefs were arrested and in September 1864 tried by Judge Begbie at Quesnelmouth (Quesnel). They were found guilty and hanged. Chief Klatsassin, in his defence, said that the Tsilhqot'in had been waging war, not committing murder. A map was drawn up at the time showing the locations of the surrender and various killings. The map is thought to have been produced for the information of the authorities as they pondered a course of action.
4. Baillie-Grohman's dream
In 1882 William Adolph Baillie-Grohman, a British sportsman and author, embarked on a fantastic project. He proposed to link the Upper Columbia River at its source - Columbia Lake - with the Kootenay River, in order to lower the level of Kootenay Lake, a considerable distance downstream on the Kootenay River, so that he could reclaim flat land that flooded every year at the southern end of the lake. It was a grandiose project that would make today's environmentalists throw up their hands in despair, but in the freewheeling 1880s no one seemed to disapprove.
By 1889, employing mainly Chinese labour, Baillie-Grohman constructed a canal linking the Columbia and the Kootenay at Canal Flats, enabling Baillie-Grohman to claim a large land grant. He even began the first steamboat service on the Upper Columbia (brilliantly circumventing customs duties payable on a boat imported from the United States by declaring it was an agricultural implement, meant to pull a steam plow on the lands he was to reclaim). It takes a map to fully appreciate the visionary scope of Baillie-Grohman's land reclamation and development dream; Hayes's book contains one published to convince investors to chance their money in the scheme.
5. Steamboats and fruit
The valleys of the interior generally run north to south and some contain lakes, and this allowed relatively easy connection to the Canadian Pacific Railway by other railways and steamboats plying the long lakes. Beginning in 1886, steamboats on Okanagan Lake began to service new lake settlements such as Penticton and Kelowna. Canadian Pacific had a transportation monopoly for many years until a railway built by Canadian National to Kelowna broke the Okanagan monopoly in 1925.
Steamboats and railways permitted the agricultural development of the Okanagan Valley, enhanced by irrigation, because fruit growers could have their produce quickly shipped to market. The atlas shows maps of rail lines that connect with the CPR, maps of steamboat routes on Okanagan Lake, the Arrow Lakes, and others, and also reproduces promotional maps for irrigated agricultural land and the creation of townsites such as Kaleden, Summerland and Naramata.
6. Railways Abound
Rail lines were proposed for nearly every corner of the province near the outset of the 20th century. Many failed. The Pacific Great Eastern ran out of money north of Quesnel and was taken over by the provincial government. For decades this railway ran "from nowhere to nowhere"; until a connection was made between Vancouver and Prince George in 1956.
Built by the Canadian Pacific as the Kettle Valley Railway, a difficult Coast-to-Kootenay railway was constructed to prevent inroads by American railways across the border which offered much easier routes. There are planning and operating maps of both the Pacific Great Eastern Railway and the Kettle Valley Railway in the atlas, and also a summary map of all the lines proposed and under construction in 1912.
7. Boom and bust in real estate
British Columbia was thought to have a boundless future following the opening of the Panama Canal. In his previous Historical Atlas of Vancouver, Hayes included maps from real estate ads just before World War I when real estate speculation was rampant. The war abruptly squelched speculators and by 1916 land that had sold for hundreds of dollars was being sold for taxes, with few takers.
Hayes has uncovered more real estate maps from 1907-1914. Although some parts of Vancouver owe their beginnings in this period, many more proposed schemes didn't get off the ground until very much later. When the end was in sight for land-grabbing opportunists, one magazine even offered free lots in White Rock with a subscription, and no, that's not a misprint: a lot free with a magazine subscription!
8. Canberra North
Charles Melville Hays has been in the news this year with the centenary of his death aboard the ill-fated Titanic. Until 1912, Hays was general manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway which brought immense changes to northern B.C., including the creation of Prince Rupert and Prince George. The former was intended to be the Pacific terminus of a new transcontinental line, the latter would be part of the railway's speculative land development plan. Hayes's book reproduces the original plans for both model towns, as well as Vanderhoof.
Booster magazine Canada West publisher and railway publicist Herbert Vanderhoof wanted his namesake town to be something special-a literary centre, believe it or not-so he hired Walter Burley Griffin and Francis Barry Byrne, both "flat roof"; Prairie School architects who had apprenticed under Frank Lloyd Wright, to produce a plan. Their layout, with curved streets conforming to the topography (rather than the grid pattern then the norm) was to include civic buildings and tree-lined avenues along the lines of another city Griffin was responsible for-Canberra, the new federal capital of Australia. Griffin's Vanderhoof plan can be found in Hayes' atlas.
