'A NEW CITY EMERGING FROM THE FOREST'
Former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan started a local history website, Transcribimus.ca, where volunteers transcribe important early Vancouver documents. One of the documents on the site is Mary Isabella Angus Rogers' five-page letter about her first visits to Burrard Inlet in 1886. Following are excerpts from the letter:
Reading about the early discoveries made me think of my first visit to Burrard Inlet, when in February 1886 we came from Victoria to see the site of the proposed Pacific Terminus for the Canadian Pacific Railway ... In Vancouver, everywhere there was excitement and real estate speculation. My father bought some lots on Richards Street, opposite where the Holy Rosary Cathedral now stands, and some on Powell Street. On Richards Street, he built two houses which were still in existence until very recently. We stayed at the Sunny Side Hotel, most of which was built on piles over the water. Sanitation was simple, in the bedroom, you opened the window and dumped the slops into the harbour ...
Altogether, the 12 months from July 1885 to July 1886 were an adventurous year for a 16/17-year-old schoolgirl. Crossing the Atlantic, and seeing a huge iceberg in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a smallpox epidemic in Montreal, with the militia called out to quell antivaccination riots in the French quarter, part of our train wrecked by a spread rail north of Lake Superior in midwinter; 40 below for X-mas on the Prairies, the sudden change to blossoming spring in California, and attack of rheumatic fever in the Palace Hotel San Francisco, arriving in Victoria limping with a couple of sticks.
Then seeing a new city emerging from the forest, sewing and knitting for the refugees from the fire, finally, the arrival of the first through train. Truly a wonderful year for me.