JD Sibbald

We have had some recent requests from family members of Revelstoke pioneers to do profiles of them on our blog and Facebook page. In the first of these, I will give a brief history of John Drinkwater Sibbald, a Revelstoke pioneer who arrived here in 1893, coming originally from the Lake Simcoe area of Ontario, where he was born in 1846. He settled for a short time in California, then moved to Yuma, Arizona, where he became involved in mining interests. In 1882, he returned to Canada, settling in Regina, where he was manager of the Western Milling Company. J.D. Sibbald moved to Revelstoke in 1893, starting in the flour and feed business, but soon gave this up to pursue mining interests, and to open an insurance and real estate office. He organized and was the first president of the Revelstoke Board of Trade in 1895. This organization still exists, under the current name of Revelstoke Chamber of Commerce.

In December of 1897, Sibbald was appointed as Gold Commissioner and Government Agent for the Revelstoke district. This was a political appointment, and when the provincial government changed in January of 1899, he was asked to resign. This created outrage among his supporters in Revelstoke, although the two local newspapers took opposing sides. The Revelstoke Herald supported Sibbald, and in their issue of January 14, 1899, they led with this headline: “The Sibbald Outrage – The Dismissal of J.D. Sibbald Characterized as Un-British, Unjust and Cruel – The Reason That the Position Was Wanted by a Friend of the Government is an Aggravation of the Wrong.” The opposing newspaper, The Kootenay Mail, published statements that caused J.D. Sibbald to sue them for libel, but the case was dismissed.

J.D. Sibbald met with a serious accident in 1904, when he was inspecting mining property at McCullough Creek, north of Revelstoke. A large rock came loose from the hillside above where Sibbald was standing, and it struck him in the back of the head, fracturing his skull and rendering him unconscious. A mining packer made the 75 mile trip to Revelstoke in a very fast 10 and ½ hours and early the next morning, Doctor Graham and Mrs. Sibbald set out on the S.S. Revelstoke, reaching the scene of the accident that afternoon. The next morning, they were able to bring Mr. Sibbald into Revelstoke where he was admitted to the hospital. The return trip took over 14 hours. Mr. Sibbald remained in the hospital for over two weeks.

Mrs. Amelia Sibbald was also very active in the community and was the first president of the Women’s Canadian Club of Revelstoke when it formed in 1913. This organization was very active in supporting the troops during World War I. The Sibbalds had two children: J.D. Sibbald, Jr., and Mrs. Kathleen Lloyd.

Mr. and Mrs. Sibbald returned to the family home in Ontario in 1919, where J.D. Sibbald died on September 19, 1923. The museum has more information on the family and would be pleased to provide this to anyone who is interested.

The Art of Embroidery

This Saturday, we will be holding a "Learn to Embroider" class at Revelstoke Museum as the first in our Pioneer Living Series. This new series is a part of our celebration of the125th Anniversary of the Farwell townsite.

As well as the opportunity to learn embroidery, we will be showing some examples of the craft. We will have some very beautiful embroidery work on display, including a few pieces done by Fred Maunder.

Fred Maunder was born in Ontario in 1876. He attended college, where he became a schoolteacher. He later became a Canadian Pacific Railway locomotive engineer. In 1907, he married Mable Cora Perrin, and she joined Fred in Field, B.C. In 1913, Fred became superintendent of Yoho and Glacier National Parks, and in 1914, when Mount Revelstoke National Park was created, he became the first superintendent of the new park.

In 1916, Fred Maunder signed up for overseas service, at the age of 40. He saw active service, and suffered shell shock and the effects of gassing. He was sent to recuperate in Oxford, England, and it was there that he learned to embroider, taught as a form of occupational therapy. He was soon creating beautiful embroidered pieces, and some of his work was displayed in the Hudson’s Bay store in Vancouver.

Upon his return to Canada, Fred Maunder resumed his work as Parks Superintendent until 1926, when he moved his family to Banff. Fred died there in 1929, after a bug bite in his eye became infected.

Fred Maunder’s daughter Marjorie married Alf Olsson in 1939, and Fred, John, Gordon and Larry Olsson are all grandsons of Fred Maunder. We thank the family for loaning Fred’s work for display.

Anyone interested in the embroidery workshop can call the museum at 250-837-3067.

