Poems by Elisabeth Belyea

We have just had a request though our comments for copies of two poems by Elisabeth Belyea that were published in the Crucible magazine in 1938 and 1940. Fortunately, thanks to the thorough work Nick Beauchesne did in indexing the Crucible, we have pdfs of most of the issues of the magazine, which ran from 1932-43.

Here are the two poems by Elisabeth Belyea, “We Who Sleep” (Crucible 5.4 (1938): 4) and “Dawn at Tranquille” (Crucible 6.4 (Summer 1940): 12).

Canadian biographies, artists and authors. A mimeograph collection.

When I first came on board with the Canada’s Early Women Writers project, we had only paper files: you remember, single sheets slid into manilla folders? In many of these files were single pages typed out and mimeographed, referenced with the cryptic “Canadian Biographies Suppl.” The files used in the 1980s, housed at UBC, have long since disappeared (as crumbling loose-leaf papers in archives will do), so we were at a loss as to where to find another copy. We spent years asking other researchers, and searching online catalogues, to no avail. Recently, however, Val Lem (Liaison for English, History, Caribbean Studies, ACS and LLC at Ryerson University Library and Archives) contacted Carole with a catalogue entry from the TPL that looked particularly promising: “Canadian biographies, artists and authors. Canadian Library Association.” As I am in Toronto with some time on my hands at the moment, I set out to discover what this item (which they define as both “book” and—promisingly—”loose-leaf”) is.

Bingo! It is, in fact, the collection from which those pages had been copied. It was originally a collection of data from a survey sent out by the Canadian Library Association in 1946 and answered by as many artists and authors as the librarian receiving the list could locate. Here is the letter describing the project:

Given our expanded mandate, there are numerous authors in this file that we did not previously record the information for. I have copied those pages of interest to our project, but cannot post them online. I can, however, with the blessing of the archivists at the Margaret and Charles Baillie Special Collections Centre, publish the list of authors and artists contained in the file. So here it is.

I have posted the jpgs for easy viewing; the attached pdf file is searchable, but sadly not discoverable by search engines. If anyone wants to do the Canadian Studies world a favour, please consider transcribing the names for us…

Canadian biographies, artists and authors: The PDF
If you have problems with this link, it may be a browser issue. PDFs don’t work in my version of Firefox, but do in Chrome and Safari.

A poems for May 21 by Seranus [Susan Frances Harrison].

Seranus [Susan Frances Harrison]. [Entry for May 21]. Canadian Birthday Book. Ed. Seranus. Toronto: Robinson, 1887.

Canada 150: Chief Joe Capilano

Today’s Canada 150 profile is of Chief Joe Capilano, leader of the Squamish First Nation from 1895 until his death in 1910.

Obviously Chief Joe Capilano (1850–1910), Su-á-pu-luck, is not on our list of authors, but perhaps he—and his wife Mary Agnes Líxwelut—should be. E. Pauline Johnson’s famous Legends of Vancouver is based on stories of the Capilano and other Native tribes as told to her by the couple. Johnson had met Joe Capilano in England in 1906, when he met with Kind Edward VII in an (unsuccessful) attempt to resolve the issue of Native land rights in BC.

Mrs. Mathias Joe, Mrs. Mary Capilano and Chief Mathias Joe and others during visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth [1939]. City of Vancouver Archives, AM73-S1-1—: CVA 6-108.

“May,” by Catherine de Vaux MacKinnon

“Trinette” [Catherine de Vaux MacKinnon]. “May.” Creative Young Canada: Collection of Verse, Drawings and Musical Compositions by Young Canadians from Seven to Twenty Years of Age. Ed. Aletta E. Marty. Toronto: Dent, 1928. 116.

Catherine de Vaux MacKinnon, the daughter of Lilian Vaux MacKinnon, wrote this in her youth; it is one of her four poems included in Creative Young Canada (1928).

Canada 150: Margaret Ormsby

Today’s contribution to our research from Stephen Hume in his Vancouver Sun Canada 150 column is Margaret A. Ormsby. You will not find her in our database as an author, as her first book—British Columbia: A History—was published in 1958. You will find her in the resource section for Susan Allison’s entry, as her second book—A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia—was a biography of this fascinating woman, the first white woman to settle in the Okanagan Valley and the wife of John Fall Allison, who founded the town of Princeton (at first Vermillion Forks) at the conjunction of the Similkameen and Tulameen rivers. And incidentally my home town.

Sadly, the Allison homestead burned to the ground on 5 January 2017: “The original Allison Family home in Princeton BC was all but destroyed, along with the belongings of its four residents, and many lifetimes of family heirlooms, irreplaceable photographs and furnishings” (We Love Princeton facebook group, where this photo of the Allison homestead is also from).

But this post is about Margaret Ormsby, whose careful and thorough research brought Susan Allison’s life to the attention of academics, historians, and anyone else who enjoys biography.