Strathcona could have been "Smithland"

 Suggested wording for illustrated display commemorating the 150th anniversary of BC's entry into Confederation, to be located in Strathcona Park.


Strathcona

British Columbia joined Canada in 1871 on the promise of a transcontinental railway within ten years. That promise was derailed by the Pacific Scandal that brought down John A MacDonald's government in 1873. One of the Conservative mutineers that ended the corrupt deal between the government and Hugh Allan was Donald Smith. Smith's own associates then built the railroad and acquired huge quantities of real estate, Smith himself bending the last spike in 1885.

Smith was a central or background figure in the Hudson's Bay Company, industry and banking, the CPR, Vancouver real estate and just about everything else in the massive expansion of Canadian colonial industrial capitalism of the late 1800's. A loyal supporter of British imperialism, he was sober, hard-working, incredibly wealthy and well-connected, and a sincere philanthropist. He was famously polite and well-mannered, a devoted husband who supported women's education. His biography is worth reading, if only to find out why he married his wife four or five times.

In 1897, Donald Alexander Smith became "Baron of Strathcona and Mount Royal". Smith had purchased land from the MacDonalds at Glencoe in Scotland, but "Glencoe" was historically associated with the treacherous massacre of the MacDonalds at Glencoe in 1692.  The word "Strathcona" was invented as a euphemism for Glencoe, although a strath is a wide valley and a glen is a narrow valley.

In 2001, Smith's descendants sold the Glencoe lands (the "Strathcona" of Smith's title) back to the MacDonalds' Glencoe Heritage Trust. So "Strathcona" itself is long gone, although it never really existed. Strathcona is just a name invented to give a fabulously wealthy Scot-Canadian a seat among the most privileged of the British upper classes. It lives on as a brand of beer, as a provincial park, as rural municipalities in Alberta and Manitoba, as a neighbourhood in Hamilton, and as a road that runs between Cranberry Flats and Furdale.

In the 1950s, Vancouver city planners began referring to Vancouver's East End as "Strathcona", borrowing the name from the East School that was renamed after Lord Strathcona in 1900. One of the ironic highlights of Strathcona school history has to be the Christmas concert where dozens of mostly Chinese-Canadian children happily sang "I've Been Working on the Railroad" to an audience of parents. An estimated 17,000 Chinese worked for notoriously low wages on the construction of the CPR, with probably 600 to 800 of them dying at work, many buried in unmarked graves along the rail line.

This display sits on what used to be marshland at the head of False Creek, filled with sand pumped from English Bay in 1913 by the dredge King Edward VII. Maps made by archivist Major Matthews in the 1930's show False Creek with a Salish name, Skwa-Chice. At this time there is no publicly agreed-upon Indigenous name for the Strathcona neighbourhood, and no record of what terms First Nations used when referring to Donald Smith.

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Header Picture: Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona) painted 1860 by William Hind