History of Vancouver

Vancouver is a city in British Columbia, Canada. With its location near the mouth of the Fraser River and on the waterways of the Strait of Georgia, Howe Sound, Burrard Inlet, and their tributaries, Vancouver has, for thousands of years, been a place of meeting, trade and settlement.

An Aboriginal settlement called Xwméthkwyiem, ("Musqueam"—from masqui "an edible grass that grows in the sea"), near the mouth of the Fraser River dates back to at least 3,000 years ago. Vancouver's ecosystem, with its abundant plant and animal life, provides a wealth of food and materials that have likely supported people for over 10,000 years. At the time of first European contact, the Musqueam and Squamish peoples had villages in the areas around present-day Vancouver. There is also evidence of a third group, the Tsleil'wauthuth, also known today as the Burrard Band in North Vancouver. These were Coast Salish First Nations sharing cultural traits with people in the Fraser Valley and Northern Washington. Hun'qumi'num', the downriver dialect of the Halkomelem language was the common language of the native community at Musqueam on the Fraser River on the south side of today's city, and also of the Tsleil-Waututh or Burrard Band. The Squamish, spoke a different, though related language, Skwxwúmesh snichim, which is similar to the Sechelt (Shishalh) and Nooksack languages and also spoken at the Squamish Nation's other main population centre at the town of Squamish. One of the most famous members of Vancouver's native community was the late Chief Dan George of the Burrard Band.

The Native peoples of the Northwest Coast had achieved a very high level of cultural complexity for a food gathering base. As Bruce Macdonald notes in Vancouver: a visual history: "Their economic system encouraged hard work, the accumulation of wealth and status and the redistribution of wealth..." Winter villages, in what is now known as Vancouver, were comprised of large plankhouses made of Western Red Cedar wood. Gatherings called potlatches were common in the summer and winter months when the spirit powers were active. These ceremonies were an important part of the social and spiritual life of the people. The largest villages were at Homulchesan, near the mouth of the Capilano River and roughly beneath where the north foot of the present Lions Gate Bridge is today, and at Musqueam. Qwhy-qwhy was a village in Stanley Park (in the Lumberman's Arch area), but this function was auxiliary to its role as the ceremonial grounds for the Homulchesan Squamish across the inlet. The foundation of a Catholic mission at Mosquito Creek engendered the creation of another large community of Squamish there. Snauq, approximately at the south foot of the Burrard Bridge, was a smaller village, more of a single residence with extra buildings, but it was the residence of August Jack Kahtsahlano, forger of the joint chieftaincy of the Squamish and Musqueam and namesake of the Kitsilano neighbourhood.

Spanish Captain Jose Maria Narvaez was the first European to explore the Strait of Georgia in 1791. In the following year, 1792, the British naval Captain George Vancouver (1757-1798) met the Spanish expedition based at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island's west coast and further explored the Strait of Georgia, as well as the Puget Sound in the present day Seattle area. Simon Fraser was the first European to reach the area overland, descending the river which bears his name in 1808. Despite the influx of the Fraser Gold Rush in 1858-59, settlement on Burrard Inlet and English Bay was unknown prior to the early 1860s due to the power of the Squamish chiefs over the area; in later years prospectors' bodies were found occasionally on isolated beaches, apparently from failed attempts to land or settle. The first non-native settlement in the city limits of Vancouver was at McCleery's Farm, in the area of what is now the Southlands area,^[1] in about 1862.

Lumbering was the early industry along Burrard Inlet, now the site of Vancouver's seaport. The first sawmill began operating in 1863 at Moodyville, a planned settlement built by American lumber entrepreneur Sewell "Sue" Moody. In 1915, expanded as a municipality and renamed "North Vancouver"; the name Moodyville still applies to the Lower Lonsdale district, though more as a marketing term than in common usage (Moodyville proper was a few blocks to the east). The first export of lumber took place in 1865; this lumber was shipped to Australia. In 1865, the first sawmill on the south shore of Burrard Inlet, Stamp's Mill, began operations in what would later become Vancouver; this mill was originally located at Brockton Point in Stanley Park but was moved to its longtime location because of the currents and shoals at Brockton Point, which made docking difficult. The largest trees in the world grew along the south shores of False Creek and English Bay and provided (amongst other things) masts for the world's windjammer fleets and the increasingly-large vessels of the Royal Navy. One famous sale of trees cut from the Jericho neighbourhood (west of Kitsilano), was a special order for the Celestial Emperor of China consisting of dozens of immense beams for the construction of the The Gate of Heavenly Peace in the Forbidden City, Beijing. Millworkers and lumberers were from a wide variety of backgrounds - mostly Scandinavians and Nootkas - who were also brought to the inlet to help with the local whaling industry. At first, Squamish typically did not work in the mills.

