By the end of 1875 the
municipality was having difficulty getting new blood on
council. Many of the original members had retired
in frustration. It became so bad that the New
Westminster Mainland Guardian wrote:
-"LANGLEY. -GONE
WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH. The Langley
Council, the first rural Municipality on the
Mainland, and the one that has broken more of the
commandments than any other, living or dead, has at
last given up the ghost, and lapsed into the limbo of
nothingness. After a painful and chequered
career, embroiled in troubles from within and
troubles from without, this notorious 'Cabinet of
absurdities' has wrapped its fossil shell around it
and laid down to pleasant dreams. Cause of
death, failure to fill (77) up vacancies
caused by absence of members as required by the Act
of Incorporation. Requiesat in pace."
And in a later paper:
"...in absence of a public
cremator the bones of the defunct body will be
decently interred by the rate-payers at an early date
in the new cemetery."
It was little wonder
that councillors got frustrated at meetings. On
June 4, 1874, James Houston and Alexander
Williams presented bills claiming for damages to their
property as the result of road construction. The
total claims had amounted to $250. The council,
which included Houston, after due consideration,
"resolved to consign the Bills to the waste paper
basket." At the next meeting Houston tendered
his resignation.
As the result of all this frustration Mackie lost the
Wardenship to William Willison Gibbs
in the January, 1876, election. Gibbs was destined
to become Langley's most colourful, and yet most corrupt
pioneer. Neither Municipal nor Provincial
Archives reveal where he came from or whom he
married. His first public service had been school
trustee. At the first municipal council meeting in
1873, he had been appointed to the dual role of Clerk to
the Council and Municipal Treasurer. In June of
that year he was granted a retail liquor license for
the Fort Langley Hotel, located
just to the west of the old fort. He had earlier
gone into partnership with James
Taylor. Their hotel faced difficulties in June,
1875, when council voted in favour of prohibition within
the township. This did not stop Gibbs and as a
result Mackie, who was justice of the Peace as well as
Warden, convicted him of selling liquor.
The conviction for selling liquor prompted Gibbs to run
for Warden. He won the election. Upon
attaining the height of his ambition his vanity got the
better of him. Dressed in a black suit and white
shirt, and with a cane in hand, he paraded about the
Steamer Landing at the fort. He was brought down to
earth--in more ways than one--just as a steamer was
landing one morning. A lithe young half-breed,
whose sister he had insulted and terrified a few evenings
earlier, approached the newly appointed Warden and
punched him several times in the face. Upon
regaining his feet Gibbs made a boastful remark so his
antagonist gave him a second pounding. This time he
stayed (78) down for the count, much to the
amusement and satisfaction of the electorate.
The popularity of Gibbs declined rapidly
after his election win for the Wardenship. At one
of the first meetings in which he officiated, he granted
himself a liquor license despite opposition from his
council. This caused him to lock horns with Councillor
Maxwell. The Councillor directed some improper
language at the Warden and Gibbs instructed Clerk
George Towle to take the words down.
Maxwell also directed some improper language at a road
builder at the same meeting, who was giving a cost
estimate for a bridge across the Salmon
River. Maxwell reckoned the estimate was much too
high.
(79)
"Why I could p-- halfway across that creek,"
remarked the Councillor.
"Councillor Maxwell, you're out of order"
shouted Warden Gibbs as he pounded the
gavel on the desk.
"I know I'm out of order," came back Maxwell's
quick reply, "If I was in order I could p- all the
way across that creek."
Following these heated remarks Gibbs expelled Maxwell
from the meeting. When Gibbs did this
Councillors Mackie, Jolly,
and McAdam walked out followed by
Maxwell. Gibbs, smarting from having his meeting
broken up had the four "severely charged with
contravening a Municipal By-law in so far as they did
unlawfully leave the council, and by words and deeds
disturb the municipal lawful proceedings of the
same." It was a chance for Gibbs to get back
at Justice of the Peace Mackie. The charges split
council right down center. Gibbs' supporters
testified against the four accused. Upon hearing
the evidence Justice of the Peace
William M. Campbell of Sumas found them guilty and
imposed $5 fines which were paid.
The split in council extended beyond the town hall.
The entire population of the municipality divided into
two parties. One side followed Gibbs, expecting
favours, and the other side followed "the advocates
of fair, clean, municipal government."
