Читать книгу Ginger - Susan Mayse - Страница 9

Cumberland delighted or dismayed new arrivals, even before they stepped down from the mine train, depending on their outlook.

Delight, or at least determination, accompanied the battered trunk holding an entire family’s motley treasures; dismay attended the matched leather valises and equally fastidious backgrounds and expectations. Cumberland, days by steamship from Vancouver, stood alone at the end of the tracks. Nearby Courtenay was a crossroads; Comox was a farming enclave among Indian lands. It was a far cry from sophisticated London or dynamic San Francisco or pretentious Victoria. Cumberland wasn’t even a settled coal mining town like Nanaimo, sixty miles south, though its small mercantile elite optimistically incorporated as a city of three thousand residents in 1897. From Brown’s upstairs brothel and the fancy houses in Minto district to the Bucket of Blood saloon, despite the earnest endeavours of the righteous in “church street” and “Little Jerusalem,” Cumberland was less a coal town than a coal camp.

A few newcomers, standing amidst their baggage on the plank station platform, probably decided to climb aboard again and head straight back to civilization via Union Bay steamship wharf. It was too late. The train had already steamed off toward Comox Lake hauling a load of miners, equipment and empty coal cars to Number Four mine. The newcomer’s view of Cumberland was of raw red earth, bristling stumps, rivers of mud politely called streets, board sidewalks, mine whistles, coal smoke and rain. The contradictions were dizzying: prosperous merchants on a hustling main thoroughfare, squalid Matthewson Square shanties with privies flowing into the gutters, coal mine tipples and headworks, the spacious park and roofs of the mine supervisor’s Beaufort House, neat rows of company miners’ cottages, and not too far in any direction, ranks of cedars and firs sickening under the murky effluvium from Number Four, Number Five and Number Six. To the west, eagles spiralled over the Beaufort Range’s snow fields, shining above the reach of coal dust.

Dunsmuir Avenue rose from “down camp” in the original settlement of Union to the new city of Cumberland, then fell again in a slow decline to the sea at Roy’s Beach four miles east. The main street was an expanse of dust in summer and in every other season an expanse of mud. Mostly people remembered the mud. Apparently bottomless and limitless, the mud mired horse teams, tracked into bars and poolrooms and houses, and swallowed gumboots whole. An expedition across the street demanded more fortitude than finesse. Board sidewalks and a few clumps of grass bordered this wallow, which teemed with the constant traffic of delivery wagons from the general merchants and bakery and grocer, hired saddle horses and carriages from the two livery stables, the two-horse stagecoach from Comox harbour by way of Courtenay village. Horses, cows and dogs regularly escaped backyard confinement and wandered around town. Runaway pigs rooted under the windows of merchants offering Paris millinery and grand pianos. But people didn’t come to Cumberland and Union for urbane refinements or genteel company. They came to work in the mines, or by second choice, at the logging camps and farms and sawmills.

Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Limited owned Cumberland, though the Victoria coal magnates no longer owned the company Robert Dunsmuir hewed from island anthracite. In 1910 James Dunsmuir sold to the railway interest of Mackenzie and Mann, which was then laying elaborate plans—but scant trackage—for the Canadian Northern Railway. CNR’s bond-issue bubble would burst a few years later, damping Cumberland’s economy among others. Meanwhile, the new city offered apparently unlimited opportunity. The pages of the Cumberland News and later the Cumberland Islander gave off an electric excitement. Anything could happen.

“I have heard lots of the old-timers speak of it, saying you could nearly walk on the heads of the people in Cumberland in 1912 when everybody was working and everybody had money,” retired grocer Tom Mumford told an interviewer not long before he died at a vigorous 105 years. “It was pretty nearly a wild west town in those days.”

Union was the heartland, the original 1887 settlement east of Coal Creek, where Robert Dunsmuir’s Union Colliery Company built its first fifty “cottages” for its mine workers at the raw frontier. Photos of old Union Camp show new railway tracks running below three rows of plain just-finished houses on a southward slope. In a morass of red island mud, cedar stumps with twelve-foot girths tower eaves-tall among the houses. Most of the houses down camp (including my own) are still family homes, still recognizable from the 1889 photos despite their new porches and garages and second stories. Small, simple, anything but luxurious, they were nonetheless built to last; they outlasted all nine of Cumberland’s coal mines. Robert Dunsmuir, though later miners rightly condemned his labour practices, was a progressive if paternalistic employer by 1887 standards. He provided not only houses for miners but schools for their children. For better or worse, he also established a company store; in other one-industry towns, such closed economies kept some workers in debt their entire working lives. Soon it was clear that high-quality “Comox No.4” coal was in plentiful supply and strong demand. Other merchants carved out retail territory in Union, until they ran out of space on the steep south-facing hillside. Since Chinese workers and merchants occupied the swampy bottomland to the west, there was only one direction to expand. Just east of Union, on colliery land, developed the orderly grid-plan community of Cumberland.

