Recently, Harbour Publishing’s Howard White visited the Courtenay and District Museum to speak about Raincoast Chronicles Fifth Five. At 712 pages, the tome is the fifth collection of Harbour Publishing’s precipitating publication, Raincoast Chronicles.

During the event, he mentioned something that stuck with me—that BC has an above average number of readers who devour BC content.

Consider this post a piece of community building, a confirmation of what you may have already suspected—that our literary heritage is significant, substantial, and very much alive.

Like me, you might be wondering: what explains this phenomenon? Why are we this way?

To find an answer, I spoke to Howard White by phone after the event. Below is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

Dave Flawse: Can you expand on your comments about BC’s interest in local literature?

Howard White: Yeah, I haven’t checked the figures lately. Over the years, various studies have shown that book purchasing per capita and library use per capita is higher in BC than in the rest of the English-speaking provinces.

I’m not sure if it’s more than in Quebec, which has also a very robust literary culture. And also, our library use figures and book purchasing figures are among the highest in the world.

So, I’m sure that’s still true, although I worry that book use is falling, just in the last several years. But I haven’t seen any figures to support that yet, but it’s just my own personal observation that people entranced and hypnotized by their cell phones and the mini videos that that hold their attention.

It’s not that they’ve quit liking books. It’s just that they don’t have much time left over for reading. Phones are eating into leisure time so dramatically that it just doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

I wrote a column in the local newspaper couple weeks ago where I quoted some figures showing that the average person on will spend something like 8 to 12 years of an average lifetime engaged with their cellphone.

It’s astounding. And it’s very recent. It’s just taken off exponentially in the last about five years. My own observation is that it has taken off exponentially in the last maybe two to three years here in BC.

That’s bound to affect every other kind of leisure activity, including book reading.

Book buying and use is still surprisingly healthy among all the print media. Book sales in Canada haven’t continued to increase at the same level they used to do it in the 70s and 80s, but they haven’t fallen off a cliff like magazine reading and newspaper reading.

So that’s the good news—they’ve maintained. I think in the past year they declined slightly but very minimally. So yeah, books are hanging in there.

DF: Why do you think BC residents are such dedicated readers?

HW: I don’t know; I just know they are. I’ve never really been able to put my finger on a single reason.

I think it’s partly the historical makeup of the province. It did tend to attract people with imagination who wanted to explore and push further west. And I think that still applies to immigrants who come here now.

They’ve passed on the chance to settle down and have a very conventional life in Montreal or Toronto and kept pushing towards the edge of the continent just like our ancestors did. Coastal people in general are more imaginative and tend to be more politically adventurous than inland people.

It’s just a sociological fact, and if you’ve got a coastal province that’s also somewhat to the north, I think that that pattern is accentuated a bit. That could be one very high-level reason that’s applied over the years.

There is such a thing as cultural momentum. When you get a group of people that is fascinated by its own history and it’s producing a lot of you know, books and films, and broadcasts dramatizing its own history then that tends to create more interest.

When we first started publishing BC stories and books. It was like a damn burst. It was like people had been just waiting for this to happen, and when we put out the first issue of Raincoast Chronicles in 1972, it sold 3000 copies, so we have to run to 10,000 copies.

It still kept selling, so we put it in a hardcover collection and that sold something like 100,000 copies. It was an eye opener, certainly to us, but also to other publishers who sort of said, “okay, there’s a market there.”

A lot of other writers and publishers started producing BC books, primarily nonfiction but also some fiction. And it created the largest regional market in English.

Ontario has a larger book market overall but not for regional writing. I’ve done a number of regional history books in Ontario, thinking, Well, they’ve got a much longer history and so many more people, but they didn’t sell more books. They actually sold fewer than a typical nonfiction history book in BC.

DF: What do you think would have happened if you hadn’t started Harbour Publishing or the Rain Coast Chronicles and bring this aspect of BC literature to life.

HW: Well, I think it would have been a different publishing history. When I started [Harbour Publishing], Grey’s Publishing was already winding down and had been publishing on a much smaller scale, some of the same kind of stuff that that we ended up doing.

They published the second edition of Curve of Time and they published George Clutesi, sort of pioneering the Indigenous lit stream, actually a very original and admirable publishing venture.

But Greg Campbell started it late in life, and he’d already retired twice from a military career and a ranching career, so he wasn’t able to keep it on, and he passed it on to Gordon Cooper, who wasn’t cut out to be a publisher, and it quickly ended.

And really, there wasn’t much else going on in that direction. Douglas and McIntyre, or JJ Douglas as it was then, did start doing Vancouver guidebooks, but both Jim Douglas and Scott McIntyre had come from branch plant publishing in Ontario.

Jim had actually trained in Scotland. So, they didn’t have the same regional vision that we did, and their list quickly started moving toward the national perspective.

I definitely think that that Harbour with things like Spilsbury’s Coast and Keepers of the Light, which were massive bestsellers, and all the Ann Cameron books, which showed that you could write good fiction about BC, strictly BC subjects, showed there was a way to write about BC in a way that spoke to BC people very intimately, and that there was a market for that.

Other people like Orca started basically following Harbour’s lead. Much later turned toward children’s literature. In the beginning they were basically doing books like we were. And quite a few other presses today, like Caitlin Press, publishes books a lot like Harbour’s.

I definitely think we proved that there was a market out there. We discovered this really strong regional market and that put ideas in the hand of other publishers as well as other writers.

DF: Thanks, Howard!

In 1979, a certain smell sustained the herring gillnetters of British Columbia. It hung from their bibs and clung to their fingernails as they laboured to prize heavy nets, hand over hand, from the sea. The stench hovered around their boots while a million silver sparks wriggled from the nets into the holds of their skiffs. It mingled with their breath; it filled their lungs. That smell, in short, was money.

The Pacific herring is a small, nervous fish that schools for protection against predators. It’s a phantom of the murky North Pacific—its scales contain biogenetic crystals that refract light to make it less visible to predators, such as chinook salmon and sea lions, that attack from below. Its greenish-blue topsides mimic the depths, offering some defence from the seabirds above.

For a brief period each spring, herring school in the billions. In thousands of locations close to shore, from California to Japan, they release eggs and milt (sperm). One female can release 20,000 eggs—a third of her body weight.

These tiny yellow orbs have sustained Pacific coast dwellers for millennia. In Japan, fresh herring roe processed from the fish is marinated and salted to make a traditional dish called kazunoko, which is given at New Year’s and weddings.

Chomp into kazunoko and the caviar-like flavour gives way to a textural experience as the eggs break apart from each other and disperse in your mouth. Given their price tag—herring roe sometimes cost over $100 for a few hundred grams—they’re known as yellow diamonds.

Japan’s economy roared in the decades after WWII. More folks could afford luxury items, kazunoko included. At the same time, Russia won exclusive rights to their shared herring stocks, which forced Japan to begin importing herring roe from foreign sources. In BC, where they were previously caught for fish meal and oil, herring began to fetch astronomical prices.

In the early 1970s, Mel Marshall reeled in salmon on his small troller, Janola, between April and October, and most years he grossed a decent amount. But the sea is tough on a boat and gear is expensive. The roe herring fishery in early spring was an opportunity for Mel to put a little cash in his pocket.

Year after year, Japanese buyers, led by the firm Hokusho Co., paid an ever-increasing price for the fish. In the late 1970s, after Greg Martin heard about opportunities in the roe herring fishery, he found an older man getting out. In his lawyer’s office, Greg signed a bank loan at a 13 per cent interest rate. “My lawyer shook his head and said, ‘What are you doing? $40,000 for a big chunk of aluminum, a net, an old outboard, and a leased license.’”

These words would become prophetic in time. But in 1979, even as the total allowable catch in tons was reduced in BC, the total landed commercial value peaked.

Ask any herring fisher from the era about ’79, and they’ll shake their head and laugh, “it was crazy.”

An uncontrolled excitement seizes their voice. It’s a nostalgia that could have easily come from the mouths of gold rush prospectors reminiscing about 1849 in San Francisco, 1858 along the Fraser River, or the Klondike in 1898. With a $150-million commercial catch taking place in a few days in March of 1979, the comparison is fair.

In some places, a thousand boats packed into bays; hundreds of them tied together in flotillas. Ships filled harbours in the northern Salish Sea, Barkley Sound, the Central Coast, and Haida Gwaii. By all accounts, the scene was one big party where normally solitary fishers drank, told stories, and got into trouble. It was common knowledge, according to some, which boat had sex workers onboard.

When the season opened, fishers dropped nets in shallow waters and waited a few hours before pulling them back in. Seagulls squawked above skiffs stuffed with herring as fishers hurried to unload. Various packer boats waited to unburden them; makeshift plywood signs hanging from their riggings listed their price per ton and the word CASH.

Mel Marshall tied up to a buyer he’d dealt with before. The packer boat’s crane whirred. The buyer hoisted the catch up, weighed it, then dropped the multi-ton load into the hold. Mel stepped inside the galley, where the buyer, a man known to some as Hägar the Horrible, welcomed him to sit.

The man plopped cash in $5,000 bundles on the table, one after another. “Jesus,” said Mel, “aren’t you worried about getting robbed?” Hägar the Horrible shrugged. “Naw, look under the table.” Mel peeked. A .357 Magnum, strapped to the underside, glared back at him. Mel pocketed his $30,000 and headed out to catch more fish, happy there was no longer a loaded gun pointed at his belly.

The gillnet quota in 1979 for the Comox area’s four-day opening was a few thousand tons, or about a million dollars’ worth of fish. The seiner Courtenay Maid provided accommodation for Bill Maximick, who joined Chief Norman Frank and his crew on their gillnet skiffs.

Bill’s crew set their 300-foot-long nets on the top end of Denman Island, and as “the herring spawn got plentiful,” they could fill their six-ton skiff by pulling in and shaking out two nets.

Some fishers gave up with eight hours left in the opening, exhausted and satisfied with their haul. Not Bill. With a mountain of herring aboard and a tarp and hose to keep them fresh, the crew waited for more packers to arrive—all the packers that were there at the start were now full. “That was one of the best birthday presents I ever had,” says Bill. “The price of herring topped at $3,000 a ton. I slept for 18 hours when I returned home.”

While licenses limited fishers to specific areas, the buyers sweated to follow the openings northwards, up to Haida Gwaii. “We didn’t get much sleep,” remembers Marvin Boyd. He ran a small packer. On board sat neat stacks of $100 and $1,000 bills, “fresh from the mint.” When the cash ran out, he’d meet a plane at the docks. One time, he recalls accepting a box crammed with half a million dollars.

Leslie McIntosh confirms. She fished the central and northern coasts. “There were planes flying in and guys walking around with a million dollars in a suitcase. And back then a million dollars was a whole lot of money.”

Unbeknownst to everyone, disaster would hit the market. Across the Pacific, Japanese consumer demand for kazunoko fell as prices spiked. The wholesale price for kazunoko decreased threefold. Hokusho Co. had overpaid; their bankruptcy became the largest in the Japanese fishing industry at the time.

In March ’79, the promise of riches drove the sleep-deprived gillnetters who struggled while “up to our eyeballs in slime.” Few lifted their gaze from the fish in the boat and beyond that season. Fewer could have predicted the future of Pacific herring in BC. As one fisher puts it, “We thought herring was infinite.”

Price speculation dealt the killing blow to the roe herring gold rush, and most of those who fished these waters in ’79 have long since retired. With that generation go memories of a sea boiling with herring, up and down the coast. However, the roe herring fishery has continued, though today, the spawning biomass of herring off Vancouver Island continues to drop, along with allowable catch limits.

But these silver phantoms possess an amazing ability: if left alone, their numbers can rebound.

Every spring, there is a smell in the waters off Comox that beckons sea lions from thousands of kilometres away. The stench washes ashore with a billion golden eggs, as cawing seabirds fill their bellies. It brings chinook salmon here, followed closely by orcas. That smell, which is but a hint for now, may be the smell of hope.

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Dave: When I came across this book online, it immediately caught my attention. So, I reached to Figure One Publishing for a review copy. I wanted to learn more about some of these women carvers and possibly interview a few for this site. Well, the book already contained an extensive interview about the late Ellen Neel. Figure One was kind enough to share that excerpt. Here it is!

Excerpt from Curve!: Mary Anne Barkhouse on Ellen Neel

Interview by Curtis Collins

Mary Anne Barkhouse (Kwakwaka’wakw; b. 1961) studied at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto and currently resides in southeastern Ontario. Barkhouse has been a practicing artist for over thirty years and has exhibited her work in venues across Canada.

Ellen Neel (Kwakwaka’wakw; 1916–1966) was Barkhouse’s great aunt. An artist from Alert Bay, BC, Neel became the first woman in Canada recognized for carving totem poles professionally and was niece to renowned artist Mungo Martin.

The following is lightly edited from a recording of a conversation that took place on November 23, 2023, via videoconference. This article is a condensed version of the original.

Curtis Collins: Ellen Neel’s artistic production was shaped by her circumstances in Vancouver; can you please describe the household?

Mary Anne Barkhouse: As I understand it, Ellen’s husband, Ted Sr., had a workplace accident and seriously injured his back and couldn’t work for a time. So then the question becomes, how do they support themselves when there’s not much of a social safety net in the 1940s and 1950s? My grandmother and Ellen had both been taught about carving and design by Charlie James. My grandfather Fred Cook said when he and my grandmother were first married, she carved a bit and would sell these small carvings when the steamship came to Alert Bay, which would have been about once a week. With both sisters having that background of being taught by their grandfather, it seems that carving was a way to make some extra money from a young age, so perhaps it would follow that later on it would be a natural to develop that as a full-time business.

By the time that my mother went to live with them she said that her Uncle Ted would prepare the wood, cutting it down to size with a chainsaw, in a workshop in the basement of their place in East Van. And as the boys got older, they would help out in the studio as well.

Mom and her cousin Dave [David Neel Jr.’s father] both went to Britannia High School, and she remembers that he used to go by tram to art school in an old library on Main and Hastings on Saturday morning. She describes him as an amazing artist and he had his paintings up in the hallways at school . . . he even helped her do a project for her art class, which she got a good mark on.

When my Mom went to live with them, Auntie tried to teach Mom how to do a few things, but eventually Mom ended up just painting the ears of the Thunderbirds on the small poles, and even that, by her own admission, she “mucked up,” so Auntie gave up trying to teach her anymore. My mother’s talents lay in other fields!

All of these recollections of life with the Neels that my Mom has told me have contributed to this sensibility about art-making that I have grown up with and that was reinforced by long conversations I used to have over bottomless cups of coffee with her son, Bobby Neel, back in the ’80s. As well as carving, Bobby worked a lot in silver, producing beautiful jewellery. This inspired me to take up metalsmithing, as well as sculpture, when I later went to art college in Toronto. The idea of making artwork for different purposes, and that it was a completely valid and perfectly fine way of doing things.

CC: There was a well-defined commercial orientation to Ellen Neel’s work. How do you contextualize such a quality?

MAB: Ellen had a knack for not only the design aspect but the business side as well, which is somewhat unique I think, because a lot of artists will be good at one and not the other. Just because you have a passion for the design and the making of things doesn’t necessarily extend to having a passion or a talent for the business aspects.

From what I understand from my conversations with my mom, as well as reading newspaper articles about Ellen from back in the ’60s, Ellen was very active in promoting understanding and appreciation of Northwest Coast art by presenting to community groups and giving talks at universities. I suppose in today’s lingo it might be called “growing your brand.” Something like that takes a lot of energy and courage at any time, especially in the era she was doing it . . . not to mention that she was a woman, to boot.

So, I see all of these efforts naturally manifesting themselves in many of her works being created for sale, not ceremony, and that also goes back to what she and my grandmother learned from Charlie James. Especially at this political moment that we find ourselves in, these distinctions are important, and it is yet another thing that I’ve carried with me as a direct result of conversations with family—there are aspects of our culture that we keep for ourselves, and then there are other parts shared with the world at large.