Feelings ran high. Leaders of both parties would
pass by each other on the public road without so much as
a word of recognition.
Reverend Dunn, in his memoirs
'Experiences in Langley', recalled the situation.
He wrote,
"But notwithstanding this
there were times when the settlers depended upon each
other for assistance, as in spring time, when cattle,
not housed but fed outside, were thin and weak, and
mired in the sloughs. A man with an animal in a
mudhole was compelled to call to his aid neighbours
belonging to both parties. No one dared to
refuse, not knowing how soon he himself might have
one in a like predicament."
"It would have been amusing,
but had it not been wrong, to watch these men as they
struggled together to rescue an animal, without
speaking a word, and parting as they had met in
silence. The story is told that one day when
two men belonging to the (80) respective
parties, one an Englishman and the other a Scotsman,
were both pulling on the same rope, and so intent
upon their work that the Englishman, in an unthinking
moment, made some remark to the Scotsman. But
no sooner had the words passed his lips than he
hastened to correct himself, saying, 'I beg your
pardon, Sir, Scotsmen are said to be slow in
perceiving the humorous point in a situation.'
On this occasion at all events he saw the point at
once, and even smiled, no doubt reluctantly."
Henry
Wark took over the care of the Hudson's Bay Company's
Fort Langley in January, 1875, following the death
of Ovid Allard. Wark's
position was postmaster. As well as caring for the
old fort, Wark bought a farm of his own. Wark was a
nephew of the John Work who had
assisted McMillan search out a
location for Fort Langley in 1824. Wark kept his
position with the company until 1886.
As the new warden Gibbs became so
arrogant that even his hotel partner Taylor
turned against him. Apparently Gibbs had found a
Hudson's Bay Company pig on the steps leading into the
hotel. He fetched a pitch fork and stuck it into
the pig exclaiming, "I'm the boy to kill pigs."
Taylor saw this and told Henry Wark, who was in charge of
the fort. Wark, Taylor, and William Emptage went out to the
shed and examined the dying pig. Wark did not
hesitate to charge Gibbs. The trial, known as the 'Langley
Pig War' was held in New Westminster before
Magistrate Henry V.
Edmonds. Gibbs tried to convince the magistrate
that the pig died of starvation. Edmonds did not
accept his story.
Shortly after this incident members of council, headed
by Maxwell, discovered that Gibbs
had juggled the minutes of several of the municipal
meetings. A group of men gathered around Gibbs'
residence one evening demanding that the minute book for
the municipality be produced for their inspection.
Examination revealed that whole leaves had been cut
out. The council ran Gibbs unceremoniously out of
Langley.
Shortly after incorporation Langley council requested
$2,000 from the Provincial Government to be used toward
road development. They also passed a bill to
collect a road tax from (81) the residents.
As early as 1861 the government had let a contract
to Joseph Girard to build
the Langley Trail along the river
from a spot opposite New Westminster to
Langley. The council now wanted to widen the New
Westminster to Yale Wagon Road,
commonly called the Yale Road, to make it passable for
buggy traffic. This road had originally been put
through in 1865.
The lowest bidder for the job was William
Henry Vanetta and his father-in-law Alexander
Murchison. Vanetta is believed to have been Pennsylvania
Dutch. His parents Samantha and Moses
Vanetta were nomadic farming folk. William had been
born in Warren, New
Jersey. At the age of 17, in Dakota,
he enlisted in the Wisconsin Infantry
Volunteers as a private under Captain Henry
Fox. He served for three years on the side of the
north before being discharged at Brownsville,
Texas. He then rejoined
his family who were now farming in Sioux City, Iowa.
It was here he met the Alexander Murchison family.
Murchison and his wife, the former Isabel
Beaton, had been married in Cape Breton Island.
They moved from there to Lucknow,
Ontario, and from there down across the line.
Vanetta married their daughter Elizabeth
in Sioux City, on May 20,
1873. After the marriage they left immediately for
British Columbia on the Union Pacific and
Central Railway accompanied by the bride's parents.
Both the Vanetta and Murchison families lived in New
Westminster upon their arrival in British Columbia.
They came out to Langley together in the spring of
1874. Vanetta leased a portion of the Hudson's
Bay Company farm while Murchison took up land at Murray's Corners. Two
months after their arrival Mrs. Vanetta gave birth to a
son in the Hudson's Bay Company house on the Langley
Prairie Farm. Alexander Moses
Vanetta, named for his two grandfathers, was the first
white child born in the newly created municipality.