Cumberland blossomed in a few short years into Canada’s westernmost, and possibly smallest, city. Brick and granite and elegant wood-frame blocks lined Dunsmuir Avenue, where anyone who had the leisure to window shop could ogle garments fit for garden party or pit work, sides of pork, pianos, seed packets and pilsner. Cumberland’s mines often worked two or three shifts around the clock to keep abreast of orders, and money poured through the Royal Bank and city coffers to underwrite the latest technological advances: a telephone exchange, electrical street lamps, cement sidewalks to replace the old boardwalks, motor cars for retail deliveries and motor stages for the bumpy stump-dodging drive to Courtenay village or Comox harbour. The Esquimalt and Nanaimo railway, until recently a Dunsmuir holding, soon made the grade to Union Bay where a colliery spur continued to Cumberland. Cumberland, at the raw edge of a vast wilderness, became instant civilization.

Men found life in the mines gruelling, often dangerous, sometimes fatal. Yet their off-shift recreations—hours at the brass rail of the Cumberland or Union or Bucket of Blood saloon, lodge meetings, sports, gambling, union and political organizing, whoring, hunting, fishing—provided distraction or at least a change of scenery. Most of these activities were closed to girls and women. Girls were soon women in any case; coal miners’ daughters had little leisure to enjoy the protracted girlhood of more privileged classes. Donetta Rallison was twelve when her mother died, and she had to leave school to keep house for her father. He showed her how to do her tasks and even helped when he wasn’t too exhausted after his shift. But her girlhood was behind her forever. “I saw kids outside playing, and I was inside doing housework.”

Many girls married as young as they could to escape drudging in their parents’ homes. Though she loved her husband, Gert Somerville soon regretted marrying in her teens. “I was too young. I wanted to get away from home. I was getting tired of it.”

Men’s work lasted a long shift, theoretically eight hours but often as long as sixteen hours. Women’s work lasted from first light to lamp light, and much of it was strenuous labour: handwashing a mountain of clothes permeated with coal dust, scrubbing floors on hands and knees, thumping bread dough, beating carpets, hauling coal, chopping wood. Hospital records list many women’s cases of general debility, abortion (more likely miscarriage than induced abortion) and hysteria. Childbirth generally called for a two week stay in hospital. Somehow women found energy to enjoy dances and socials and their own lodge gatherings, and somehow they kept a sense of humour.

“We didn’t have a bathroom either,” Doll Williams told an interviewer. “We had a little tub, as the saying goes you wash down as far as possible, and up as far as possible, and the question is when does possible get washed? I’ve seen those days, soaking dirty and all this stuff to wash, and you had to wash it by hand, no washers in them days.”

People soon settled out into their chosen districts. Most of the families in Cumberland were of British, Eastern Canadian or American origin. Presbyterian Scots clustered, not far from their church, in the southwest corner of Cumberland which lively wits dubbed Little Jerusalem. The eastern reaches would eventually be called the Townsite. But Cumberland’s population was really scattered into a handful of towns and hamlets, most divided along ethnic lines. The Italians clustered in Union Camp, sometimes called West Cumberland. The English-speaking immigrants crudely dubbed other outlying enclaves Japtown and Chinatown and Coontown.

Chinatown sprawled around two main thoroughfares, Shan gai (upper street) and Ha gai (lower street), both crooked doglegs. Here European eyes saw a distressingly chaotic sprawl, but Chinese eyes saw a wisely contrived confusion to keep demons at bay. This didn’t always work; non-Chinese sometimes descended to Chinatown to sample strong Chinese whisky and gamble a few rounds of fan tan or pai gow. This was one of the largest Chinese communities of the Gold Mountain, as the Chinese called North America, with a population of three thousand reported for 1900. Among the slapdash houses on haphazard streets, Chinese trade and culture flourished. There were butchers, laundries, herbalists, restaurants, drygoods shops and other merchants. Opera companies, entertainers, Buddhist and Christian ministers, and teachers arrived regularly from China. Dr. Sun Yat-sen visited Cumberland for four days in 1911 with a four-man armed bodyguard. The Wo-Yick Theatre was packed with six hundred people who eagerly provided money for his fall 1911 revolution in China.

