Talk:History of Vancouver

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Reviewed version: December 20, 2006

Contents

[edit] BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum

Please see RE BC & Pacific Northwest History Forum re: Talk:List of United States military history events#Border Commission troops in the Pacific Northwest. If you think maybe I should also move some or copy some of my other stuff from NW history and BC history pages and various Indigenous peoples project article/talk pages let me know; I never mean to blog, but I'm voluble and to me everything's interconnected; never meaning to dominate a page so have made this area to post my historical rambles on. Thoughts?Skookum1 03:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

Comment on my posting of this: if anyone has any questions or wants to debate any issues relating to Oregon Country/Columbia District/Pacific Northwest history/historical geography, colonialist or aboriginal/indigenous, please feel free to drop by the forum and start a thread/topic, or just butt in at yer leisure.Skookum1 05:50, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 1900-1940

Here's a draft for the 1st 4 decades of the 20th century, still needs work, though. Could be organized better, and it reflects my own interest in this history, so it could probably use some balancing out. And its probably too long for this period, especially once a postwar history gets added in there. But, its something to work with.Bobanny 22:46, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Skookum:
I appreciate your comments (embedded in the article) on what I wrote, and made some changes. As I noted above, I wrote this as a draft, rather quickly, thinking of it as a point of departure rather than a final product. I’m hoping others will jump right in and modify it as they see fit, on the way to getting it up to par. In other words, go nuts in editing what I wrote if you want – I’m sure there’s lots of room for improvement, and I just wanted to get the ball rolling because it’s an important section of wiki-van that was missing (and postwar history is still undone). That said, I’ll respond to the comments you left, some I disagree with, others I’m not clear on.
First, I’ll accept that Terminal City is an anachronism. If you know the origins of that term, I’d be curious to hear it. (I know it’s not the newspaper). What I do know is that there was a foundry in town with that name, the name of which can be seen on manhole covers around town, and Eric Nicol uses the term “terminal town” in his 1970 book. Vancouver was the end of the line for lots of transient men “riding the rods,” which is all I wanted to say there.
I just came across the use of "Terminal City" as a nickname for Vancouver in The Canadian Police Gazette from August 1935, so I'm back to believing that it's an old name derived from Vancouver being chosen as the terminus for the CPR.Bobanny 02:47, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm back, but haven't sat down to the "big questions" section yet...but re this Terminal City thing, try looking up the history of the Terminal City Club in the VPL (it's Vancouver's No.2 Gentleman's Club after the Vancouver Club and is located next to the Marine Building on W Hastings); think it dates from c.1910 or c.1920 at that building; the name is as old as the founding of the city, as I think you'll find cf. Chuck Davis, Denny Boyd, Bruce Hutchison writings and others; sure it's in Chuck Davis somewhere, or he'd certainly be able to give you its provenance.Skookum1 02:51, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Today’s Downtown Eastside does include the former East End, which is different than East Van. It’s roughly where Strathcona is today. Strathcona School was originally called the East End School, which distinguished it from Central School that was behind the old court house on the present VCC site across from Victory Square, and I’m guessing there was probably a West End School somewhere too. So far as I know, the interurban facilitated the eastward extension of the working class part of town by WWI, helping create the Drive area and beyond.
The amalgamation paragraph wasn’t deleted, but incorporated into what I wrote for the sake of trying to stay roughly chronological.