A former river pilot, John (Jack) Deighton, set up a small (24' x 12') saloon on the beach about a mile west of the sawmill in 1867 where mill property and its "dry" policies ended. His place was popular and a well-worn trail between the mill and saloon was soon established - this is today's Alexander Street. Deighton's nickname, Gassy Jack, came about because he was known as quite the talker, or "gassy". A number of men began living near the saloon and the "settlement" quickly became known as Gassy's Town, which was quickly shortened to "Gastown". In 1870, the colonial government of British Columbia took notice of the growing settlement and sent a surveyor to lay out an official townsite named Granville, in honour of the then British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville, though it was still popularly known as Gastown (and which is the name still current for that part of the city).

The new townsite was situated on a natural harbour and for this reason it was selected by the Canadian Pacific Railway as their terminus. The transcontinental railway was commissioned by the government of Canada under the leadership of Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald and was a condition of British Columbia joining confederation in 1871. The CPR president, William Van Horne, decided that Granville wasn't such a great name for the new terminus because of the seedy associations with Gastown, and strongly suggested "Vancouver" would be a better name in part because people in Toronto and Montreal knew where Vancouver Island was but had no idea of where Granville was. Under its new name the city was incorporated on April 6, 1886. Three months later, on June 13, a spectacular blaze destroyed most of the city along the swampy shores of Burrard Inlet in twenty-five minutes.

Things recovered quickly after the fire, although celebratory Dominion Day festivities to launch the opening of the CPR were postponed a year as a result. The first regular transcontinental train from Montreal arrived at a temporary terminus at Port Moody in July 1886, and service to Vancouver itself began in May 1887. That year Vancouver's population was 5,000, by 1892 it reached 15,000 and by 1900 it was 100,000.

The fire which destroyed the city was eventually considered to be beneficial, as the city was rebuilt with modern water, electricity and streetcar systems.

With the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, Vancouver’s seaport was able to compete with the major international ports for global trade because it was positioned as an alternative route to Europe. During the 1920s, the provincial government successfully fought to have freight rates that discriminated against goods transported by rail through the mountains eliminated, giving the young lawyer of the case, Gerry McGeer, a reputation as “the man who flattened the Rockies.”^[2] Consequently, prairie wheat came west through Vancouver rather than being shipped out through eastern ports. The federal government established the Vancouver Harbour Commission in 1913 to oversee port development. With its completion in 1923, Ballantyne Pier was the most technologically advanced port in the British Empire.^[3] The CPR, lumber exporters, terminal operators, and other companies based on the waterfront banded together after the Great War to establish the Shipping Federation of British Columbia as an employers’ association to manage industrial relations on the increasingly busy waterfront.^[4] The Federation fought vociferously against unionization, defeating a series of strikes and breaking unions until the determined longshoremen established the current ILWU local after the Second World War.^[5] By the 1930s, commercial traffic through the port had become the largest sector in Vancouver’s economy.^[6]

Although the provincial resource-based economy allowed Vancouver to flourish, it was nonetheless a volatile economy. Two general strikes were launched in the postwar years, including Canada’s first following the killing of trade unionist, Ginger Goodwin. Major recessions and depressions hit the city hard in the late 1890s, 1919, 1923, and 1929, which, aside from creating hardship, fuelled social tensions generally. In particular, the significant Chinese population was frequently targeted in Vancouver and was subjected to systematic discrimination and periodic upsurges of white racism. The most overt expression of this was perhaps the 1907 riots by the Asiatic Exclusion League, an organization formed under the auspices of organized labour and inspired from its counterpart in San Francisco.^[7] But anti-Asian racism was more continuous than such dramatic events suggest and also included Japanese and South Asians. Politicians and publicists promoted and disseminated racialized ideologies through widely read books such as H. Glynn-Ward’s 1921 The Writing on the Wall and Tom MacInnes’s 1929 The Oriental Occupation of British Columbia. Newspapermen such as L. D. Taylor of the Vancouver World and General Victor Odlum of the Star generated a glut of racist editorials analyzing and warning about the “Oriental Menace,” as did Danger: The Anti-Asiatic Weekly.^[8] This determination of whites to secure BC as a “White Man’s Province” ^[9] influenced federal politicians to pass exclusionary immigration laws such as the head tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act. It also created a climate of fear and hysteria in the 1920s, culminating in the 'Janet Smith case', in which a Chinese houseboy was accused of killing his young, white, female co-worker. The evidence for his guilt was based more on racial stereotyping than facts.^[10] A growing Sikh population was also the recipient of white racism and subjected to attempts at exclusion, which was more complicated because Indians were subjects of the British Empire. This was dramatically expressed during the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which a ship load of 376 British subjects from the Punjab in India were not permitted to dock because, ostensibly, they had not come via a “continuous passage” from their homeland. Indo-Canadians in Vancouver rallied a great deal of support for the migrants, but the government remained intransigent. Following an incident in which, according to the Vancouver Sun, “howling masses of Hindus” repelled an attempt by the police to board the ship. Subsequently, the federal government sent in the armed forces and the ship returned to India, where twenty of them were shot by police for refusing to return to the Punjab.^[11]

