Echoes of British Columbia

Voices from the Frontier

Robert Budd

• Publisher: Harbour Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781550176780
• eBook ISBN:
  9781550176803
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In a follow-up to his well-received Voices of British Columbia, Robert Budd returns with more captivating tales of the province’s pioneering past in the very words of the people who lived them.

Between 1959 and 1966, the late CBC Radio journalist Imbert Orchard travelled across British Columbia with recording engineer Ian Stephen, conducting interviews with some of the province’s most remarkable and inspiring pioneers. The resulting collection contained 998 conversations totalling 2,700 hours of material—one of the largest oral history collections in the world and a precious treasury of western heritage.

In Echoes of British Columbia, author Budd skilfully renders some of the most entertaining and astonishing accounts from the Orchard collection into entrancing prose. There are tales about rawhiding to the Klondike; being rescued by the legendary Chief Capoose; of riding and racing horses standing up; of homesteading, birth and murder. You’ll meet Pattie Halsam, who grew up at remote Cape Beale Lighthouse and travelled to Victoria by canoe. You’ll laugh and cry with Bob Gamman as he transports a frozen corpse via wicker laundry basket and tugboat. You’ll thrill to Thomas Bullman’s eyewitness account of the siege of the murderous McLean Gang’s cabin in Douglas Lake. Combining text, archival photographs and original sound recordings on three CDs, this collection brings the reader (and listener) in intimate contact with British Columbia’s past, deepening our understanding of the characters and events that shaped the province.

( 1 )

An Urge to Go to New Lands

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In 1857, New Caledonia—today, British Columbia—had a population of approximately 200 non-Native residents. However, when news of gold along the Fraser River reached prospectors in California a year later, a gold rush and the first wave of settlement began. Nearly 300,000 people had flocked to California in search of gold in 1849, but the area then entered a small depression and the gold seekers sought their fortunes farther north. By the spring of 1858, 30,000 immigrants had arrived.

Several other gold rushes followed, bringing more people and new infrastructure. Roads such as the Cariboo Wagon Road were built to connect the Lower Mainland with the gold fields in the Cariboo, and stopping houses and towns were established along the way. A railroad was laid to link British Columbia to eastern Canada, a trip that had previously taken months of travel by boat, and people from all over the world were able to access western Canada and its coal, metals, salmon and timber. A global economic depression struck in the first decade of the twentieth century, but BC remained a land of possibility and its population swelled to more than 370,000 non-Native people by 1911.

The following stories relate the experiences of men and women who felt compelled to move west—or whose families did. Some came in search of adventure in a vast wilderness; others followed friends or family into established communities. Their recollections help us to understand the diverse realities of the province’s early settlers.

The view from a CPR steamer as it arrives in Arrowhead, 1905. Photo: b-06650

What Did I Just Come Through?

Albert Veranous Franklin

on Building a Road to the Gang Ranch

(recorded july 28, 1964)

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The Chilcotin First Nation were the first people to settle Tatla Lake. However, on March 15, 1892, Benjamin “Benny” Franklin purchased a ranch at Tatla Lake and he and his family, including his young son Albert (1884–1968), were among the first non-Native settlers in the Chilcotin region.

Benny Franklin set out to carve a route from the Chilcotin to Victoria via Knight Inlet. It took him and his guides six days to cross the 130 miles to the ocean, travelling by canoe, snowshoe, horse and on foot. The Victoria Colonist newspaper reported the following on April 13, 1892: “The two Indians who accompanied Franklin to Victoria had never been in a city before. Never seen a railway, a steamboat or a streetcar, and the Indians themselves were a curiosity to the city folks as well as they passed up Government Street with their bundles of furs on their backs and their rifles in hand.” As the following anecdote further illustrates, Franklin was constantly trying to fashion new roads into Tatla Lake. He eventually sold his land to Robert Graham in 1902.

Today, Tatla Lake is a small unincorporated community located at the halfway point of Highway 20, which runs between Williams Lake to the east and the coastal community of Bella Coola to the west. For decades, however, Tatla Lake was known as the “end of the road” since it was the end of the Chilcotin Highway. In this case, the term “highway” really meant a poor horsetrack that wagon teams could bounce over.

