The city of Vancouver had existed for less than two months on the day it burned to the ground. The flames which consumed the fledgling city on a quiet Sunday afternoon in 1886 were unexpected, devastating, and moved with such terrifying swiftness that in less than twenty minutes, the entire town had been destroyed. And, by the time night fell, and the survivors huddled on a hilltop outside of town, at least twenty one people were dead.

“The city did not burn,” recalled early resident W.F. Findlay, in a 1933 interview with archivist James Skitt Mathews, “it was consumed by flame; the buildings simply melted before the fiery blast. As an illustration of the heat, there was a man (driving horse and wagon) caught on Carrall Street between Water Street and Cordova Street; man and horse perished in the centre of the street. The fire went down the sidewalk on old Hastings Road, past our office, so rapidly that people flying before it had to leave the burning sidewalk and take to the road; the fire traveled down that wooden sidewalk faster than a man could run.”

That nobody had seen it coming would be an understatement. Though, why they didn’t is another matter entirely. News that the C.P.R. planned to extend its Western Terminus into the tiny logging community had given rise to an explosion in population and a frenzy of construction, and by the summer of 1886, the city was a literal tinderbox of planked streets, fallen trees, and closely-grouped wooden homes.

“The best way to describe Vancouver as I first saw it on 25 May 1886 is to describe it as a whole lot of fallen trees,” explains George Allen, early Vancouver businessman, “cut down, tumbled over one another; there were no streets. Save for a few buildings around Water and Carrall Street—Water Street was of course planked between Carrall and Abbott streets, bridged as it were over the hollow of the shore; there was nothing else. There were a lot of shacks of rough lumber around.”

The fire itself was idiotically preventable. At the time, the West End was simply dense forest, and, in preparation to build homes for the growing population, gangs of workers from the CPR had been tasked with removing trees and brush from the area. And, while felling the trees was dangerous, difficult work, involving hours of strain with saws and axes, the gangs quickly discovered that removing the underbrush was much easier if they simply set it on fire. Now, why setting a large, uncontrolled brush fire right next to a gathering of closely grouped, wood-and-tarpaper buildings on a breezy day in the middle of summer didn’t strike the clearing crews as hazardous is a point lost in the mists of antiquity. But, at any rate, at roughly 10:00 in the morning on June the 13th, a fire set in the C.P.R lands (only embers to begin with -it was Sunday, and no work was being done) was suddenly struck by powerful winds, and grew to an unmanageable size. Locals joined in to keep it contained, though they failed to take the threat seriously, even breaking for lunch before it had been subdued. And, by 3:00 in the afternoon, when the firefighters returned from their break, the flames, fanned by more high winds, had flared completely out of control. The speed and ferocity of the blaze took Vancouverites entirely by surprise. And, as George Allen reports, no one was more surprised than the wife of the city’s Fire Chief.

“Mrs. Pedgriff [wife of Fire Chief Sam Pedigriff] was in her bath when the alarm of fire came that Sunday afternoon,” Allen recalls. “I ran and knocked on the bathroom door with all my might, and told her she would have to get out, and get out quickly. Perhaps I should be more truthful if I said that Mrs. Pedgriff was in her little cabin at the back of the store, having her bath. She answered back that she was ‘in her bath.’ I told her it did not matter what she was in, she would have to get out, and quickly too, or she would be burned up. Then, and not until then, did she come out.”

Minutes later, the city was an inferno. Homes, offices, sidewalks, even the planked streets themselves were aflame. Locals took refuge in wells, inside buildings, or leapt from the Hastings dock to escape being burned alive. The heat was so intense, the bell at St. James Church melted into slag.

“I secured our books and money—payday was nearing—but there was not much time,” W.F. Findlay recalls. “I had been in our little office but a few moments when I saw through the window a rabble of people running by. They were coming down Hastings Road from the direction of the Deighton House, Gassy Jack’s place. I went out on the road, walked up towards Gassy Jack’s, but by the time I got there the Sunnyside Hotel across the street was a mass of flame, and before I could get back to the office I had just left, that was on fire too; I had not even time to save clothing [...] I waded out into the harbour at the back of our office, between Carrall and Columbia streets now, with hundreds of dollars of pay money in my pockets, and nearly suffocated. The heat was so intense that we had to stoop down almost to the surface of the water to get our breath. There was a current of cool air close to the surface of the water we were standing in, between the heat and smoke and the surface of the water; we breathed that, and it saved us.”

Less than twenty minutes later, the winds died down, but by then, only a handful of buildings remained. As the afternoon turned into evening, survivors were pulled from the harbour, and, at the behest of Mayor Malcolm MacLean, assembled at the foot of Mount Pleasant.

“The fire was at midday,” Archivist J.S. Mathews recalls. “That night all Vancouver lay black to the bare earth except where, in the distance from the foot of Mount Pleasant hill (Main Street) where the refugees had assembled under His Worship the Mayor awaiting food from New Westminster, the blackness of night was pierced with little lights in the distance, the small fires on the hill beyond, now downtown Vancouver, burning themselves out; just little glow worm lights against the dark background of gloom.”

Word of the city’s destruction quickly reached New Westminster, and, by midnight, food and supplies had begun to arrive. As former Alderman W.H. Gallagher recalls:

“Some thoughtful New Westminster woman had prepared some sandwiches, just fried eggs between bread, but with it was a little note which feelingly said she regretted it was very little, but was all she had. Sane, sensible woman, whoever she was; how pleased she would have been had she seen what her little mite accomplished for those splendid men. The sailor man who got the note turned and faced the east, raised his hand in an attitude of supplication, and offered the most beautiful prayer for New Westminster and its people, imploring the Almighty never to let them be in such distress, and asking the Lord to reward them a hundredfold. You do not expect that sort of thing from a rough sailor, and in the middle of the night.”

And, as Gallagher explains, by morning, a space had been cleared in one of the surviving buildings, where the process of collecting and identifying the bodies had begun.

“It was never known, and never will be, how many lost their lives,” he continues. “Of all the remains found, three only, those found at the corner of Hastings and Columbia streets, were recognisable by their features; then, too, we made an effort to keep the number as low as possible. Three bodies were taken out of a well down near St. James Church on Cordova Street East; at the time, there were some shacks down there. They were evidently husband, wife and little daughter, and must have been strangers, saw the fire coming, rushed away, and seeing a well, jumped into it. There was three or four feet of water in the well, and their clothing was unharmed by fire, but their faces were livid; the fire had, apparently, swirled over the well, and they had been suffocated, not burned. They were well dressed; the lady had gloves on her hands. It was the gum and pitch which made the fire so terrible, so fierce, and created a black, bitter smoke more smothering than burning oil.”

Most people had only the clothes on their backs (even Mayor MacLean had lost all his possessions and both his properties - neither insured), and had nowhere to sleep and little to eat, however, in the face of the blaze which had levelled the city, a determination had emerged amongst the survivors. Before the ashes had even stopped smouldering, buildings were being raised to shelter the citizens of Canada’s newest city, and within five weeks, Vancouver was a bustling port city once more.

“McPherson put up a big barn of a place opposite Pat Cary’s on Hastings Street. I remember his sign, ‘RAISED FROM THE ASHES IN THREE DAYS’,“ recalls city pioneer G.H. Keefer. “The day after the fire, I saw a burned out hotel keeper selling whiskey from a bottle on his hip pocket and a glass in his hand, his counter being a sack of potatoes.”

Less than two months after Vancouver was incorporated, it had burned to the ground. Less than twelve hours later, the rebuilding had begun.