As for the Stanley Park residents, I’m not sure who you are saying is left out, since Portuguese, at least now, fits into the category “white.” I don’t have sources handy, but so far as I understand, there were distinct communities of Chinese and Portuguese, but any English/Scot/Irish (if that’s what you mean by white) “squatters” were scattered. I know one blind guy was allowed to stay there until he died in the 1950s, but I’m not sure what ethnicity he was. But I’m not hung up on insisting no whites were evicted. (In any case, there are white squatters there now!)
My claim about the West End being the result of speculators was not a reference to the Three Green Horns. The CPR bought the land for a song from the Three Greenhorns and others as part of the backroom deals that sweetened the pot for the CPR making Vancouver the terminus. The influence of the CPR, which many considered to be synonymous with the government, created a division with the earlier business elites in the eastern part of town, but who eventually they came around and headed west. No, it wasn’t city council and zoning bylaws, but backroom deals that made this happen, and included civic officials L. A. Hamilton (also Land Commissioner for the CPR, the guy who named most of the original streets, including one after himself) and David Oppenheimer, local rich guy.
I’m confused about what you mean about race in Vancouver. I could bombard you with primary sources expressing contemporary attitudes that dominated prewar thinking of influential whites, but I don’t see the point. Nor do I see the need to cite for that part. I mentioned The Writing on the Wall, The Oriental Occupation of British Columbia, Danger, the World, and the Star in the body of the article if the reader wants elaboration or verifications on racial attitudes amongst influential whites. Nowhere did I say that white racism was an organic phenomenon, somehow inherent in the white race gene, or that the ideology was consistently applied or practiced. It was, however, a huge factor that shaped the city along racial lines. Yes, whites and non-whites interacted and associated on a variety of levels, including gambling dens in Chinatown and blind pigs in Hogan’s Alley, but I have not seen anything to contradict what I wrote in any relevant histories, modern, “pomo,” or any other kind. Off the top of my head, I could refer you to the murder of Chief McLellan in 1917 by a “crazed negro drug addict," as well as a backlash against blacks following a murder committed in Hogan’s Alley. Emily Murphy’s The Black Candle was in part based on her tour of opium dens in Vancouver. Blacks were associated with drugs, Chinese were associated with opium specifically, as well as “white slavery” (corrupting white women) and gambling. The fear, in a nutshell, was of miscegenation: white girls being corrupted by these men and then knocked up, which would threaten the white race. “Ethnic” Europeans were more associated with bootlegging. No group monopolized these activities, and no one at the time would have been surprised to learn that whites came to these neighbourhoods to engage in vice, but those racialized associations were made, and reinforced by Mayor Taylor’s “open town policy,” which effectively designated these areas as red light districts. Taylor was also a key figure in the Asiatic Exclusion movement, mainly through his alarmist editorials in the World. Whether these were deeply held beliefs by Taylor and others, or just fears they exploited politically, I can’t say. My confusion lies in what you are claiming about race relations in Vancouver before WWII. If I’m being “revisionist,” I have no idea what it is I’m revising. There is a huge difference between opinion and analysis, the latter being based on interpreting evidence. At this point I don’t know what evidence or analysis you might be referring to that counters what I wrote or even suggests that it is even remotely controversial. I’d be willing to find a citation, but I’m not sure what it is that needs verifying.