9. Rules of the roads
Hazelton ran a competition in 1911 to reward the first car to reach their new town. The winner arrived by driving along river beds and, it was later revealed, dismantling his car and packing the parts over trails, reassembling the vehicle when Hazelton was close by. Hayes's atlas depicts a 1919 tourist road map complete with the banner admonition "The Rule of the Road in British Columbia - Keep to the Left."; He also reproduces a map that documents the changeover from left to right which began the following year.
The majority of the province outside of Vancouver Island and the southwestern mainland changed from left hand driving to right hand driving as of January 1, 1920. It was easy for them; there were few roads with more than a single lane. The rest of the province changed two years later. A two-stage change was possible because the two parts of the province were not connected by road. Construction of the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway (now Canadian National) in the Fraser Canyon had obliterated the road in many places. The Hope-Princeton highway was not completed until 1949. Maps indicated the necessity of shipping cars between Hope and Princeton by rail.
10. Defending the coast
Long before Pearl Harbor the Canadian military had been preparing for a possible attack by the Japanese from the sea, an anticipation that came to a head in the months following Pearl Harbor when an oil refinery near Los Angeles was shelled by a submarine, and air attacks were thought to have occurred; in June came the reported attack on Estevan Lighthouse, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Shortly after the United States ordered all persons of Japanese descent removed from the coast, Canada did the same. Hayes's book shows maps of some of the detention camps set up in the interior to house them, maps drawn by internees themselves. As with many of the maps in the book, they are combined with old and modern photos to better convey what they were like.
Declassified military maps in the atlas indicate gun batteries in Vancouver at Point Grey, Point Atkinson, and Stanley Park, guarding Vancouver Harbour, and Steveston, guarding the mouth of the Fraser; on Albert Head, guarding Esquimalt Harbour; and at the entrance to Prince Rupert Harbour. Yorke Island, near Kelsey Bay, was fortified with long-range guns to guard the northern entrance to the Strait of Georgia. To guard the Skeena Valley east of Prince Rupert, Canada's only armoured train ran secretively back and forth. The atlas shows a map published in an American newspaper in 1943 that purported to have been captured from a Korean spy and showed the Japanese invasion plans for the entire west coast of North America.
978-1-92681-257-1
[BCBW 2012]
It's easy to predict it will become a required reference work, stored on the same shelf as the Encyclopedia of B.C., Chuck Davis' Vancouver volumes, Robin Inglis' Historical Dictionary of the Discovery and Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America and Jean Barman's West Beyond the West.
In Hayes' words, it's a cornucopia of history-and he hastens to add it's not a new edition of his Historical Atlas of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest with which he made his debut in 1999. Only 33 of the maps were in that first atlas. He says 65 per cent of the maps in the new atlas have never been published before.
Highlights include an aboriginal-drawn map, of which there are remarkably few, and a newly discovered bird's-eye map of the entire colonies of British Columbia and Vancouver Island with so many egregious errors extant as to render it essentially useless for practical purposes, but highly amusing.
**
Hayes traces the complex story of how British Columbia obtained that adjective British, starting with the 1579 voyage of Sir Francis Drake. (There is still no proof that Drake reached British Columbia waters-and it's unlikely he did, according to the Drake Society of California-but we know the Brits and Spanish explored West Coast waters in the late 1700s after a Spaniard named Juan Pèrez got here first, in 1774.
Occupation by Britons began in 1805 when the North West Company, following Alexander Mackenzie's 1793 footsteps, crossed the Rockies and began to set up a fur trade network that was taken over by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821.
In 1799, the Russian American Company had been granted a charter by the tsar that gave it a monopoly of the fur trade and by 1804 it had established a headquarters at Sitka. In 1821 the tsar was persuaded to issue a ukase, or imperial edict, claiming Russian sovereignty south to 51°N which produced formal complaints from both Britain and the United States.
The Russian claim was negotiated back to 54°40´N by treaty with the United States and with Britain the following year. This is today the latitude of the southern extent of the Alaska Panhandle.
Fur traders were the first to make maps of the interior of the province, a number of which are reproduced in Hayes' book. Also shown are various boundary proposals as first Russia and then the United States flexed their muscles.
**
It is difficult to know where to begin to provide a synopsis of an atlas that covers aboriginal settlements, European exploration, fur trading, gold rushes, colonialism, railways, mining, agriculture, forestry and fishing.