Ellen supported herself and family from a variety of sources, as I understand it. She created her own business opportunities, such as the shop at Stanley Park, in addition to the sales to a network of other stores and galleries across the country, as well as becoming involved with what I see as groundbreaking initiatives like the Totemland series.

CC: The focus of this exhibition is on carving; however, I understand that carving was just one among many artistic practices in the Neel household.

MAB: I guess my grandmother and Ellen thought that Mom needed to be occupied when she wasn’t doing her nursing studies, otherwise maybe she’d get into trouble? As if studying full-time for a nursing degree wasn’t enough work! But both my grandmother and her sister were nothing if not hard-working ladies, so perhaps it follows that they would impress that upon the next generation.

In any case, my mom had these embroidery projects she was expected to complete. My grandmother would prepare long swatches of this beautiful cotton, cut to the size of a table runner or decorative cover for a set of dresser drawers. Ellen would then draw a design on it, and this was what Mom was supposed to embroider during all her “free time.” We still have them . . . they’re behind me in the drawers right now. And my grandmother would do a crocheted edging to finish it off nicely and voila . . . a beautiful table covering.

CC: This exhibition features a selection of masks and small poles rooted in Kwakwaka’wakw ceremonial and heraldic forms that Neel transformed for the tourist market. Can you comment on this aspect of her practice?

MAB: I think that she investigated various forms amazingly well in order to make that transformation from ceremonial-inspired to commercial object. Just looking at the selection you have here are some good examples—from very small tourist items and then some larger, more involved ceremonial-type works. Although, the various burnt-wood Dzunukwa [“Wild Woman of the Woods,” also known as Tsonokwa] and Wind masks would have been made for display purposes as opposed to ceremonial use, as is evident from their lack of holes for the eyes, which goes back to the whole idea of “intended purpose” that a lot of carvers today still address. There are pieces used in ceremonial settings and they have regular use. And then there’s other ones that are made as commercial items only; it’s a part of the decision-making process for any artist.

CC: What are the strengths of how Ellen Neel developed small-scale works?

MAB: In terms of the pieces that are created for different purposes—just because the totems are small doesn’t mean that they took any less care. There’re some really interesting design decisions that she’s made to shrink to that scale. The manner in which she was able to condense Kwakwaka’wakw pole-based forms is genius. It’s one thing to expand something, but it’s a special skill to condense it so precisely and beautifully in these miniature poles. Which is why I’m so sad that I broke this little one [Barkhouse holds a tiny totem to the camera]. In my defense, I would have been like five years old at the time [laughs].

CC: Who taught Ellen how to carve?

MAB: Ellen was taught to carve by Charlie James who was, as mentioned, her maternal grandfather. I don’t know if her uncle Mungo Martin had any role in teaching her. I’d have to clarify that. Although, I do have a photograph of Charlie carving with a couple little girls, two or three little girls, sitting beside him. One of those girls would be Ellen and one would be my grandmother. So, I am assuming she became interested in carving as a child and obviously it was something that she was very adept at and must have loved to do. But like any artist, when you’re working at two o’clock in the morning, you’re probably telling yourself, “And I’m doing this because . . . why?”

CC: What were some of Ellen’s most innovative business ventures?

MAB: Most definitely the Totemland initiative that she entered into with, I think, either a tourism or historical society in Vancouver, is one instance of that innovation. And it’s a great example of a purpose-driven artistic form that Ellen developed. More specifically the miniature poles with a globe-like form on the bottom featuring a green and blue depiction of the BC coastline. If you’re considering unique styles or unique commercial partnerships and endeavours, Ellen stands out as exceptional in her time. I don’t know of too many other Indigenous artists that have done anything like the Totemland series, which extended from carving to the custom bone china Totem Ware she designed in partnership with Royal Albert China.

CC: How did Ellen Neel communicate the importance of the art tradition she was part of?

MAB: She did a lot of public lectures in Vancouver. Mum was saying that she used to know when Auntie Ellen was going out to give a talk because she had a certain orange dress that she liked to wear. In Phil Nuytten’s book there is a reference to a lecture that Ellen gave in 1948 at UBC that is as poignant today as it was back then.1 She was one of the Indigenous artists on the coast, along with Mungo Martin, that were very vocal about the tenacity of the art form, about the vibrancy, about its contemporary relevance. And it’s important to remember that she was a young woman talking about Kwakwaka’wakw cultural traditions that were still technically outlawed by the Canadian government at that time (the Potlach ban section of the federal Indian Act was in place from 1885 to 1951). And it may be pertinent to remember that just because something is banned doesn’t necessarily mean that it disappears entirely . . . but it does force things to go underground, as it has in so many instances throughout history.

CC: What do you think is Ellen Neel’s artistic legacy?

MAB: Ellen always left the door open to the advancement of traditional forms. She used her understanding of the Kwakwaka’wakw carving style and interpreted everything in her own way and made it contemporary. So, the artists after her—not just people in the family, like myself; and there’s many other artists in the family as you know—but artists at large, especially women artists on the coast, are indebted to Ellen Neel. It’s like she was saying, “This is something you can do!” Unfortunately, it has taken the Canadian art scene at large sixty years to catch up to what she was advocating.

Which is not to say that she didn’t have respect for her practice in certain circles at the time . . . but there were other ways in which she wasn’t respected. For example, she applied to [the] Canada Council for the Arts for funding, but to no avail. We have come a long way from those times when a very well-respected professional artist like Ellen would be turned down by [the] Council as there wasn’t the recognition for Indigenous arts that there is today.

CC: The commercial or tourist orientation of Ellen Neel’s miniature poles and display masks is often cited as diminishing their artistic value. What do you think of such a criticism?

MAB: I think that’s a ridiculous criticism, because a lot of work by artists from time immemorial is directly linked to patronage of some kind. Just think of painters from the past hundreds of years—from Nicolas Poussin to Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet or Picasso . . . they were all painting to sell. Some, like Poussin, had the French kings and the Medicis as patrons; the others had networks of art dealers. But is that same criticism even part of the conversation about such Western art icons? So, I just wonder, is that because she was a woman? Is that because she was Native? Is it because of both that they minimize her work due to its commercial value? Because if you look at other art forms in cultures around the world, that commercial value may have existed too. But mostly I’m thinking of European precedents. That same magnifying glass isn’t applied to the origins of those people’s work. So that’s a very valid point about the devaluation of Ellen’s art that you have raised. I might not be here if it weren’t for Ellen convincing my grandmother to send Mom to high school in Vancouver. I would not have grown up with that influence of art as being part of a respected profession.

When I attended art college, I remember the families of some of my fellow students withdrew support from them, as art was not valued as a way to make a living. Thanks to Ellen, however, my parents viewed a career in the arts differently. Ellen, and Mungo and Charlie before her, effectively created the template for how one can make a perfectly reasonable living through the arts and, in so doing, create a voice for expression and dialogue for community. It set that precedent of design, respect, education, and outreach that I try to be mindful of every day.

CC: Do you have any closing thoughts on the grouping of women carvers, starting with Ellen Neel in the 1950s and continuing to the present day, that are part of this exhibition?

MAB: I think that an exhibition like this is important and long past due. I’m sure that there have been other examinations of art by women over the past few decades. But this exhibition comes at a pivotal time, when some of the Indigenous knowledge keepers are leaving us. It’s really important to try to document that cultural lineage, and to connect the dots with these intergenerational influences, the why’s and how’s of art production, as well as to capture the anecdotes of these women’s lives. It all serves to tell this larger narrative of perseverance, creativity . . . and good humour.

CC: Thank you for sharing your family history.

Excerpted from Curve! Women Carvers on the Northwest Coast. Curated by Dana Claxton and Curtis Collins. Copyright © 2024 by Audain Art Museum. Excerpted with permission from Figure 1 Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Midnight March 3, 1913

Stooped in the coved entryway of the Fraser and Bishop General Store in Union Bay, a man yanks a skeleton key from his pocket. He gropes for the door’s lock and shoves the key in. The door groans open. Cloaked in midnight’s shadows, he and a second man slink inside, their footfalls deadened by soft-soled shoes. Once more, the man sinks a hand deep into the pocket of his Mackinaw coat. With a wink of his electric flashlight, he exposes the unguarded loot.

But before the men can stuff their sacks, a lock jiggles at the store’s second entrance and the two freeze. The first man again thrusts a hand into his coat. This time he wrenches out a .44 calibre Colt revolver. Their hearts thump. They crouch between counters filled with dried goods and breathe air choked with spices and sweat. The man aims the Colt at the second entrance.

***

What happened next? For over a century, various writers have recounted the story of one of Vancouver Island’s most infamous shootouts. From the first time I read about the notorious pirate and smuggler nicknamed the Flying Dutchman and his exploits in Union Bay, I wanted to write my own version of the tale. I began my research by scouring the handful of published versions out there. But I noticed inconsistencies between them. Unsure of which ones to believe, I quested for the truth. The source documents I unearthed from both Canadian and American archives, prison records, and newspapers not only illuminated the small details but also called into question whether the gunman deserved his final judgment: execution.

***

In 1870, over forty years before the general store robbery at Union Bay, one of Louisiana’s newest residents was a squalling baby named Henry Ferguson Sastro. The baby looked up at his German-born parents through steel-grey eyes. Other distinguishing features included a mole on his right cheek and bow legs that never straightened out. In 1882, his father died, followed six years later by his mother. Eighteen years old and parentless, Sastro possessed a face that looked as if it could take a punch. Standing 173 centimetres (5 feet 8 inches) tall and weighing in at eighty-two kilograms (180 pounds) of muscle and bone, no doubt he could deliver punches too. At some point he joined the U.S. Merchant Marines, a civilian organization responsible for international and domestic seaborne trade. Here he became steeped in the life of a seaman.

***

A decade before the robbery, on October 18, 1901, two police officers scrambled from their boat at a Whidbey Island dock in Puget Sound. The officers rushed a nearby cabin and flung the door open, guns drawn. Inside, Sastro and another man raised their hands. The officers charged Sastro with the theft of thirty-five sacks of oats from a warehouse a year earlier. Long since a Scotsman’s breakfast, the oats were a minor, easy-to-prove offence. In court two months later, Sastro admitted to a more wicked crime: smuggling nine thousand pounds of opium from Canada to the United States over a number of years. The judge sentenced him to fourteen years of hard labour at Walla Walla State Penitentiary.

The penitentiary was a prisoner-run, self-contained city that produced goods for sale—like grain sacks for oats. Inside, Sastro met the man who would eventually become the number one witness in his murder trial. In 1903, William Julian got three years hard time for grand larceny. Of Welsh heritage, Julian was born in the same era as Sastro. His lustrous black hair sat atop a baby face with a Celtic complexion. In contrast to Sastro the slender man stood at 5 feet 3 inches and weighed 135 pounds.

Sastro was released in 1908 for good behaviour, but that behaviour failed to extend beyond incarceration. In 1909, a “Wanted” poster pegged Henry Ferguson (by now he had dropped Sastro from his name) as the prime suspect in a post office robbery in Washington State. He and two other men had snuck in at night and stolen $176.80. A self-taught locksmith, Ferguson gained entry with a skeleton key and worked a safe. Police captured the other two culprits, but “Water Pirate Henry Ferguson, alias ‘Jack the Flying Dutchman,’” escaped. The alias Flying Dutchman comes from sailors’ tales of a ghost ship that has haunted the seas for centuries. Sighting the ship foretells doom. The people of North America’s Pacific Coast affixed the name to Ferguson somewhere along his travels.

The poster explained that he “wears a black cap when in boat and a light-coloured canvas hat when on shore” and “is generally armed with a Colt .44 revolver and a double-barreled shotgun.” Known to be handy and clever, Ferguson would sometimes repaint and refit the cabin on his 16-foot boat, the Spray. With a three-horsepower gasoline engine and small sail, the Spray was quick and nimble.

The poster referenced Ferguson, William Julian, and a woman of mixed Indigenous ancestry, “all of whom are supposed to be in Nanaimo, BC, or vicinity, as their plan was to rob a company store at that place. Both of these men are desperate characters, and I am informed left here about a week ago for B.C. for the purpose of murdering two men and committing a robbery.” The poster said that “Ferguson is well posted in the B.C. waters and on Puget Sound. He talks about Yulu Island, Frazer River, and Bring Berge Island” (a misspelling and likely reference to Lulu Island—one of the seventeen islands that make up modern-day Richmond—the Fraser River, and Bainbridge Island, west of Seattle). For the Washington authorities, his capture was “of the utmost importance on account of the crimes he has committed and for those he threatens to commit.”

This heat is perhaps what drove Ferguson and Julian into Canada, where U.S. law enforcement could not follow. But BC was no safe haven. They had jumped from a sinking ship into a heaving sea. Their Wanted poster trailed the pirates north into Canada, where a man hardened by decades of policing on the coast readied himself.

***

Chief Constable David Stephenson began his job in 1881 as the Island’s lone BC Provincial Police officer, stationed north of Esquimalt. Before immigrating to Canada, he had been a member of Queen Victoria’s Guard of Honour. He looked every part the Canadian frontier cop—a smart uniform, stabbing glare, and thick, drooping moustache on an otherwise clean-shaven face. In the early days, he travelled the coast alone by canoe to take prisoners to court in Nanaimo. Whether they helped paddle is unknown.

In the years after the Wanted poster’s publication, pirates marauded the BC coast, committing a string of burglaries. On October 12, 1912, the Daily Colonist reported that thieves blew a safe in Victoria and made away with nearly six hundred dollars. Vancouver saw safe-breaking attempts in the same month. On December 15, burglars broke into the safe at Nanaimo City Hall. Up Island in Union Bay, around the same time, a woman named Mrs. Bishop was working in a hotel kitchen. She heard a noise and went down the hall to investigate. According to The Friendly Port, a book about Union Bay’s history, a burglar was breaking in and heard her coming. The burglar ducked into a bedroom and hid in a wardrobe. She never did find him, but “Mrs. Bishop’s brother was up staying, and he had an old pair of comfortable pants. One day he went to put them on, and they weren’t there.” Police found the pants months later at the Flying Dutchman’s hideout.

With an area eight times larger than Puget Sound under his care and few officers to help him, Stephenson had found it impossible to apprehend the culprits. He needed a break in the case. Convinced the pirates would hit Union Bay again soon, he planned a trap. For this he enlisted two undercover officers. The first, Gordon Ross, had fought in the South African war as a Lovat Scout. The Scottish sniper regiment was famous for being a pioneer of the ghillie suit, a type of camouflage that helped wearers blend in with their background. The second, Harry Westaway, hailed from PEI. Up until his thirtieth birthday he lived with his parents. According to the census, he worked as a painter before becoming an officer. Stephenson posted the two men in Union Bay at the beginning of February 1913.

***

On March 3, 1913, the Farmers Institute on Lasqueti Island was holding a meeting. Two reputable Lasqueti community members, Henry Wagner and William Julian, told their neighbour in Scottie Bay they were leaving to attend the meeting. At four in the afternoon, Wagner’s wife and children watched them motor out of the bay. The next time they saw Wagner, he would be behind bars.

The Flying Dutchman’s true name depended on who you asked and where you asked them. The desperado’s actions necessitated aliases to elude the authorities. In Washington State, he answered to Henry Ferguson Sastro and Henry Ferguson; on the Canadian side of the line, Henry Wagner.

With his three-horsepower engine, Wagner could travel a little faster than a horse could walk. He never intended to make the Farmers Institute meeting. From Scottie Bay, the most direct route to Union Bay led him west to Hornby Island. Here, he hooked slightly south around Denman Island. One of the few nighttime guides, the blinking Chrome Island lighthouse, lay to starboard just offshore from Denman’s southern end. Darkness shrouded the headlands and shoals as they sputtered northwards.