The Yale Road as it existed through the Lower Fraser Valley prior to 1875 had
been little more than a quagmire. It was Vanetta's
task to make it a usable wagon road within the
municipality. Once completed it would be used to
freight (82) produce from the south side of the Fraser Valley into New
Westminster and Vancouver
markets. By the fall of 1875 a widened Yale
Road passed through the tell green timbers of Surrey
to the riverbank opposite New
Westminster. Here a cryptic ferry service, called
the K de K, floated the wagons and
teams across the river to New Westminster.
One of the many settlers into the Langley district in
1874 was Paul Murray. He
was 63 years of age and should have been retiring instead
of looking for a new home. Born in the north of
Ireland, Murray as a young man of 18, emigrated
from Sutherland, Scotland, with his
family to Oxford County,
Ontario. (83) At the age of 28 he
married Lucy
Bruce and soon afterwards bought 160 acres of bushland
at Zorra, Ontario. It was
here they raised a family of three boys and four
girls. The family was grown up when he decided to
pull up stakes and come out west with the three
sons. His sons were William, John,
and Alexander.
Being the head of the household in the accepted fashion
of the early Presbyterians, he met with no opposition
from his wife or children. His two married
daughters remained in Zorra with their husbands. In
May, 1874, the Murray family bade farewell to their
friends and travelled by boat from New
York to Panama, then across
the isthmus, then to San Francisco and
eventually to Victoria. They
remained at Victoria for six weeks while Murray and his
sons purchased essential household equipment. Upon
their arrival on the mainland they made their home in a
shack by the Fraser River in New
Westminster.
At Langley, after staying with the Kenneth
Morrison family a couple of weeks, Murray finally chose a
heavily wooded spot on the summit of a hill some miles
south of Fort Langley. Here he and his sons felled
a mighty fir tree and erected a crude shelter on the butt
end. It offered little protection from the
elements. In this leanto they made bunks one above
the other to use as beds. It was to this primitive
dwelling that Mrs. Murray and her girls came.
Despite its short-comings it was still better than the
shack in New Westminster. The women immediately set
to work to make it as liveable as possible. Once
settled Mrs. Murray bought two milk cows and some heifers
from the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Langley. She
also purchased chickens and a few turkeys from the
Indians. In this way their supply of milk, butter,
and eggs was secured. Game was plentiful and
venison supplemented their food supply. The Murray
family lived in this primitive manner for three years
while the men cleared and built a house. It was
during this time that they were joined by two daughters
and their husbands. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas
Black and Mr. and Mrs. Christian Isaacson,
homesteaded near the girl's parents and brother's farms.
Once Vanetta had completed
the Old Yale Road through the
municipality William Murray built a hotel along it to
cater to the travellers going to the interior.
(84)
The Murray Hotel was the first building in what came to
be known as Murray's
Corners. Murray was the best
carpenter in the district and later built many of the
barns in the area. He also built the first bridge
in Port Coquitlam. The three
Murray brothers had all worked on the widening of
the Yale Road.
In 1875 William Edge bought
the river front farm belonging to Alfred Freeman situated just
upriver from the Derby Townsite.
Originally from Dublin, Ireland, Edge
as a young man had come to Ontario and settled in Owen
Sound. It is known that he lived there for a short
time with a brother and sister and it is probable that he
came there with his parents. It was here he
married Harriet Mighton.
She was originally from North Yorkshire,
England. She had come with her family to Ohio
and it is likely (86) that she moved to Owen
Sound with them. In any event the pair married in
Owen Sound and had four children before coming to British
Columbia.
Once Edge got his own family settled he was joined by his
brother Samuel and sister Sarah
and their spouses. Samuel Edge had the distinction
of being the first white man to climb the Golden
Ears. He made the climb in 1876 in three
days. Edge Peak is named in
his honour. Sarah was married to John
Hinch. Both Samuel Edge and Hinch chose to settle
on the north side of the river in Maple
Ridge.
There seems to have been difficulty in the valley in the
early days for teachers to obtain the number of students
to satisfy government regulations. In 1875, James
Murray Sinclair, a 17 year old youth who had passed his
teacher's certificate in Victoria,
arrived in Maple Ridge, across the river from West
Langley. In order to keep his job at $50 a month,
he rowed across the river morning and evening to obtain
West Langley children for his classroom. He was
thus able to keep the required number of students to keep
his school open. His river crossing was the first
regular ferry service on the Fraser. His pupils
from the south side of the river included the Muench and
Edge children.
