Outtakes from the ‘Olden’ DaysOuttakes from the ‘Olden’ Days
Featured Photo: John Millar outside of his cabin 1911. Philip Collection.
The trials of this town’s early trailblazers were not without their moments of hilarity, precarious predicaments and comic quandaries. Here, I highlight four such stories: standouts in the history of how a place comes to be…
John Millar ran a roadhouse at Mile 34 ½ (Function Junction) in the early 1900s. A former cow wrangler, rumour had it he was on the run from the Texas Rangers with a couple ‘notches in his gun.’ He housed and fed weary travellers who were making the arduous journey along the original Pemberton Trail. He was known to serve stewed raccoon, muskrat stew and haunch of bear; recognizable by his broken nose, his buckskin coat, beat-up stetson and neck-wrapped red polka dot handkerchief.
John was a character. He was also a trapper and tended a line up the Cheakamus Lake valley: catching marten, rabbit, mink, muskrat…and wolverine. On one mission, John put the limp body of what he thought was a dead animal – a large, muscular and aggressive member of the weasel family – into his pack and set off… only to have the angry beast ‘come to’ and bite him in the buttocks. The tangle on the trail made it so that John could not sit comfortably for some long time after!
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Fast forward to the summer of 1958 and a backpacking trip around London (now, Whistler) Mountain. Local notables Florence Peterson, Kelly Fairhurst and Don Gow were out with overnighting packs and picnic gear and a billy can they rigged over a fire to make dinner. The pot was neglected, as campfire comradery took over, only to be remembered when the pungent smell of scorched food filled the air. The stench permeated the area to such an extent that the basin and the ski run earned its name ‘Burnt Stew’.
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Back now to butt-bitten John. Periodically he would venture with his packhorses down to Squamish and then take the steamer to Vancouver. One fall, he was returning with his entire winter’s supply of liquor, when one of his horses fell hard into Rubble Creek. Every bottle of John’s seasonal spirits were broken, shattered in the stream. The only glass that didn’t break was a bottle of vinegar. “I was so cussin’ gol’ danged mad that I pulled the cork out of the vinegar and a good swig of it.” Rueing the woes of the rubble, John made his way home with a much lighter, more sobering load.
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Then there was explosive Charlie Chandler. Charlie came to the valley in the early 1900s. He, too, was a trapper. A floatplane pilot gifted Charlie with a small amount of high-grade aircraft fuel, which he then used to clean his filthy overalls. After laundering the garment in gas, he felt it best to dispose of the dirty fuel down the pit of his outhouse. He didn’t think twice about it. The next time he visited the bivvy, he sat himself down, lit his pipe as was his custom, and survived (albeit, stunned and singed!) to tell the tale of an explosion that was heard from miles around!
Charlie would later leave the world with a bang, again sitting down. In 1946, friends found him dead, in his chair, outside his cabin. He appeared to have had a heart attack. He was also frozen stiff. Charlie was transported – still in his chair – by ‘speeder’ along the rail line to Rainbow Lodge to catch the train south. The train, however, was not to arrive until the next day. Now this is where the story gets a little blurry, but somehow, as local lore would have it, in the meantime, Charlie was offered a final drink – (surely to warm up!) – and hoisted, still seated, bolt upright, into a boxcar for his final, if not somewhat flamboyant, voyage!
