Edward Mallandaine never forgot his moment as the Boy in the Picture.
In 1889, at the age of twenty-two, Edward left what he considered a dull life in Victoria to strike out for the Kootenay region, then virgin territory in the remote southeastern corner of the province. He was hired by the man who had built the Panama Canal to lay out a new railway from the United States into British Columbia. That experience qualified him as both a civil engineer and a forester.
Edward and his lifelong friend Fred Little became business partners and the two of them staked a 180-acre site for the future town of Creston. It had a perfect setting on the shoulder of Goat Mountain overlooking the fields below Kootenay Lake. In a deal to gain the town a CPR station, they gave the railway half the townsite and Edward became the land agent. He had control over several million acres and, in 1911, scoured Europe for immigrants willing to come to British Columbia.
Edward showed great foresight in everything he did. The valleys of the Kootenay region had great potential for agriculture, but without water nothing could be grown. He worked with various promoters to build dykes and canals to divert water from the region’s rivers onto the flat lands in its valleys. His first project irrigated thousands of acres in the Windermere Valley. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of the successful scheme to dyke the Creston Flats.
Edward went to France during the First World War as the major in charge of the Kootenay Regiment of the Canadian Overseas Forestry Corps. He later became a colonel in the Canadian Army Reserve, a title he was known by the rest of his life. Colonel Mallandaine was the whole show in Creston — reeve (mayor), head of the school board, the hospital, the board of trade, and owner of the town’s waterworks.
Edward married Creston’s first school teacher, Jean Ramsay. They had no children, but he loved to tell the town’s school children how he became the Boy in the Picture. He returned to Revelstoke in 1945 for the sixtieth anniversary celebration of the Last Spike. Edward died in 1949 at the age of eighty-two.
Edward Mallandaine attends the sixtieth anniversary celebration of the Last Spike in Revelstoke in 1945. Young Lewis Davis of Revelstoke played Edward in a reenactment of the ceremony.