During Wagner and Julian’s northbound journey up Baynes Sound, Constables Gordon Ross and Harry Westaway played cards and drank beers in the Nelson Hotel. As the port for the Cumberland coal mines, Union Bay’s long wharf welcomed ships from all over the world. A short stroll away, the hotel faced the sea. Its bar was a fine place to spend the evenings, drinking and chatting to travellers. Ross and Westaway had waited for a month, night in and night out, for criminals to appear at the Fraser and Bishop General Store next door. At night, the white building, with its high false front, sat dark and quiet.

At midnight, the officers noticed a light. They walked into the post office adjoining the store to investigate. Once inside, they heard a creak in the store proper, as if someone had stepped on a floorboard. Westaway clutched a pistol. Ross gripped a flashlight and baton. Unknown to them, Wagner was peering down the sights of his Colt .44.

***

Union Bay’s local police officer was on duty not far away at the colliery dock when he heard someone yelling for help. At the store’s entryway, the door’s shattered glass crunched under his feet. A shadow beckoned him inside. The officer clicked on his flashlight to behold Gordon Ross standing by the door. Beyond him waited a grisly sight—a captive lay unconscious on the floor, bloodied and beaten to a pulp, and Harry Westaway lay dead in a pool of blood.

Chief Constable David Stephenson happened to be in Cumberland that night, visiting another constable, his son, Albert. They received a call about an incident in Union Bay. A bumpy thirty-minute drive down Royston Road and what is now the Island Highway and the two officers arrived on the scene. Someone poured cold water onto the prisoner. Stephenson identified the barely conscious man as the Flying Dutchman.

Wagner was brought to the Cumberland lockup, where he asked to have a reporter sent to take down his story. He planned to sell the story and give the money to his wife. Permission was not granted.

On March 13, 1913, an officer named George Hannay shepherded Wagner to the Nanaimo Gaol. George Hannay and the entire force had had a busy March. They had scoured the area for an unidentified second man who had escaped from the scene of the burglary. After the botched burglary, Julian had taken the Spray’s skiff and started rowing the thirty miles back to Lasqueti Island. On March 7, with two aching arms from three days of rowing, Julian arrived on land, only to find Hannay waiting for him, pistol drawn. Perhaps it was Wagner who told police where to find him.

***

Proceedings in Wagner’s trial began on May 13 at Nanaimo’s courthouse. The doctor who arrived on scene early in the morning after the murder testified that Westaway had died from a gunshot wound through his right lung, but was unsure from which direction the bullet had entered. A bullet’s exit wound is typically much larger than the entry wound. However, Westaway’s two deadly holes measured about the same. As well, the doctor found two gashes about two inches long on the top of Westaway’s head. He also noted how Wagner had taken a thrashing while Ross had no marks on him.

Gordon Ross came to the stand next. His testimony went like this: He and Westaway entered the post office and heard the creaking floorboard in the store. Ross pointed his flashlight into the store but saw nothing until he directed the beam to his left, where he found himself looking down the barrel of Wagner’s Colt .44. Wagner was crouched on one knee in a narrow corridor between the counters. Ross killed his light and rushed him. Wagner fired. The bullets missed Ross in this narrow corridor and hit Westaway, who was behind him. Westaway said, “I’m shot, Gordon, do you have him?” While Westaway bled out on the floor, Ross and Wagner fought for the gun, knocking supplies off the shelves. The crime scene photos show disarray. Eventually, Ross subdued Wagner, knocked him unconscious, and handcuffed him. Ross admitted during questioning to being punched several times by Wagner.

As the doctor noted, however, Ross was unscathed. He did not even have marks on his knuckles. Victor Harrison, the lawyer assigned to Wagner, raised this anomaly during cross-examination: “What was he fighting,” Harrison asked Ross, “the counter or walls? What was he fighting? You are not marked up. I don’t understand you.” Ross responded, “I don’t understand it myself.” Harrison asked Ross if he’d had anything to drink that evening. Ross sketchily admitted he’d spent the entire evening in the hotel bar but that he’d drunk only one beer. Post-trial, Harrison stated in a document that he sent to Ottawa to have the case appealed that Ross was a known drunk.

Another question raised by Harrison was how the bullet had missed Ross in the narrow corridor and hit Westaway, who was behind him. Ross did not know.

Wagner’s testimony contrasted with Ross’s. He claimed a drunken Ross had accidently shot Westaway while Wagner and Westaway wrestled. This version of events might explain why Westaway had two gashes on his head and Ross was unmarked, and it would also solve the bullet wound puzzle. A bullet entering from the back would add some credence to Wagner’s version.

The prosecutor asked Wagner about his past crimes. Was it true he’d been a member of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, the infamous American train-robbing gang? Wagner answered no.

Next, Julian came onto the stand. His story was short and simple. He entered the store behind Wagner, clutching his coattails in the dark. When a light flashed on them, Julian fled, and as he exited the store, he heard two gunshots. If true, the timing of the gunshots supports Ross’s version of events. As the number one witness against Wagner, Julian sealed Wagner’s fate with his testimony. Julian would be tried shortly afterwards for burglary only, not as an accomplice to murder.

In the Nanaimo courthouse, the judge addressed the court and described his take on the events: Wagner entered the store armed with a pistol to commit burglary. He had that pistol to avoid apprehension, if it came to it, and had long prepared to shoot someone. The jury, apparently split until the final minutes, took four hours to come back with a guilty verdict. Wagner was condemned to death by hanging, with his execution set for August 28 of that year.

The case was murky and evidence scant, but the Flying Dutchman had a reputation. After the trial, in the same petition Wagner’s lawyer sent to Ottawa to request an appeal, he claimed some jurors had made up their minds to have Wagner executed before the court case began.

***

The Flying Dutchman’s final months were not without drama, both in his cell and on Vancouver Island. Days before the trial, the Island’s coal towns erupted in riots. Coal miners demanded better working conditions and threatened to unionize. The situation prompted the Provincial Police to call in the militia, who made mass arrests. The prisoner records for the Nanaimo Gaol at this time are choked with miners’ names.

Beginning the day after the trial, guards watched Wagner around the clock. This was called a death watch. Unlike at Walla Walla, he was assigned no labour, hard or otherwise. In the months leading up to the execution, Mrs. Wagner and the children visited nearly every week. On one visit he gave her $250 from the sale of the Spray. She also took his watch, chain, and other effects. The remaining $50 from the $300 boat sale he kept. As with the gaols in Victoria and New Westminster at the time, prisoners condemned to death could purchase and cook their own food. Wagner regularly bought eggs, butter, and bacon, which the guards delivered to him.

After a final visit from his wife and children, Wagner attempted suicide by banging his head against the radiator in the shower. After that, guards shackled his legs with a chain so short he could only shuffle his feet.

***

Arthur Ellis, the Dominion of Canada’s official executioner, had hanged hundreds. Ellis was only the latest of many forefathers to undertake this grim task. Untold numbers met their end by his kin, who had been executing people for over three hundred years. The night before his current task, Ellis stepped into Wagner’s cell. He placed two fingers on the prisoner’s wrist—a touch to measure a pulse by the man who would steal it.

Due to the miners’ strikes, the execution was closed to the public. In the early morning of August 28, 1913, a handful of police constables, a Salvation Army officer, and Ellis gathered in Nanaimo’s gaol courtyard. Silence filled the dewy air. The assembled men faced the wooden gallows, where a noose, rigid and still, hung from the top beam. At the platform’s crest, high above the witnesses, the executioner grasped a black sack and leather straps. A door to the courtyard flew open. The Flying Dutchman stumbled into the sunlight.

The hanging began at 7:45 a.m. in the gaol’s courtyard. According to a first-hand account of the execution published in Outlaws and Lawmen of Western Canada, the conditions were right for Ellis to attempt a world record for the fastest hanging. Ellis had noted that the distance between the courtyard door and the gallows in Nanaimo matched the location in England where the current record was set by his uncle. He left the bottom of the gallows unscreened so the timekeeper could see the moment the condemned man’s toes hit the gravel.

***

When Wagner stumbles into the courtyard, those gathered lift their hats, not out of respect for the convicted murderer but because it is the law. As soon as Wagner reaches the trap on the gallows, Ellis yanks the sack over his head, pinions his legs with the strap, and jerks the noose tight behind his ears. Before the Salvation Army officer can say four words of the Lord’s Prayer, Ellis springs the trap. The Flying Dutchman’s third vertebra snaps, his toes graze the gravel below the scaffolding, and he meets Death instantly.

Ellis thrusts his hand into the air. “Time!”

***

Published versions of this story have invariably painted the Flying Dutchman as a cold-hearted desperado and the police as heroes. This is a common narrative in any story where a police officer is murdered, but truth is rarely so cut and dried. The BC Provincial Police both protected and acted against the public. According to volume three of British Columbia: From the Past Times to the Present, a biographical account of prominent community members, Chief Constable David Stephenson was respected and generally considered a fair officer. Conversely, a common photo of Stephenson shows him leading a gang of mounted constables, ready to quell the strikes in Nanaimo.

In the case of the Flying Dutchman, Stephenson managed to stop the crime spree, but one of his officers paid for the victory with his life. What Stephenson thought of the justice Wagner received, we don’t know. Other problems were likely at the forefront of his mind. The strikes continued, only abating during the First World War. In 1916, Stephenson retired at his own request after thirty-six years on duty. After the war ended, the strikes worsened.

Other BC Provincial Police constables were indistinguishable from the criminals they arrested. Not long after the Flying Dutchman was hanged, William Julian pled guilty to breaking into the Fraser and Bishop General Store and served a five-year sentence. Shortly after his release, police scoured the coast for two pirates who were robbing communities in the same manner Wagner and Julian had. Police caught up to Julian on February 18, 1920, and arrested him. The next day they arrested his accomplice: George Hannay, the officer who had arrested Julian on Lasqueti Island in 1913.

More Great Stories Await! Buy Book Here

Excerpted from A Place Called Cumberland by Cumberland Museum & Archives. Edited by Rhonda Bailey. Copyright © 2024 by Cumberland Museum & Archives. Essay by Dave Flawse. Excerpted with permission from Figure 1 Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Sources

All sources can be found in A Place Called Cumberland where this story appears.

Peruse the “Local Reads” section your neighbourhood bookstore or the BC Ferries giftshop and you’ll notice it’s stuffed with memoirs. These personal accounts are often set in coastal BC and framed around two themes: fishing and logging.

Even if you’re someone who feels they’ve read enough about catching salmon and cutting down trees, these memoirs are usually worth picking up. You never know what you might find in them; historical treasures frequently hide in their pages.

Take Jon Taylor’s Fried Eggs & Fish Scales, for example. In 30 or so stories, the long-time fisherman chronicles his 50 years in remote Sointula on Malcolm Island. In one tale, Taylor solves a thirty-year-old mystery that stretches back to WWII. I love little tales like these. This one in particular speaks to much more than just the two men involved.

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Harbour Publishing was kind enough to send an excerpt for your reading pleasure:

War Story

My first trolling skipper had spent World War II in the gumboot navy, alternately catching fish to feed the troops and patrolling for Japanese submarines. He said it was a good life most of the time, lots of hunting and fishing, and lots of time to explore every bay on the coast. He said he spent half his time in a skiff.

The problem was that they were always hunting for a rumoured Japanese sub that kept getting reported in the area. Since a sub would definitely outgun their patrol vessel, they had to take it by surprise. This frequently meant stopping on one side of a point and sending a man to the beach in the skiff, so he could look into the bay beyond to be sure the sub wasn’t waiting in ambush. If the day was nice the recon would go on for some time. Naturally, it being wartime, the scout always took his .30-30 along (the fly rod was more difficult to explain). If the scout came upon a few deer or trout while reconnoitring, well, it was just natural to share his good luck with his shipmates.

There were, of course, black nights and horrible gales that threatened to put an end to all the good times. But those times being in the past, it was the good times scouting the bay that remained strong in his mind. Except for the damned “Jap sub.” Over time, they had interviewed dozens of good, reliable people—loggers and fishermen mostly—who swore that they had seen the damned thing. But the skipper and the crew never got a glimpse or whiff of it. They spent the whole war chasing an illusion, and thirty years later it still hurt.

At that time I had five acres of land and a house that was falling down. I decided to clear some land and build a new house. Toward that end I hired a local Cat driver. He brought in a friend. The friend was a school principal by profession, but loved to spend summers up the coast, anywhere away from the city. As we talked, it became apparent that he knew every nook and cranny on the inside coast. I asked him how, and he told me.

Most people don’t know that during World War II, Canada had one submarine on the west coast. High authority decided that rather than send it off to sink the enemy, a duty from which it was very unlikely to return, it would better serve as a means of testing coastal defences.

“It was horrible,” he said. We popped up in every bay and village on the whole coast anywhere there was a log boom or a shack, made all the noise we could; then we’d dive and run elsewhere. We’d cruise back and forth under the gillnet fleet at night with our deck lights on. No one ever saw us. We did everything possible to get reported, but as far as we know, not one single report was ever sent in.

I told each of the men about the other’s story, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. The futility and frustration was too deeply ingrained. I even arranged for them to meet, but it never happened. Even when they were in the same town and knew exactly where the other could be found, they never saw each other.

Excerpt from pages 199-200 of Fried Eggs & Fish Scales by Jon Taylor (Harbour Publishing, 2024). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.

Interested in getting a copy of Taylor’s book? Click here. (I don’t get any kick backs for sharing this link, just sleep better at night.)

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A flip through Collin Varner’s Invasive Flora of the West Coast, and everything you thought you knew about plants blows away on the wind like a dandelion puff. Varner’s latest book about plants, but first book about the invasive ones, isn’t just a field guide, it will alter how you see the botanical world: invasive plants are everywhere.

An invasive plant is a non-native plant that has adapted to its new environment. Sometimes these plants outcompete native ones, but not always. Just because it’s invasive, doesn’t mean the plant is undesirable in certain contexts.

The book is split into two sections: herbaceous plants and woody ones. As with Varner’s other field guides, each page contains a picture and lists some important details: common names, Latin name, description, traditional use, etymology, season, reproduction, concerns, and last but not least, origin.

The origin descriptions tease the reader with tantalizing snippets. Consider this one about the domestic apple:

All this from the humble apple!

This is where I take an off-ramp. I had to learn more about these origin stories. And I’m going to share what I learned with you. I set up an interview with Varner to ask him more about these origin stories. Our conversation didn’t disappoint.

The most notorious invasives, Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry, have been widely discussed in other places, so I asked Varner about other plants readers will likely recognize.

Common Apple

DF: I found the origin story of this one pretty fascinating. I had assumed the apple was a native plant.

CV: We have only one native one here. That’s Malus fusca. It’s about a quarter of an inch across. That grows along the coast here and is quite common. If you do the West Coast trail you see thickets of it. You go around Beaver Lake and Stanley Park, and our native apple is in there. But there’s 10 to 1 of the domestic apples, from people throwing their apple cores away.

And apples don’t come true from seed. You have to graft them. And that’s what happened over how many thousands of years. Romans were the first one to start grafting those. And that’s why you’ll go along the old railway lines, especially like Britain. The kids throw their apple cores out the windows. Then you wonder why there are orchards of them growing everywhere. But the apples aren’t very good.

In Vancouver they have the Arbutus Corridor. It used to be a little train that went through Vancouver off to Lulu Island, which is Richmond. That line is now a Bicycle Path, and there must be over a thousand small and big apple trees growing along that line, just from people discarding their apple cores.

When we went across Mongolia. Kazakhstan, that’s where the original apple is. That’s Malus domestica. I didn’t get to find them in the wild, but I had a bowl of them given to me, so I photographed those.

It’s amazing history on those. It’s only been in the last 200 years that the Granny Smith, Delicious, and all those have come out. And now the University of Washington State, they’ve been working really hard on the hybridization. They’ve come out with the Cosmic Crisp.