Here are ten "stops of interest.";
1. Should we claim Blaine?
Back in 1846, it was agreed our southern boundary would be at 49°N, except for Vancouver Island. British proposals had generally showed a boundary at the Columbia River, which would have placed much of Oregon and all of Washington under the Union Jack. The United States had been posturing for 54°40´N as a northern boundary, which would have completely eliminated a British presence on the West Coast. Even after the 1846 agreement, the San Juan Islands were still in contention. It was not until 1872 that arbitration by the German Kaiser settled the boundary at where it is today. But Hayes tells us the surveying for the 49°N boundary line was incorrectly done. The boundary line for the 49th parallel actually runs through the middle of what is today Blaine, Washington. It took another treaty, in 1908, to agree to leave the boundary not at 49°N but where it was surveyed, about 300m north of that.
2. Murder on the Canadian Pacific
After contractor Andrew Onderdonk imported thousands of Chinese workers for the building of the transcontinental railway in the West, anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant among the European population. One of the worst incidents of violence took place as the track laying approached Lytton. On May 8, 1883 an American foreman, one Mr. Gray, fired two workers he believed were lazy and then refused to pay them for the work they had completed that morning. The rest of the gang then attacked the foreman and three others, injuring one of them.
That night twenty workers, all of them thought to be Americans, stole into the Chinese camp, severely clubbing and beating its inhabitants who tried to escape in the dark. The attackers set fire to the camp. Nine Chinese workers were left on the ground for dead, all with serious head injuries. One labourer, Yee Fook, died on the spot-a severe case, the Daily Colonist in Victoria reported the next week, where "the brain appeared to be oozing from the skull."; An extremely rare map from a private collection shows the location of a hole where the body was found, along with numerous other details that illuminate the way the railways construction gangs worked. The map is thought to have been drawn up as evidence for a trial.
3 The Chilcotin massacre
Hoping to build a railway to the Cariboo gold fields, Alfred Waddington began construction for a wagon road that would connect Vancouver Island to the mainland by island hopping and following Bute Inlet towards the interior. Hungry Tsilhqot'in (then known as Chilcotin), angered and frightened by deaths from smallpox, demanded food from a ferryman on the Homathko River and killed him when he refused, on April 29, 1864. Provisions intended for the construction works were taken. The next morning the Tsilhqot'in fell on the construction camp at dawn, killing nine workers; three escaped. Then they located William Brewster, the foreman, and three others farther up the trail and killed them too. Later they ambushed a pack train and killed more people.
Fearing a general uprising, Governor Frederick Seymour organized two parties to track down the killers. William Cox, a gold commissioner, made contact and persuaded the Tsilhqot'in leaders to surrender. The chiefs thought they had been given immunity, but they had not; Chief Klatsassin and four other chiefs were arrested and in September 1864 tried by Judge Begbie at Quesnelmouth (Quesnel). They were found guilty and hanged. Chief Klatsassin, in his defence, said that the Tsilhqot'in had been waging war, not committing murder. A map was drawn up at the time showing the locations of the surrender and various killings. The map is thought to have been produced for the information of the authorities as they pondered a course of action.
4. Baillie-Grohman's dream
In 1882 William Adolph Baillie-Grohman, a British sportsman and author, embarked on a fantastic project. He proposed to link the Upper Columbia River at its source - Columbia Lake - with the Kootenay River, in order to lower the level of Kootenay Lake, a considerable distance downstream on the Kootenay River, so that he could reclaim flat land that flooded every year at the southern end of the lake. It was a grandiose project that would make today's environmentalists throw up their hands in despair, but in the freewheeling 1880s no one seemed to disapprove.
By 1889, employing mainly Chinese labour, Baillie-Grohman constructed a canal linking the Columbia and the Kootenay at Canal Flats, enabling Baillie-Grohman to claim a large land grant. He even began the first steamboat service on the Upper Columbia (brilliantly circumventing customs duties payable on a boat imported from the United States by declaring it was an agricultural implement, meant to pull a steam plow on the lands he was to reclaim). It takes a map to fully appreciate the visionary scope of Baillie-Grohman's land reclamation and development dream; Hayes's book contains one published to convince investors to chance their money in the scheme.
5. Steamboats and fruit
The valleys of the interior generally run north to south and some contain lakes, and this allowed relatively easy connection to the Canadian Pacific Railway by other railways and steamboats plying the long lakes. Beginning in 1886, steamboats on Okanagan Lake began to service new lake settlements such as Penticton and Kelowna. Canadian Pacific had a transportation monopoly for many years until a railway built by Canadian National to Kelowna broke the Okanagan monopoly in 1925.
Steamboats and railways permitted the agricultural development of the Okanagan Valley, enhanced by irrigation, because fruit growers could have their produce quickly shipped to market. The atlas shows maps of rail lines that connect with the CPR, maps of steamboat routes on Okanagan Lake, the Arrow Lakes, and others, and also reproduces promotional maps for irrigated agricultural land and the creation of townsites such as Kaleden, Summerland and Naramata.
