Fleeing the FIre

When I left off Monday, 1886 Vancouver had just gone up in flames. The townfolk saved what they carried. Nothing else. J.Z. Hall and Sam Greer's daughter were on their way to teach Sunday school. Hall went back inside to get his bible, which he had forgotten. While waiting , Miss Greer saw the smoke and called out to Hall. After the fire, the only things Hall owned were the clothes on his back and his bible.

Miss Greet helped Mrs. Ben Wilson, a neighbour,carry her sewing-machine into the inlet's water.  There she, Hall and Wilson waited until the fire passed. The postmaster, Mr. Miller, ran for the mill with the post office cash-box. His glasses were carefully balanced on top of it. Ike Johns managed to save his customs register and that's it.

A young man along Cordova Street lashed a horse harnessed to an old buckboard with a canvas tied over its load. A wind blew the canvas away and in the buckboard was the body of his mother. The 300-pound woman died the night before. A man ran  by, swinging a dead goose by the neck and laughing crazily.

Another man struggled to carry a mattress and half a brass bed. He dropped them in the street and ran back to get his wife and children, who he forgot. Two men ran past a house and stopped. They forced a woman and a little girl to vacate. The woman was in tears because the men wouldn't let her wait to put shoes on the little girl's feet. These refugees all headed for Hastings Mill.

Another danger was the fact there were explosives stored in town. These were the responsibility of drivers employed by the merchants involved. Hugh Campbell was on Water Street near Cambie and he refused to flee until he loaded seven cases of dynamite. Farther down the same street, teamster Harry Berry and two men put 20 barrels of blasting powder on his dray, wrapped them in wet blankets and forced his team through the flames down Carrall Street to False Creek, where he drove them into the water.

Among those who retreated to False Creek were Magistrate Boultbee, C. Gardner Johnson, Bailey, the bartender of Balfour's Hotel and a stranger carrying a valise. They had been surrounded by flames while trying to save the hotel.  On their way to False Creek, they passed a man throwing water from the side of the road onto a woodpile. He refuse to come with them and was burned to death.

At Pender and Carrall Streets, the group could go no farther and lay down in a small patch of gravel.

"To the westward side," said Gardner Johnson, "a large frame house was burning and it was so near that the burning timber came falling around us, causing us agonies I cannot describe. Bailey said he could not stand this and said he was going to to get through at any cost, but he could not penetrate a foot in the flames, and after running around for a few seconds, he dropped and burned up before our eyes."

Johnson was on the windward side of the three. He borrowed the stranger's valise to shield his head. Inside the valise was a loaded revolver and the heat exploded the cartridges.

The fire roared past and burned out so they headed for the creek  and scrambled along the shore, half in and half out the water. The deep bay in the creek shielded that part of the town built on the Westminster Road where Gardner Johnson lived. When he arrived at his cottage, his wife was standing outside, looking for him. In later years, he said,

"I could not go and speak to her, but I remember sitting down on the steps and beginning to cry."

The information above is from the book, Vancouver, from Milltown to Metropolis by Alan Morley.

I hope you find the beauty around you.

Vancouver Explodes

Vancouver was incorporated on April 6, 1886 so that is our official birthday. However, many people feel that June 13, 1886 was the day that Vancouver was truly born.

Sunday, June 13, 1886 was a peaceful sunny day. Art Sullivan and a friend were lazing in a half-decked pleasure sloop just off the Burrard Inlet shore near the Indian Mission Church, west of Moodyville. Art and his mother were proprietors of the prosperous Gold's Hotel on Water Street. The Vancouver boom had been good to them and many others.

Suddenly, a fierce, freakish western squall swooped down on English Bay and the Inlet.

On the south shore, clearing fires to the west town were inflamed. The small, controlled blazes burst into a thundering menace.

