Heber Cole and the Hume Hotel

One hundred years ago today, a man sent a five-page letter to his wife on stationery from Nelson’s Hume Hotel. A few months ago, I bought the letter on eBay from someone in Etobicoke, Ont., with a winning bid of $103 US.

The stationery itself is presumably why others were interested in it, inflating the price. It features a fabulous engraving of the Hume as it appeared in those days, although the backdrop is very clearly not Nelson, as the mountains are far taller and more rugged than in real life. It looks more like Kaslo or Fernie or Switzerland. A lake with sailboats is seen to the right of the hotel, while a series of imaginary buildings line the hotel’s Ward Street side.

A bunch of buses are seen in front of the hotel, strangely out of proportion with the building. (I also have an envelope from West Transfer in Nelson, postmarked 1942, with an engraving of the building and a similarly out-of-proportion vehicle in front of it. Perhaps this is the signature of the same artist.)

The text says: “Hume Hotel/Nelson BC/George Benwell, proprietor/European plan/Cafe a la carte & Table d’Hote/Rotary Club Headquarters.”

“European plan” meant the room rate did not come with meals. “Cafe a la carte & Table d’Hote” meant guests had the choice of ordering separately priced meals from a menu or a multi-course meal for a fixed price.

A century later, the Hume is still the Rotary Club headquarters!

The hotel didn’t look the way it did on the stationery for much longer. A modernization in 1929 resulted in its roof being flattened and its turret and balconies being removed.

I’ve scanned each page of the letter, which can be found at bottom, and transcribed the text here, but to summarize: the writer is on a geological expedition. He has just received letters from his wife, his mother, and someone else, which have been forwarded to him from Winnipeg. 

In the previous few days he has travelled by train from Swift Current to Medicine Hat, where he had hoped to see a member of the Geological Survey, but was unable to locate him. Instead, he met up with someone else he knows from the Geodetic Survey. They tour the Dominion Glass Co.’s plant and then go golfing, I guess because that’s what geologists do in the field.

The writer takes the train to Cranbrook, but isn’t able to see much through the Crowsnest Pass on account of forest fire smoke. At Cranbrook, he rents a car and spends the next couple of days looking at gypsum deposits at Mayook and Wardner. Then he heads to Kimberley and meets someone he knows from Rossland. We begin to realize the writer has previously lived in the Kootenays.

“My but the Sullivan mine is a wonder, probably the biggest zinc mine in the world or pretty close to it,” he says. “I also met one of the 4 men I took up to the mine with me in Dec 1909 when I first went up there to open up the property when the Consolidated first bought it.” (Consolidated is shorthand for the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Co., or Cominco.)

He returns to Cranbrook, then catches a train for Nelson, which involves taking a sternwheeler from Kootenay Landing.

“When the train arrived at Kootenay Landing and we got on the boat the smoke was so heavy from forest fires that we could not see the sides of the lake a quarter of a mile away,” he says.

He arrives in Nelson on Saturday evening, Aug. 14, and heads immediately to a performance of the Coldstream Guards Band, which is held at the skating rink on Hall Mines Road (where the Alpine Lodge is today). Described in ads as “The premier band of the British Empire,” their appearance in Nelson is a very big deal. A special train is arranged to bring people from Trail to see the show. (Departs Trail 5:30 p.m., arrives Nelson 7:30 p.m., leaves Nelson at midnight.)  

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Nelson Daily News, Aug. 13, 1926

After the concert, the writer heads to the train station to see if he can find any old friends from Rossland or Trail. He succeeds. Upon checking in at the Hume Hotel, he discovers a Mr. and Mrs. Townsend, former Rosslanders, are waiting to see him. The next day the Townsends return and they drive up the lake together for a picnic on the beach.

“Their two girls are grown up now and the youngest one is married and living in Salmo, while the older one is working in Spokane,” the writer tells his wife. “Their oldest girl died. You most likely have heard me speak of the Townsends. Bert Townsend was the chap who bought a dog the same time I did, a brother of ‘Spot.’”

The writer returns to Nelson that evening and heads to the train station, where he secures a berth en route to Penticton. He then begins writing the letter to his wife and hands it to a porter to mail. He promises to write often.

“The work is going splendidly and has been extremely interesting and well worth while,” he adds. “Give my love to the children and the others and with heaps for yourself.”