From the 1880s, Chinese companies organized the emigration of labourers, especially from poverty-stricken Guangdung province. In Canada the workers were underpaid, overworked and shamefully mistreated—they paid a discriminatory “head tax” to enter the country, their families were excluded, they were denied full citizenship until 1947—and tradition has it that a Chinese labourer died for every mile of trackage laid on the Canadian Pacific Railway. These early Chinese arrivals were not settlers but sojourners who sent money home and hoped themselves to return one day.

Chinese generally gave non-Chinese better treatment than they received, from mixed humanitarianism and self-preservation. Cumberlanders today remember the open invitations to Chinese New Year in Chinatown, with apparently unlimited food and drink and fireworks. Forcibly separated from their own families, they missed children’s laughter and women’s graces. Their kindness was repaid with lurid “yellow peril” newspaper stories about kidnapped children, and repressive laws forbidding them to hire white women. Bitterness over this mistreatment still seethes to the surface of Canadian society, especially in British Columbia. Individual men and women steadfastly rose above the discrimination, however. Retired railwayman Piggy (Jimmy) Brown told me about Sam, a Chinese miner his father and uncle contracted for pit work. Unusually big and strong, Sam could carry heavy mine timbers over his shoulder like so many tentpoles, and earned two men’s wages each shift. In one of Cumberland’s many mine explosions, without breathing equipment, Sam somehow made his way from the mine portal down into the dust-filled black maze of the drifts, found his boss and carried him out to safety before collapsing outside the headworks. Thanks to Sam—who recovered and worked many more years underground—Piggy Brown’s uncle lost only one finger. Twenty-three other miners and mine workers lost their lives.

Some Cumberland Chinese did return home to Asia with their earnings. Others who died on the Gold Mountain instead were buried facing the sunrise in the Chinese cemetery, a slope of grass and wildflowers. After several years their bones were exhumed, crated and sent to distant Guangdung. The small wooden crates were a familiar sight, awaiting their long journey home, on Station Cumberland platform under the soft rain and the ravens’ cries.

Japanese communities of small, neat wooden houses grew up near the area’s coal mines, logging camps and other industries. Number One Japtown near Comox Lake and Number Five Japtown just north of Cumberland were the largest sites, with stores and halls and churches. The Japanese, eligible for citizenship unlike the Chinese, could bring their families to Canada. They planned to stay, and soon assimilated into the business community. A Japanese tailor shop, photographic studio, hardware and jeweller all operated on Dunsmuir Avenue. In 1899, about eight years after the first Japanese arrived in Cumberland, visiting Japanese consul Shizaburo Shimizu said, “. . . I am very favourably impressed with the general appearance of the town. I am quite struck with the progressive spirit of the citizens, and have no doubt that a few years will see a large city here.”

Black workers, many from families that fled the United States for British Columbia as early as the 1850s, formed their own community. Coontown was a cluster of houses and small businesses near Number One Japtown. White Cumberland regarded its inhabitants with suspicion and, if mine jobs were scarce, with outright hostility. Police blotters show repeated complaints of Negro women practising prostitution, though investigation found some complaints to be malicious and unfounded. One of Cumberland’s respected black residents, however, did run a brothel above his store.

John Brown was a summer gold prospector and winter coal miner, general merchant and no-holds-barred entrepreneur. Nigger Brown’s Creek north of Cumberland is said to commemorate him, though the provincial government has recently tried unsuccessfully to sanitize the name as Brown’s Creek (nearby Sheba’s Tits Mountain and Mount Ginger Goodwin also offend the government’s decorum and political proprieties). Brown prospected—packing his supplies over his shoulder in a potato sack—into his late eighties, when a broken kneecap restricted his expeditions, and was over ninety when he died in the 1960s. Islanders remember his long loping stride, slow deliberate diction, quick temper and aristocratic manner. Once he met another prospecting party high in the Little Oyster River watershed, Piggy Brown recalled. The prospectors invited him to have a drink. John eyed their whisky bottle and portable radio, and nodded slowly. “My, you boys do travel in style. I do believe I will.”

