THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: 1886
On June 13, the new city of Vancouver was destroyed in the Great Fire
One hundred and twenty-nine years ago, Vancouver was burnt to a crisp in the Great Fire of June 13, 1886.
The city was barely two months old, and probably had a couple of hundred buildings on June 12. According to the 1888 Williams Directory, only three buildings survived the fire.
“Probably never since the days of Pompeii and Herculaneum was a town WIPED OUT OF EXISTENCE so completely and suddenly as was Vancouver,” reported the Daily News on June 17.
“It was about two o’clock in the afternoon that the breeze which had been blowing from the west BECAME A GALE, and flames surrounded a cabin near a large dwelling to the west of the part of the city solidly built up.
“A few score men had been on guard with water and buckets between this dwelling and the cabin, but when the wind became a gale they were forced to FLEE FOR THEIR LIVES, and in a few minutes the dwelling was a mass of flames and the whole city was filled with flying cinders and dense clouds of smoke.
“The flames spread from this building to adjoining ones with amazing rapidity. THE WHOLE CITY WAS IN FLAMES less than forty minutes after the first house was afire.”
Everything that was in the fire’s path was torched, including newspaper offices. If you look through old Vancouver newspapers on microfilm, there is a gap between the June 10, 1886 Daily Advertiser and the July 23, 1886 Daily News, probably because the offices went up in flames, and it took awhile to start printing papers again.
But there is a two-page version of the Daily News for June 17, only four days after the fire. We know this because Don Stewart of Macleod’s Books has a copy, which he purchased off another dealer at the Vancouver Antiquarian Book Fair last fall.
It is a very, very rare document. The Vancouver Archives doesn’t even have a copy. Neither does the Special Collections department of the Vancouver Public Library, or UBC Special Collections.
The Legislative Library in Victoria also doesn’t have a copy, and it has the most extensive collection of printed newspapers in the province.
“Things like this only normally survive in a group of papers or pamphlets,” said Stewart. “Someone must have recognized its importance at the time, as a representative account of an extremely traumatic event, and carefully preserved it.” There have been other accounts about the Great Fire, written after the fact.
Last year, Lisa Smith wrote an acclaimed book about the fire, Vancouver Is Ashes. (She’s giving a talk about the Great Fire on Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Hastings Mill Museum at Alma and Pt. Grey Road.)
What makes the June 17 Daily News riveting is its immediacy. One paragraph is in smaller type, probably because it was inserted at the last minute.
The paragraph is in the section identifying the dead.
“It is feared that the seven whose bodies were recovered constitute only a fraction of the whole number who perished,” the News reported.
“The total number of victims and their identity will probably NEVER BE KNOWN. With the exception of Mrs. Nash and Mr. Craswell, the bodies recovered were all burned to crisp and barely recognizable as human remains.
“Mr. Craswell’s body was found in a well where he took refuge and died in suffocation. A young man named Johnson and his mother were found in the same well. Johnson was dead and his mother has since died.
“The body of Mr. Fawcett, the soda water manufacturer, was identified by his wife by means of his watch-chain.” Many of the survivors lived by jumping into Burrard Inlet, or clambering aboard boats anchored there. Others had miraculous escapes.
“John Boultbee and C.J. Johnson saved their lives by lying down and BURROWING THEIR FACES in the earth,” the News reported.
The News didn’t report that a third man named Bailey was initially with Boultbee and Johnson (who was actually named Johnston).
Johnston told Vancouver’s first archivist Major James Matthews that Bailey was panicked by the flames and had tried to make a run for it.
“He could not penetrate a foot in the flames,” said Johnston, “and after running around for a few seconds he dropped and burned up before our eyes.
“Mr. Bailey’s cries were heartrending. His charred remains were picked up later.”