Very fortunately, the writer addressed his wife by name (Glad), and signed his own unusual name (Heber). He also mentioned three streets and addresses (Frank Street, Robert Street, and 166 Holmwood) that all point us (via Google) to Ottawa.

These clues are more than enough to identify the writer as Lionel Heber Cole.

Here is his life story in broad strokes, informed in part by a family tree on ancestry.com.

Heber was born in Montreal in 1883 (and was therefore 42 when he composed the letter on Hume Hotel stationery). He had four brothers and at least one sister. In high school, he showed an aptitude for science. He completed a bachelor of science at McGill University and also picked up an engineering degree. In 1906, he won a gold medal from the Canadian Mining Institute in a student competition, which resulted in the earliest known photo of Heber, seen below.

Montreal Star, April 26, 1906

It’s not clear when he came west, but it may have been before he finished university, for in 1905, he had already received a prize for a paper about Rossland’s Centre Star mine. The first actual sign of him in BC is in August 1906, when he took a job with the Snowshoe mine in Phoenix. While there, he served on the executive of the local men’s hockey club, but doesn’t appear to have played himself.

By 1908, if not sooner, he was in Rossland, although it’s not known who his employer was. There he joined the 102nd infantry regiment and attained the rank of captain. As alluded to in his letter, he became assayer of the Sullivan mine in Kimberley in December 1909.

On Nov. 20, 1912, Heber married Edna Gladys Scarfe (later to become the recipient of our 1926 letter) in Winnipeg. Gladys, five years Heber’s junior, grew up in Nipissing and Sudbury, Ont. We have no indication how they met. They moved to Ottawa and had three children: Jack in 1913, Frederick in 1918, and Sheila in 1921. On the 1921 census, the family is found living at 56 Robert St. in Ottawa and Heber is listed as a mining engineer with the federal Department of Mines.

For decades, Heber was occasionally in the news, as he published reports and gave lectures on such topics as silica and sodium sulphate and gypsum and salt. His visit to the Kootenays in August 1926 actually merited a mention in the Cranbrook Herald: “L.H. Cole, mining expert from Ottawa, was in the city over the weekend.”

In 1946, as head of the Renfrew plant of the federal Mines and Geology Branch, Heber was made a member of the Order of the British Empire.

Heber was also an athlete, involved in Ottawa’s tennis, fencing, and curling scenes. In 1953, the Financial Post revealed he had long been on a mission to turn Canada into a nation that produced its own curling stones: “That conviction carried him through 15 years of unsuccessful searching for rock to fill the specialized needs required for curling. This year, his cross-country search finally paid off. He has just formed Canadian Curling Stones Ltd., to capitalize on what he believes to be a small but lucrative business.”

Montreal Star, May 26, 1954

Manufacturing facilities were set up at Bedford, Que., to process rock from a quarry at Grenville, Que., which Heber deemed ideal for curling stones. In 1954, the company put 100,000 shares on the market and produced a prototype. But for reasons unknown, the venture flopped. (For a few years in the 1960s, a northern Ontario shop manufactured curling stones, but it wouldn’t be until 1992 that Canada Curling Stone Co. of Komoka, Ont., began making stones on a larger scale.)

Until now, nothing pointed to any real drama in Heber’s comfortable life. But then I arrived at June 24, 1955, and was alarmed to read this headline in the Ottawa Citizen: “Ottawa mining expert missing in bushlands.”

The story explained that Heber, now 71 and retired from the federal government, had arrived at a camp about 100 km north of Makiwaki, Que., with his son-in-law and some friends on a fishing trip. Heber went off on his own into the bush. When he failed to return by noon, a search began. But there was no sign of him that afternoon. Or evening. Or night.

The next day, a larger search party, including experienced Indigenous guides, continued the search. Also en route was Heber’s son Jack, who had served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was now an inspector with the Department of Transport’s air services. They were confident he would be found safe.

“Mr. Cole has had wide experience in bush country, and members of his family feel that he will not have too much difficulty in fending for himself until he is located,” the Citizen wrote. Helpfully, Heber had matches and a compass, “an item he never failed to take along in his bush travels.”

Still, from a distance of more than 70 years, I feared for the worst.