Possibly it’s a question of emphasis for you. My gut feeling says that the biggest weakness of what I wrote is in what I selected to represent Vancouver history in this period. Race and class relations are prominent in the local historiography, so I feel justified in having made it prominent here as well, but it's also a reflection of my own interests and what I've read. With the possible exception of Kay J. Anderson, I drew from social historians, not post-modern sources, which reflects the dominant stream in professionally produced local history of the last forty years. If you’d rather pull this away from university egg head history, by all means, dig in. (Just be sure to cite your sources :D) Bobanny 07:37, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm thinking prohibition (including, by extension, the temperance and women's movements) should be incorporated in the vice section (echoing Skookum, methinks), and also maybe the free speech fights. Maybe have more comprehensive categories (economics, politics, immigration, that sort of thing) and maybe make this part into its own page (like Seattle's does.Bobanny 05:03, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Those would all be "Politics" wouldn't they? Of course, in BC, crime is politics, and the politicians are just a bunch of criminals who haven't tripped up yet, but that's beside the point: termperance and suffrage are interlinked, as is Prohibition and also veteran's rights; and free speech rights is definitely politics, but speaking your mind remains a faux pas socially here, even though not necessarily any longer a crime...just wanted to add, relative to the "association with vice" thing on Chinatown and Japantown is that the whorehouses were already established on Dupont Street (E. Pender) when the Chinese moved back from China Creek, where they had fled in the winter riots of 1885-86 (early 1886 I think; don't have the date handy), and Chinese merchants chose to set up shop alongside the whorehouses, as there was a lot of "custom" (consumer traffic in the old merchandising slogan) because of the life generated by a bawdyhouse district; they also didn't have the same qualms and pretentiousness towards prostitution of the Protestant establishment (the post-railway establishment, as pre-railway Gastown was very live-and-let-live). Ditto with those officially-sanctioned bordellos that were built out on Alexander Street, where the Dupont girls moved when the city finally kicked them out of there (and it became more available for Chinese businesses to settle in/expand...); can't remember what year that got going (Alexander St) but I don't think Japantown was all that large yet; if it was the '20s, OK, but really that area of Alexander Street in the '90s (when I think the "project" got going) was a remote area, maybe close to the beginnings of what became Japantown, but again the working girls were there before the ethnic community had become all that established; and again the Japanese are more practical towards certain things that Protestant values condemn as "vice". The first whorehouses in Gastown were around where the remaining chunk of Woodward's is - really a bunch of shack-tents, and it happened that this was the same area that a few Chinese had chosen to put their tents.....gee, I wonder why? It's also worth mentioning that, especially in early Gastown, whoring was a multicultural business, girls and madams alike; I'm not sure of the ethnicity of the oldest Hastings area (Woodward's) group, but it quite probably including Asian and Polynesian girls as well as Indian and what few whites there were (probably transplanted San Franciscans or otherwise via the US); but the reason wasn't racism, but as with the labour force, Asia and Polynesia and the like were a lot easier to get talent in than from, say, London's East End. As for opium, gambling, and other vice, yeah, there's obvoius reasons Chinatowns get that rap - essentially Chinese business people being more willing to provide what more "righteous" operators would not, whether it's girls, opium, booze (although everyone served booze in those days, including the banks or gambling games, which the Chinese themselves were fond of); blaming it on "racism" is just more of the knee-jerk stuff. As for Hogan's Alley, that's a different story and a different era, and between L.D. Taylor and Grandma Hendrix it's a different tale altogether. The last vestige of that community I remember, by the way, was Vie's Steak House, on Union about seven doors east of Main, and of course the bar next to the Ivanhoe that was for a while re-named Hogan's Alley in tribute to its forebears (it was a jazz/r&b joint).Skookum1 17:07, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

