“VANCOUVER is really twenty-five years old this month that is, the town was incorporated in April, 1886. The event is to be celebrated later on, with carnival and pageant, in which the jubilation which Vancouver has not in her busy past had time to express will be let loose. The commercial and civic alchemists, who have achieved so much in twenty-five years, have lived to see a spectacle no city builders ever saw before—the city of their hands grown to size and fame, and known in the world for both commerce and beauty. What R. H. Dana, Jr., quoted in a recent “Collier’s,” said about San Francisco in 1836, might have been said in 1886 about Vancouver, and would have been fulfilled just as certainly. “The abundance of wood and water,” wrote Dana, “the extreme fertility of its shores, the excellence of its climate, which is as near to being perfect as any in the world, and its facilities for navigation, affording the best anchoring ground on the whole western coast of America, all fit it for a place of great importance.” Dana had not heard of Burrard Inlet, of course.”

British Columbia Magazine April 1911