Hall's Landing/Sidmouth

This week, we had a "Memories of Sidmouth" evening at the museum. We invited people who grew up in the Hall's Landing and Sidmouth areas, south of Revelstoke, to share their stories. One local resident had several stories written by former residents of the area. One of them was a story written in the 1970s by Walter M. Girling. He told of his family's move to Hall's Landing in 1912, when his father secured the job of teacher at the one-room school. The family had previously been living at Nakusp. Walter Girling tells of their coming to Hall's Landing:

"I remember my father saying that the advertisement for a teacher at Hall’s Landing asked for a man with several children of school age who were needed to bring the enrollment up sufficiently high to prevent the government from closing the school. There were 4 of us of school age at the time. My 2 older brothers Moray and Charlie and my older sister, Louise and myself, age 8. My father went ahead of us to be on hand for the opening of the school term. We did not follow him until about the end of October where Noah and Dove Hall and Noah’s wife came down to Nakusp to get us in a small steam wood-burning paddle boat called the “Beaver” which was operated under government sponsorship for the Hall’s Landing people from Arrowhead on the other side of the Columbia River. I was very surprised and impressed to see Mrs. Hall acting as “captain” and steering the boat part of the way. The night we arrived, it snowed. The first snowfall of the season, but we did not see the ground again until the end of March or early April.

"Mrs. Noah Hall put us up the first night and I remember looking out the first morning and seeing a number of cows pulling hay out of a haystack as their pastures were covered with snow. Later we moved into a 2-story log house about 1/2 mile north of the Ferry Landing.
Shortly after that we moved to a house on the opposite side of Cranberry Creek from the school. This house had been owed by an English family who had wearied of pioneering in Canada and returned to England. This was a very badly built house. The walls were full of cracks. The winter was very cold-- often down to 20° below zero-- and we had to rely on stoves for heat. These burned out during the night and we awake every morning to find the water frozen to ice on the wash basin and water pails. Milk was also frozen and the bread glistened with frost. There was no wood supply and my father and 2 brothers spent all their spare time after school and on the weekends, cutting firewood in the foothills and dragging it home on a sleigh. Fortunately green birch wood burns fairly well.

"My brother had located an abandoned preemption consisting of about 100 acres on the bank of the Columbia River almost opposite Arrowhead, with a small building on it ("The shack," we called it). My father filed a claim on this property and as soon as the snow was melted sufficiently, he laid out a site for a small house and excavated by hand with a shovel, a hole for the “cellar.” As soon as things were ready, the neighbors organized a “bee” and erected the frame of the house. A man named “Nichol” an eager proud axe man, squared up some cedar logs for the joist. This I believe is probably a lost art in this mechanical age. We lived in this house till December 1914, where we left to join my father at another school where he was teaching at Balfour, B.C.

"Some incidents which occurred during our residence at Hall’s Landing may be of interest. My parents were always devoted church members and one Sunday evening during January or February when we were living in the Wymess house, they and my older brother, Moray, set out to attend evening service at the church in Arrowhead. They were re-crossing the river in a rowboat when the broke an oar lock and they found themselves stranded helplessly on the middle of the river. The boat was caught in an ice floe and they were carried down to the head of the lake where they managed to land on Cottonwood Island. There they “hallooed” until they attracted the attention of someone on the shore at Arrowhead. And a very harsh voice shouted “Go into the bush and make a fire and get yourselves warm.” Help came and they spent the night in Arrowhead, returning home next morning. We younger children went to bed and slept unconcerned, but my brother Charlie and sister Louise spent a very worried night.

"The first school I attended at Hall’s Landing was in a little log cabin, so tiny that my desk was so close to the teacher’s desk that I could reach out and touch it. Slate pencils squeaking on slates were the bane of the teacher in those days. Our family owned the Hall’s Landing property up to about 6 years ago (mid 1960s) when it was sold to the Provincial Government because it was going to be flooded.

"During the 2nd World War, birch trees growing on the property were bought by the Dept of National Defense to use in airplane manufacturing but most of the revenue from this was taken by the government to pay arrears of taxes, Some of the people I went to school with were; Byron Bessie and Grace Frusster, Alee and Jean Shannon, Oscar and Evertt Petersen, Nelson Nichol and Lawrence Vigue."

We would be very happy to hear of any other stories from families who settled in this region.