DF: Oh, I haven’t heard of that one. [Interjection: since this interview, I’ve tried a Cosmic Crisp: highly recommend.]

CV: To me it’s the best apple out there.

DF: Better than the Honeycrisp?

CV: Yep. It’s part Honeycrisp.

Canada Thistle

Dave Flawse: As I understand it, this plant is native to Europe. How did it get here?

Colin Varner: It first came over to Eastern Canada from Britain by boat in a tainted seed or bale lot of hay, clover, or alfalfa. Some of these tainted or contaminated seeds or bales were sent over to Wisconsin and New York where the thistle germinated. So, the Americans called it the Canada Thistle. You know, if that would have been a good plant, it would have been called the American Thistle.

DF: How did it arrive on this side of the continent?

CV: It came across Canada the same way in tainted or contaminated seed lots or bales of hay, clover, or alfalfa.

Giant Hogweed

DF: The specific date of introduction in the book was interesting to me: 1950. How do you know that exact date?

CV: The seed came in as an ornamental, and it was ordered from one of the seed catalogs, and they brought it into a Seattle garden. It really is a beautiful plant. But it’s photo toxic. I ended up in the hospital when I was 12. I took down half acre of it with a machete up in Prince Rupert. The sun came out and I was in the hospital for three days. It was horrid.

One time, I measured a 14-foot-high clump down at Jericho Beach, which by the end of summer was all gone. The parks board came in and removed it. I think it was an overreaction, really.

DF: Why do you think it was an overreaction?

CV: Unless you’re going there and cutting it down and getting the juice all over your body and it’s a sunny day, it’s fairly innocuous. I will not grow it in my garden only because I’ll get shunned by the neighbours.

Morning glory

DF: It’s hard to miss morning glory, those beautiful flowers that are roadside, in gardens, and—

CV: Everywhere. We have a native species here that grows on the beaches. But the rest of them came over in seed lots. Most likely the big flowering one, Calystegia sepia. This is probably brought over as an ornamental because it is quite beautiful. It’s one of those ones that if it’s contained, it’s just fine.

DF: What surprised me was the line in the book that said it is one of the top-ten most-invasive plants worldwide.

CV: Yeah, they call it bindweed because it does bind all the other flowers and everything around it together. And they did use it as cordage to wrap up the hay bales at one time. So, it does have a purpose.

DF: And how do you feel about Morning Glory? Similar to Giant hogweed or do you have a different viewpoint on it?

CV: No, it’s nasty in fields once it gets in there. If you got a damp, low-basin field, it’s horrible to get rid of. It ruins crops, there’s just hundreds of millions of dollars a year of wasted on chemicals to get rid of this stuff.

English Ivy

DF: When you look around English Ivy is everywhere.

CV: And it’s in the top ten noxious weed. People think they strangle the trees and kill them. They don’t. They smother them. They knock out the light, and that’s what kills the trees, especially conifers.

Conifers can’t outgrow their natural shape. Whereas as a big leaf maple or birch, if they start getting English ivy (If you want to call that. It’s actually Persian ivy. Another misnomer.), they can actually grow their limbs to get away from the ivy. They know what’s going on. And you’ll see one limb going about 30 feet sideways. It’s very seldom you’ll see one of our native maples be killed by it.

But Doug firs and our grand firs and hemlocks, they can get taken over. But a mature Douglas fir, there’s nothing that can get up to 200, 300 feet. Even the English ivy can only get up to about 80 feet. I’ve climbed a lot of trees and gone up and looked at the ivy, and it’s pretty interesting: if the bark is really thick and has got crevices, the ivy actually re-roots and starts to regrow again at 60, 80 feet.

DF: This is a question I’ve always wondered, if people disappeared tomorrow, what’s going to happen with the English Ivy in the in the forest? Is it going to take over, or is it going to be impeded by something?

CV: Wouldn’t it be nice if we all disappeared?

DF: I know right.

CV: The English ivy can go ballistic as it wants. But really, the first forest fire that comes along, they’re gone. They are not used to forest fires like a lot of our indigenous plants. There is a dozen of our native plants, like fireweed, that have their seeds on the ground, and the forest fires come through and then they thrive. The seeds germinate.

Whereas the English ivy, those seeds get burned right to toast. So, I would think you’ll have isolated spots of the English ivy, but it will never become prolific.

DF: Thanks, Collin!

To learn more of the fascinating world of invasive plants, check out Varner’s latest book!

Earlier this year, Harbour Publishing reached out to me with this message:

Happy New Year!  Are you interested in a review copy of The Best Loved Boat: The Princess Maquinna by Ian Kennedy?

Built in 1913, the Canadian Pacific Railway’s ship Princess Maquinna steamed along the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island in summer and winter, calm weather and storms, for over forty years, and has become one of the most beloved boats in BC’s maritime history. The book has been on the BC Bestseller List since publication!

I said, yes, and by the time I finally interviewed Ian at his Comox Valley home mid-March 2024, the book was still sitting at number one on the bestseller list. Not surprisingly, Ian has had a fair share of media attention. (See links below to other interviews.) I don’t want to repeat what’s already out there. And you probably don’t need my recommendation to figure that all these sales mean the book is worth buying. (It is!)

Instead, I decided to ask Ian about the research process for the book. This is not just for my own selfish interest as a writer: there is something fascinating, whoever you are, about pulling away the veil of a well-researched book, to see its inner workings.

I sat across from Ian while his living room’s towering bookshelves loomed over us. His casual reading material—various history tomes—stared down at me as I attempted to ask some coherent questions.

Dave: Why did you want to tell the story of Maquinna?

Ian: Well, it grew out of this book here. [The book Ian picks up off his coffee table is Tofino and Clayoquot Sound: A History.] My coauthor and I wrote this. She and I did a whale of a lot of research in that book. And one of the things we covered was boats. And one of the boats, the main boat, was the Princess Maquinna. And so, we had a fair bit of material on Maquinna. And after that book came out in 2014, I thought I could do a Maquinna story.

It seemed like an interesting story because here was this ship that went from Victoria to Quatsino three times a month, 1500-kilometer round trip, and stopped at all these communities along the way.

I was asked on a CBC interview one time, “why is this boat so important?” I said, “Well, any boat that goes up and down the graveyard of the Pacific for 39 years and doesn’t come to grief, it says something about the crew, and it says something about the boat.”

Dave: From that initial kernel, what did the process look like to grow your research?

Ian: A lot of hours in the archives in Victoria, finding articles or anything that was ever written about it. They’re very good down there. I hired a researcher. I couldn’t be there all the time. You work out the costs to stay down there, to drive down, to spend the day and eat, that sort of thing. You’re better off sometimes to hire one of the researchers who knows where to go and get this stuff. Boom, they go get it, photocopy it.

Dave: Where else to the research take you?

Ian: There are a lot of books. Bob Turner wrote a lot of books about the princess boats. Another one by Kaye Lamb, which is on the princess boats as well. Then I interviewed a lot of people who had been on it. They were still alive at the beginning of the process. A few good quotes out of people always helps enliven the thing.

Dave: Any memorable interviews in your research?

Ian: Yeah, I was never able to be on the boat. It was 1952 when it went off the schedule. So, I relied on other people to tell me about it. There was a guy out in Tofino named Bob Wingen who had built boats himself. His father and he built fish boats. They were very famous. And he told me yarns about the Maquinna because people who lived in Tofino were always on that boat. They were up and down, up and down the coast because there was no road out there in those days.

And another guy named Ron MacLeod was very good. He had been born and raised in Tofino and he was a good writer. He actually had written memoirs and was pretty good to give me all that stuff. We used them in that book [Tofino and Clayoquot] and the bits about the Maquinna I used them in the Maquinna book.

Dave: Following the Maquinna’s journey gave you a chance to dive into these stories up and down the coast. Where did the idea to make the book follow a journey come from?

Ian: Well, when I was in the middle of doing the research, I was trying to think about how I was going to hold all this together. The boat was on the water for 40 years. How do you connect the events that happened over 40 years?

I have a very good friend who’s an author who lives here in the Valley, and he’s written a lot—he’s a novel writer. I had coffee with him, and I said, how am I going to hold this thing together?

He said, well, what you do is create a family and have them arrive in say, Tofino or Ucluelet or Quatsino and set up themselves up. The dad goes to the First World War and the son goes to the second. And the Maquinna would tie it together.

I thought, thanks very much for the insight. But then I came home, and I thought, that’s what novelists do. That’s not what I do. That’s moving into a different genre, which I’m not really familiar with, so that didn’t work.

But I thought, 1913 was its first run. So, ten years later and the kinks had run out. It had a good captain, Captain Gillam at the time, a very famous man on the coast. I thought, okay, I’ll make it 1924 and start from Victoria and stop on all these little places.

Places like Port Renfrew. Then you have to look up the history of Port Renfrew. What the hell was everybody doing there? Then Clo-oose had a very interesting history that I didn’t know much about.

One problem was that I wanted to do the gold rush in Zeballos, but that didn’t happen until the 1930s. So suddenly I had to put a paragraph in there saying, look, we’re going to take a reroute here. We’re not going to follow the path she would have taken in 1924. We’re going to pretend it’s 1930 and we’re going to go up to Zeballos.

As you look up these places like Holberg, for example, you say what the heck is in Holberg? If you read enough about it, you eventually link up there was a Danish gardener who lived up there and had a very famous garden.

You’d be surprised about some of these little communities. The Coal Harbor one was interesting because there was a guy there that was reputed to be the leader of the Quantrill Raiders in the American Civil War, which was a great story. But then I have to say that that’s the local story. It’s not true because he’s actually buried in Louisville, Kentucky. There was an article about it in the Times Colonist.

When you’re writing, you can work your way around these things to make sure you get it in because it makes a good story. People want to hear things that are interesting. Good stories like that, you don’t want to leave them out.

Dave: Thanks, Ian!

Other interviews:

The BC Review

The BC Review Interview Series

Times Colonist

CBC

I spoke with Barry Gough about his new book the morning after finishing the 300-or-so-page hardcover. While the book spans only a blink of Vancouver Island history, it leaves you with much to dwell on while you panic to think of questions to ask its author.

My challenge for our interview rested on which questions to pull from a roster of potential angles: Blanshard’s not-so-humble origins; the unfortunate circumstances of his short, three-year governorship; the impact he left on the Island besides a Victoria street name (spoiler: not much of one, it turns out); or whether he was one of these old-timey white dudes we’d sooner forget anyways.

I didn’t ask an in-depth question. Instead, I zoomed out and asked Gough why he chose to write about the now largely forgotten figure. The conversation led down a path to something still topical in Victoria today—real estate. (And guess what, the prospects of home ownership were just as depressing for the average person then too.)

For anyone interested in early settler Vancouver Island history, this book is indispensable. You can purchase at your locally owned bookstore or at the publisher’s website here. (I don’t get paid for recommending books, just sleep better at night.)

Enjoy!

Dave: Why did you choose to write a book about Blanshard?

Barry: Blanshard was always a ghostly figure, haunting the margins of Vancouver Island's early history. And I've always thought that so much can be told by secondary figures or even tertiary figures that dance around the edges of any great story.

It's all very well for students of history to continue to write another biography of James Douglas or in the history of the American West to do another book on Lewis and Clark, just as an example. But sometimes these secondary figures are more exciting to write about because they're new and they can also tell us something about the primary characters. And I think the revelatory aspect of this book is it shows how clearly James Douglas was into the Hudson Bay Company project at the expense of the colonization.

And I've demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt the duplicity of the Hudson's Bay Company in accepting the Charter of Grant, which was designed to populate Vancouver Island with British colonists. But James Douglas’s policies and that of his bosses, more particularly George Simpson, The Little Emperor, and his boss, Sir John Pelly, who was the head of the corporation in London, were to look after stockholders’ interests. And those stockholders’ interests were to keep selling furs and engage in the mercantile trades here—selling lumber, selling fish, selling wheat, engaging in the primary trades that the Hudson’s Bay Company had developed so much.

Now the Hudson’s Bay Company was under change at this time, as I explain. They were, first of all, of course, defending their fur realm of the north, which was New Caledonia on the mainland. But they were also engaging in this diversification of their trade. They were getting into shipping, they were getting into selling wheat to the Russians, trading and exchanging gold to California, servicing whaling ships that needed provisions, etc. So, this is a marvelous company in terms of its adaptability, but the least of their interests, as I've disclosed, was colonization and settling of Britons here.

So that's a very good first question to start with. Why Blanshard? Well, he's the secondary figure. We can see the unfolding world through his eyes. We can see all the difficulties of the times. We get an indication of how the Americans were closing the border, seizing British ships, fining British traders, and upsetting attempts to take timber from the American side of the border. And from his point of view, we see the developments that occur at Fort Rupert [miners’ strikes and the Nahwitti War.] We see that Douglas may not have chosen the best place for the mercantile activities to develop on Vancouver Island.

Dave: At Fort Victoria?

Barry: Yes, at Fort Victoria in Camosun Harbor. Blanshard would have preferred Esquimalt, which is a far better harbour. We also see how, because the Hudson’s Bay Company dominates all the metropolitan land of Victoria, which is now the city of Victoria, James Douglas steers all the private, independent settlers to the margins.

He steers them to Sooke, where the Captain Grant sets up. He steers them to Metchosin, where James Cooper and Thomas Blinkhorn have properties. And, as one of my readers so astutely pointed out, you can see now how these settlements in and around Victoria are not at the center of gravity, so to speak. Esquimalt, Metchosin, Sooke, these are the places where the other minor communities have developed, and they are a direct result of the policies of Douglas to steer away the independent settlers and meanwhile to develop the lands in and around Fort Victoria.

Victoria becomes the first retirement center of the old Hudson’s Bay Company traders. John Tod comes first. William Henry McNeill settles in. Roderick Finlayson, William Fraser Tolmie, John Work. They all end up with these massive properties as of retirement, at least 100 acres, sometimes 400 acres. And when the Hudson's Bay Company relinquishes all these lands to these people and it goes through the privatization process, these are the people who are able to profit mightily from their own investments in the land.

So, I wouldn't say there's skullduggery here. I think it's the natural way of real estate law. That if you acquire a lot of land, you develop it. Then then you subdivide and sell off portions of it to your own benefit.

Dave: These guys made sure they were in the right place at the right time and able to take advantage of their situation as landowners?

Barry: Right from the beginning. That's absolutely correct. They were they were able to lay down their markers and even the certain jurisdictions went to these people. So, it's a fascinating real estate history indeed.

Dave: Thanks, Barry!

Barry Gough is one of Canada’s premier historians and biographers. His insightful research and lucid writing spanning five decades have earned him high distinction. Among his awards are the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Prize, the Maritime Foundation’s Mountbatten Award, the Washington Historical Society’s Robert Gray Medal, the Alcala Galiano Medal and the Keith Matthews Award. In 2022, he was awarded the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing for Possessing Meares Island. He is a Fellow of the Society for the History of Discoveries. He lives in Victoria, BC.

About The Curious Passage of Richard Blanshard: Gough brings a defining era of Pacific Northwest history into focus in this biography of Richard Blanshard, the first governor of Vancouver Island—illuminating with intriguing detail the genesis and early days of Canada’s westernmost province.

Early one wintry day in March 1850, after seven weary weeks out of sight of land, a well-dressed Londoner, a bachelor aged thirty-two, stood at the ship’s rail taking in the immensity of the unfolding scene. From Her Britannic Majesty’s paddlewheel sloop-of-war Driver, steadily thumping forth on Imperial purpose, all that Richard Blanshard could make out to port, in reflected purple light upon the northern side, was a forested, rock-clad island rising to considerable height. Vancouver’s Island they called it in those far-off days. This was his destination.

