Chinese Legacies

In 2008, Revelstoke Railway Museum and Revelstoke Museum & Archives opened joint exhibits entitled “Chinese Legacies”. The Railway Museum’s exhibit focused on the thousands of Chinese men who worked on construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway from Yale to Craigellachie in the 1880s. This exhibit is currently travelling, having recently been on display at Exporail in Montreal. It is now in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. The exhibit here at Revelstoke Museum and Archives is still on display. It follows the story of the Chinese community that developed here after railway construction was complete. By 1901, Chinese residents made up about 1/10 of the total population.

This past week, we were pleased to host Toronto artist David Cheung and his sons Lucas and Dudley who are embarked on a project known as Rocky Railway High (Closure.) David has created several works of art that commemorate the story of the Chinese railway workers, and he is inviting the public to submit small written or artistic pieces to supplement his paintings. The paintings and the gathered submissions will be shown in an exhibit and eventually brought to China to symbolically return the spirit of the workers to their native country. For more information on Rocky Railway High or to contribute a submission, see their website: http://www.rockyrailwayhigh.com/

There were up to 15,000 Chinese people employed along the railway line from Port Moody to Craigellachie between 1880 and 1885. Exact figures are impossible to find, as the workers were hired as gangs rather than as individuals, and there was a high turnover of workers. They were engaged in clearing the road, laying ties and other construction work. The work was tedious, difficult and dangerous, and the rewards were few.

The Chinese workers were paid $1 per day throughout the years of railway construction from 1880 to 1885. Their pay was reduced to .80 cents per day if they bought their staple food and supplies outside of the company store. Goods in the company store cost twice as much as they did on the open market.

The white workers were paid on a sliding scale depending upon their skills and the work performed. The wages for white workers were increased in March of 1881 in order to attract more men. The lowest paid white workers were receiving $1.50 to $2.00 per day as blacksmiths’ helpers, labourers, hewers and choppers.

In 1885, the Dominion Government conducted a Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration. Huang Sic Chen, a member of the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, presented a report on the number of Chinese in British Columbia and the work they were doing. He stated that there were 3,510 Chinese labourers involved in railway construction. An average labourer’s wage was $300 per year, and after expenses the labourer would be left with about $43. The expenses included a deduction of three months labour during the winter, $130 for provisions and clothing, $24 for room rent and other costs. For more information on this story, contact Revelstoke Museum and Archives.

William and Bertha Cowan

Among the more noticeable markers at Revelstoke’s Mountain View Cemetery are two fairly similar red granite gravestones that are just across the service road from each other. William Cowan, who lived from 1855 to 1926 is buried just behind the maintenance shed, at the edge of the main cemetery. The road next to the shed marks the boundary between the Protestant and Roman Catholic sections of the cemetery. The Catholic section opened in 1906, and one of the first to be interred there was Bertha Beatrice Cowan, the young wife of William. Bertha was born in 1880 and in 1903 married William Cowan, who was 25 years her senior. The fact that theirs was a “mixed marriage” between a Protestant and a Catholic was also unusual for that time.

Bertha and William had a son Patrick, who was born in 1904, and two years later, Bertha died in childbirth with their second child, who also died. Bertha was buried in the Catholic section, next to the service road. William had an elaborate red granite marker placed on her grave. At the time of Bertha’s death, a non-Catholic could not be buried in a Catholic cemetery, so William obviously did the next best thing, and purchased the plot directly across the road from Bertha. William died in April of 1926 in Rochester, Minnesota, where he had gone seeking treatment for an illness.

William Cowan was one of Revelstoke’s most enterprising pioneers. He came to Revelstoke in 1885, where he built the Victoria Hotel on Front Street. He was one of the partners in a steamship company that saw the building of the S.S. Dispatch and the S.S. Lytton from a small shipworks at the south end of Front Street. Cowan had the first telephone in town, with a line between his hotel and the Canadian Pacific Railway station. By 1896 he had incorporated the Revelstoke, Trout Lake and Big Bend Telephone Company Ltd. and established a telephone exchanged in a building at the corner of Third Street and Charles. He formed the Revelstoke Water, Power and Light company that constructed the first water system in 1896 and the first electric power plant on the Illecillewaet River in 1898. The company was sold to the City of Revelstoke in 1902.

Front Street in Farwell Townsite

Revelstoke tells its history through the many heritage buildings that are still in existence here. The restored heritage downtown and the many heritage homes are testament to the pioneers who built this community. However, the oldest part of town doesn’t have the built heritage to proclaim its fascinating history. It is only through sharing the stories and photographs of the Farwell townsite that this part of the community comes back to life. A Farwell walking tour scheduled for July 11th will help to keep this part of our history alive.

The Farwell townsite, centered on Front Street, was established with the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885. By that summer, the population was over 5,000, with railway workers and those who would profit by their presence here making the town a lively place. Surveyor A.S. Farwell planned to sell his land to the C.P.R. and sell lots to those who wanted to settle in this new railway town. Unfortunately for Farwell, his plans turned to dust when the C.P.R. wouldn’t negotiate with him, and the dispute meant that clear title could not be issued for the lots he was trying to sell. He was forced to charge trespassers with “disturbing the earth” when people refused to pay for lots that they couldn’t get deeds for.

The bustling townsite of Farwell boasted a plethora of hotels and bars, several brothels, general stores, Chinese laundries and other necessities for a largely male population. What it lacked in the very first years were churches, schools, a hospital and a fire department. These eventually came into being as the town grew, many of the new facilities moving to the upper part of town closer to the railway station and the burgeoning “Revelstoke Station” townsite.

By the 1920s, many of the original buildings in the Farwell townsite had been moved or dismantled. The area was sparsely settled until the 1950s when a new wave of construction began. Front Street, once the main business street, is now purely residential.