Tournament of Champions

We've been doing so many things at the Museum lately that it was hard to decide what to blog about. I'll go back to last week's Brown Bag History topic: Tournament of Champions. This was the name given by the Revelstoke Ski Club to the international ski-jumping tournaments that they held on Mount Revelstoke from 1950 to 1974. Ski-jumping had been an important winter sport in Revelstoke since 1915, with several Canadian and World Records established on the local jump. In 1948 the hill was rebuilt to meet FIS (International Ski Federation) specifications. The hill was classified as an 80 meter jump which was the largest that the FIS recognized for world competition at the time.

In 1949, plans were underway for the Tournament of Champions, and excitement grew when it was confirmed that several jumpers from the Norwegian Jumping Team would compete at the Revelstoke Tournament. The date was set for January 29th, 1950, just a few days before the team was scheduled to compete at Lake Placid, New York. The local club was hard at work, and had about 40 volunteers lined up for the various jobs involved in hosting the event. One week before the event was scheduled to take place, the local organizers got word that the Norwegian team would not be able to come for January 29th. They suggested an alternate date of February 11th and 12th. The Revelstoke Ski Club moved ahead with the new plan and quickly got everything in place for the big event. The event was a huge success, and the Norwegians were certainly popular in town. On the first evening, a dance was scheduled for 9:30, and the Norwegian team showed up right on time, only to discover that no-one in Revelstoke would ever show up for a dance that early. They amused themselves playing the orchestra's instruments, until the rest of the population showed up. One of the jumpers, Arnfinn Bergmann, married a Revelstoke woman, and came back to Revelstoke in 1951 where he helped to train the younger jumpers. Bergmann was acclaimed as a jumper with flawless style, who could make jumps of up to 266 feet.

In 1951, the Canadian Olympic Trials were held in Revelstoke, along with an International meet called the Diamond Jubilee Ski Jumping Tournament, celebrating 60 years of skiing in Revelstoke. For 1952, the name reverted back to Tournament of Champions. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was still a lot of enthusiasm for ski-jumping, and competitors were coming from Norway, Sweden, Japan, Italy and Germany. In 1959, a young Japanese jumper, Yasuhi Sugiyama was a hit at the concert held as part of the event, when he sang, "Love Me Tender" in perfect English.

By 1974, ski-jumping was waning in popularity, and the local club was finding that they were putting more effort into grooming the hill than into developing new skiiers. The last large tournament held in Revelstoke was the Western Canadian Ski Jumping Tournament held in February of 1974.

Mattie Gunterman

This past Wednesday, I spoke about Mattie Gunterman at Brown Bag History. Mattie was a truly remarkable woman who lived in Beaton, south of Revelstoke from the late 1890s until her death in 1945. She grew up in Wisconsin, then travelled to Seattle, Washingon at the age of 17. She married William Gunterman in 1891 and their son Henry was born in 1892. Mattie wanted to leave the damp climate of Seattle to ease her worsening lung condition, so the family decided to visit Mattie's cousin in the small mining community of Thomson's Landing, later known as Beaton. William and Mattie, along with 6-year-old Henry and their dog Nero, walked a total of 600 miles, with Will looking for work in sawmills along the way. They arrived in Beaton in June of 1898 and decided to settle there.

Mattie had learned photography from an uncle back in Wisconsin, then received further lessons from Will's brother-in-law, including the art of developing of her own photographs from her glass slide negatives. She began chronicling the life of her family through her photographs, and continued to develop her photographic skills when the family settled in Beaton. Will found work in area logging camps, and Mattie and Henry often went along, with Mattie and Will soon becoming popular camp cooks. Mattie's photographs portray her love of the outdoors, and her connection to her chosen community on the Upper Arrow Lake. Mattie loved to appear in her own photographs, and developed a method for doing this. She used a long piece of rubber tubing attached to her camera’s pneumatic shutter at one end with a rubber bulb at the other. By squeezing with the hand or stepping on the bulb, the shutter would be released and an exposure made at any distance within the tube’s length of the camera.

Will's original occupation in Seattle had been as a candymaker, and he practiced his art in Beaton, providing candy for all of the local children at Christmas time. He shared his skills with Horace Manning of Revelstoke, and provided Manning with the recipe for the famous Manning's Broadway chocolates. Will had not originally been too pleased to be relocating to the isolated community of Beaton, but he did so knowing that Mattie was delighted with the semi-wilderness of the area, and that her health improved greatly in the new environment.

