1867:

Under a light drizzle, former riverboat Captain John Deighton makes his way into Burrard Inlet, in a dugout canoe that also contains his wife, his mother-in-law, a cousin by the name of Big William, two chickens, two “weak-backed” chairs and a dog. They have come in search of a fresh start, and, in so doing, inadvertently contribute to the beginnings of the city of Vancouver.

“Jack landed at his destination in the afternoon of the last day of September,” an unnamed Vancouver Pioneer will remark, in a conversation later quoted by Alan Morley’s “Vancouver: Milltown to Metropolis”. “Lookers-on from the mill remarked that it was a doubtful acquisition to the population.”

Deighton - known as “Gassy Jack” (due to his propensity for long-winded stories), arrives in the inlet fleeing bankruptcy, and, within 24 hours, has has convinced workers from the nearby Hastings Sawmill to build the city’s first bar, The Globe Saloon, in exchange for all the whiskey they can drink. The mill workers require little convincing; their only company is currently one another, and the only other saloon in the Lower Mainland is more than 25 kms away.

It was “a lonesome place when I came here first, surrounded by Indians,” Deighton will recall in a letter to his brother Tom. “I care not to look outdoors after dark. There was a friend of mine about a mile distant found with his head cut in two.”

Despite the rough nature of the area, The Globe will quickly become incredibly successful, and Deighton himself, a man “of grotesque, Falstaffian proportions and green-muddy, purplish complexion, with the gift of grouping words and throwing them away with volubility of a fakir,” will become a wealthy and respected member of the tiny community. And, by the time of his death in 1875, the community that grew directly up around his saloon will be on its way to becoming a bustling metropolis.

“You and I may never see it but this inlet would make the nicest of harbors,” Deighton once remarked to miner William Mackie. “It will be a port some day.”

 

IMAGE: Hastings Sawmill and wharf, at the foot of what is now Dunlevy Street, circa 1883. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives