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Chapter Seven
Two Horsemen, Two Solitudes: George McLean and Gordon Flowerdew
Before the war broke out, riding horses was a way of life for most men in the Thompson–Nicola country. The Model T didn’t start to change that until the war was over. The hills near Kamloops were full of cowboys, Indian cowboys and remittance men who wanted to be cowboys. And many of them ended up in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Contents
First Nations War Hero
The British Immigrant
Article: Walhachin: A Gentlemanly Occupation
Article: Remembering Walhachin
The Rest of the McLean Story
Another Commemoration
First Nations War Hero
When George McLean came back to British Columbia from the front in October 1917, the headline in the Kamloops Telegram read, “‘German killer’ returns home.” Private McLean was a hero. He had been awarded the DCM for bravery at Vimy Ridge earlier that year. A crowd of 250 local citizens came out to see him. A military band serenaded him. Red Cross girls were there to give McLean and his comrades cigarettes.
“There were two machine guns playing on us and one of our officers got hit,” he told the crowd. “I pulled him out of the mess, and at the time I was close to the Germans’ dugouts. I knew there were about sixty of the enemy there, and I got hold of my bombs. Just as I was in the act of pulling the pin, my partner, who was close to me, got it in the head. Then I bombed them, and I bombed them again and again."
McLean was not a kid when he enlisted in Vernon in October 1916. He was forty-one and previously served with the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles to fight in the Boer War. Horses were a big part of his life as a cowboy in Douglas Lake. And he went back to that life as soon as the war was over.
The Kamloops Telegram story said his father was a Scottish pioneer and his mother an Indian. But that wasn’t quite right. He had First Nations heritage but the story was a lot more interesting than the paper let on. But more on that later.
What McLean had done at Vimy was truly astounding. He was credited with single-handedly killing nineteen of the enemy and capturing forty others.
“After they ran into the dugout,” McLean told the crowd, “I kept bombing them until their sergeant major threw up his hands shouting, ‘Don’t throw the bomb’ and I didn’t. He came out of the hole and handed me his automatic pistol and asked how many there were of us and I told them 150.”
In fact, there was just George. He marched them back to Canadian lines. McLean told the Telegram that they were disgusted at having been fooled. It was quite a day for the cowboy from Douglas Lake.
George McLean wasn’t the only hero from the Kamloops area. Victoria Cross winner Gordon Flowerdew lived not far away at the British fruit farming enclave of Walhachin. Their lives couldn’t have been more different.
Flowerdew was educated at Framlingham College, a private school in Suffolk, England. He came to Canada before the war to ranch and farm and ended up living among other members of the English gentry on benchland above the Thompson River. Walhachin was one of many BC real estate schemes designed to lure second sons and remittance men interested in an easy life of fruit farming and lawn tennis in the wilderness. On June 20, 1914, the front page of the Ashcroft Journal proclaimed, “Rosy Future for Walhachin”:
The London office claims that the name of our little town is getting well known in investment and emigration circles now, and thata big rush will be on before long. Lord Islington and the Marquis[of Anglesey] would have made a trip out here this spring but for unsettled conditions at home.
Settlers had already built an elaborate irrigation system to bring water from the hills above and make the sagebrush bench bloom with apples and other crops. The idea was noble, but like the war to come, it wouldn’t turn out the way people expected.
Flowerdew ran some shops in town, but he had bigger dreams. He joined the local militia and drilled on horse in desert. When war broke out, he enlisted almost immediately, serving with a unit of the BC Horse and then Lord Strathcona’s Horse.
As a son of empire, Flowerdew was immersed in the glories of imperialism. He wanted glory too but told a fellow officer the highest honour, the Victoria Cross, was probably an unattainable goal. “I shall never be brave enough to win it. Valour has reached such a standard that you have to be dead before you win the VC.”
By 1918, Flowerdew was given command of his own unit. Being in the cavalry was a bit of a letdown. For most of the war, trenches made the cavalry almost useless. Without open ground, there was no place for men on horseback to break through. Then in the last year of the war, there were some stunning offensives that overran the trenches. In March 1918, Flowerdew got his chance. At Moreuil Wood, he led a daring cavalry charge into enemy lines.
