User talk:KenWalker/Archive Feb 2007

/Comments
Question I honestly don't know the answer to: What are these /Comments pages? --maclean 06:03, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
 * They arise from clicking on a link that comes up in the BC Project template that appears on talk pages. For example, at Talk:Taylor%2C_British_Columbia the template has a link that says "If you have rated this article please consider adding assessment comments.". It creates a separate comment page that shows up in the Comments column at Version 1.0 Editorial Team/British Columbia articles by quality/1.  There are a series of those work list pages under the View Full Worklist link at WikiProject British Columbia.  Has potential uses I think.  -- KenWalker | Talk 06:13, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, I understand now. Thanks. --maclean 01:13, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Pig War
I didn't look deeply into it, but I think the guy who did that thing with the cats is connected to the Serbian Pig War, i.e. he's trying to downplay the primary use of "Pig War" in English to mean the San Juan Islands Dispute; it certainly wasn't a war by Balkan standards of warfare, but about as close as it got to cross-border hostilities in these parts; but the cats deleted were "conflict" and "military history", not "war" anyway. But as said, I think it was an edit from someone who'd rather see the main Pig War article go to the Serbian one instead of this one; which, granted, by European standards is incredibly obscure and something of an opera buffa. But then, so is most of BC history....Skookum1 21:48, 20 February 2007 (UTC)


 * BTW please stop in on Talk:Tonquin and follow the link to my resources page; will be adding the Akrigg account soon. If there's any specific ships/shipping companies you might want me to look up in what I've got around here let me know; time is of the essence as within weeks I'll be passing over my BC history collection to a friend while I pursue less worldly concerns in the next year....The Tonquin thing involves Aboutmovies, who I'm not directly engaging and I think on the Oregon treaty/boundary dispute pages we got into mis-interpreting things negatively and I recused/disengaged, until he showed on up Talk:Hollywood North; my basic thrust on those pages is still that the discussion is all US-flavoured; is there as much legislative detail, political sloganeering/stumpification and an equivalent British worldview in the article to go with its US one?  No, of course not; but for raising this issue I had the usual "but what you want is POV" thrown at me by the defender(s) of the current POV; that Canadian historians (outside of BC historians) downplay all this stuff, Pig War, Oregon Dispute and overlook American belligerence re Alaska doesn't help, because citability is the issue here; what is citable is the chorus of denunciations of the Oregon and Alaska treaties that are still current in BC historiography; but I'm too tired to "fight the good fight", I just want to write my songs and go play da music and forget about the fools who populate webspace and academia; maybe once "out there" I can "raise awareness" and such, but it's all non sequitur implicitly now; as with my own life, it's not who you used to be that counts, it's who you're going to be.  And for BC, that's a big and very dicey prospect; and "who you used to be" in this province isn't known like it should be, and IMO has been re-painted by ethnic and sociological/ideological-agenda brushes too heavily for it to be of much "use" until it's suitably neutered of the politicized tone it's acfquired.  More on this in email I guess as it gets into particulars of something I've been asked to write for CBC, in which I'm aware who the other contributors are and the likely errors of theirs that they're going to repeat (again) as if fact.  But "they have credentials and I don't"....they also have funding grants and I don't, which puts me at a loss, huh?  Anyway....Skookum1 21:56, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Frank Barnard Sr. and Jr. and the B.X., and historical trails
Hi; just saw your re-rating of Frank Barnard Sr. - which come to think of it should be a redirect, as despite the differing middle name he's also known that way, as with Frank Barnard Jr.), and there should be a dab line at the start of the respective pages concerning the other, with Frank Barnard as a redirect to one or the other, presumably the elder (just created both). I'm fine with the change to "start", but it's not really anywhere near "B" because there's a lot more on him, and on his son as well, and the Barnard's Express page needs expanding.  One thing I do know is that the first operations and the original business license, or something to that effect, had the B.X. starting out in Port Douglas, as with other freighting companies of the time (he may have, however, started freelance without license/contract from Yale via Lytton to Cariboo - and presumably Lillooet, which was the other "pole" of the Canyon during the gold rush and for the longest while after, long after Yale had dwindled into a rail stop in fact; the Lytton route in the earliest days went by the Chapman's Bar Trail, which I guess I should write up an article on; it leaves the Fraser a few miles northwest of Lytton, at Laluwissen Creek, and goes up North Laluwissen Creek into the uppermost Upper Hat Creek basin, from where the trail continued down Hat Creek to Carquile, which is the old name for what is now the Hat Creek Ranch Heritage thingy, aka Cottonwood House, just near the Hwy 99-Hwy 97 junction a dozen miles or so north of Cache Creek; Hat Creek, British Columbia deserves a whole article, in fact, because of many ranch histories associated with it and a very long settler history, so care should be taken when it's written/expanded to not only address the modern meaning, which is the heritage-tourism place; There could also be Hat Creek (British Columbia) and/or as a direct to/from Hat Creek I guess (unless there's another one); but still the migration of the name, and the Lower/Upper thing would have to be in the Hat Creek, British Columbia article; the name means the whole basin, in fact, though "Hat Creek Country" was never used in the way Bonaparte Country or Bridge River Country were used). Point is there's yet another gold-rush era trail that's documentable, though rarely referred to in most modern write-ups though part of the human landscape of the time, more importantly than the better-known routes (everyone thinks all travel to the Cariboo was via the Ashcroft route; that's only after the mid-'60s), and there's, for example, an important pass from Seymour Arm of Shuswap Lake over to the Big Bend goldfields that could use a write-up; also the HBC Brigade Trail (v.1 and v.2); ; ditto the Pemberton Trail, which was the effort to keep the remnant of the Lillooet Cattle Trail going, until its roadbed was largely absorbed into the Pacific Great Eastern. The details of the CPR Surveys in BC are also very interesting, and kind of staggering - all routes were explored through the Coast Mountains, sometimes at the cost of human life; one party led by Stanley Smith and his brother disappeared trying to traverse the Ring Glacier route to the Southgate River over the Lillooet Icecap-Compton Neve area, never to be heard from again; it's why there's a Stanley Smith Glacier and the other Smith glacier in the Lillooet Icecap; other parties tried out Toba Inlet and the Dean-Kimsquit route and others. Lieut. Palmer falls in the same category, penetrating the deepest mountain wilds in the search for a better wagon road to the goldfields, in a much earlier and more difficult time, including Toba Inlet (via the Lillooet River-Meager Creek) and also overland from Lillooet to Fort Chilcotin - a route I wish he'd kept a journal of. Samuel Black and that Campbell guy (James? John?) in the far north are also staggering in the adventurers category; and even later-era people like Neal "Curly" Evans and Frank Swannell, who I'll also try and stub, who were respectively a freightman and a government surveyor, but both of them trod over most of their territories on foot or by horse, bridging the age of the pack train into that of the bush pilot and chopper; in Swannell's case his turf was the whole of BC; he's reckoned to have set foot in more of the province than anyone else ever has, or ever will; and "foot" is the operative term. I better not go on or I'd come up with other examples of the roster of individuals who I see as core to BC's history, and who can be included in a one historical resource for the first time; Volcanic Brown et al.....even in the case of the Bridge River I'm faced with twenty different mining biographies if I so much as start writing about the "Bridge River Gold Rush" (never called that), 1890-1960s, which is why Bralorne, British Columbia, which I should have written a long time ago, is still (I think) a redlink.