Mill owner Henry West got a new
neighbour in 1876 when Murdock McIver took up
160 acres in East Langley.
McIver had been born in Tolsta, Isle
of Lewis, Scotland, in 1848. At an early age he
joined the British Navy.
At New York he jumped ship and
from the shore shook a fist of defiance at his
captain. He spent the first years in the Western
New England States along the Atlantic Coast. From
the American East Coast he ventured into Quebec.
At Tolsta, Quebec, he ran into a
McIver family to whom he was not related. McIver
left them bound for British Columbia with the intention
of some day returning to marry their eldest
daughter. Besides clearing stumps on his homestead
the young Scotsman worked out logging and fishing.
For the first several years the pioneers would sow grain
around these stumps and harvest their meagre crops in the
fall. The farmers would have bees to help each
other take off the crops. They would use
scythes. This mowing and reaping (87)
implement with a long slightly curved blade was swung
over the ground by the farmer hanging on to a five foot
snath with two short handles projecting at right angles
from it. The users of this implement were called
cradlers.
Following each cradler was a tier. This man
gathered the cut grain and with its own straw tied it
into bundles called sheaves. The sheaves were
bunched together, heads up, into stooks, which in turn
were picked up by horse or oxen and wagons and taken into
the barns. At a later date a threshing machine
would arrive and separate the grain from the straw.
This grain in turn would be ground into flour to be then
made into bread.
At the bees, which were generally consummated with a
crock of whisky, the craddlers would go around a field
making their 8-10 foot swathes one behind the
other. The best man was placed at either the head
or end of the line. If up front he would set a fast
pace and the others were expected to keep up. If at
the rear he would bulldog the others. George
Medd, William Medd's son, as
a teenager well remembered being second from the rear
behind William Plaxton, a
school teacher and lay minister from Fort Langley.
Plaxton told him to move it or would clip him on the
heels with his scythe. Medd believed him and worked
like the devil.
William
Edge was considered a pretty good cradler. On one
occasion he challenged the other men at a bee as to who
could cut the most grain in a day. Any takers to
the bet were required to leave an agreed amount of money
with a judge which would be picked up by the winner in
the evening. Story goes that around mid-day Edge
visited the crock of whisky which was shaded from the sun
in a stook of grain in the center of the field.
Edge took a healthy swig before adding a laxative.
That evening he picked up the winnings from the judge.
In 1877 Murdock McIver
acquired a new neighbour. Gilbert
McKay, and his wife, had come out to Langley with his
wife's married sister and brother-in-law John
McIver. This McIver was also from the Isle
of Lewis, Scotland, however was not related to Murdock
McIver. This McIver was the former cooper at Fort
Langley and a pioneer settler of Maple
Ridge. He had gone back to Scotland in 1877 to
fulfill a promise made to the parents of (88) Kenneth
Morrison before he had left Scotland. He had gone
back with the intentions of marrying Morrison's baby
sister. He married the girl and returned to
his Maple Ridge Farms, also
accompanied by his bride's sister and her husband Gilbert
McKay. They chose to settle along the Fraser
upriver from the fort. McKay named the spot Glen
Valley. McKay built a house from lumber from
the West Mill which is (1977) still
standing. The lumber used in its construction was
absolutely knotless.
In 1877 the Hudson's Bay Company officials decided to
sell their farm at Langley Prairie.
The farm was subdivided into 100 acre lots and offered
for sale by auction in Victoria for roughly $25 an
acre. There were no buyers. The first two
lots to be sold went to land speculator Reverend
Alexander Dunn.
Another bachelor that came to Langley in 1876 was Samuel
McClughan. He had been born near Belfast,
Ireland, in 1841. McClughan homesteaded 160 acres
and worked it alone for three years before being joined
by his intended bride, Eliza Frances
Shaw. The pair were married in Victoria in
1879. His wife had been born in Curawan,
County Leitrim, Ireland, in 1854.
The Joseph Michaud family came to Langley in 1878 and
were the municipality's first French settlers. Warden
Adam Innes happened to be at Fort Langley for supplies
and offered to drive the French speaking family in his
democrat to the Old Stopping Place on the Semiahmoo or Smuggler's Trail
where it crossed the Nicomekl River.