Richard Blanshard was governor of the young colony for three short, unhappy years—only one and a half of which were spent in the colony itself. From the very beginning he was at odds with the vastly influential Hudson’s Bay Company, run by its Chief Factor James Douglas, who succeeded Blanshard as governor of the colony of Vancouver Island and later became the first governor of the colony of British Columbia. While James Douglas is remembered, for better or worse, as a founding father of British Columbia, Richard Blanshard’s name is now largely forgotten, despite his vitally important role in warning London of American cross-border aggressions, including a planned takeover of Haida Gwaii. However, his failures highlight the fascinating struggles of the time—the supreme influence of commerce, the disparity between expectations and reality, and the bewildering collision of European and Pacific Northwest culture.

And here’s a link to a review of Gough’s book on the British Columbia Review by someone much smarter than me.

In 1979, at the same time when nuclear anxiety from Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island reactor meltdown consumed the public, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) promoted nuclear power in British Columbia. “Vancouver Island,” according a 1979 AECL study, “appears to be a logical area for the application of nuclear power.”

Organizations such as AECL presented nuclear power as an inexpensive and safe alternative that would spur economic growth, yet many Canadians expressed concern about the risk to public safety and environmental consequences of the technology.

Canadian environmental activist David Garrick, also known by his pen name, Walrus Oakenbough (a name he created while writing for Vancouver’s alternative newspaper The Georgia Straight), worked for over a decade raising awareness of the dangers of nuclear activity.

Garrick had been educated as an anthropologist in Ontario at Trent University, where he also studied the sciences and ecology and developed his research skills. His interest in environmental issues was further stimulated by a move in 1971 to Vancouver where he became involved in a protest against a Four Season’s hotel development at the entrance to Stanley Park.

Here, he met early creators of the fledgling Greenpeace movement such as Rod Marining and Paul Watson, who remained lifelong friends. Marining and Watson would join Greenpeace’s first campaign to stop atomic bomb testing in Alaska in 1971. Then in 1975, Garrick and Watson joined the Greenpeace crew on the organization’s first whale campaign. They set out on the fishing vessel Phyllis Cormack to search for Russian whaling ships, with the intent of disrupting their hunt. In 1976, they travelled on the converted minesweeper James Bay in search of Japanese whale hunters to again protest harvesting whales. These two campaigns brought Greenpeace world-wide attention.

Garrick then travelled across the Pacific with his partner, Taiko Miwa to create a Greenpeace branch in Japan. He visited health institutions where patients still suffered the effects of radiation poisoning, thirty years after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Upon his return to Vancouver in 1977, in his role as a Greenpeace director, Garrick organized protestors to rally against the planned Trident nuclear submarine station in Bangor, Washington State. On his third trip to join the protests there, authorities arrested and jailed him, along with Miwa and Watson.

This experience motivated him to increase public awareness of the detrimental effects of nuclear energy and uranium mining. When news reached Garrick about plans to mine uranium in BC, he attempted to convince other Greenpeace directors to recognize the importance of anti-nuclear education. Unsuccessful, Garrick left Greenpeace and instead formed an anti-nuclear alliance with SPEC (at that time SPEC stood for the Canadian Scientific Pollution & Environmental Control Society), the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, the Voice of Women (VOW), First Nations groups, unions, and church organizations.

At Clearwater, BC, he mobilized support and documentary coverage for a decisive town meeting where seven hundred community members successfully blocked the proposed Birch Island open-pit uranium mine.

In October 1978, the Vancouver-based environmental group, SPEC, hired Garrick as a coordinator of its Public Nuclear Awareness Program where he enlightened the public to the hazards of BC’s nuclear development.

Around this time, VOW members alerted Garrick to proposed nuclear plant developments on Vancouver Island. Since the post-war years, at a time when many feared atomic war between the West and Russia, VOW had been educating the public on the hazards of radiation.

Garrick travelled to the proposed sites on the Island’s northern end: at Port McNeill and False Head, near Port Hardy. He had previously visited the area while on a Greenpeace voyage and was aware the Port McNeill plant would be on ‘Namgis First Nation’s territory. At Alert Bay he informed ‘Namgis elders of the plans.

Despite AECL’s assurance that environmental impacts would be low and that “the level of radioactivity found in the environment, especially outside the exclusion area, as a result of reactor operations would be a small fraction of that existing prior to startup of the nuclear plant,” those who lived in the area expressed concern. Fresh in the public mind were the Three Mile Island reactor incident, and, in 1952, the world’s first nuclear meltdown in Deep River, Ontario at the Chalk River facility. The facility would melt down again in 1958. Those involved in the cleanups suffered from various cancers, most notably leukemia.

Garrick organized two rallies to educate the public on the dangers of radiation poisoning. At the first, on September 17, 1978, he addressed 2000 onlookers in Stanley Park on the topic, Radiation and Survival. Outside the Vancouver Planetarium he again addressed 1500 people on the topic, Organizing Against Radiation Hazards in BC. In 1980, as part of the Vancouver City Day of Anti-Nuclear Protest, he addressed a crowd of 5000 on similar topics.

As coordinator of SPEC’s anti-nuclear awareness program, Garrick sought to ban uranium mining in BC and forged the Environmental Alliance Against Uranium Mining (EAAUM), a voice to participate in the technical phases of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Uranium Mining in BC. He would also assist the Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere prepare a funding proposal to participate in the inquiry.

The EAAUM planned to present environmental findings to the Royal Commission. However, the Commission perhaps found enough information without EAAUM’s input, because they adjourned the inquiry in late 1979 and placed a seven-year moratorium on uranium mining in BC.

The province has never lifted the moratorium on uranium mining, and BC’s uranium deposits lay untouched. Due to efforts by those such as David Garrick, today there are no nuclear power stations on Vancouver Island, nor in the entire province. Anti-nuclear activists in BC had successfully convinced the public and province of the dangers of nuclear power.

About Catherine

Catherine is a historian and best-selling author in British Columbia and has a passion for uncovering the untold stories of the province’s past. 

A graduate of the University of Victoria, Catherine earned a master’s in public history. Her most recent book, A Journey Back to Nature, a History of Strathcona Provincial Park, based on her thesis, was published by Heritage House Publishing in time for the Park’s 110th anniversary. Her other local history about the Second World War in the Vancouver Island region, Yorke Island and the Uncertain War, Defending Canada’s Western Coast was published in 2012 by Ptarmigan Press.

Catherine is currently working with David Garrick, aka Walrus Oakenbough, on the story of his life from his role in the formation of Greenpeace in the 1970s, followed by his involvement with numerous ecological campaigns throughout the 1980s and work in Ottawa on parliament hill, to his ground-breaking recent study of culturally modified trees on Hanson Island, BC.

Help bring this important book to life by supporting her work here!

More about Catherine here.

Sources

Bates, David, James Murray and Valter Raudsepp. Royal Commission of Inquiry, Health and Environmental Protection, Uranium Mining. Commissioners' Report Volume I, Victoria, BC: Queens Printer, October 30, 1980. (David Garrick collection) Available at https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/13/695/13695554.pdf

Garrick, David. All Season’s Park; After the Referendum, unpublished journals Volume I and II 1971. David Garrick collection.

Garrick, David ed. “BC Uranium Inquiry”, Spectrum, Vancouver BC: SPEC February 1979.

Garrick, David. Unpublished autobiography, 1981. David Garrick collection

David Garrick, interviews with author, from October 2020 to April 2023.

Guillemette, Mélissa. “Chalk River: The Forgotten Nuclear Accidents,” The Walrus, July 13, 2022. www.thewalrus.ca/nuclear-accidents/

Hunter, Robert and Rex Weyler. To Save a Whale: The Voyages of Greenpeace, San Francisco CA: Chronicle Books, 1978.

Nuclear Power for Vancouver Island, Atomic Energy Canada Limited, Ottawa, ON: April 1979. https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/04/043/4043948.pdf

When his Nanaimo antique store of more than 30 years was closing, Curiosity Cove owner Gerald Gonske reminisced about how customers were often looking for items that represented the city. "'People would ask, "What do you have that's a symbol of Nanaimo?"' Gonske said. 'I couldn't have anything better than a Rumming's bottle.'"

In 1889, a 20-year-old William Edward Rumming and his older brother Charles Henry Rumming set out from Liverpool, England with Vancouver Island as their intended destination. By the time of the 1891 census, William Rumming was living in Nanaimo's Middle Ward and working as a soda water maker. He had joined John Mitchell at the Pioneer Soda Water Works on Wallace Street.

By the fall of 1892, John Mitchell and William Rumming were more than just colleagues at Pioneer Soda Water Works, they were also brothers-in-law. John Mitchell married William Rumming's sister Emma Eliza on September 24, 1892. Unfortunately, within just a few years, John Mitchell died on March 21, 1895.

For a period of time after William Rumming assumed control of the company, Pioneer Soda Water Works used bottles with W.E. Rumming's name embossed vertically on them instead of John Mitchell's. Just before the turn of the 20th century, the standard Rumming bottle changed to the one with the embossed crossed pick and shovel that local bottle collectors know and love.

In the 1920s, William Rumming faced a new competitor in the soda market…one by the name of Coca-Cola. According to the book Soda Kings of B.C. & the Yukon, "This largest of international soda companies arrived in British Columbia in 1907 on an agency basis with Cross & Company [of Vancouver], but Coca-Cola was initially poorly received by the local market."

The brand didn't seem to take off on the Island: "After the Vancouver plant opened in 1921, Coca-Cola tried shipping their bottled pop to the island from Vancouver but found it unprofitable, despite attempts by several managers." However, in May of 1922, a Coca-Cola-owned bottling plant was opened in Nanaimo on Selby Street and produced 2000 dozen bottles of Coca-Cola daily.

The Nanaimo bottling plant was just one piece of Coca-Cola's Canadian manufacturing and distribution system which, according to a 1923 advertisement, included four syrup factories, 21 bottling plants, and five warehouses across the country.

Perhaps predicting the impact having a Coca-Cola branch right in his own town might have on his business, Rumming made arrangements to start bottling two well-known brands – Kist (a brand from the Citrus Products Company that included a line of fruit flavoured sodas, notably lemon, lime, and orange flavours) and Hires Root Beer. The book Soda Kings of B.C. & the Yukon says, "By the 1920s, an affiliation with a national brand was a key strategy to success. Certainly by the 1940s national or international brands were sold in almost every town in British Columbia."

Coca-Cola bottled by William Rumming in Nanaimo would not have been bottled in these Bastion bottles, but in its own distinctive contour bottles. Coca-Cola's iconic 6.5 ounce "hoop skirt" or "Mae West" bottle had been originally introduced in 1915 and came to Canada around 1919. To maintain its brand image, Coca-Cola insisted that all local bottlers used the distinctive bottle. As well as needing its own bottles, bottling Coca-Cola was not without its challenges. "All Coke bottlers were required to maintain strict production standards which were far more stringent than any other brand of the era."

The Rumming enterprise had a name change to Rumming's Limited and continued to expand on Vancouver Island. In 1943, William Rumming retired and sold the business to three men with experience working for Coca-Cola. William Rumming died in Victoria in 1957.

When Rumming's Limited was sold to Gene Koster in 1953 it became Island Bottling Company. Koster had worked with Coca-Cola in Regina before serving in World War II, and he later worked at the company's Moose Jaw plant.

Goodwill Bottling of Victoria bought Island Bottling in 1965. Goodwill Bottling had been started by Edward Gudewill in June of 1954 when he purchased the Old English Beverage Company, a licensed bottler of Coca-Cola, on Johnson Street in Victoria.

In 1955, the company moved to a former knitting mill on Erie Street, near Fisherman's Wharf. Over the next 24 years the company expanded throughout Vancouver Island and across the B.C. mainland with seven more franchise acquisitions.

This was a time of consolidation, not only in British Columbia soda businesses, but also in the industry at large. Wometco, a Florida-based company that had a soft drink division as well as cable television and movie theatre interests, was buying up smaller Coca-Cola outfits, including those in British Columbia.

A Vancouver Sun article from 1965 details how Wometco had recently bought Coca-Cola franchises in both Vancouver and Chilliwack, and how "owners of the Victoria and Nanaimo franchises turned down Wometco's offer."

By the late 1980s, Coca-Cola had begun acquiring Canadian bottlers in earnest. T.C.C. Bottling Limited was formed in Canada by Coca-Cola in 1987 and according to the book Canada’s Coca-Cola, the company,

"was acquiring the franchise bottling rights of the many independent bottlers across the country. (T.C.C. Bottling's name would be changed to Coca-Cola Beverages in 1989.) When the new bottling structure was announced, Coca-Cola's own bottling plants produced about 55 per cent of the company's sales. By 1991, as franchise bottlers were absorbed, Coca-Cola Beverages accounted for 93 per cent of sales in Canada and was the fourth-largest Coca-Cola bottler in the world, with nineteen plants and sixty-two distribution centres. Today, all Coca-Cola products are bottled in Canada by Coca-Cola Beverages."

This trend played out locally, both on the Island and at a provincial level. Coca-Cola bought Wometco in 1984, including its British Columbia division. At the time, Wometco was one of North America's largest Coca-Cola franchise bottlers, consisting of over a dozen bottling plants and dozens of distribution facilities.

On the Island, Goodwill Bottling was sold to Beatrice Companies Inc. in 1983, which was in turn sold to the American Coca-Cola Company in 1986, and then to Coca-Cola Canada in 1989. So ended the more than 100-year history of locally owned soda bottlers on Vancouver Island.

International soft drink brands have been dominating the market for decades. But a renewed interest in flavoured carbonated drinks could mean hope yet for local soda makers on Vancouver Island.

Just think about how many flavoured sparkling water and speciality soda choices there are now at the grocery store. People seem to be ready for different soft drink options, especially ones that are organic, traditional, or locally made.

In 2012, the Phillips Brewing Company of Victoria founded Phillips Soda Works. Offering ginger ale, root beer, cola, and an orange cream soda. With the rise in popularity of craft brewing, as well as a "buy local" trend amplified during the global COVID-19 pandemic, it seems as if companies like Phillips Soda Works could be on the right track to re-establishing a thriving soda industry on Vancouver Island.

Frances and Captain Charles Barkley navigated the Imperial Eagle into Nootka Sound in June 1787. The wife, husband, and crew sailed across the globe through storms and pirate-infested waters to procure a seemingly humble item—sea otter pelts. These fetched astronomical prices in China, and, as luck would have it, the Imperial Eagle was the first trading vessel to arrive that season. This gave them first choice of pelts and an upper hand in bargaining, but the luck did not end there.

They anchored in Yuquot (Friendly Cove). “A canoe,” writes Cathy Converse in Frances Barkley Eighteenth-century Seafarer, “came alongside paddled by a man that was clothed in a greasy sea otter skin; he was disgustingly dirty.” Dr. John Mackay was a surgeon and “he then proceeded to tell us his story, which I will relay as it was extraordinary.” Sick with scurvy on a European vessel the year previous, he requested to be left ashore to recover. In that time he’d been treated well by Maquinna, the Chief of the Mowachaht tribe. But upon breaking some protocol, he was exiled from the community and survived on his own until the Barkley’s arrived. Once aboard he divulged information to help the Barkley’s procure more furs than they could have hoped to on their own.

After loading furs the Barkleys sailed south and mapped what would become known to Europeans as Barkley Sound. Islanders will recognize the name, but the name Frances Barkley is less recognized. Upon marriage she refused to wait at home while Captain Barkley sailed the world. She and her husband circumnavigated the globe while they experienced the ebbs and flow of life.

Converse shares this amazing woman’s adventures in a short and entertaining 120-page tale. The book is split into two parts and 27 chapters plus an epilogue, introduction, conclusion, and prologue. That means some of the chapters are brief (Chapter 25 is just one page long). The structure feels like a journal, and this, I suspect, is on purpose.