Anyway, there's all kinds of itty-bitty details about guys like Barnard and where they were when they were there scattered through various local histories and "truckstop histories" (Paterson, Basque, Hopper), including stuff like the B.X. starting in Port Douglas - that's in Francis Decker's Pemberton: History of a Settlement, which is a very engrossing read as you'll find, despite being locally-written; also the book People of the Harrison, by Daphne Sleigh of Deroche, is incredibly detailed though a bit less readable than the Decker). There's all kinds of anecdotes about both of them, too, and about their crack whips Steve Tingley and Billy Ballou....he reason, or one of them, I want to do Clement Francis Cornwall and also have a look at Semlin is because of that whole rancher/politician/pioneer entrepreneur and gentry-crat that typified that area of those times; Walhachin, British Columbia I've got some great stuff on but don't know if I have the time....Skookum1 22:28, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Historical justices of BC
Please have a look at Talk:Supreme Court of British Columbia and Talk:British Columbia Provincial Court, which I just added the BC template to re listing historical justices. I don't know where to start for Henry Crease, though have bits on his background in Akrigg and maybe a couple of other sources I still have around; will try to get L-G. Cornwall done next, so tossing Crease over to you maybe - ? - but pondering how much work it would be to compile a listing of justices for the two high courts, starting with Begbie and Crease on down; also Gold Commissioner is on my menu before I'm gone (and there were enough of those guys there should be a cat for them eventually); x-ref with Government Agent and Indian Agent as well as land commissioner, magistrate, coroner, assayist, surveyor (sometimes) and all the other hats they wore (nice job, and mostly cash, too...or gold dust, rather....). There's also on the backboiler the colonial assembly and the executive and legislative councils; I guess we should come up with titles for those and put them in Article Requests, no? But you being the closest thing to a guy with a robe and a wig around here ;-) I thought I'd see what your thoughts on the historical courts/justices listings might be...and here's some content on the Barnard's, which came to me as a I sat down originally to tell you about the justices:  Skookum1 22:28, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I think I could come up with a source for the lists of justices, but I wonder if it is worth it. At the moment there are something like 150 of them.  A historical list of Supreme Court justices could be over a thousand people.  The Chief Justices would be simpler, that would be a couple of dozen.  Those I could get next time I am in the Vancouver Court House as their photos are on the wall right back to the beginning I think.  As to Crease, I will keep my eye peeled.  I  could check at the Court House library for historical material, they may have some.  A start will be to check their website.  I am crazy busy these days, but I will be at the Nanaimo Court house Friday and will see what they have if I get the time to do it.  -- KenWalker | Talk 03:02, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Helping out with the Unassessed Wikipedia Biographies
Seeing that you are an active member of the WikiBiography Project, I was wondering if you would help lend a hand in helping us clear out the amount of [unassessed articles] tagged with. Many of them are of stub and start class, but a few are of B or A caliber. Getting a simple assessment rating can help us start moving many of these biographies to a higher quality article. Thank you! --Ozgod 21:09, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I will have a run at it, a bit at a time. -- KenWalker | Talk 01:36, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Bowden Island revision
Sorry about that, I only noticed that you already revised after I placed the warning on the vandal page. --Qyd 03:57, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikiproject Biography March 2007 Newsletter
The March 2007 issue of the Biography WikiProject newsletter has been published. You may read the newsletter, change the format in which future issues will be delivered to you, or unsubscribe from this notification by following the link. Thank you. Mocko13 22:22, 28 February 2007 (UTC)