6. Railways Abound
Rail lines were proposed for nearly every corner of the province near the outset of the 20th century. Many failed. The Pacific Great Eastern ran out of money north of Quesnel and was taken over by the provincial government. For decades this railway ran "from nowhere to nowhere"; until a connection was made between Vancouver and Prince George in 1956.
Built by the Canadian Pacific as the Kettle Valley Railway, a difficult Coast-to-Kootenay railway was constructed to prevent inroads by American railways across the border which offered much easier routes. There are planning and operating maps of both the Pacific Great Eastern Railway and the Kettle Valley Railway in the atlas, and also a summary map of all the lines proposed and under construction in 1912.
7. Boom and bust in real estate
British Columbia was thought to have a boundless future following the opening of the Panama Canal. In his previous Historical Atlas of Vancouver, Hayes included maps from real estate ads just before World War I when real estate speculation was rampant. The war abruptly squelched speculators and by 1916 land that had sold for hundreds of dollars was being sold for taxes, with few takers.
Hayes has uncovered more real estate maps from 1907-1914. Although some parts of Vancouver owe their beginnings in this period, many more proposed schemes didn't get off the ground until very much later. When the end was in sight for land-grabbing opportunists, one magazine even offered free lots in White Rock with a subscription, and no, that's not a misprint: a lot free with a magazine subscription!
8. Canberra North
Charles Melville Hays has been in the news this year with the centenary of his death aboard the ill-fated Titanic. Until 1912, Hays was general manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway which brought immense changes to northern B.C., including the creation of Prince Rupert and Prince George. The former was intended to be the Pacific terminus of a new transcontinental line, the latter would be part of the railway's speculative land development plan. Hayes's book reproduces the original plans for both model towns, as well as Vanderhoof.
Booster magazine Canada West publisher and railway publicist Herbert Vanderhoof wanted his namesake town to be something special-a literary centre, believe it or not-so he hired Walter Burley Griffin and Francis Barry Byrne, both "flat roof"; Prairie School architects who had apprenticed under Frank Lloyd Wright, to produce a plan. Their layout, with curved streets conforming to the topography (rather than the grid pattern then the norm) was to include civic buildings and tree-lined avenues along the lines of another city Griffin was responsible for-Canberra, the new federal capital of Australia. Griffin's Vanderhoof plan can be found in Hayes' atlas.
9. Rules of the roads
Hazelton ran a competition in 1911 to reward the first car to reach their new town. The winner arrived by driving along river beds and, it was later revealed, dismantling his car and packing the parts over trails, reassembling the vehicle when Hazelton was close by. Hayes's atlas depicts a 1919 tourist road map complete with the banner admonition "The Rule of the Road in British Columbia - Keep to the Left."; He also reproduces a map that documents the changeover from left to right which began the following year.
The majority of the province outside of Vancouver Island and the southwestern mainland changed from left hand driving to right hand driving as of January 1, 1920. It was easy for them; there were few roads with more than a single lane. The rest of the province changed two years later. A two-stage change was possible because the two parts of the province were not connected by road. Construction of the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway (now Canadian National) in the Fraser Canyon had obliterated the road in many places. The Hope-Princeton highway was not completed until 1949. Maps indicated the necessity of shipping cars between Hope and Princeton by rail.
10. Defending the coast
Long before Pearl Harbor the Canadian military had been preparing for a possible attack by the Japanese from the sea, an anticipation that came to a head in the months following Pearl Harbor when an oil refinery near Los Angeles was shelled by a submarine, and air attacks were thought to have occurred; in June came the reported attack on Estevan Lighthouse, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Shortly after the United States ordered all persons of Japanese descent removed from the coast, Canada did the same. Hayes's book shows maps of some of the detention camps set up in the interior to house them, maps drawn by internees themselves. As with many of the maps in the book, they are combined with old and modern photos to better convey what they were like.
Declassified military maps in the atlas indicate gun batteries in Vancouver at Point Grey, Point Atkinson, and Stanley Park, guarding Vancouver Harbour, and Steveston, guarding the mouth of the Fraser; on Albert Head, guarding Esquimalt Harbour; and at the entrance to Prince Rupert Harbour. Yorke Island, near Kelsey Bay, was fortified with long-range guns to guard the northern entrance to the Strait of Georgia. To guard the Skeena Valley east of Prince Rupert, Canada's only armoured train ran secretively back and forth. The atlas shows a map published in an American newspaper in 1943 that purported to have been captured from a Korean spy and showed the Japanese invasion plans for the entire west coast of North America.
978-1-92681-257-1
[BCBW 2012]
Submitted on June 14, 2012 in By David.