And re my pending reply to Bobanny above, time has slipped away these last few days and last night I wound up pre-occupied cribbing from Teit to write Nicola (chief), still not quite done and needs expansion from other sources. I'm gone to the mountains (round Lillooet) for the next week as of this afternoon and won't be wiki'ing, but I have been meaning to reply and will once I'm back.Skookum1 17:07, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

One thing I did want to suggest was the dates on chapter sections should be more like 1880s-1918 (or 1914), 1914/18-1929, 1930-1945, and so on; 1900 as a cutoff date is in the middle of a period in Vancouver, not the beginning or end of one....(IMO; although there were significant shifts because of the Klondike but that's throughout North America).Skookum1 17:14, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

I was thinking thematic organization within a time frame-specific article. I don't think its possible to do justice with a straight chronological organization without making arbitrary cut-offs, like you point out. But yeah, yours do make more sense. I was just copying Seattle (cuz, y'know we're not supposed to be original here), and because the early history seemed to go upto the 20th century with the exception of amalgamation. And yes, the proposed themes could all be boiled down to politics; for the sake of making it manageable, they would be used in the narrowest sense, IMO. ie, 'politics' having to do with government and developments in civic governance, etc. Crime that's not vice related is rather unremarkable in Vancouver. So I think vice/morality/temperance/ or whatever category name would cover the important stuff there ('policing' would be more precise than 'crime,' since crime is basically a sloppy euphemism for what police do). Maybe "Order" without the "Law" could cover a bunch of relevant stuff, like free speech, racial, and industrial conflicts.
As for the racial associations with vice crime, the point is not that any specific group engaged more or less in these activities, but that it meant something different for whites than non-whites in the ideology of middle and upper class anglophiles. Here's a quote from the prosecutor in the Joe Celona case in 1935 (he was 'public enemy' #1 back in the day, and ran brothels in various parts of town). Celona was Italian, but what made his activities particularly offensive was that he was pimping white girls to Chinese clients:
"'This case would be bad enough if it was a case of the girls prositiuting themselves to white men,' he continued, 'but there are no words in the English language to describe the abhorrence of their being procured exclusively for the yellow men from China. That these girls should be submitted to crawling, yellow beasts of the type frequenting such dives...' words failed the silken gowned prosecutor as he dwelt on this image." (News-Herald, 2 April 1935). That's pretty harsh racism there in the original, not a knee jerk interpretation of the past. And it's not just the view of the prosecutor in this case. Celona was released early on parole for good behaviour, or whatever, but they had to throw him back in jail because the public (presumably the white public) threw a hissy fit. For respectable white society, Celona was the Robert Pickton of his day. No, not everyone held such harsh views, but the people with a lot of influence in policy making and steering the organization and development of the city had very distinctly racist ideas guiding them. Prostitution was more commonly understood as a necessary evil despite all the emphasis on moral puritinism in this era, with the idea that if men didn't get laid periodically, they'd have to rape. It wasn't the exploitation of women that made white slavery so disturbing (not that they'd want their daughters prostituting to white men), but that it was a threat to the racial integrity of whites. And it wasn't a racism based on cultural differences, but the understanding of biological differences of the races. The result was that the parameters within which the Chinese, Japanese, natives, South Asians, etc. lived and worked, were rigidly demarcated - where they lived, where they worked, what industry they worked in, where they set up shop, and so on. Within this blatantly oppressive structure, sure, they made the best of their situation, as people usually try to do. Chinese businesses thrived in part because the Chinese market was so concentrated and cut off from white business because of de facto segregationism. Chinese, Japanese, Italians like Celona, and lots of others including whites engaged in vice operations because, then as now, vice is a pretty lucrative source of income. Absolutely, there's a material dimension to race relations in early Vancouver - international relations, economic development, immigration patterns, bosses like the Dunsmuirs preferring to hire non white workers to cut labour costs (Indian, Chinese, Japanese, depending on the context). It was a very racially segregated society because of policies and practices of powerful white actors. Okay, that's enough. Have a good vacation.Bobanny 21:39, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Failed GA

As of [1], the article during the review, I failed this article for Good Article status for the following reasons:

  • (1.a) — Prose is poor. The story is hard to follow because the flow is abrupt and one story jumps into another one without smooth transition. The full story is fragmented.
  • (1.b) — The lead section is too short, it does not comprise the summary of the article.
  • (1.b) — Logical structure is poor and it is not clear to understand the chronological flow of the article. Section 1900 to 1940 is completely empty. Why is there a question mark in the section name?
  • (2) — Section First settlements and Early growth are completely unreferenced. There are many unsourced facts and unreferenced trivia statements.

Therefore the article is not yet ready for GA at the moment. A lot of copyediting is needed. I'd suggest to find other copyeditors that are unknown about the subject to copyedit this article. When it is ready, the article can be renominated back. As always, if you feel disagree about this review, you may ask for re-review. — Indon (reply) — 15:50, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Source

I uploaded a booklet from 1946 with a pretty comprehensive history of Vancouver. It's got it's flaws (a promo for the city), but it also has some interesting material you won't see in many other places, such as sport and aviation history, and it's loaded with photos (a lot of which can be found on the City of Van archives website. I had technical problems with it; I tried to upload it as a pdf, but that didn't work so I made it a .djvu file, which I had to download a browser plug-in to work. Hopefully others can access; it's 100 pages and has a lot of detail. Image:VanJubileeSouvenir.djvu bobanny 20:21, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Another online source I found recently is all of Rolf Knight's work, posted on his website. bobanny 20:24, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Date and Location of first operations at Stamp's Mill / Hastings Mill

It seems unlikely that Stamp's Mill began operations in 1865 at Brockton Point. We need a citation from an authoritative source about when and where the mill operations actually began.Nesbit (talk) 01:42, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

