Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886
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by Lisa Anne Smith
Ronsdale Press, Vancouver, 2013
212 pp., illus., $21.95 paperback
It took only five hours to reduce the newly incorporated city of Vancouver to smouldering ash. This little-known story is told in detail in Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886, by Lisa Anne Smith.
In the nineteenth century, Vancouver went from an indigenous community of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh, who lived resourcefully off the land, to a lumber town stripped of many of its giant red cedar trees. Hunger for timber proved the town’s undoing.
On June 13, 1886, a small clearing fire got out of control and swept down the wooden sidewalks of Vancouver “faster than a man could run.”
Smith gives a detailed account of the events that occurred that hot Sunday and of the cleanup and rebuilding thereafter. The book includes interesting photos of people, artifacts, and buildings. Due to the transient nature of the city’s population, the precise number of the dead and missing is unknown.
After providing eyewitness accounts of the tragedy, Smith closes with a discussion of other similar catastrophes. Vancouver is Ashes is an engaging and revealing book.
— Beverley Tallon (Read bio)
Beverley Tallon is a freelance writer and the former Assistant Editor for Canada's History.