The story is told in first-person perspective of Frances and reads like engaging fiction, adding to the journal-like feel. This style of creative non-fiction pulls from in-depth research (the sources list is long and, if you’ve read anything else by Converse, it’s what you’d expect) and imagination. Good creative non-fiction is about making the most of what you have. Converse’s work successfully rides the edge between non-fiction and fiction in an enthralling historical journey.

A standout scene waits near the beginning and illuminates the Converse’s ability to pull the reader into the story: Frances’s second time on a ship was a voyage around the globe. Three days out she, “met her first challenge at sea.” Captain Barkley sent Frances to her cabin and told her they were in for some “very bad weather. Very quickly the seas steepened, and the wind howled, causing the ship to groan and screech. Together with the clanking of the chain pumps, it all made for a thunderous timbre that was deafening. Our grand ship suddenly seemed so small set against the breadth and ferocity of the ocean.”

Cathy Converse is a best-selling author who has been writing for over thirty years. She has authored, co-authored, and co-edited seven books, many magazine cover stories, academic journal articles, and technical manuals. Her book, Following the Curve of Time: The Legendary M. Wylie Blanchet, was shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes’ Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award in 2009, and Against the Current received an Honourable Mention for the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing. Cathy is a former chair of social sciences, a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, and a founder of the women’s studies curriculum and ancillary programs at Camosun College.

The book is a part of the Amazing Stories collection. According to the Heritage House website, the series consist of “interesting books on hundreds of different topics.” The quick tales are “about animals, gold hunters, historical figures, lawmakers, shipwrecks, true crime, Canadian history, and many other subjects” and they’re accessible writing means suitability for any adult reader but also middle-grade and school use.

Besides North America’s west coast, the book details the Barkley’s other aptly categorized amazing adventures around the globe. Though, these could be better described as misadventures. Heartbreak, and not luck, were the norm for the Barkleys. So, while the book reads like fiction, the story possesses the realities of true life. Don’t expect a happy ending.

The maps and historical drawings in the book help give context to where the couple travelled. They most important map, the one showing the Barkley’s two voyages, is dedicated its own page and read by flipping the book 90 degrees. Unless you’re equipped with a magnifying glass, you might find it difficult to decipher the other maps. My only minor criticism for the book is that these maps could have been larger to aid in the geographical understanding of the voyages.

Before leaving the west coast of North America, Captain Barkley made a crude map of Barkley Sound. The map shows a safe anchorage, a useful tidbit for any mariner. As that information was useful to the sailor so is this review to the reader. If you’re looking for safe harbour for your hard-earned booty, Cathy Converse’s Frances Barkley Eighteenth-century Seafarer is a solid choice.

Shanon Sinn is a nonfiction and fiction writer and the author of the BC and Amazon bestseller, The Haunting of Vancouver Island. The book became an instant classic when it was first published in 2017. Sinn is currently working on a sequel to The Haunting of Vancouver Island that will navigate beyond dry land and into ocean-based ghost stories, folklore, and “sealore” of the BC coast.

We emailed him a couple weeks before Halloween in hopes of getting an interview. As the Island’s ghost guy, Shanon is busy this time of year and was kind enough to spare a moment to chat.

When we spoke, Sinn was working on a presentation for an Island-based historical society. That presentation, suitably, was about the history of Halloween on Vancouver Island. Here he is discussing that story:

Shanon: I have clippings from digitized newspapers starting from around 1864. In them Halloween is mentioned as, “people from Scotland will remember the old holiday back home.” Halloween starts appearing more often towards 1888.

It was clearly a cultural holiday. It’s Scottish and Irish, and there were so many Scots on the Island. Over time, Halloween started to become mainstream, like everybody celebrating it, not just the Scottish people. Then it started to take on some of the characteristics we recognize today.

The old stuff, that was more about pranks and apples—apples were pretty big. Candy was not really a thing. It was pretty late, around 1950, where you started seeing ads with candies with actual images of Halloween on them.

It’s interesting how it evolved. What we’ve got going on today is pretty extreme compared to how it started.

Dave: When did you start to notice the holiday become more commercialized?

Shanon: It happened gradually. In 1884 there are concerts starting to happen. And by 1888, people are being warned about their gates because people would steal gates or move them. That was a huge prank. There were some great articles in Nanaimo’s newspaper about it.

Between 1890 and 1899 was the era of pranks. [Pranksters] would tie a secondary rope to the church bell, hide, and then start to ring the church bell. Of course, people would think it was a ghost until they figured it out.

From 1900 to 1908 socials and concerts became more common throughout B.C. The ads in 1902 and 1903 for men’s clothing had Jack O’ Lanterns with top hats on them. Or whatever they called them at the time, fedoras. (They weren’t quite like the old Victorian top hats.) There are a couple of more ads in the early 1900s listing apples or postcards for sale, and stationery and stuff.

1909 was the first Halloween feature I found that was almost a full page with images of witches and all that stuff plus more clothing ads. In 1919, there was a Halloween Chiclet gum ad. It’s interesting because it says, after the party, after people have eaten their apples, and after people have socialized, pull out Chiclets. So, it’s clear there wasn’t a bunch of candy before this moment. Because it’s only an after-the-event thing they are trying to promote.

In the 1930s, there are Halloween movie ads in the Province newspaper for Dracula and Frankenstein. During the Second World War, they talk about candies not being plentiful. I looked into the back story of that, and it was the sugar rationing that was going on. Around 1948, the newspapers start to show more photographs of children in costumes.

There was a lot of cultural insensitivity, as well. For example, a 1950 clipping from Vancouver Sun talked about having a “Halloween hobo party.” It shows kids dressed up as people experiencing homelessness. It says you can have an open fire and roast stuff—that wouldn’t fly today.

Then in 1955 to 1962 Halloween becomes more commercialized with brand targeting in newspapers across the province. It went from the store itself having an ad to the actual brand. Coca-Cola having a Halloween ad, for example.

I’ve put a lot of work into this presentation. I’ll have 90 images to show them. That’s going to be the bulk of my presentation. But because people expect it, I have a couple of ghost stories to share, as well. Otherwise, people might be disappointed.

Dave: Totally, you’re Vancouver Island’s ghost-story teller in a lot of ways. In research for this interview, I came across previous interviews you’ve done. One of the things that really struck me was how you say ghost stories are teachers of history. I’d like to ask you more about that. What’s the most important revelation in your eyes that you came to understand about Vancouver Island history during the research for your book?

Shanon: Well, that’s a big question. First of all, when I was researching the White Lady of Thetis Cove, which is connected to the Four Mile Inn in Victoria, I found so many historical inaccuracies both on their website and by people writing about its history. That made me stop. It would take me a whole day to do the research for one paragraph, because I had to have the evidence to back up what I was saying.

For example, for the main family that lived there, Peter and Elizabeth Calvert, everyone said they had met on the Norman Morison, which is basically Vancouver Island’s Mayflower. This version of the story is in historical books and is very prevalent. When I looked at the records though, he wasn’t even on that ship, and she was two years old when it arrived.

That chapter set the tone for my book as I had to use sources and say things like, “according to this record,” or “according to this book.” Otherwise, I might not have even written the book this way. So, that was really eye opening. The Victoria area is riddled with these inaccuracies in ghost stories.

The second thing I was going to say about this has to do with the slandering of a man named Richard Johnson. He was an officer of the Black Pioneer Rifles, and they were discriminated against. [Johnson] spoke out against this, so he was an early civil rights advocate for Victoria. The freed slaves here were being treated like garbage. There are records of people throwing stuff at them in the theaters, and it’s just horrible to read.

So, the [Black] community was kind of forced out of Victoria. The Pioneer Rifles were disbanded, and, a few years later, [Johnson] passed away in Metchosin. He was buried at the old cemetery in Victoria.

But the story today has been changed since. He has a pseudo name. They call him Richard “Soap and Suds” Johnson. They say his apparition appears and pretends to cut his own throat. He basically chases white teenagers around. When people tell this story, it’s problematic because he seems to be amped up as scarier because he is non-white.

Also, people never talk about all the civil rights things he was doing and that he was a leader. Plus the suicide didn’t happen because they had the ceremony at the church.  But the fake story is that he killed himself because Victoria disbanded the Pioneer Rifles.

It was really eye opening and I was just like, this isn’t cool. It’s something that really stuck with me. Here, this guy lived this exemplary life and he’s just being slandered, right?

So, it’s kind of like a historical teaching. It seems wild to me there are certain events that happened, that over time would have probably been forgotten, definitely forgotten by the general public. When ghost stories are looked at more critically, it brings up all sorts of issues at the time to do with, you know, what was going on with governance of Indigenous people and non-white people and so on.

Dave: Totally. And yeah, ghost stories seem like a really good example of that happening. I think criminal stories are also a common one, where just because there is a horrendous crime involved, people remember it more. Often the stories get over sensationalized.

That brings me to something I noticed you mention in the Hepburn Stone story you wrote recently. There are writers from early BC, especially B.A. McKelvie, a prolific writer and editor in the early 20th century, that took so many leaps with the truth in his stories.

Shanon: Yeah, definitely. Another big one I’ve come across is D.H. Higgins, who was an early Colonist, editor. He wrote a couple of books like The Mystic Spring and The Passing of a Race. When you look at his stuff, it’s the same thing. He’s twisting details and making these giant leaps. I recently read a book by Peter Johnson that says [Higgins] was pretty much responsible for getting some Hesquiat Indigenous people executed because he made up these stories that they raped a shipwreck victim from the John Bright. It was horrible. Higgins was a big name in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Dave: The power these people had to sway public opinion was tremendous.

Shanon: Especially then when there was only one news source. I find a lot of them did step into the ghost story world too, like B.A. McKenzie and Higgins. Another more modern one is Robin Skelton, who was the founder of UVic’s creative writing program. He’s like super revered but some of the ghost stories he tells, again, the history is completely made up.

When he wrote about Brother XII and about their land, he said it was an Indigenous sacrifice place and that they would do body dumps of slaves there. Super, super racist, and this is the 1970s and 1980s. It’s not even that long ago.

He’s well known for one of his books, A Gathering of Ghosts. It has a chapter in it called “The Indigenous Inheritance.” He actually says that white people are the strong race. The whole chapter is about all these places that are haunted because of Indigenous history.

I’m just like, man, how is this mainstream [narrative] still being accepted today? Like I mentioned before, the problem I have is that some of the people involved in the paranormal community are actual historians, and they’re not challenging this stuff. So, they’re kind of perpetuating these myths that are harmful to whole groups of people. It’s not flattering when Indigenous people are villainized or when a haunting all of a sudden has a made up Indigenous graveyard attached to it or whatever.

Dave: Very interesting. I’m amazed so much can be gleaned from our local ghost stories—good and bad. Unfortunately, that’s about all the time we have today. Thanks so much for speaking with me!

You can read more about Shannon Sinn’s work on his blog. Keep an eye out for his forthcoming Haunting sequel. Vancouverislandhistory.com will be providing updates on its release.

*This story also appears in CV Collective.

Over a century ago, on a Monday in late September, crowds of young and old thronged Vancouver’s sidewalks. Mothers fussed over their children’s hair. Dressed in their Sunday best, onlookers peered over shoulders and jostled for space close to the street for a better view.

A motorcar sputtered by, and the throng hooted, clapped, and waved the Union Jack. From the back seat, a young man in full military dress tipped his hat to the admirers. Here he sat, the great-grandson of Queen Victoria, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, next in line to be king of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire and Emperor of India, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David.

The prince was hurrying to official royal business: he was going dancing. At 25 years old, and on the tail end of a two-month Canada-wide tour in 1919, the eligible bachelor and Great War veteran had no shortage of dance partners and admirers. To date, the dance was the largest gathering in Vancouver’s history, with a guest list of 10,000—one out of every ten residents—who foxtrotted until their feet blistered.

Later in his Canadian trip, he sailed to Victoria and toured Vancouver Island in a single day. On his ride along the E&N Railway, he stopped at every town to give a speech and declare that children had the next day off school (because royals can do that, I guess). 

He spent an entire three hours in “Courtenay and District” and filled those hours with the best offerings from the area, first stopping to throw rocks at salmon off the 5th Street bridge. Just like they had done in his other Canadian stops, nearly every loyal Anglophile lined the streets and waved. In a special visit to Merville, where veterans were clearing the newly established community for settlement, the prince pressed a plunger to blow up 22 stumps. The townspeople then lit a 50-foot-high bonfire to honour him. Besides a few stunned fish (now long departed) the prince left a legacy during his brief visit that lives on today.

According to a local history book, when the prince opened Merville’s brand-new schoolhouse (which builders rushed to finish in two weeks to match up with his arrival), he planted an acacia tree at the bottom of the driveway.

The school no longer stands—it’s been replaced by a simple house—but an intriguing tree remains in the driveway.

Its crown stretches out from a thick main trunk cross-hatched with deep grooves. The thing looks, well, really old. I identified the tree as a black locust. A beekeeper’s favourite, this non-native flowering tree also goes by the name false acacia. The slight misnomer aside, I’m pretty sure this is the royal tree.

Maybe it’s no surprise the royal tree has faded from memory. (Even the homeowner was unaware of its historic roots.) Does the average Islander care that an entitled aristocrat planted a tree over a hundred years ago? Probably not.

What’s more, this particular prince turned out to be not so charming. In January 1936, he became king, but abdicated the throne after less than a year. He believed in the superiority of the British and European cultures, and in 1937, he took a special trip to Nazi Germany, where he drove past crowds of adoring fans—only these ones waved swastikas and gave him the Nazi salute, which he returned. He dined with high-ranking Nazi officials and met in private with Adolf Hitler. The Brits suspected him of devising a plot to overthrow the British Crown and, in 1940, shipped him off to become governor of the Bahamas, where he could not influence the war.

Nowadays, over half of Canadians believe we should get rid of the British Crown as head of state. Barbados did so in 2021; several other Caribbean nations intend to follow suit. Even in the United Kingdom, nearly half of citizens (especially the young) believe the monarchy should be abandoned. 

We could be witnessing the final links in a chain of rulers that stretches back to the ninth century, a dynasty some 600 years older than the modern English language. The black locust in Merville may yet outlast the monarchy that planted it.

The Kus-kus-sum site on the Courtenay River estuary is accustomed to change. As the liaison between ocean and river, estuaries live in constant flux—a ritual of ebbs and floods but also a centuries-meandering as the river forges new pathways through its delta. However, the Kus-kus-sum site hasn’t always existed in an estuary, nor above sea level.

Take a holiday to Vancouver Island 14,000 years ago, and you wouldn’t lack for ice. You’d find yourself shivering on an ice sheet that’s over one kilometer thick in places. This is not a quiet place. Chunks of glacier creak, snap, and splash as they break off into the sea.

Where would you find the Kus-kus-sum site on your visit? Well, that’s difficult to untangle explains Jerome Lesemann. The Vancouver Island University Earth Science Professor completed his PhD on glacial landforms and is interested in reconstructions of ancient environments.

At that time, major ice sheets began to melt across the globe. You can think of the glaciers as big storage containers for water, and as they melt, “the glaciers shrink, and water goes back into the ocean. So, what we tend to see is sea level rising.”

Another effect of ice sheets comes from their weight on the Earth’s crust. “They actually depress it,” says Lesemann. “They basically create these huge divots in the land and regress the crust downward.” Over time, the weight on the crust lessens.

Given these two interacting factors, one raising sea level and the other raising the land, pinpointing the site’s elevation at this time is difficult, but around the Comox Valley, “the total amount of depression was probably roughly 150 meters,” putting the Kus-kus-sum site somewhere underwater.

As the centuries and millennia past, braided glacial rivers roiled and boiled grey blue. They forced sand, gravel, and stone downstream to collect at sea level. As the glaciers receded further, the Kus-kus-sum site emerged from underwater around 8,000 years ago.

