While our events and exhibitions garner most of the attention, there is a third, equally important component of the Museum’s activities: managing our archives. This might not sound that exciting, but an archive is essentially a community’s collective memory, at least on paper. If you considers the sharpness of some people’s memories around here you begin to realize how crucial our archives are.
Anyone interested in the history of our local mountains will be excited by one of Sarah and Brad‘s latest projects: accessioning the Cliff Fenner fonds. (“Fond” is archive-speak for a distinct collection of documents, usually an organization’s documents or someone’s personal files.)
Cliff Fenner was born in 1909 in England where he built a solid career in the timber industry. After helping manage and maintain the crucial flow of commodities for the Allied war effort, in 1947 he moved to Vancouver. Here he bounced around a few more logging camps, then helped run Mount Seymour Park for a few years, before accepting the position of Park Supervisor for Garibaldi Provincial Park in 1953.
A Vancouver Province article on Fenner.
For the next few decades Fenner’s job mainly consisted of hiking around Garibaldi’s vast mountainscapes observing wildlife, leading trail crews, and advising on the park’s development. Dream job, anyone?
A year into his warden career Fenner described this twist in his life’s path in a way that’s easy to relate to today:
“I have always loved the outdoors. I’ve had city jobs, of course. Even thought about building up my own business, but I’d been exposed to too much good, fresh air.”
Lucky for us, Fenner was more than capable behind the lens; after retiring from the park service he made his living as a travel photographer and writer. Today our archives hold an extensive collection of his photos taken over more than two decades amongst the Coast Mountains.
Other interesting documents in the Fenner Fonds also include:
Fenner’s March 1960 report to BC Parks about a helicopter survey of Garibaldi Park to locate potential Winter Olympics sites. His preferred location for the Olympics base area was the west end of Cheakamus Lake, with ski runs on Whistler’s south-western slopes (Khyber’s, Cakehole, etc).
Several old magazines (Reader’s Digest, B.C. Motorist, etc.) in which Fenner’s photos and articles were published.
Personal files like his official certificate of Canadian citizenship, correspondence related to his photography, writing and travel, even a tourist visa for Columbia from 1980.
Another Fenner photo from the same issue of BC Motorist, showing Creekside in its infancy.
We’ve just started to browse the documents and photos, so surely there’s still some goodies yet to be found in there.
An unidentified climbing partner on one of Cliff’s mountaineering trips near Bralorne.
For those who missed it (or not), here’s the slideshow that our summer student Jeff made for the intermission of the always-awesome Deep Summer Photo Challenge. We don’t have many mountain bike images in our archives (something we plan on rectifying in the future) so Jeff decided to craft his show around some of our beautiful old mountaineering photographs. Enjoy.
Earlier this summer after an outing to Rainbow Park some of us museum folk paid a visit to the Whistler Cemetery. None of us had ever been so we figured it would be a good opportunity to see this oft-forgotten but integral local landmark.
Cemeteries provide historical researchers with a wealth of useful information that can often be hard to find elsewhere. Rows of gravestones offer reliable data such as people’s full names, places of birth, years of death, etc. Examining gravestone design and cemetery layout can provide clues regarding religion and class structure in a community, among other things.
I was especially interested as my academic background is in environmental history, a field concerned with not only the history of our landscapes, but the history in our landscapes as well.
At first I was surprised by how few grave sites there were. With some thought I recognized that over the years most local people remained connected to their places of birth, or chose to retire elsewhere; only in recent decades have people been born “Whistlerites.” The fact that grave markers were greatly outnumbered by still-unoccupied spaces, perhaps more than anything else, expresses just how young this community is.
Of course, cemeteries don’t only record useful data, they are hugely important community institutions. By paying tribute to our loved ones in an enduring, often highly personal manner, they preserve memories and emotion in their rawest, most human form.
With this in mind, I was equally struck by the landscape design of the cemetery as a whole.
It is refreshingly modest and incredibly peaceful in there.
There are no standing gravestones, only ground-level plaques to mark individual burials. In one corner there is a garden with some stone structures to house urns, as well as a separate meandering path through the forest along which ashes may be scattered. This simplicity and consistency in design ensures that nothing is overshadowed by larger monuments. Everyone has their place.
A simple, but fitting Eulogy for Myrtle.
By all accounts, Seppo was the man.
A few days after our visit, I was pedaling up the Westside Road, tired but content after a solo, late-evening trail ride. As I approached the cemetery turnoff, a hulking mule deer suddenly appeared ahead, staring intently at me over his shoulder. Ignoring my impulse to stop, I instead geared down but kept moving, the deer and I remaining locked in an intensely quiet gaze. Finally, after I had passed the deer and the distance between us grew, he turned his head and calmly wandered into the forest towards the ash-scatter garden.
The deer was at home.
As I rode off, I gained an even deeper appreciation of our community’s cemetery. This thoughtful landmark modestly commemorates Whistler’s past without disturbing its present. The local wildlife are far more rooted here than us human folk, after all. An inspiring model of sustainability, and a fitting tribute to past loved ones, one might say.
At the Whistler Cemetery new generations draw strength from memories of our past.
Whistler draws people from around the world for any number of reasons: skiing, biking, wildlife viewing, night clubs, fine dining, mining… wait, mining? Although a largely forgotten aspect of our region’s past, the (mostly unfulfilled) promise of underground riches was one of the Whistler Valley’s main draws in the days before “world-class shopping.”