Flowerdew died in that “last great cavalry charge” of the war. But his gallant gesture won him the cherished Victoria Cross. His citation read:
For most conspicuous bravery and dash when in command of a squadron detailed for special services of a very important nature. On reaching his first objective, Lieutenant Flowerdew saw two lines of enemy, each about sixty strong, with machine guns in the centre and flanks; one line being about two hundred yards behind the other. Realizing the critical nature of the operation and how much depended on it, Lieut. Flowerdew ordered a troop under Lieut. Harvey, VC, to dismount and carry out a special movement, while he led the remaining three troops to the charge. The squadron (less one troop) passed over both lines, killing many of the enemy with the sword; and wheeling about galloping on them again. Although the squadron had then lost about 70 per cent of its members, killed and wounded from rifle and machine gun fire directed on it from the front and both flanks, the enemy broke and retired. The survivors of the squadron then established themselves in a position where they were joined, after much hand-to-hand fighting, by Lieut. Harvey’s part. Lieut. Flowerdew was dangerously wounded through both thighs during the operation, but continued to cheer his men. There can be no doubt that this officer’s great valour was the prime factor in the capture of the position.
They buried Flowerdew in France not far from the battleground.
Back in Walhachin, they could have used him. While the men were away, the irrigation system was washed out and there was no one to fix it. The dream in the desert collapsed shortly after the war, and a lot of buildings were dismantled and carted away. The hotel, once an exclusive enclave of English respectability, disappeared. It was never meant for cowboys and other regular folks.
[Click here for Walhachin: A Gentlemanly Occupation]
[Click here for Remembering Walhachin]
When the war was over, George McLean made it home alive. He was happiest in the hills around Douglas Lake and he was the best kind of hero, a survivor. But there was more to his story than cowboying and capturing prisoners.
That newspaper said George’s father was a Scottish pioneer and his mother an Indian. In actual fact, George was the son of Allan McLean, one of the notorious Wild McLean Boys. It was Allan’s father who was Scottish, a well-known Hudson’s Bay chief trader. Allan’s mother, Sophia, was First Nations. Allan and his brothers came to a bad end after a murderous rampage through the Thompson–Nicola country. They were hanged for murder in the 1870s.
Mel Rothenburger, the former mayor and newspaperman in Kamloops, is a descendant. “I do know that George was very sensitive about that connection to the Wild McLean Gang,” Mel told us. “He did not like to talk about it, and it was just not a subject that you brought up. It was obviously very sensitive as it was with other members of the family.”
“Whether or not he was intentionally trying to make some amends for the acts of his father and his father’s brothers,” says Rothenburger, “we don’t know, but certainly he was seen to have done that. So if that was his objective, he succeeded because it did restore some sense of self-respect among members of the family. When George is mentioned, the connection to the Wild McLean Gang is mentioned in the same context, and notation made that he was one of the good guys in a family.”
George McLean died in September 1934 and is buried somewhere on the Nicola Reserve. There was some thought of giving him a military funeral at the time, but his friends took him back to the hills he loved and buried him in a simple grave. To mark the anniversary of the war, Mel Rothenburger is working with the Nicola Band to locate that grave and provide a headstone more suitable for a war hero.
“Well, I think he was a true hero,” he says. “From what we do know about him, he was one of these guys who did some amazing things, under incredibly trying circumstances, but he wasn’t a braggart, didn’t go around talking about it. He came home and just quietly returned to his love of horses and ranching. He went back to what he was doing before. I guess you could call it an ordinary life, like the rest of us.”
In England, Gordon Flowerdew’s old school at Framlingham is also working to keep his name alive. The Society of Old Framlinghamians have made trips to his grave in France and the Imperial War Museum in London holds his Victoria Cross for safekeeping. In Walhachin, now a small retirement community, the local museum keeps his memory alive as well. Like George McLean, he’ll be remembered in the sagebrush hills of the Thompson–Nicola country.