Shed been feeling ill for a couple days. I didnt really think much of it, George Turle says in a sad Southern drawl, describing the days before he lost his beloved wife Elsie to smallpox. But Hackman, he knew it immediately. He caught a glimpse of the beads, underneath her skin, crawling up her neck. As soon as he saw that, he wrapped his hands and face in linen because he does not want to catch this vile disease.
Turle, who moved to New Westminster in 1862 with his pa, looks at the crowd of people listening around him in the shadowed Gastown alley.
He drags my Elsie out of the hotel and brings her right down and locks her up in this storage room. He points to the door of an old brick building. He nails a yellow piece of cloth to wall you can still see the hole where the nail went it. Yellow was the symbol: quarantine for smallpox.
No, I didnt find a working time machine or take some LSD. George told his story as part of the Lost Souls of Gastown, a theatrical walking tour that took myself and 12 other people through the dark, but fascinating past of Vancouvers first neighborhood a past that includes an impressive amount of murder, fire and other surprises.
The idea is to weave a path through the citys earliest history in old Gastown, through smallpox outbreaks to the great fire to coming of the railway to the Klondike Goldrush, said Will Woods, founder and chief storyteller of Forbidden Vancouver, the local company that organizes the tour.
Woods was inspired to create Forbidden Vancouver after taking part in similar tours in Edinburgh and Seattle. [Those tours] had big doses of theatre and drama, the London native said. They share the citys history in a non-academic, very accessible fashion. As I went on these tours I thought to myself, I would love to do these tours as a job. So I started Forbidden Vancouver and enrolled myself in acting classes for several months to build up my abilities in theatre and drama to make it work. I spent a ton of time in the library archives researching the citys history.
Woods called the work wonderful. Every tours different and theres not many lines of work where you finish a shift and you get a round of applause. I totally found my calling with it. Ill be doing these tours in 40 years for sure.
And after the tour, there was applause for Mark Turpin, the actor playing the gold-and-women-chasing George Turle on our tour.
Its a lot of fun, Turpin said, now drawl-less. We get so many different people out from other countries and from around Vancouver. Ive had a good time playing George.
Woods believed it was important to acknowledge both the light and dark sides of the citys history.
Were a port city and bad stuff happens in port cities, he said laughing. Theres always a lot of transient people coming in and out and theres a lot of goods being transported through the city. Its always been that way and it hasnt always been just picnics in Stanley Park... We had bootlegging, opium dens and brothels lining Alexander Street.
Theres diverse history in this city and wed like to share that with people here, Woods continued. Wed like to take them back into the citys past and tell them the good, the bad and the untold and to celebrate that and not hide it any way.
Until November 9, the Lost Souls of Gastown will be showing locals and visitors the areas dark history several times a week. To book a tour or learn more go to ForbiddenVancouver.ca