Our local mining industry is actually 10,000 years old. Squamish archaeologist Rudy Reimer has found obsidian quarries in Garibaldi Park that were in use shortly after the retreat of continental ice sheets permitted the initial peopling of the region. Used for razor-sharp blades and fine jewellery, this volcanic glass can still be found among Garibaldi Park’s ancient lava flows.
Because each obsidian quarry has a distinct mineral composition, scientists are able to “fingerprint” fragments found at archaeological sites and trace them back to their source. Garibaldi obsidian, a valuable trade item, has been found throughout southern B.C. and Washington state.
The first non-indigenous visitors to Whistler–William Downie, a Scottish veteran of the California gold rush (a “49er”), and Joseph Mackay, a former Hudson’s Bay Company employee (a fur trader, not a retail clerk)–were commissioned by the colonial government to explore the territory between Lillooet Lake (Pemberton) and Howe Sound (Squamish) in September 1858, hoping to find a better coastal access route to the booming gold mines of the B.C. interior. Dwindling rations forced Downie and Mackay to press on to to the coast before exploring the surrounding mountains.
Scouring our archival holdings is a little like exploratory mining. Our archivists recently uncovered a gem, this massive 1916 map of recorded mining claims in southwestern BC. It is currently in a very fragile state and unavailable for public viewing, but we are looking into getting it properly restored.
Following on their heels, tens of thousands of goldseekers rushed into B.C. during the 1860s. While the majority of them travelled along the Douglas Route up Lillooet Lake then northwards beyond Pemberton, many other prospectors came up from Howe Sound and rooted around the surrounding creeks and mountains en route. Since mining men are notoriously secretive, however, very few records survive of prospecting activity prior to the twentieth century.
Among Whistler’s earliest known commercial mining operations was the Green Lake Mining and Milling Company, beginning operations at least as early as 1910. Run by Mr. A McEvoy of Vancouver, the Green Lake Co. worked 10 small claims at the 1000 – 1300 metre level on Whistler Mountain above Fitzsimmons creek. The workers lived on the mountain’s lower slopes in cramped, drafty housing with a regrettable male-to-female ratio. Sound familiar? They found gold, silver, and copper, but never in commercially viable quantities.
Harry Horstman, a lanky prospector from Kansas, was to have greater staying power but similarly meagre returns. Despite his prairie roots, Horstman was at ease up high, living for decades in a log cabin near the 1600-metre level on Mount Sproatt. Digging several tunnels, Horstman found enough copper to eke out a modest living (supplemented by trapping), but he never struck a major load.
Harry Horstman at his Mt. Sproatt cabin.
The Horstman Glacier on Blackcomb is named after this pioneering local. Horstman was a fixture in the Alta Lake community for decades, but still appreciated the seclusion of his mountain-top retreat. I wonder what he would think of the neon circus that goes on every summer on his namesake glacier!
Beginning in 1916, a group of twenty-odd men began operations as Alta Lake Mining near today’s Alpine Meadows neighbourhood. They excavated bog-iron ore, which occurs when iron dissolved in run-off water forms deposits in bogs or swamps. At their height of operations they sent 150 tons of bog iron a day down the PGE railway to Squamish, where it was then shipped to the Irondale smelter at Port Townsend, Washington.
Other locals also pursued small-scale prospecting and mining. Fitzsimmons Creek, which runs between Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains, is named after Jimmy Fitzsimmons, who prospected throughout his namesake valley. Mining shafts that resulted from his exploration can still be found along the Singing Pass trail.
In the 1930s, locals Billie Bailiff (who also kept a trapline in the Singing Pass/Cheakamus Lake area) and Bill “Mac” MacDermott also dug mine shafts on the north side of Whistler Mountain, hoping to find the north end of the Britannia Mine’s massive copper vein. They didn’t succeed, but interest in Whistler Mountain’s underground remained.
Most of us know that the first ski lifts on Whistler Mountain started from Creekside. Fewer realize that the original plans included lifts and runs on Whistler’s north side, rising from near the present-day village. These plans had to be abandoned, however, because the provincial government chose to protect mineral claims on that side of the mountain now held by two companies, including the Canadian giant Noranda.
Unsurprisingly, mining claims didn’t interfere when plans to develop the north side of Whistler Mountain resurfaced in the late-1970s, as the provincial government was now a key investor in the planned resort expansion.
While never developing on a comparable scale to the Coast Mountain mega-mines at Brittania Beach or the Pioneer Mine, the quest for underground riches still played a formative role in Whistler’s early days. If one knows where to look, traces of this past mining activity can still be found throughout the local landscape. Local whitewater folk are familiar with the abandoned Ashlu gold mine because it is the drop-in point for a popular kayaking run.
Kayaker at the entrance to the abandoned Ashlu gold mine.
Though interesting to history buffs, this hidden legacy also poses significant physical and environmental hazards. For more on this context, track down the Summer 2011 issue of Kootenay Mountain Culture Magazine for a short article on this titled “Rider Dun Gone.” (The article isn’t available on-line, but the magazine is free and can be found here.) For more info on industry and government efforts to track down and regulate Canada’s thousands of abandoned mines, check out the National Orphaned Abandoned Mines Initiative.
If you’re really keen you can even take your new knowledge into the woods and find some old mining ruins that haven’t yet been completely overtaken by the relentless coastal rainforest. But be careful! And remember, although relatively young these are archaeological sites; try to leave them undisturbed for others to enjoy.
