Ron Shearer
rshearer@mail.ubc.ca
In August, 1895, Rossland had almost 100 school-aged children and as families flooded into the booming mining camp that number was increasing every day. There were lots of children, but no public school and no teachers. The provision of schools and teachers was the responsibility of the provincial government, but there was no allowance in the budget for a school for Rossland. However, the minister scraped together funding for one teacher if the community provided a school building “at no cost to the government.” This was the context in which David Dalton Birks appeared in Rossland.
Like his father and brother, Birks trained as a Methodist minister, serving part of his probationary period in Nelson and the Slocan. Intending to be a foreign missionary, he took the provincial examinations to be certified as a school teacher, receiving very high marks. What he needed then was teaching experience.
In 1895 the Methodists decided to establish a church in Rossland and the neophyte Birks was assigned the task. He arrived in Rossland on July 8 and by August 25 had a rough church building enclosed, far from finished and unheated, but usable. It was on the edge of the rough-and-tumble Sourdough Alley. Although the location was not popular with parents because it was accessible only “by devious back-ways and unsavoury alleys,” the unfinished church would become Rossland’s first public elementary school.
Who would be the teacher? Birks was available, but there was a technical problem. By law a “clergyman of any denomination” was prohibited from being a teacher in the “strictly secular” public school system. In early September, 1895, Birks wired the superintendent of education asking if a minister who resigned his parish could serve as a teacher and the superintendent gave the ambiguous reply that a minister “who resigned his profession” could serve. Birks then resigned as Methodist pastor, but he did not resign his “profession.” He continued to be an ordained Methodist minister, though unemployed. With the school year almost a month old, the desperate school board chose a favourable interpretation of the superintendent’s telegram and appointed Birks as Rossland’s first teacher and principal at $60 per month.
It was a demanding post. The students were at all levels, from beginning to advanced, and the school was equipped with rough benches and desks. Although many school-age children did not attend, enrolment continued to explode; from 58 in early October, to 78 a week later and 98 and rising by December. The government then funded a second teacher, for whom a room had to be found “at no cost to the government.” The school trustees devoted much time and energy to raising funds to pay the rent. Finally, the government agreed to build a new school on a lot donated by the townsite company on Kootenay Avenue near Earl Street — but it had only two rooms. The day it opened it was overcrowded, with insufficient desks for all of the students. More classrooms and teachers had to be found, scattered about town.
Birks seems to have been an effective principal and teacher, but he wanted more of what the mining camp had to offer. He lost his idealism, abandoned his ambition to become a missionary and, while still a teacher, became the secretary of two mining companies and the president of a third. After half a year at the Kootenay Avenue school, he resigned to pursue his mining interests. None of his mining ventures proved profitable, so he set up shop as a mining broker. As such, he was one of the founding members of a stock exchange in Rossland, but also one of the vigorous dissenters who forced the exchange to close after little more than month in operation. His brokerage was not successful. He then tried to sell lots in a new townsite near the lower Arrow Lake and managed mines in the Lardeau. When all else failed, he operated a bakery. He was discouraged, perhaps desperate.
In 1898 Birks married Jessie Clute, a divorced woman who had a son in the mining brokerage business in Spokane. David and Jessie moved to Spokane where David taught school for two years to make ends meet. He then joined the Clutes in lead and copper mining ventures near Metaline Falls, none of which succeeded. He then prospected, without results. Jessie died in 1923. In 1942 David, a tired, lonely man, was found dead in an isolated cabin where he had been caretaker of an estate.
Birks’ disjointed career was unusual but not unique. It illustrates the seductive and mesmerizing effects of gold mining in Rossland’s boom years — but also the slim chances of achieving success despite the untold riches produced by a few mines. It is a sad story of the undoing of a talented man.
