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Jack was born in Hull, England, in 1830, and was a sailor in a previous life. He arrived in San Francisco during the California Gold Rush, and in 1858, came to B.C. to try his luck when gold was discovered on the shores of the Fraser River.

He didn’t strike it rich in the gold fields, but did well enough as a pilot on steamboats in the Fraser to open a bar in New West in the 1860s. But he had health problems, and when he let a friend take over the bar, it went bust. So he relocated to Burrard Inlet.

He seems to have done OK, because in 1870 he built a new building to replace his ramshackle original saloon, which his biographer Olga Ruskin called a “12-by-24-foot board and batten shack.”

In any event, he was forced to build anew because when surveyors laid out Vancouver’s first streets in 1870, the Globe Saloon was in the middle of Carrall Street. So he built a two-storey wooden building at the southwest corner of Carrall and Water, which he called the Deighton Hotel.

Unfortunately his first wife, a local First Nations woman, died about this time. Jack then married her 12-year-old niece, and in 1871 the couple had a son.

Jack died on May 29, 1875, at age 44. Sadly his son died a few months later. After settling his debts, Deighton’s estate was left with only $304.89. He was buried in an unmarked grave in New West.

Gassy Jack died over a decade before the City of Vancouver was incorporated in 1886. His Deighton Hotel was destroyed in the Great Fire of June 13, 1886, when the original Gastown was virtually destroyed.