Italians made up one of Cumberland’s biggest ethnic groups, and were soon a major presence in the mines and the business community. A few came from Southern Italy, many more from Northern Italy and Italian-speaking parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Joe Franceschini’s family arrived in stages; his uncle came to work on the Fraser River road in 1901 and later returned to Lombardy, his father arrived in 1920 and stayed, joined by his mother in 1930. Other families arrived en masse, all the men and boys seeking work in the mines. The community was close-knit, like most immigrant communities, for self-help and support in a new land. At the turn of the century they formed the Mutual Relief Society Felice Cavallotti. Members had to be of Italian ancestry. Their dollar a month in dues paid them a dollar a day in benefits—the going rate for a day’s room and board—for sickness or injury. In the early years, Italians clustered in the far western end of Union Camp, nearly as far down as Chinatown. The Felice Cavallotti hall was there, too, surrounded by its members. Two of its first-generation members were still active when the dwindling society disbanded in 1974, having served its purpose for seventy years.

Italian musicians quickly formed into a popular concert and marching band. The West Cumberland Band played at picnics, parties, parades and other gatherings. They played at the train station for Lance-Corporal Robert Rushford’s 1915 war-hero homecoming, and they led the 1918 parade for Ginger Goodwin’s funeral. Miners said only two kinds of men got a good deal from the company, fine musicians and star soccer players. Not everyone applauded this system.

“My dad worked in the timber yard at Number Four with two others,” Jim Weir told me. “They loaded all the timber that went down the mine. They had about four football players added who were supposed to help them, but in weather like this they would be out at the lake—it wasn’t too far from Number Four out to the lake, and they’d be out at the lake laying around in the sunshine. My dad and the other two did all the work.”

The Italian bandsmen, like the soccer players, were company favourites as long as they didn’t rock the boat. Knowing the Italians’ importance to the union’s success, in 1911 the UMWA sent an Italian-speaking organizer to make matters clear to all. Italian mine workers, despite company threats of deportation, became some of Cumberland’s staunchest supporters of the union.

Other immigrants passed through Cumberland and the mines—Slavs, Finns, Russians, Germans—but most were working-class British. Their regional dialects bespoke poverty and disadvantage: broad Yorkshire and Lancashire, lilting southern “valleys” Welsh, Scots lowland burr. But they spoke some approximation of the King’s English, which made it easier to climb to shiftboss or pitboss. Some climbed clear out of the mines altogether to wrestle with a merchant’s starched white collar every morning instead of gritty pit clothes.

In the early years the ethnic communities mixed little, but also experienced little friction. There were occasional outbursts. In one case European discrimination provoked a scuffle between Japanese and Chinese workers. Hostility to blacks peaked when some stayed on the job during the Big Strike. And a Chinese man’s temper finally snapped at rock-throwing and name-calling white youths in 1911. He shot and fatally wounded a boy, then rode the Chinese community’s “underground railway” to Port Alberni and Vancouver, never to be found or charged.

Photos showing a single ethnic group, perhaps carefully posed and smiling at a picnic, give a falsely benign impression. Any mixed-race photo—Japanese and Chinese workers standing in the background, always, European workers sitting in the foreground—sharply points out the discrimination. In 1910 Cumberland sought to keep children from outside Cumberland city limits—mainly Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and other non-English speaking children—out of their school, ostensibly to lower their school taxes. Their attempt at segregation failed. For the next half-century, students from these ethnic groups often led their classmates in sport and academic prowess. Cumberland was a small and blinkered society, but it was no more racist than other places. In fact, its exuberant ethnic mix worked like yeast, leavening the age-old weight of bigotry. Scots learned Italians were industrious and family-loving; Slavs learned the English admiration for fair play; Irish learned the intricacies of Chinese gambling. Chinese and Japanese and blacks, however, mainly relearned the timeworn lessons of discrimination and survival.

Men and women could sometimes reach across the barriers of race, religion and class when they found common cause. Sports, annual miners’ picnics and Christmas socials brought people together in a convivial atmosphere. Mine disasters, fires and other community crises evoked extraordinary outpourings of generosity and co-operation. So did strikes.

“Cumberland was always a great-hearted town,” said retired dairy farmer Roy Genge. Born in 1921, he grew up in the farming district of Minto or Happy Valley halfway between Royston and Cumberland, but learned the town inside-out by delivering milk twice a day.

His onetime teacher at Minto School, Margaret Eggar, agreed. “They were a very well organized and generous, kind-hearted community. They liked to pull their weight and feel that as a city they were doing what a city should do.”

