1867: GASSY JACK ARRIVES IN THE FUTURE VANCOUVER
Unofficial founder of city, Deighton set up a makeshift bar and started selling booze
One-hundred-and-fifty years ago today, John Deighton arrived on the south shore of Burrard Inlet in a dugout canoe. Within 24 hours he had set up a makeshift bar and was selling booze to workers from nearby Stamp’s Mill.
Deighton named his establishment the Globe Saloon, after a bar he had owned in New Westminster. He was a big talker, hence his nickname, Gassy Jack.
“He was a Yorkshireman, fat, florid and full of fun,” said a July 12, 1927, story in The Province. “Withal he was a past master of the art of invective, and had a ready wit and a flair for inventing nicknames.”
A tiny settlement quickly sprang up around his saloon, a squatter’s shack just outside the Stamp’s Mill timber lease. (Stamp’s Mill became Hastings Mill.) In 1870 the colonial government dubbed it Granville, after Britain’s secretary of state for the colonies. But many continued to call it Gassy’s Town, or Gastown, after Gassy Jack.
Deighton was born in Hull, England, in 1830, and was a sailor in a previous life. He arrived in San Francisco during the California Gold Rush, and in 1858, came to B.C. to try his luck when gold was discovered on the Fraser River.
He didn’t strike it rich, but did well enough as a pilot on steamboats in the Fraser to open a bar in New West in the 1860s. But he had health problems, and when he let a friend take over the bar, it went bust. So he relocated to Burrard Inlet.
He seems to have done OK, because in 1870 he built a new building to replace his ramshackle original saloon, which his biographer Olga Ruskin called a “12-by-24foot board-and-batten shack.”
In any event, he was forced to build anew because when Vancouver’s first streets were laid out in 1870, the Globe Saloon was in the middle of Carrall Street. So he built a two-storey wooden building at Carrall and Water, which he called the Deighton Hotel.
Unfortunately his first wife, a local First Nations woman, died about this time. Deighton then married her 12-year-old niece, and in 1871 the couple had a son.
Deighton died on May 29, 1875, at age 44. Sadly his son died a few months later. After settling his debts, Deighton’s estate was left with only $304.89. He was buried in an unmarked grave in New West.
Gassy Jack died a decade before the City of Vancouver was incorporated in 1886. His Deighton Hotel was destroyed in the Great Fire of June 13, 1886, when the original Gastown was virtually destroyed.
But as the years went by the legend grew of the saloon keeper whose little shack laid the foundation for Vancouver. In 1970 a group of Gastown property owners commissioned artist Verne Simpson to do a Gassy Jack statue, which they installed near the site of his old bar at Maple Tree Square. A few months after it was installed, someone chopped Gassy Jack’s head off. It was discovered in a parking garage and reinstalled.
In 1971, authors Raymond Hull and Ruskin (the mother of local alternative-music legend Nardwuar the Human Serviette) published a small biography of Gassy Jack.
Hull then spearheaded a campaign to finally erect a tombstone on Gassy Jack’s grave. He asked Vancouver council to contribute $50 toward the $200 project, but was rebuffed. But the masses responded, and on Sept. 30, 1972, Gassy Jack’s tombstone was unveiled.
“Like the label on Old Style beer, it’s got a steamboat, mountains and bright lettering — quite out of place amid the sombre greys and browns of the Fraser Cemetery in New Westminster,” wrote Christy McCormick in The Vancouver Sun.
“But its very gaudiness would probably please Gassy Jack, the reprobate saloon keeper who got Vancouver going.”