Sullivan swung the sloop across the wind to head to the city wharf at the foot of Carrall Street. With two reefs in the mainsail, the jib blown away and his shipmate bailing furiously, he couldn't make the long slant to the wharf. He ended up at Hastings Mill, half a mile past the newly built wharf. That trip took less than twenty minutes.

That was all the time it took for the blossoming city of Vancouver to wiped off the face of the earth.

First warning of the impending disaster was the dense cloud of smoke from the western clearing. Then came the shouts of men running from the clearing camps, which were quickly followed by the clanging of the bell at St. James' Church at Powell Street and Westminster Road. Father Clinton had seen the mass of smoke in the distance and guessed correctly as to what it was.

There was no way to fight this fire. In seconds, not minutes the fire swept across the tangle of felled trees and brush along the shore of the inlet. It torched its way through the dense timber still standing south of Hastings Street. The flames jumped ahead of and cut off the men from the clearing gangs as they rallied on the Regina Hotel in its cleared area west of Cambie Street.

There were four avenues of escape for those in town; the city wharf at Carrall, along the CPR embankment or the road to Hastings Mill, to False Creek at Pender and Carrall or out the Wesminster Road and across the bridge to the south shore of the creek.

On the south shore, Sam Brighouse and George Black were racing horses that morning. One of the spectators, Lewis Carter - owner of Carter House - tried to make his way back into the city. He got across the bridge when the flames forced him into False Creek.

Houses in Vancouver that day did not 'catch fire'. Paint or the pitch on new boards blistered and ran, walls and roofs shimmered with heat waves for a second or two then the whole exterior of the building was a single mass of flame.

One eyewitness said, "Vancouver did not burn - it exploded."

The above information was taken from the book Vancouver, From Milltown to Metropolis by Alan Morley.

I hope you find the beauty around you.

Chang Toy

Today I am going to tell you about one of the men responsible for the building of Vancouver- Chang Toy.

Born in Guangdong province in southern China in 1857, Chang Toy's father died when Toy was three. This didn't stop Chang Toy from going to school though. He was married as a child - so that his mother could have a servant.

In 1874, Chang came to Canada. Initially, he lived in Victoria before moving to New Westminster where he worked at a sawmill. In 1876, Toy moved to Granville and bought a share in a laundry. He then added a small grocery business and started labour contracting other Hakka speaking Chinese workers.

As the years passed, Chang Toy got involved in more businesses such as charcoal burning, an import and export business, steamship ticket sales and real estate. Originally, the goods were shipped from a more established Victoria merchant, the Wing Chong Company to Chang's business, the Sam Kee Company. Funny thing is that Sam Kee appears to be a totally made up name.

Chang Toy. Photo courtesy of the City of Vancouver archives.

After the Great Fire of 1886, Chang Toy moved to Steveston. But by 1888, he was back in the newly named Vancouver. Retail sales rose steadily and the company also acted as a wholesaler - bringing in goods from Hong Kong then shipping them to other parts of B.C. 

In the early 1900s, Sam Kee's store was on the south side of Pender backing onto a much larger False Creek. Sam Kee was also a clearing house for Chinese sending money back to China. By 1908, trade in things such as rice had grown hugely. Chinese sourced rice was shipped mainly to major Vancouver wholesalers like Kelly-Douglas and W H Malkin. On the export side, Hong Kong and later Shanghai had a market for salted fish.

As that trade expanded, Sam Kee made complex relationships with Japanese fishing concerns. When the sources of fish declined, the company made connections in Nanaimo. Sam Kee added a wharf, fish tanks and a saltery. Then Chang Toy's company turned around and leased the area to Japanese companies who supplied the fish Sam Kee exported. 

The different traders in Chinatown were rivals but they worked together when needed. In 1893, Alexander Cumyow and Chang Toy pooled their resources to buy property, which they then leased to Wing Sang and other merchants before selling two years later.

I want to thank the website Building Vancouver for the information on Chang Toy. I will tell you more about him on Wednesday.

I hope you find the beauty around you.