Vancouver’s longest serving and most often elected mayor, L. D. Taylor, followed an “open town” policy prior to his final defeat in 1934 to Gerry McGeer. Essentially, the policy was that vice crimes such as prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging would be managed, rather than eliminated, so that police resources could be directed towards major crime.^[12] A consequence of this, in addition to assumptions that Taylor was colluding with the criminal underworld, was the maintenance of red light districts in racialized neighbourhoods, such as Chinatown, Japantown, and Hogan's Alley, which perpetuated the association of non-whites with immorality and vice crime.^[13] Taylor suffered the biggest electoral defeat the city had seen in 1934, largely on this issue.^[14] McGeer ran on a law and order platform, resulting in a crackdown on vice crimes, which, after years of Taylor’s “open town,” targeted non-white communities disproportionately for harassment.^[15] Even the East End (today’s Strathcona) had by WWI been largely vacated by English, Scottish, and Irish residents who moved to the wealthier (and whiter) new developments of the West End and Shaughnessy. The East End, the original residential district that grew up around Hasting’s Mill, was left to successive waves of new immigrants, and became associated with poverty and vice, (as the Downtown Eastside remains today).^[16]

The first act of City Council at its first meeting in 1886 was to request that the 1,000 acre military reserve be handed over for use as a park. Historians have pointed out that this may seem a strange priority for the nascent city as there was an abundance of green space at the time. The West End, however, was designated to be an upscale neighbourhood by speculators with connections to the CPR.^[17], They did not want the scattered settlements on this property to grow into another industrial, working class neighbourhood.^[18] This act also signaled the beginning of the process that would see the remaining Chinese, Portuguese, Native, white and other inhabitants evicted as squatters in the 1920s for the creation of a seemingly pristine park.^[19] Ironically, the new Stanley Park would over time be purged of any trace of native occupation only to be refilled with Native artifacts more palatable to white park visitors.^[20] By the interwar years, other neighbourhoods had grown that were working class, but not especially impoverished or racially exclusive, such as Mount Pleasant, the suburb of South Vancouver, and Grandview-Woodland.^[21] Even the West End was becoming less exclusive. CPR developers once again established a new enclave for the city’s white and wealthy elite that would pull them from the West End and be the destination for the “coming smart set.” Point Grey was incorporated in 1908 for this purpose, and Shaughnessy Heights would be developed exclusively for the “richest and most prominent citizens,” who were required to spend a minimum of $6, 000 on the construction of new homes, which were to conform to specific style requirements.^[22] These patterns of economic segregation were apparently secured by 1929 when Point Grey and South Vancouver were amalgamated with Vancouver. Point Grey included the current neighbourhoods of Arbutus Ridge, Dunbar-Southlands, Kerrisdale and Marpole, Oakridge, Shaughnessy and South Cambie, and South Vancouver included the current neighbourhoods of Cedar Cottage, Collingwood, Killarney, Riley Park-Little Mountain, Sunset, and Victoria-Fraserview. William Harold Malkin was the first mayor of the new city, having defeated incumbent Louis Denison Taylor, the champion of amalgamation, in the 1928 civic election.

BC was perhaps the hardest Canadian province hit by the depression. Although Vancouver managed to stave off bankruptcy, other cities in the Lower Mainland were not so lucky, such as North Vancouver and Burnaby. Vancouver also happened to be the target destination for thousands of transients – unemployed young men – who traveled across Canada looking for work, often by hopping on boxcars. This was the end of the line and had for years been a “Mecca of the Unemployed” because, as some cynically joked, it was the only city in Canada where you could starve to death before freezing to death.^[23] “Hobo jungles” sprouted up in the earliest days of the depression, where men built make-shift shanty towns out of whatever they could find (or steal).^[24] The largest of these was shut down allegedly for being unsanitary. Vancouver was also the launching pad for the Communist-led unemployed protests that frequented the city throughout the decade, culminating in the relief camp strike and the On-to-Ottawa Trek in 1935. Communist agitators and their supporters also led strikes in other industries, most notably the 1935 waterfront strike, and organized a large proportion of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion from Vancouver to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War as Canada’s (unofficial) contribution to the International Brigades.

Vancouver was the site of major celebrations in 1936, in part to bolster civic spirit in the midst of the depression, as well as to celebrate Vancouver’s Jubilee. Mayor McGeer provoked considerable controversy by organizing expensive celebrations at a time when the city was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and civic employees were working at a significantly reduced pay rate. Nevertheless, he did find a great deal of support from those that agreed a celebration would ultimately be good for the city’s prosperity. While some large expenditures were roundly criticized – for example, the “ugly” fountain erected in Stanley Park’s Lost Lagoon ^[25] – others drew significant financial and public support, such as the construction of a new (and the current) city hall on Cambie Street. The next major civic celebration was the 1939 visit of the King to mark the end of the depression and the onset of another world war.^[26]

• Matthews, J. 1937. Early Vancouver. Vancouver Archives.
• Macdonald, B. 1992. Vancouver: A Visual History, Talonbooks
• City of Vancouver archives - Point Grey
• City of Vancouver archives - South Vancouver