The site has looked more or less the same for the last 5,000-6,000 years. Around this time, the North Coast Salish established permanent settlements across their territories.

Visit the Kus-kus-sum site before European settlers arrived, and you might have heard the soft cadence of the Pentlatch River Song rippling along a gentle moving estuary. Richard Hardy is a member of K'ómoks First Nation (KFN) and sings the Pentlatch River Song to me over the phone. He picks up the beat. When the rains come and the river’s flow picks up, so does the song’s timing, explains Hardy, who is also a KFN Councillor. “Even our songs are reflective of that area and the end of that River.”

Today, KFN represents the formerly separate tribes of the Sathloot (‘sath-loot), Sasitla (sa-‘seet-la), Ieeksen (eye-‘ick-sun) and Xa’xe (‘ha-hey) and the culturally similar but distinct Pentlatch. The ancestors of KFN occupied the extent of their territories which supported thousands of people who built a sophisticated and rich culture.

Hardy explains that KFN’s priority is water. “Water is so important. When we look at water from an Indigenous perspective, there’s the spirituality side of things. With water comes all the various animals that we have in our songs and dances. When we start to talk about that connection to water, that’s the importance of the [Kus-kus-sum] site from a KFN perspective.”

The entire estuary surrounding the site was a land of plenty and significant to KFN. “The Kus-kus-sum site was our gathering place for harvesting food,” says Hardy. But also a place where they placed mortuary boxes in trees, “so there’s a spiritual connection there.”

A man named George Mitchell was the first white settler to arrive in the estuary area sometime in the 1850s. He acquired a large waterfront acreage between the present-day location of the K'ómoks First Nation and the Kus-kus-sum site. According to Land of Plenty, A History of the Comox District, he finally pre-empted the land in 1862—a total of 150 acres.

More settlers arrived to pre-empt the best land, a naturally treeless area described by early European explorers as a “prairie,” along the Courtenay and Tsolum Rivers and on the east side of the Kus-kus-sum site. While they did not farm directly on the site, farmers did change the landscape around the estuary in the form of dikes and ditches to control the flow of water.

In the late 19th century, “a number of K'ómoks chiefs finally got the opportunity to meet with different Indigenous commissioners to start finding areas of interest for a reserve,” says Hardy. “That was a priority site for our chiefs at that time. And unfortunately, the property never did come back to K'ómoks.”

The site remained mostly unchanged from its natural state as seen in an aerial photograph in 1931. In 1947, brothers Ron and Roy, and their father, Clarence, started a sawmill on the site of today’s Arden Elementary. By 1949 they had striped the timber from the Kus-kus-sum site on the Courtenay River and established their sawmill there.

Over the following decades, the Fields Sawmill would change hands numerous times. As the operation grew, sawmill owners would thrust new pilings further into the estuary and infill behind the new wall to create more space.

In the 1970s the sawmill owners began to infill the site’s south side and into what’s now called the Hollyhocks marsh. Concerned residents stopped the further incursion into the estuary, and the provincial government purchased the land to become a protected area.

The mill produced lumber for the Japanese market. At one time, it was one of the Comox Valley’s top employers and an integral part of its economy. In the end, the specialization in the Japanese market would be its downfall as other specialty mills could produce the lumber cheaper.

In 2006, the mill shut its doors and the owners, now Interfor, auctioned off the equipment. The site went up for sale in 2008. In subsequent years applications to turn the site into condominiums was put to city council. Ironically, the development around the site saved it from that fate. Variances from the road and the flight path for the Courtenay airpark meant there was little room to build out or up.

Fast forward to September 2022. Where developers had once hoped condominiums would go, an orange Hitachi excavator reaches into a muddy pit and pinches a mud-covered log between its claw and bucket. There’s an odour of fragrant yellow cedar mixed with dingy soil. The site is wet, and the old sawmill’s steel retaining wall holds back the river. The huge machine struggles to pull the old-growth cedar from where it sat lodged in the mud for the last seven decades or so. With a crack and splinter, the former piling breaks free to be added to the pile of other pulled logs.

The logs and other compounding factors have slowed restoration work, explains Caitlin Pierzchalski. She’s a watershed steward, restoration ecologist, and Project Watershed Society’s executive director. Established in 1993, Project Watershed Society and its members are watershed stewards. They purchased the former mill site from Interfor in November 2020 and are holding it in trust for K’ómoks First Nation and the City of Courtenay, who will become joint title owners.

The plan is to restore the site back to natural grading. They determined the natural grading by looking at historical aerial photos and by surveying the Hollyhock Marsh. The marsh is in a natural state and also serves as an example for the types of vegetation they will plant.

The iconic hum of vehicles rolling over the metal grate on the 17th street bridge reverberates over the piles of logs and dirt. But walk into the Hollyhock marsh area, and the noisescape lightens. The thick roots from the many Sitka spruces sprawl along a forest floor that is bare of delicate plants. At times of high water, this area floods. The river flows across the feet of alders, cottonwoods, and Sitka spruce as it has forever. This is what naturally happened at the Kus-kus-sum site as well. One third of the site will be low-lying, while the other two thirds closer to Comox Road will be slightly higher in elevation and either flat or sloping. There are no plans to have a park-like setting or paths. This will be a natural site not made for humans.

The steel wall along the river was built in the late 20th century and replaced the former retaining wall of pilings and boards. Pierzchalski says the wall removal is planned for 2024.

The site will provide climate change mitigation in the carbon catching trees. But also provide salmon habitat and habitat for other animals. The trees they plant on the site will grow and “it will slowly restore itself over the next 20 years,” says Pierzchalski.

For Richard Hardy and KFN the site’s restoration means a circling back and a chance to re-establish their ties to an area that they’ve always maintained as a site of importance. “To me,” says Hardy, “this is a prime example of reconciliation because of the close ties that we had to that area, having it taken away from us, and now, through this particular project, the ability to have it come back to K’ómoks’s hands.”

As the tide rolls in and out of the estuary one more time, this place will begin to take on its old face and look more like it has for the past few millennia. Hopefully, it can live in peace for a few thousand years until the inexorable circles back, and a new ice age renews it again.

Interested in helping out? There are several ways to contribute to the restoration, like sponsoring a salmon, donating a used car, or by e-transferring to donate@projectwatershed.ca. Check out projectwatershed.ca for more information.

In the 1970s, Britain’s rising punk rock scene swept over the country’s rambunctious youth. Wildly popular bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash performed for massive crowds and their influence spread to North America.

A world away in Saanich, BC, Jade Blade, Carmen “Scout” Michaud, and Dale Powers listened to their rambunctious records and soaked in the anti-establishment punk rock ethos. In 1977 the three highschoolers formed a band—the Dishrags were born.

The Dishrags were one of North America’s first all-female punk bands. In a music genre that was already obscure, they were an oddity in the male-dominated punk-rock scene. Jade Blade wailed on the guitar, Carmen “Scout” Michaud beat the drums, while Dale Powers slapped the bass. They all shared vocals.

Some audience members failed to appreciate the all-female trio and even threw beer bottles at the 14- and 15-year-old teens. At some gigs, establishment owners wouldn’t want them to play on the venue drum kits or use the amps because they thought girls would break them.

But the punk scene was mostly positive. They played in what was considered to be Vancouver’s very first punk rock concert at the Japanese Hall. They would continue to perform in Vancouver the following year (while still attending high school) and in 1979 opened for a band they had only two years earlier admired from afar.

In January 1979 they opened for the Clash at the Commodore Ballroom. After that show the Clash invited them to open again at their next stop in Seattle.

The band began with covers then moved into writing their own songs and worked with Modern Records out of Seattle. They released two 3-track Eps: Past is Past in 1979, and Death in the Family in 1980.

The band disbanded in 1980 for reasons known only fully to the band members. Fast forward to 1997 and they re-released all of their original recordings in an album called Love/Hate.

In 2010 the old band got back together. The documentary “Bloodied but Unbowed” spotlighted them, and in the same year they toured Japan with the Pointed Sticks.

Their legacy lives on in today’s rebellious punk youth. The group trailblazed for both the punk scene in BC and female punks. Today, women dressed in punk attire are sometimes referred to as dishrags.

Interview with the Dishrags in 2010:

Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2022
$24.95  /  9781774390511

This review was also published in the British Columbia Review

Kathryn Willcock’s rustic childhood summers spent in a remote British Columbia logging camp “with endless forests, a rugged coastline, and not much else,” provide the staple ingredients for this memoir’s humorous and candid collection of stories, even if far away from civilization.

Told partly through the perspective of an adult looking back through a child’s eyes, Up The Coast delves into a child’s life in a logging camp, compares rural living with the glamour of American yachts en route to Alaska, details loggers’ relationship with an unforgiving landscape, illustrates one family’s struggle to make ends meet, and lots more.

As Willcock provides no explicit mention of what she hopes readers will take from the book, a reader could take the small snippet in the front matter as a clue to her aspirations: “My father’s logging camp was situated on the shores of one the most spectacular fjords in the world. I loved going there for the freedom and the beauty and sitting around the kitchen table at night with my family, telling stories by the light of a kerosene lamp.” You may find, as I did, the memoir seems a place for Willcock to gather folklores — from the family and community — largely in the form of rhozzums, short humorous tales, often about local characters.

No mention of previously published work adorns her rather short profile on the publisher’s website, which may surprise you — the prose breathes with confidence. While understanding an artist can be important for gaining insight into the work, you can be content to let this memoir do the talking. And it speaks well.

To establish the setting, a short first chapter features eight-year-old Willcock flying into camp. After which, the family saga begins with her father, John Willcock, arriving decades earlier to the same fjord, the waterfall-clad Bute Inlet which thrusts 75 km into the mainland northeast of Campbell River. In 1935 the fourteen-year-old North Bay, Ontario, emigrant landed alone, carrying only a desire to get hired on in a logging camp.

Chapters Two to Four detail how John Willcock eventually started his own logging outfit, met Kathryn’s mother, and stared a family. In Chapter Five and succeeding chapters, Kathryn and her two sisters, along with the other loggers’ children, were set loose to play “in an area now considered one of the best places on earth for viewing grizzlies.”

This setting is ripe for compelling stories, and Willcock knows how to make the most of it by putting storytelling first, as opposed to exact factual account. Being exact, she says, “would have left the reader feeling as if they were listening to someone recount amusing tales about every cat they had owned.”

Each of the book’s ten chapters contain collections of stories themed around the chapter’s title, and each story within those collections varies in length from two to six pages. Not counting the initial in media res beginning, the stories arrive chronologically, and the book is best enjoyed cover to cover.

Favourite characters from previous chapters reappear throughout. Like Dave who was a drunk but a good camp cook (a rare thing), so they kept him around — even though he guzzled all the vanilla extract. And Charlie Joe who “always had tales to tell and plenty of advice to hand out. After all (he maintained) he was one hundred and eight years old and he knew a thing or two. One of his favourite stories was about the time he saw Christopher Columbus sailing through the Yucultas.”

The first three quarters of the book offers light-hearted stories full of straight-talking humour. Throughout Willcock uses jokes that surprise the reader at the end of sentences, for example: “At low tide, we ran and cartwheeled on the vast expanse of sand fanning out from the mouth of the river, built roadways and spillways, and chased each other with dead salmon.”

These funny moments may make you wonder why the book’s blurb failed to mention the humour. In fact, my only quibble with the book is not the book’s contents, but the back cover. To be fair, the book is about a lot of things, and adequately capturing the work’s essence in a cover blurb is no easy task. Still, the promise of stories that “pour off the page like warm syrup on a stack of cookhouse hotcakes” seems disconnected and toned down from the stories’ oddball spirit. Especially when they feature images that are striking and somewhat zany: banana slugs on toothbrushes, cats eating chihuahuas, and drying starfish in an oven (with pungent consequences).

The memoir’s final quarter (or less) is where the harder-hitting stories live. These stories are about murder, drownings, gangsters, and candid moments with her father, who developed deafness in his later years: “Dad became socially awkward and, frankly, an embarrassment to me and my sisters.” Here, the laughs tastefully fade away to let the reader soak in morality and some of life’s unfortunate realities.

Is this book worth the purchase? Absolutely. Yes, it’s another memoir about logging in BC, but the reader is skilfully guided with humour. The ability to write humour well is a rare skill, and if you were humming and hawing over whether you want to read this memoir or another coastal memoir, this book would be the clear choice.

1.      Evelyn Penrose

Evelyn Penrose possessed a special gift. From a young age, her father had taught her how to divine water. She could find aquifers without the use of divining rods and even estimate the depth of water with accuracy.

From her home in Cornwall, she took her water finding skills around the world. In the 1930s she visited the Okanagan where she found water for orchards. She traveled to California to divine for oil. The signal for oil was so strong it made her sick.

She eventually made her way to Vancouver Island where she not only found water but could find minerals by pointing at a map. In her autobiography, Adventure Unlimited: A Water Diviner Travels the World she claimed to be able to locate almost anything, including illness in the body and wanted criminals.

You can read more about her here.

2.      Frances Macnab

When journalist Frances Macnab arrived in Victoria harbour aboard the Empress of Japan in 1897, the evening light set the harbour in a serene calm. The scene transfixed her. She thought to herself, “What a heavenly spot to live in!”

Once she landed and met the locals, however, her opinion changed: “With Vancouver Island itself I was greatly disappointed, though many people tried to persuade me of its advantages.”

The Englishwoman traveled to BC across the continent on the CPR railway to gather information for her 369-page book entitled British Columbia for Settlers: Its Mines, Trade and Agriculture. As one of few female journalists in the British Empire, she had written similar books in other locations. She possessed amazing recall and a writer’s eye for detail.

Land speculation, it seems, stood near the top of her list of reasons for not liking the Island. She stated speculators “only intended to screw as high a price as possible out of the purchaser, but their influence in the Government was sufficiently strong.” (Some things don’t change.)

The drinking water situation in Victoria has improved now, but when Macnab visited, she called it “a disgrace and a constant menace to health.” Water was in abundance, but she claimed, “only the energy and enterprise is lacking to bring this much-needed blessing into Victoria.”

She lamented the poor roads and other infrastructure, including bridges that were “known to be unsafe, and only one vehicle at a time is allowed upon them, and that at a foot pace.” When an old-timer told her Victoria was the “London of the Pacific,” she “marvelled that no rumours of the existence of San Francisco had reached him.”

Macnab would continue by steamer to Port Alberni to examine the gold mines there and Nanaimo to the coal mines. After Nanaimo she took a canoe ride to Cowichan with two Indigenous guides. The two men “accidently” guided their canoe onto rocks and claimed she would have to pay more for them to continue. She was having non of it. The world traveler was accustomed to these types of schemes and held firm until they finally brought her to her destination. Despite this she thoroughly enjoyed the canoe trip and seeing the Island’s natural beauty.

3.      Norah Drummond Davis

Artist Norah Drummond Davis, famous for her scenes of wildlife around the Banff area, arrived on the Island with her two Airedale dogs between the two world wars. She lived in a small cabin in Sydney, and her two dogs pulled a cart full of paints and brushes around town. When these dogs got too old, she shot them. Then got two more to take their place.

4.      Agnes Deans Cameron

Born in 1863 in Victoria, Agnes Deans Cameron was the kind of teacher children feared but respected. She became a teacher at 18 years old and trained in Comox and Vancouver before returning to Victoria four years later, eventually becoming the first-ever female principle at South Park School.

Quick to the whip, she thrashed disobedient children. When one rebellious student complained to his father about a particularly bad beating, she doubled down in a letter to the editor in the local rag about the incident. “I whipped him severely,” she said. “Just as severely as I possibly could.” Despite this, many students said she was a great teacher.

She held firm to her beliefs. Eventually, she lost her job over defending children accused of cheating on an exam. After which she became a freelance journalist and traveled to Chicago to report on America’s industrial success. Two years later, she became the first non-Indigenous woman to travel up the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean. There she met with the Inuit and found them marvellous. She condemned the racism of the settler society and any thoughts of superiority. Back in Victoria in 1912 she fell ill with appendicitis and died after a few days after the operation.

