Monkey turns on his old bartender
Jacko had been accustomed to a daily tipple of gin and beer
George Black was a prominent Vancouver pioneer who owned a hotel with a bar in Hastings, a settlement by today's New Brighton park. He had a fondness for exotic pets, including a pet monkey named Jacko.
According to the March 15, 1894 Vancouver World, Jacko the monkey “had been accustomed to a drink every morning, his favourite tipple a mixture of gin and beer.”
George Newson had been the bartender at Black's hotel, but had left a month earlier, “after the hostelry changed proprietors.”
When Jacko saw Newson, “by diligent biting and squirming, (he) managed to get (his) chain clear of its fastening.”
Then Jacko went ape.
“He sprang upon Newson with great venom, and catching hold of his left ear bit it completely off and threw it away,” the World reported.
“A fearful struggle then ensued, the infuriated animal biting and scratching wherever it could lay its claws.”
Newson fought back and “managed to half-choke the animal once, but on letting go the animal sprang at him again.”
The battle ended when Newson killed Jacko.
The bartender who had replaced Newson came back to discover Newson “unconscious in a pool of his own blood, with Jacko stretched out dead by his side.”
A surgeon was able to reattach Newson's ear, but his hearing was “irreparably damaged.”
Black's other exotic pet was a bear that he kept chained outside his butcher shop on Water Street in Gastown.
Vancouver's first archivist, Major James Matthews, called it “the notorious bear” in an 1884 photo of the waterfront in Granville, Vancouver's name pre-incorporation. Matthews annotated the photo, noting that Black owned two buildings, a cottage and a butcher shop, which were built “part on land, part on piles.”
Black was known as the “Laird of Hastings” because of his Scottish ancestry and love for hosting parties. Matthews wrote that Black “gave fashionable evening dances; not big, but select parties” in his cottage, and the butcher shop had a “swing arm used as (a) derrick for hauling up and lowering down meat for ships to butcher boat; also, by children, for fun, to swing `far over' water and back.”
But back to the bear. Major Matthews did an interview with another early pioneer, John Murray, which he recorded in the fifth volume of his series of booklets called Early Vancouver.
“That bear's mother was shot on the south bank of the Fraser River, across from Westminster, below the present Westminster bridge, in March 1877,” said Murray. “George Black got one of the young ones, and George Bennett, butcher at New Westminster, got the other. I looked after that bear for a long time, a very long time, until about, say, the 20th December 1879, when we put him on the Beaver and shipped him to Goodacre and Dooley, butchers, in Victoria.”
Why did they ship off Black's pet bear? Because he kept killing Black's pigs. “He killed 42 pigs,” said Murray. “You see, we had him on a chain down at the slaughterhouse, and the pigs used to run around loose, around the slaughterhouse, and eat up all the offal; the bear would slack up on his chain, and back up, and the pigs would come near, and he would make a bound and catch a pig.”
The bear was shipped off to Victoria aboard the S.S. Beaver, perhaps because Black had become too fond of it to butcher himself. En route the bear got loose, but the ship's cook lured him with sugar, allowing the ship's crew to slip ropes around him, which they lashed tight enough to keep him subdued.
Black was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1831 and came to California during the 1849 Gold Rush. He moved north during the Cariboo gold rush in 1859. After several years in the Cariboo, he bought land in what became Coquitlam in 1864. Black settled in Hastings in 1872, where he started his butcher shop and opened the Brighton House Hotel. In 1875 he moved his butcher shop to Gastown, but still lived in Hastings, where he often organized sporting events like horse racing and shooting. He died on Dec. 21, 1896 at the age of 65.