The next day, a front-page Citizen story reported that about 50 people, most of them Indigenous, had split into three search parties.

A helicopter had also joined the search.

Ottawa Citizen, June 25, 1955

Footprints had been found leading up a steep hill not far from where Heber was last seen. They figured he was wandering in an area of about 15 square kilometers, bordered by lakes on two sides and a highway on a third side. But it was the fourth side that was worrisome: “thick, almost impenetrable bush.”

The helicopter would carry a special loudspeaker to call to Heber and warn him from heading in that direction.  

“It is believed that this is the first time in Canada that an aerial ‘voice system’ has been used to direct a search for a lost person,” the Citizen said. The message to Heber would come from his son. The exact words were: “Mr. Cole, if you can see this helicopter, move in the direction in which we are now pointing.”

The newspaper said Jack used the term “Mr. Cole” to “avoid confusion, as his father does not know that the son has joined the search.” (This still sounds confusing.)

Oh, Heber, are you done for?

I clicked on the next hit, in the Ottawa Journal, worried what it might contain.

The banner front-page headline read: OTTAWA GEOLOGIST FOUND SAFE.

Heber was alive and well! But details of the rescue of the “stocky and affable Mr. Cole” did not emerge until a couple of days later, after a Department of Transport plane touched down at a military airport in Ottawa with Heber on board.

Heber was said to be in “excellent” shape and he told a Citizen reporter that after two days in the woods, he was merely hungry.

He explained that got lost when a photographic light meter that he wore on a cord around his neck and used with his camera threw off his compass readings.

“I totally forgot about the light meter, and when I finally realized that it was throwing the compass off, it was too late and I was completely lost.”

Heber couldn’t find so much as a berry to eat. But he built a lean-to out of evergreens and remained perfectly comfortable.

“In fact it got so warm in there both nights that I had to take off my jacket. I had two of the most comfortable night’s sleeps that anyone could want.”

However, his matches got wet, so he wasn’t able to build a fire until the second day. He said he was never worried and figured it was just a matter of time before someone found him. 

Then he thought about something that had occurred long ago somewhere in the Kootenays: “Why, this experience wasn’t anything in comparison to what happened years ago when I got lost in British Columbia. Out there it was really rough country, and I had a pretty bad time of it until I was found.”

Heber said the only thing that bothered him were the flies and mosquitos, but he just smeared himself with heavy mud, and that did the trick.

Ottawa Citizen, June 27, 1955

Amazingly, the loudspeaker system from the air was key to his rescue. Heber spotted the helicopter and heard his son telling him to walk in the same direction that it was flying.

“I did that, and it was only a short time until I reached the lake. When I got there I built a fire to attract attention, then I just sat down and waited.”

Soon after, an Indigenous guide named Joe McDougall and Heber’s friend Art Mason saw the smoke and found him. They took him by motorboat across the lake to a base camp, and from there he was driven to a fishing lodge at Lac des Loups.

After being checked by a nurse and resting for a few hours, he was flown back to Ottawa, accompanied by his son. At home, he had a bowl of hot soup, a brandy eggnog, and went to bed. The next morning he rose at his usual time and over breakfast told his family about his experience.

Whew, Heber. You scared me!

Heber shows up in the newspapers a few more times under better circumstances. Around 1958, he donated an award, known as the Heber Cole Trophy or Cole Cup, to recognize the winners of the Ottawa high school boys double rink curling championships. The trophy was presented through 1969.

Ottawa Citizen, April 30, 1959

That’s the last we hear of him until Aug. 9, 1981, the day Lionel Heber Cole, MBE, died in Ottawa, age 97. He was survived by Gladys, his wife of 68 years, their three kids, and six grandkids.

Gladys died in 1985, age 96. The kids all enjoyed similar longevity: Jack, whose voice once helped guide his father to safety, died in 2008, age 94. Frederick, who, like Jack, served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, died in 2011, age 92. Sheila, who became a registered nurse, died in 2022, age 101. (It was Sheila’s first husband, Bill Howe, who was on the fishing trip when Heber got lost.)

I can only guess that Sheila preserved her father’s long-ago letter to her mother and that upon Sheila’s death it ended up in the hands of an antique dealer who then sold it to me. As we have seen here, you never know what stories might lurk behind old letters.