On the Road with the Histocrats: "Gastown Historic Walking Food Tour"

Our second tour in Vancouver was the "Gastown Historic Food Walking Tour," a two and a half tour of Vancouver's municipal starting point, Gastown. Today, metro Vancouver is the third-largest urban area in Canada, known as one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities and for being surrounded by lots of natural beauty. In 2010, it hosted the Winter Olympic Games, despite the fact that average annual snowfall in the city is about 2-3 inches, and winter temperatures are moderate compared to other host cities.

Indigenous settlement of the area began 10,000 years ago and included the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. While a few white explorers, traders, and trappers visited the area up until the 18th century. White settlement began in earnest in the mid-1800s when the Fraser Gold Rush of 1858 began, drawing 25,000 miners, including many Americans, to the vicinity. Vancouver had no gold, but the area around Vancouver became a source of timber used to support the population boom. A thriving logging and sawmill industry developed, and a settlement called "Gastown" was born. The name Gastown apparently comes from the most well known promoter of the area, John Deighton, who was nicknamed "Gassy Jack" because he talked all the time, full of gas in the parlance of the day, or full of hot air. Deighton built a pub in record time to keep the loggers and sawmill workers happy, and it became the center of municipal development.

The name "Gastown" wouldn't last, however. Tour guides will tell you that Queen Victoria didn't care for the name, but it was far more likely that the heads of the Canadian Pacific Railway demanded a name change, and the city was renamed Vancouver after British naval officer George Vancouver who led expeditions that charted and mapped the region in the late 18th century. "Gassy Jack's" legacy continued to tumble over a century later when a statue of the man standing in front of his former pub on Maple Leaf Square was torn down during a February 2022 Memorial March for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Girls. Marchers were upset by claims that his second wife was a twelve year old Squamish girl that he either kidnapped or bought. Stories differ, however. Some claim that she was the niece of his first wife who had come to nurse her ailing aunt, and she was assigned multiple birth years at different times.

Following the Great Vancouver Fire of 1886, the city rebuilt, using bricks that arrived as ballast stones in returning cargo ships to replace the first wooden structures. Today, Gastown is a thriving area of the city filled with restaurants, galleries, and high end retailers, making it an ideal tour location.

We met our tour guide Kelsey at the Waterfront Station transit center, originally built in the early 1900s as the western terminal of the Canadian Pacific Railway, restored and now a hub for city transit.

From there, it was a walk from one taste to another, with lots of history along the way. Craft beer at the Steamworks Brewery, named for the original six miles of steam pipes under the area installed for heating, crispy Karaage chicken at a Japanese restaurant, sausage and cheesy potatoes at Petrichor French Bistro, chili cauliflower "wings" at a vegan place called Meat, real Canadian poutine at 6 Acres (on the original site of Gassy Jack's pub), great tortellini and meat sauce at a Sicilian place, and Nutella waffles for dessert. Along the way, we saw the famous steam clock in operation ("Westminster Chimes" at every quarter hour), Maple Leaf Square, and other points of interest.