2009

9 December 2009 What Goes Around, Comes Around Ladysmith Vancouver Island British Columbia - The birth of Ladysmith was the result of a bitter rivalry between Nanaimo-area coal mines.   During their two-generation dynasty the coal-mining Dunsmuirs made almost as many enemies as they did dollars, just another of the costs of doing business, seems to have been their rationale. Usually their bullying approach worked. At least once, however, it came back to haunt them in a form that very much resembles poetic justice.   In July 1895 the New Vancouver Coal Co. (NVCC) went to court seeking an injunction to stop the E&N Railway, owned by James Dunsmuir and acting on behalf of the Wellington Colliery, from further trespassing on their lands "for the purpose of making a road and constructing a railroad for the carriage of coal mined by the defendants to Departure Bay".   There was a sense of deja vu to this courtroom skirmish. Seven years before, the NVCC had begun development of their Northfield Mine and laying track to their coaling wharves. Unfortunately, their main rivals, the Dunsmuirs, had recently extended their own line from Wellington to Departure Bay and, to effect a crossing, the NVCC required permission of manager James Dunsmuir. Never known for his personal or professional largesse, James, a second generation coal baron who also was in charge of the E&N, flatly refused. This forced his competition to build a five-mile-long extension and underpass, at great financial cost as well as time and motion.   By the mid-1890s James likely had all but forgotten about that railway crossing. His mind was focussed upon the unpleasant fact that the Wellington Colliery beside Diver Lake was rapidly running out of marketable coal. In just a quarter of a century this black diamond had made the Dunsmuirs one of the wealthiest families in the province. Now the family was faced with the source of that wealth running dry. Their salvation came quite unexpectedly in the unlikely guise of Ephraim "Edward" Hodgson, a colourful character who claimed to have discovered a high-quality outcropping of coal south of Mount Benson. It was situated on land owned by the E&N, hence his informing James Dunsmuir, who, according to legend, rewarded him handsomely.   When Hodgson's find proved to be an outcropping of the original Wellington seam, the resulting minesite and community became known as Wellington Extension, then Extension. The new mines would be linked to the Dunsmuirs' existing Departure Bay shipping wharves by means of a new standard gauge railway line. The fact that it would have to cross land owned by his old nemesis, the New Vancouver Coal Co., didn't discourage James from turning his survey crews loose, and navvies were clearing the right-of-way and about to lay down track when they were slapped with a stop-work order.   In granting the NVCC an injunction, Justice M.W. Tyrwhitt-Drake cited from legal precedent to the effect that, "In my opinion the (Coal Mines Prospecting Act) contemplates an agreement being arrived at, or in default of, an arbitration before any land can be entered on because the proposed line may be the subject of discussion, and the owner may have something to say as to the direction and course... I think the plaintiffs are entitled to the injunction asked for, which will be to restrain the defendant company, their agents, servants, and workmen from entering upon the lands of the plaintiffs to lay out or construct a road, railway, or tramway upon, or over, the plaintiffs' lands until the conditions in the act (in this case, mutual agreement) have been complied with or until further order".   Justice Drake would have been unaware of, and uninfluenced by, the fact that the seeds for this courtroom confrontation between Nanaimo's two largest collieries had been planted seven years before. When the competing companies failed to come to terms, James Dunsmuir had to make some other arrangement. His solution, at great expense, was to go south to Oyster Harbour. A spin-off of this 15-mile detour was a new town.   Ladysmith, which celebrated its centenary in 2004, owes its very existence to the New Vancouver Coal Co.'s successful application for a cease-and-desist order that could well have been motivated as much by a taste for vengeance as for justice.   T.W. Paterson.

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