Henry Gunterman stayed in Beaton for most of his life, and raised his family there as well. In 1961, he was visited by Ron D'Altroy of the Historic Photographs divsion of the Vancouver Public Library. Henry helped Ron look for his mother's glass negatives in an old woodshed, and they found them in a box covered with packrat droppings. Henry donated the photographs to the Vancouver Public Library, where they were carefully cleaned and catalogued. The collection is still available at the VPL and many of the photographs were reproduced in the book "Flapjacks and Photographs" by Henri Robideau. You can view the photographs on the Vancouver Public Library website: http://www3.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca/spe/histphotos/

SS Minto

The Brown Bag History talk yesterday was on the S.S. Minto, a paddlewheel steamer that was part of the Canadian Pacific Railway's Inland fleet. The S.S. Minto operated on the Arrow Lakes between Arrowhead and West Robson from 1898 to 1954 and there are still plenty of people around who fondly remember travelling on her.

Otto Estabrooks, captain of the S.S. Minto in 1947 told some of his adventures to E.L. Affleck, author of "Sternwheelers, Sandbars, and Switchbacks" As Estabrooks remembered, “My own major brush with an eddy occurred many years later on the MINTO, in the narrows between the two lakes. With the stern caught in an eddy and the bow in a fast running current, both pressing hard in opposite directions the boat turned with breathless speed to crash against the sharp rocks of a granite bluff opposite. Here destiny had provided a big log caught on the rocks against which the boat made a spectatular crash landing without doing any damage to the hull. Had the log not been there, I cannot say what would have happened, but one thing is certain, the boiler was too close to the contact point for comfort. That one never took liberties with steam boilers was a maxim.” Estabrooks had many other stories of his time as a steamboat captain in the interior of British Columbia.

The Canadian Pacific Railway finally made the decision to retire the S.S. Minto in 1954, after the boat had logged over 2,500,000 miles in its 56 years of operation. The last run of the Minto took place on April 23, 1954, and all of the staterooms were fully booked. One of the passengers was Mrs. Olive Maitland of Winnipeg, who had ridden on the maiden voyage of the Minto back in 1898. Residents all along the Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes came out to bid farewell to the Minto.

The Minto was sold to the city of Nakusp for $1, but they could not maintain it, and it was finally acquired by John Nelson of Galena Bay. He brought the Minto up to his property, but never had the money needed to get the sternwheeler navigational again. After John Nelson's death, the boat was towed into the middle of the lake and burned in August of 1968.

Plans for 2010

We have lots of events and programs coming up for this year. To begin with, we are collecting stories on behalf of the Revelstoke Olympic Committee for the Revelstoke Torch Relay Story Contest. Submit a story of 1000 words or less on Winter Fun in Revelstoke, Past, Present or Future, and be eligible for cash prizes. Stories must be submitted to the museum at revelstokemuseum@telus.net by 5 pm, Monday, January 18th.

There are a few significant annivesaries in 2010. This year marks the 125th anniversary of the Farwell townsite, and the 125th anniversary of the Driving of the Last Spike. We will be holding a Farwell Tea on March 6th to begin our celebration of these events.

The Brown Bag History series commences on January 13th with a talk on the SS Minto, and we are adding a new program beginning January 20th. The "Memories" evenings will give everyone a chance to share their stories of the history of this region. The series will kick off on January 20th at 7 pm with "Memories of Arrowhead," led by former Arrowhead resident Sherrian Van Goor. Whether you lived there and have stories to share, or whether you just want to come to hear everyone else's stories, you are welcome.

100 years ago on March 4, 1910, Canada's largest avalanche disaster occurred at Rogers Pass when 58 men were killed. There will be a series of events this year marking this tragic event. Here is the schedule of events planned by the committee:
January 21, 2010: Avalanche safety awareness film night—Lessons from 1910, Revelstoke United Church at 7:30 pm.
March 4, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. 1910 Avalanche Memorial Service at Grizzly Plaza.
March 4, 2010 at Noon: Opening ceremony for a special exhibit on the history of avalanche safety in Canada at the Canadian Avalanche Centre.
August 13 – 22, 2010: Railway Days History Field Trips to Rogers Pass National Historic Site.
August 13, 2010: Opening ceremony for a special exhibit at the Revelstoke Railway Museum.
August 14, 2010: Opening ceremony for a special exhibit at the Revelstoke Museum & Archives.
August 15, 2010: Memorial Service at the site of the 1910 slide in Rogers Pass National Historic Site.

Call us at the museum at 250-837-3067 for any information on these events or to find out how you can get involved.