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Click to listen to this interview

albert veranous franklin: Maybe I should start from the time I was born.

imbert orchard: Could we start even before that?

franklin: No, I wasn’t here then. [laughs] I was born on Skykomish River in the year 1884 at two o’clock in the morning. My father was in— I was in the logging camp. Born in a logging camp. My father had an old log teamster, called— his name was John Gowan. And he was a splendid teamster. My father learned how to drive oxen through him. The Skykomish River emptied into the Snohomish River and they had agreed with the mill company that they’d put the logs in the Skykomish River on a certain date, and they had a shear boom to shear them off into a slough for the mill. Well, the day that everybody shot the logs, the shear boom was broken. And all the logs went past Everett, Washington, to the sea. And my father turned out broke. Nothing. He managed to pay all his help. When he got done, he had only 25 cents left. He decided to throw that away and start new. “But no,” he says, “maybe the wife or kid might need something to eat,” so he kept it.

Benny Franklin’s new route from the Chilcotin makes headlines in the Daily Colonist. Scan courtesy of the Times Colonist

And we moved up to Aldergrove. And my father started milking cows, making butter for Old Man York at Sumas. And he was doing pretty well, putting up good butter and milking cows—’course they were working hard—and in about four years’ time, the surveyors was up around the Chilcotin Country surveying for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, trying to bring it in by the way of Bute Inlet. ’Course there are pretty vicious mountains there. And they had Waddington’s Canyon to tunnel through, also Tiedemann’s Glacier to get around someway. It was a pretty difficult proposition. But, when they come back they had seen the Tatla Lake meadow. And the sidehills alongside of Tatla Lake, and they happened to stop in at York’s place and they were talking to my dad, telling him what a wonderful meadow that was. There was even sugarcane growing there and there was bunch grass on the sidehill the full length of Tatla Lake, up to the horse’s knees. What a wonderful place to raise cattle. So my father sold out his butter making and milking business and moved up there. He had something like $4,000 saved up.

The Chilcotin Valley near Alexis Creek, ca. 1925. Photo: a-01581

We moved up there, and he had a wagon and he got a team of horses, and he come up by the old road alongside of the Fraser River, and stopped in at Ashcroft and got some groceries and stuff and went on up and we had to swim the horses at Soda Creek to get over into the Chilcotin Country because we was headed for Tatla Lake. He knowed about it on account of these surveyors telling him all about it. And they had surveyed right through the flat where we built our home. So, anyway, he come on up and when he got as far as Alexis Creek, there was no more road. So we had to make the roads from Alexis Creek through bull pastures—there’s bull pastures alongside of the river there— Chilcotin River, you know, we’re not on the Fraser River anymore, and an Indian come along and says, “You want some mawich?” “Maika tiki mawich?” he said. That’s Chinook, now.

orchard: What’s it mean?

franklin: “Do you want some deer meat?” My father says, “Nawitke.” He could talk Chinook, too.

Pack horses swimming across the Chilcotin River, 1904. Photo: i-58390/Frank Cyril Swannell

So away he went, trotting on ahead. And all he had was a knife about, oh, ten inches long overall, handle and everything. And that’s all he had to get that deer with. He, he was just before we got to Redstone Flat we caught up to him. Here he had a deer, sure enough, wasn’t a big one. He’d creeped up onto it on his hands and knees so that it wouldn’t hear him, and he stabbed it while it was laying down. And he had it all dressed and ready for us when we arrived there. We all had mawich to eat, that’s deer. We had plenty. And when we got to Tatla Lake, Old Gishawn, the fellow that killed the deer, he claimed that he was the owner of the Tatla Lake place because no king or queen ever come to see him to ask him for it, so it was his. Well, that was all right. My father bought it from him for a caddy of T&B tobacco. That was the price he paid for the Tatla Lake place. Well, we established a home there. My father got some groceries and dry goods and so forth from Ashcroft, had to go to Ashcroft to get them, and he started a store with the Indian selling the goods: calico and stuff to make the dresses out of, and Jew’s harps, they liked to play them. And, when we had to go for supplies we had to go clear to Ashcroft.