“As they always say, once you’ve got a friend in Cumberland, you’ve always got a friend,” Piggy Brown reminded me of the local proverb.

A fierce clannishness that survives today, like so many early Cumberland ways, was the flip side of this community spirit. Margaret Eggar, a Minto farm girl, discovered this in her teens. “At one time Courtenay and Cumberland were rivals, who had the better football team—they hated one another, even the schools. I know when I moved to Cumberland High School from Courtenay, I wasn’t accepted there for about two years.”

This Cumberland exclusivity could embrace outlying communities on occasion. A few people still know the words to “Are You From Bevan?” a song which carries memories of the island’s bitter 1912-14 coal strike:

“If you’re from Union Bay or Courtenay or Cumberland,

Anywhere below that Bevan second dam,

If you’re from Bevan, I said from Bevan,

Well, I’m from Bevan, too!”

Minto wasn’t on the list, maybe because it wouldn’t rhyme with much besides pinto. But it had its own eccentrics and a well-developed tradition of practical jokes. Silos sprouted red flags and milk cans, outhouses tipped with or without occupants, and livestock wandered, especially on Halloween.

“One farmer had left his wagon on the road outside his barn with a load of hay in it,” Mrs. Eggar remembers. “Ted and Harry . . . decided to be horses and they pulled this wagon about a quarter of a mile down the road. By the time they got it down to the next farm they were tired, and they stopped to rest. Then all of a sudden something popped up from the middle of the hay, and it was the old gentleman that owned the wagon. He said, ‘Now boys, you’ve run it this far, now run and take it back again.’ He had a big whip in his hand. He had hidden in the hay, you see, anticipating something like this.”

Character and characters made early Cumberland. Nicknames are a longstanding local tradition. No one knows quite why; it could be a legacy of coal miners from South Wales, where nicknames are a pastime and a passion. Cumberland nicknames could even be passed from generation to generation, and they have formidable staying power. Jimmy Brown said he gave up introducing himself by name at reunions; old acquaintances didn’t know him until he used his nickname of Piggy. Mayor William Moncrief has said even his mother called him Bronco.

“Everybody goes by nicknames in this town,” Karl Coe told me. “You hardly hear anybody’s right name around here. They take it to the grave with them, when they get one.”

Even the merchants, far from being stuffy and dull, were a gallery of nicknamed rogues and saints. Shorty Perodi—his given name was soon forgotten—was the tough little Southern Italian who ran one of the poolrooms. The town constable turned a blind eye to his back room gambling and unofficial trade in alcoholic beverages as long as things stayed quiet.

The Campbells of Campbell Brothers store—brothers Red (Alex), Black (William) and Dan, and their shy sister Mary—were said to be Quakers, although the Victoria and Vancouver meetings of the Religious Society of Friends made no mention of them in early records. Perhaps their way of life created the rumour. Their thoughtfulness was legendary. “Whenever anybody said there was somebody hungry, they always sent an order down,” Piggy Brown said. “My dad brought a monkey home one day, and God, [Red] was sending coconuts down every week. They were so kind.”

Strong socialists, during the Big Strike they gave strikers credit and shelter almost to their own ruin. The Campbells were also to demonstrate conscience and compassion worthy of the Quakers when they aided young men evading military service in July 1918.

Edward W. Bickle, the miner who became a notary and city clerk, in 1912 joined the weekly Cumberland Islander and eventually bought it. The paper still publishes today as the Comox District Free Press, though the Bickle family sold to a newspaper chain in 1989. The opposition Cumberland News reported on 13 December 1911 that one Edward Bickle (whether E.W. or his son Edward is not clear) was charged with drunk and disorderly behaviour and breaking windows, and was under prohibition from being served liquor. E.W. Bickle, undaunted, less than a month later ran for school trustee. Stories about Bickle and his brother Tom—a bossy-man or contractor of Chinese workers to the mines—are plentiful, possibly apocryphal and usually outrageous. Miners long resented the Islander as a pro-company, anti-union paper, and thoroughly begrudged Bickle his financial opportunism and success. Their attitude embodied an irony, since early trade unionists generally believed workers should own the means of producing wealth. This was exactly Bickle’s self-help strategy, after all, perhaps with rather more emphasis on self than on help.

But most of Cumberland’s character and characters were inextricably linked with the coal mines. Miners, mine work, mine accidents, mine unions, miners’ nicknames, miners’ picnics—Cumberland and Union from the earliest days to the present have revolved around mining. The coal dust still hasn’t quite settled.