P. S. Bonney, district forester, and Walter Holliday, ranger, in a home at Mile 53. Ca. 1910
Valemount & Area Museum

Brothers Alfred, Walter [ca. 1884-1986], and Howard Holliday came into the valley around 1909 with the surveyors of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. Caught by winter near the creek that bears their name, their boats froze into the Fraser River.

Surveyor Dalby Brooks Morkill [1880–1955] reported in 1912 that at “Holliday Creek (formerly known as Baker Creek) W. Sweeny and W. Holliday had equal success with garden-truck which they put in as an experiment, and a patch of barley. The two later built a water-wheel on the river and during the month of June irrigated their garden.” A map accompanying this report notes for the southwest fractional quarter of District Lot 7196, on the Fraser River just upstream of what was denoted Baker Creek, “Cleared and cultivated, W. Halliday.”

Their field is said to have been the first one plowed in the district.

In 1962 Walter Holliday paid a brief visit to McBride and Dunster to locate the land where he and his brothers lived before the railroad arrived. Walter has seven surviving grandchildren and many great-grandchildren living on the lower mainland. His brother Howard has many surviving relatives in BC. [See comment from Ian Holliday]

George Holdway, 1963
Valley Museum & Archives Society

When George Holdway (1885–1979) died after spending 66 years in the Robson Valley, his obituary stated that he and his wife Anna (1894–1980) had “long been thought of as Mr. and Mrs. McBride.”

George was born in London, England, and came to Canada in 1907. After a stay in Ontario, he worked on a farm in Manitoba before going to Edmonton in 1911. He worked on the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway near Edson, at a sawmill at Edmonton, and at a farm at Spruce Grove, where he met Edmonton-born Anna Wagner. In 1913 Holdway went to the Raush Valley on railway construction, but found conditions so bad that he quit and went to work in McBride at the Crummy Brothers general store. He returned to Stoney Plain to marry Anna, and the couple returned to McBride. Crummy Brothers moved out after the end of the railway construction, but Holdway stayed in McBride. For a short time he was a constable in the provincial police, then he became locomotive clerk and storekeeper for the Canadian National Railway until his retirement.

George was magistrate and coroner from 1945 to 1960, and was president of McBride Electric Company, which distributed electricity purchased from the railway. Community interests included the United Church and Sunday school, the Farmers’ Institute and Fall Fair Association, the Elks, the McBride Board of Trade, the McBride School Board, the Hospital Board, the Old Age Pensioners’ Organization, and the Robson Valley Story Group.

In 1939, Anna Holdway was founding president of the McBride Women’s Institute, a post she held for 23 years. The Holdways lived most of their married life on a little farm on the eastern edge of McBride, where they raised poultry and cattle and grew bedding plants. They celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary in McBride in 1979. George’s 1957 Chevy was a familiar sight in the district, since he never gave up driving.

During the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern railways in the 1910s, contractor Denny (or “Dinny”) Hogan had a camp below Overlander Falls, on both sides of the Fraser River. But is he associated with the naming of this creek, which is 20 km to the south? [See the comment below.]

Alberta native Arthur Hinkelman (born 1911) came to the McBride area in 1928. After twenty years of farming and two year of carpentry, he went to work in the logging industry as a log scaler and lumber grader. He was secretary of the Beaver School District for four years, and president of the McBride Farmers’ Institute for five years.