The authoritative sources are several; try reading some, they're very well known. Major Matthews' Early Vancouver, Olga Ruskin at al's The Gassy Jack Story, Alan Morley's Vancouver:Milltown to Metropolis, Peter MacDonald's historical atlas, and others; also in the Akriggs' BC Chronicles. Captain Stamp's misadventure on Brockton Point is part of the story; I think there's even fairly exact dates, or months/weeks anyway, to pin it down to...it may seem unlikely to you, but it happened. Not sure how far mill construction got, but they had major problems with the tides/currents and the Brockton reef; IIRC they were also warned by the Skwxwu7mesh that it was a bad spot, but stubborn ol' Stamp he wouldn't listen. Until he had to. Those are the cites; it's in all of them, and many more. Read some.Skookum1 (talk) 06:08, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't doubt that the site at Brockton point was planned and that land was cleared. I'm questioning where and when the mill actually began sawing logs and producing lumber. Was the imported mill equipment first assembled at Brockton point or at the south shore site? This has implications for the timing of permanent settlement of workers and the development of early urban infrastucture. Nesbit (talk) 16:53, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
A little hunting for electronic resources turned up this.
In 1865 he formed a company in England, backed by capital of $100,000 , to produce lumber in British Columbia. Stamp also secured from the colonial government of British Columbia the right to purchase or lease 16,000 acres of timber on the lower coast, and selected a mill site on a point of land along Burrard Inlet's south shore. Delayed by the failure of crucial machinery parts to arrive from England, Stamp did not begin cutting lumber for export until June 1867. After managing the firm for less than two years he retired, and shortly thereafter his company went into liquidation in England. The mill closed for a period in 1870 but opened again in August after being purchased by Dickson, DeWolf and Company of San Francisco. Known at first as Stamp's Mill, it now became the Hastings Sawmill Company, or Hastings Mill.
McDonald, Robert A. Making Vancouver: Class ,Status and Social Boundaries, 1863-1913. Vancouver, BC, Canada: UBC Press, 1996. p 7. Copyright © 1996. UBC Press. All rights reserved.
We should revise the article accordingly. I'll work this into the Hastings Mill article first. Nesbit (talk) 17:22, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
I'm questioning where and when the mill actually began sawing logs and producing lumber. Was the imported mill equipment first assembled at Brockton point or at the south shore site? This has implications for the timing of permanent settlement of workers and the development of early urban infrastucture.

Whuh? Obviously the "timing of permanent settlement" woujldn't include temporary digs on Brockton Point, and this has nothing to do with the devleopment off "early urban infrastructure". There's a case to be made, that other than the mill manager, there were no permanent residents at Hastings Mill (the Dunlevy site, not Brockton); it was a company town, inherently impermanent, as were its workers. What began urban infrastructure was the land-survey of the lot next to teh mill property that became Granville, B.I. aka Gastown, and it can be dated right down to September 1, 1867, which is when Gassy Jack wset up a plank and a couple of barrels and got the mill employees drunk. As re the mill machinery, I don't know if any source, other than maybe Matthews (which is grotesquely un-indexed), has anything about whether or not it was unloaded/assembled at Brockton Point, although as mentioned some fairly precise dates are mentioned somewhere; it may be taht the instability of docked ships prevented the unloading of equipment; my reading of the sources gave me t he impression that ships couldn't dock to pick up milled timber, suggesting that the mill was already in operation. I suggest yhou find the Olga Ruskin book mentioned, it had a lot more Gastown-specific detail; the book on Capt. Stamp that's around these days also should have something more.....Skookum1 (talk) 18:09, 1 April 2008 (UTC) Still, June '67 to Sept '67, by which time the mill had been already at Dunlevy for a while....hmmm. It may be only that they figured out the reef/currents would be counterproductive before the machinery arrived...but if the Brockton Point "experimental site" was attempted in July, that would be after the equipment arrived. Check the Olga Ruskin book, maybe the Morley which is easieer to find (I'm in Halifax, they're not possible to find here at all).Skookum1 (talk) 18:17, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

I checked Morley and Eric Nicol's Vancouver, and neither is that specific. Morley does say, however, that the Dunlevy site wasn't up and running because "an essential piece of equipment" was delayed in arriving. But yeah, we're still a ways off from anything resembling "urban infrastructure" at this point. -Bobanny —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.46.26.41 (talk) 21:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)