This trail, originally used by the Indians, was much used
in 1858 by American miners coming up by way of Bellingham
to Langley. By avoiding the custom officers at the
mouth of the Fraser these men were able to avoid paying a
head tax to prospect on the Fraser. The Old
Stopping House had been built to cater to this
traffic. It was to be the Michaud home for the next
ten years.
It was here that Maximilian Michaud,
Joseph's older brother, had purchased over 600
acres. Both these men came from St.
Philippe de Kamouraska, Quebec. Their ancestors had
been in Quebec prior to the Battle of the Plains
of Abraham.
The older Michaud
had arrived in British Columbia about 25 years earlier
having worked his way across the United States on (89)
foot. His journey had taken him 18 months. He
had been among the first to pre-empt land in the vicinity
of Hope. He had first worked
in the Colonial Hotel in New
Westminster but in 1869 had purchased the New
Brighton Hotel in Hastings (later Vancouver).
Shortly afterwards he became the first postmaster in
Vancouver with the office in his saloon. He changed
the name of the saloon to the Hastings Hotel, which was
nicknamed Maxie's, and enjoyed
an ever increasing reputation for fine food and
comfortable lodgings.
The arrival of the Joseph Michaud family
marked the beginning of Roman Catholic history in the
Municipality of Langley. The first mass was held in
their home. The Oblate Fathers from
New Westminster said mass once a month in their (91) hospitable
home for the first few years. Later the Oblates from Mission City
catered to the spiritual needs of the Catholic settlers. One of
the Oblates in their home was the Reverend Joseph
Michaud, an uncle to Joseph Michaud the settler. It
was the small building formerly used as a school house at
Innes' Corners which was used
as the first Roman Catholic church at Langley Prairie. It was
named St. Joseph's upon
being moved across the Yale Road into the Michaud
hayfield.
Soon after Michaud's arrival in Langley he purchased hogs
and cattle which thrived on the pea vine and crab apples
which grew in abundance on the Hudson's
Bay Company farmlands at Langley Prairie. The hogs
were on occasion the cause of some excitement for their
owner. The numerous black bears would molest them,
and Michaud, upon hearing the squeals, would arm himself
with only a pitch fork and ride out on horse like Sir
Galahad in pursuit of the culprit. Once he found a
black bear eating the back out of one of his pigs.
He charged at the bear (92) shouting at the top of
his lungs and flailing the fork causing the bear to drop
the dying animal. The little Frenchman, slightly
over five feet tall, feared nothing except the sting of a
bee to which he was critically allergic. Because he
was such a lousy shot with a rifle he on another occasion
asked his neighbour William Murray to
conceal himself in the vicinity of the hogs and attempt
to bag a troublesome bear. Murray did so one night
but only managed to wound the brute. The following
morning the two men headed out on foot following the
blood and tracks. Michaud, armed with his fork,
carelessly got out ahead of Murray who had the
rifle. Climbing up onto a windfall Michaud met face
to face with the charging bear. He jumped clear of
the attacking animal and Murray was quick enough to get a
clear shot which dropped the bear just as it reached
Michaud.
If Joseph Michaud was useless with
a rifle, his younger son, Maxie, made up for it
by being one of the best crack-shots in the valley.
He took his rifle with him everywhere and used it from
the time he was seven to put wild meat on the family
table. He developed a reputation for shooting deer
only on the dead run and rarely missed a buck as it
dodged in and out of the thickets.
Michaud, who spoke only French, had difficulty
communicating with his neighbours for the first few years
after his arrival. In his twilight years he used to
delight in telling a joke on himself concerning an
incident in which he outsmarted an Englishman by using
his speech impediment to his advantage. The English
chap was looking for a good horse. When he offered
Michaud a sum of money for a horse he happened to have
the Frenchman refused saying, "Dat animal, by gar,
she no look so good."
The horse looked good enough to the buyer who shoved the
money into the Frenchman's palm and went off with the
horse thinking he had gotten the better of the
bargain. He was soon back complaining that the
horse was blind and had just run into a tree.
Michaud just smiled and in flawless English said, "I
told you so."
Each year the Fraser Valley was
taking in more and more settlers. The Fraser
River gold excitement caused the first influx (93) of
men. The building of the Trans-Canada railway would
cause the second.
(94)
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