After we got all settled and started to accumulate a little from selling our goods, my father had to go to Ashcroft to get some goods and he found out that there was a ferry boat at the Gang Ranch. So he made the road, I was with him, and he had Gilpin as a guide, an Indian, to guide him to make the road from the Chilcotin Bridge through to the Gang Ranch. And when he got there, he got off, tied up his horse and went over to talk to [James] Prentice that lived in a big mansion there. Told Prentice that we had a road through from Chilcotin Bridge to the home ranch. “No, Franklin, you’re a darned liar,” he says, “there’s no road there.” “What did I just come through? I just made it. Just got done.” And he spent about $150 to pay for the Indian and the food and so forth, the cost, for to get that road through because he was going to Ashcroft to get his supplies.

And, when we got across the ferry, we come on down, up Dog Creek, it’s—you’re going upstream there, and come out at the 61 Mile House, and then on down to Clinton. When he got to Clinton, he stopped and a fellow walked out in the street, “Your name Mr. Franklin?” My father said, “Yes, sir, and I’m proud of it.” “Well,” he says, “I’m the tax collector,” and he says, “I’m going to collect toll taxes from you for the use of the road.” And my father just got done paying $150 to build the road. “Well,” my father says, “I’m not going to pay it.” “Well,” he says, “Well, I’m going to take your rig, your horses and wagon.” He says, “You’ll take them over my dead body!” Well, he never did pay it. That was $150 toll tax that he never paid. Do you blame him? I don’t.

Located at the end of the Chilcotin Highway, Tatla Lake marked “the end of the road” in the 1890s. Photo: i-57385/Frank Cyril Swannell

Just Try and Throw Us Off

Florence Reedman

on Homesteading in the Shuswap

(recorded may 14, 1965)

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John Reedman (1856–1930) was born into an upper-class British family and ran the family furniture business. He was also an auctioneer and government representative in charge of levying certain taxes. John had been widowed twice, and Florence Harriet Cave (1881–1968) of Stamford, England, was his housekeeper and the caretaker of his three children until the two married in 1902. She was twenty-six years younger than him. The couple had eight more children, though one died in infancy and another at age 15.

The family felt compelled to leave England when a good friend of John’s committed suicide after his gambling debts were uncovered, and because many of John’s class-conscious friends made hurtful comments toward Florence. The family travelled to Canada in 1905 aboard the steamship Virginian and then moved west to Calgary, where they met with John’s son Harry. The family was looking to make a fresh start, which included a new vocation for John.

In the following story, Florence Reedman describes how the family established themselves by homesteading in Blind Bay, at the south end of Shuswap Lake, in the first decade of the 1900s. This story conveys a sense of isolation and teamwork as well as gender roles, and it paints a picture of how much work was involved in acquiring things like flour that we now take for granted.

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Click to listen to this interview

florence reedman: At that time, in England, all over the British Isles, you saw big placards. CPR, of course, were boosting this country, because they got the railway through. “Go to Canada. Go to British Columbia—the land of milk and honey.” And there was pictures of apple trees, and the apple trees were big silver dollars. Very enticing, you know. And that was why we came.

So rather than give up all this interest, because he was very comfortably fixed, he sent his eldest son. And so Harry came out, and he eventually got to Edmonton. Well, he was musical, he played the piano very nicely, and he got in with nice people, was having a good time, he got work, and everything was lovely. Wrote to see, so of course, my husband set the wheels going to dispose of all his businesses and come out. And we left England the sixth of April, got across the ocean, we got in to Newfoundland, we saw the beautiful icebergs, and we had to go 300 miles out of our course. We were admiring these beautiful, oh, you know, just like diamonds shining in ...

Table of contents

• Author’s Note
• Map
• Introduction
• ( 1 ) An Urge to Go to New Lands
• ( 2 ) When We Were Young
• ( 3 ) Mischief and Mayhem
• ( 4 ) Opening Up the West
• ( 5 ) Life and Death in the Country
• ( 6 ) A Suitable Place for a City
• Acknowledgements