Hastings Mill employees, 1889
This is one of my favourite photos of early Vancouver. These guys all look like hard working, hard living characters, each with a story to tell. Hastings Mill workers were the original settlers on Burrard Inlet and whose thirst Gassy Jack hoped to quench when he built his saloon here in 1867.
If you look closely, it was a pretty mixed bunch. Many of them ended up here because they were sailors who happened to jump ship at Burrard Inlet, and may have come from Chile, Polynesia, England, or pretty much anywhere that had a maritime culture. Others may have been Chinese, American, native (there was a small native community, or “rancherie” near the mill), or men who trekked here from Eastern Canada and beyond looking for work and opportunity.
Because of the culturally and linguistically diverse labour force at the mill, the working language wasn’t English, but Chinook Wawa (or Chinook Jargon), a hybrid local language consisting of fewer than a thousand words that was therefore easy to learn and made trade and everyday interactions in the Pacific Northwest possible, not just between natives and non-natives, but between natives and other natives, as there are numerous distinct indigenous languages in the Pacific Northwest. Even court trials were often conducted in Chinook, and a newspaper using the language, the Kamloops Wawa, began in 1891. Some words can still be heard on occasion in these parts, such as “skookum” (strong/impressive), “klahowya” (hello/goodbye), “tyee” (big fish/chief), “siwash” (native man), and “tillicum” (friend/people).
It’s easy to imagine early Vancouver as socially dichotomized into white/European power/privilege and non-white drudgery/oppression, but in reality, those social structures weren’t fully formed in this area until well into the 20th century. Certainly economic power and wealth was overwhelmingly held by British men, including the owners and managers of Hastings Mill, but on the ground, among the people who did the real work, there was a lot more unity in diversity than one, looking back from a 21st century vantage point, might expect.
Source: Photo by Charles S Bailey, City of Vancouver Archives #Mi P4; Kamloops Wawa, 2 May 1891, from Early Canadiana Online.
dededos
gummygunk
stormborns
annaxmalina
jbbartram-illu
vaporwave
ellievsbear
dailybridgerton
titsay
origamiaround
kaledo-art