You can read more about her here.

5.      Hannah Maynard

Born in England Hannah Maynard immigrated to Canada with her husband, Richard in 1852. In 1858 Richard struck gold on the Fraser River, and the couple moved to Victoria in what was then the Colony of Vancouver Island.

Hannah Maynard used her photo-taking skills around town. Throughout her career, she photographed almost every resident in the city, from street vendors to the Lady Douglas, Governor Douglas’s wife, and became recognized throughout Canada for her work which she displayed in her studio downtown.

She eventually taught her husband the trade and he became a famous landscape photographer as well. Photography in the 19th century took time and patience. She was one of the first to use back lighting from angles. In photo development, Maynard would play with multiple exposures and overlap photos to create surrealist art that was far ahead of the time. After the death of her child her art became more abstract.

In her later years she was the official photographer for the Victoria Police Department. She died in 1918 and was buried at the Ross Bay Cemetery.

6.      Mary Ann Croft

When the Discovery Island lighthouse keeper became too ill to continue with his duties in 1899, the federal government scrambled to find a replacement. The answer to their problems, however, was already solved. The keeper’s daughter, Mary Ann Croft had been performing his duties for years.

With these unofficial years in account, she is thought to be Canada’s first female lighthouse keeper. She would continue to keep the lighthouse at Discovery Island for 30 years, and in that time life’s events passed while her family lived a secluded existence on the craggy and broken islets off the coast from Oak Bay.

She raised and supported two daughters. Her husband was, according to one of her superiors, “worthless in sorry sense of the word,” and spent time in hospital. In 1919, and thinking about retirement, she enquired into what her pension would be in a letter to Ottawa:

“This is the case shortly put, as I do not believe in long and tedious stories. I think that after 23 years’ service in such employment as the Lighthouse Branch, a person is due for some rest and something to make that rest free from worry for whatever few years that may be left.”

“I could make an appeal a mile long about the desolate situation of the Lighthouse Keeper in bad and stormy weather, but you know the coast, and you know the circumstances as well as I can tell you, if indeed not a good deal better.”

“I hope you will be able to convince those warmly housed gentlemen at Ottawa that when 23 years are taken out of a woman’s life in a lighthouse, she is about due for a recognized and guaranteed rest.”

The reply came with a denial of any pension. She was forced to work until she couldn’t handle the duties at age 67. She did receive a medal and eventually a small pension and could look at the lighthouse from her residence in Victoria. Three years later she died.

7.      Phyllis Munday

Back in the days when some of the mainland’s coastal mountains remained unmapped, Phyllis Munday and her husband hiked Mount Arrowsmith on Vancouver Island. From the top they spied a mountain thrusting beyond the others across the Salish sea. They dubbed the mountain Mystery Mountain.

They explored the area at the head of Bute Inlet and bushwacked up to a glacier. Mystery mountain would not give its peak so easily, and after a few attempts, getting within 60 feet of the summit, they were forced to turn around.

This didn’t matter to Munday. She wasn’t a peak-bagger. She was in it for the journey and was happy just exploring the area of what would become BC’s tallest peak—Mt Waddington. “We didn’t go into the Waddington country just to climb one mountain and run out and leave it,” she wrote. “We went into the Wadington country to find out all we possibly could about glaciers and mountains and nature and everything about the particular area—completely unknown before we went into it—so that we could bring out the information for the interest of other people as well as ourselves.”

Munday began climbing mountains in North Vancouver at 16 years old. She met her husband while in the mountains and took their newborn child into the mountains as soon as she could hold her head up. With over 200 peaks climbed in her lifetime, Munday still wanted more when arthritis forced her to stop. In her eighties she still did lots of walking—just not in mountains anymore. She died in 1990.

8.      Gilean Douglas

Similar to the more famous Cougar Annie, pioneer and writer, Gilean Douglas, was born in 1900. When her father died in 1916, she received a handsome inheritance. Three years later she worked as a reporter for the Toronto Star. She had relationships with several men at the same time. In 1921 she married her first husband, Slim, who took her last name, at her insistence.

The relationship didn’t last, Slim disappeared, and she assumed he was dead. When she married another man again in 1929, Slim reappeared and they started back up again only for both men to leave her a short time later. A few years passed, and she met another man. They moved into a remote cabin near Hope, BC where she authored Silence is my Homeland, an award-winning book. In 1947 her cabin caught fire and her life was uprooted.

She eventually moved to Cortes Island where she spent the final forty years of her life. She became widely known on Vancouver Island for her column in the Victoria Times Colonist. She would continue to publish ten books of poetry and prose. In 1993, two days after publishing her last book, she died at home.

9.      Rosemary Neering

Much of the research for this article was done with my copy of Wild West Women written by Rosemary Neering. Neering was born in England in 1945 and has spent over thirty years in British Columbia. Her impressive list of publications includes over forty titles, many of which are award winning (including Wild West Women). She writes non-fiction for all ages with a focus on history and exploring the lives of ordinary people. She’s been a freelance writer since 1981 and lives in Victoria. You can read her work here.

Know of other notable yet obscure women we should have included? Please tell us in the comments below!

This story also appears in Compass Magazine.

When Quentin Smith pointed the nose of a Cessna 172 towards the notorious Savary Island airstrip, he barely had 20 hours of flying time recorded in his training log. At only 700 meters long, the Savary airstrip would have made any pilot’s palms sweaty, not to mention the other challenges the sandy runway supplied. The dry sand could nosewheel an aircraft; dense salal grew right up to the edge, concealing skittish deer; and maintenance was almost unheard of.

From the passenger seat, his father, Daryl Smith, guided him through the necessary maneuvers for a smooth landing. The plane bumped and jerked down the yellow strip, and the wheels came to a rest before the brushy terminus. A few years later, news came that surprised no one—the airstrip would be shuttered for safety reasons.

This particular memory sticks out for Quentin Smith because his father “didn’t have a lot of time for personal flying,” he says in a phone conversation. “He was working hard, and we didn’t see him that often.”

Before jumping into a pilot’s seat, a young Daryl Smith jammed gears into cranky truck transmissions. He hauled brimming loads of old-growth Doug fir down muddy, vertigo-inducing plunges that could hardly be deemed roads.

Perhaps that thrill failed to sustain his lust for adventure because he left old-growth logging on BC’s mountains for a career threading a plane between them. In 1964, after two months of training, Tyee Air hired him to fly freight and his former co-workers in and out of logging camps.

Ever restless, the new pilot struck out on his own five months later. He and a pilot friend bought Wilderness Airlines, a one floatplane airline out of Bella Coola. By 1967, the pair added four more planes to their fleet.

With that success, Daryl Smith moved on to start another bush piloting company. Shortly thereafter he sold that one, worked as an employed pilot for a time, and finally in 1975 started yet another company in partnership with a different friend. Powell Air employed seven pilots and had six planes in the hanger.

Change came yet again in 1984 when Powell Air merged with Air BC to become Pacific Coastal Airlines. Eventually, that bush plane company grew to be BC’s small-town connector. Before Pacific Coastal operated dozens of planes and flew out of 17 airports, a young Quentin Smith got more involved in a business that was just starting to provide wheel plane service with one aircraft from Port Hardy and Bella Bella to Vancouver.

Quentin Smith joined in 1988, a year after his brother, Sheldon Smith. The brothers did whatever jobs needed to be done, he says. “We took reservations. We did the check in. We did the bag loading.” One day, after over a decade helping to build the family business, Quentin Smith received a call from his father who told him, “I’m going to make an announcement that I want to read to you.”

He learned that with a new millennium, change would come to the helm of Pacific Coastal. Daryl Smith stepped into the semi-retirement CEO role, appointing Quentin Smith as the company’s new president and operator of the day to day. Twenty years later Quentin says he’s not driven by titles and takes the example from his father: “it’s more about everyone just doing what has to be done.”

Covid provided exceptional challenges for airlines around the world, Pacific Coastal included, and, in their 35th year of operation, Quentin Smith is focused on bringing their traffic back to pre-pandemic levels. In the longer term he sees himself stepping back as president and into a semi-retired CEO role like his father did, joking, “I want to work 24/7: 24 hours a week, seven months a year.” Decades later perhaps he still remembers his father’s guidance for a smooth landing.

Harbour Publishing
ISBN: 9781550179262
Paperback / softback
5.5 in x 8.5 in - 256 pp
Publication Date: 05/03/2022

This review was also published in the British Columbia Review.

Flip over a copy of One Inch from Disaster and you’ll see a picture of a shirtless Kelly Randall (Zeus) Ricketts glancing back at the camera, biceps flexed, wielding a nail gun. While not your typical author photo, it does much to set the tone for this rambunctious memoir set in British Columbia.

The collection of 44 stories in this 256-page paperback evolved from “The Club,” a long-standing story-telling custom between the wolfdog-owning Ricketts and his nine children who would listen to his life stories at bedtime.

The blurb on the back jacket explains how Ricketts “has tried his hand at an astonishing array of occupations, from logging to mining to wrangling horses to performing country music.” He’s a self-proclaimed “enthusiastic bear hunter” and was a boxer and boxing coach spanning four decades. These occupations and hobbies, mixed with Ricketts’s personality, provide a lively source for stories.

The shortest story is just two pages long and the average just over five, and they all stand alone — the order you read them in has no effect on understanding any of the others.

In the introduction, Ricketts says he hopes these stories “will bring you entertainment and enlightenment, and possibly even a sense of confederacy on things you too may have experienced.”

Does he succeed in providing these three aspects: entertainment, enlightenment, and confederacy? I’ll get to that. But first, I want to address Ricketts as a character, because as with most stories, the strength of the main character has the greatest influence on whether you’re going to enjoy it.

While glimpses of humility and “wry self deprecation” as promised in the book’s description pop up here and there, almost all of Rickett’s stories feature what I perceived as a heavy dose of embellishment that invariably casts him as the hero, star, or champion.

For example, after a serious logging accident in “One Load to Go” a doctor told Ricketts that the trauma he suffered “would have killed almost anyone else who had been through a similar accident” and in “Jump or Die” a coast guard told Ricketts that his “thirty-two hectares of waterfront was the most beautiful place on the whole west coast of British Columbia.”

To be sure, this braggadocio is part of his charm — he does things his own way. Modesty though? Nope. You may want to take it with a grain of salt.

Do the stories entertain? While there is a comfort in the familiarity, you’ve likely heard similar tales of adventures and mishaps before (probably over beers). That said, there are moments of deeper storytelling that this reader finds compelling like “The Flying Apple Crate” where a young Ricketts imagined flying away from his childhood problems on his homemade airplane. For the most part, however, the memoir lacks a desire to dig at deeper, universal understanding and is more about glimpsing harrowing moments without much insight or reflection.

This is especially true with the collection’s first story entitled “Cry Wolf,” a hunting story where Ricketts finds himself deep in the forest and surround by a pack of growling and yipping wolves. “Any moment,” writes Ricketts, “I expected to see the timber release the pack of demons with slashing fangs ready to rip and tear the flesh from my still-living carcass. The terror I felt, in an instant, turned to anger mixed with fear. I screamed at the unseen horde, ‘Come and get me! I’ll kill you all!’”

Any enlightenment you might glean from these pages could take both meanings of the word. The first meaning contains a sense of giving greater knowledge about a subject or situation. In this sense you will sample Ricketts’s varied and interesting occupations and hobbies in locations across the province and may gain some insight into how some folks eek out a living and spend their free time here.

The other meaning of the word contains a sense of providing spiritual knowledge or insight. As a devote Christian, Ricketts provides a small dose of this as well. For example, in the story “Miracle Baby” he writes, “I laid my hands on her little head and pleaded that our Heavenly Father would give our baby back to us, by the power of the holy priesthood and in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Would some find a sense of confederacy, that is, be in a league of common experience with him in these pages? I have fished some of the same rivers, visited some of the same places, and had comparable close calls to Ricketts (though in different decades), so I can speak for myself, anyways.

My sense varied. In stories like “Man, That’s Got to Hurt” Ricketts repeatedly put himself in the path of a stubborn wind fallen tree he was pulling off the road with a truck, and I thought “what was he thinking?” To be fair he does admit when he made mistakes: “My stubbornness has been a great help to me in overcoming some difficult challenges, but sometimes it can also be my downfall.” Other times I recognized where I’d made similar blunders or had the same self-doubts. For anyone else who has outdoor hobbies and works blue collar jobs, you may find the same.

The memoir’s macho content means the audience is decidedly male. The short, straightforward stories would appeal to the casual reader or someone with a couple of minutes to spare away from a device. Tourists or others unfamiliar with the West Coast would find it an escape into rural life in BC. Maybe it sits on the coffee table or in the bathroom at an Airbnb. This book could also be nostalgic for those who grew up in BC around the same time as Ricketts, or anyone looking for a light read.

Does this sound like you or someone you know? Great. Buy it. If you’re looking for a deeper read rife with metaphors and subtleties, you might want to look elsewhere.

But other phenomena have slipped our memories…

1. The Time the Island Burned Tip to Tip

Rain-drenched Islanders may be surprised to learn that droughts are somewhat common on Vancouver Island. Since the 1500s, 21 severe droughts have occurred in this rainforest.

With drought comes fire. Devastating fires occur every 150­­­–350 years. These fires burn huge swaths of land. In 1668 a fire consumed most of the timber between Comox and Campbell River (and again in that area more famously in 1938). Over the 100-year period from 1550–1650, practically the entire island burned tip to tip.

Part of the reason Doug fir flourishes here is their thick bark. On old growth trees it can be nine inches thick—too thick for fire to penetrate. The tree’s canopy is also too high for flames to reach. Since Doug fir is shade intolerant it proliferates after other species are razed by fire.

You can still see charred bark on old growth trees today from ancient fires. Next time you’re in Cathedral Grove, at Miracle Beach Provincial Park, or anywhere else with old growth Doug fir, look closely and you’ll see the charred evidence of these destructive events.

2. The Other Big One

Indigenous communities’ oral histories from up and down the BC coast all feature a similar story—a great shaking followed by a great flood.

At 9 o’clock in the evening on Tuesday, January 26, in the year 1700, the big one hit. On this frigid night the earth shook for hours.

People became sick from the constant movement, homes collapsed, and the mountaintops slid into valley bottoms. In tsunami zones, a giant wave swept villages into the sea and wiped out everything 20 meters above sea level.

Anyone who was caught in the water and managed to survive faced sub-zero temperatures.

Big earthquakes like this happen every 300 years or so…

3. Ucluelet Tornado

The west coast of Vancouver Island isn’t the first place you’d expect a tornado, but on March 7, 1966, a tornado ripped through the seaside town of Ucluelet.

The 200 km/hr winds came as a shock to residents as a two-car garage was hurtled into the ocean. Roofs on several buildings were peeled off, boats capsized, and a metal spike embedded itself into a blackboard at a school being attended by students.

The wind knocked out the power, and that night a snowstorm hit Hwy 4. Nobody could reach or leave the town. Even though it caught the town by surprise, no deaths were reported.

4. Falling Stars

On September 5, 1908, fourteen-year-old Willie McKinnon barely escaped death. According to a story entitled “Message from Mars” in the Cowichan Leader, a meteorite struck the ground eight feet from where he stood.

As the chunk of rock plummeted to earth, he had been working in the garden. He heard a rumbling but had assumed it was a train. The meteor strike sent rocks flying and caused a mini earthquake. The teen rushed into the house.

His parents came outside, and there lodged in a crater appeared to be an ordinary boulder about ten inches in diameter, except it was so hot they couldn’t touch it.

The smoking meteor was smooth as a marble except for strange, deeply scored markings. The father thought it looked like hieroglyphics—a message from mars.

5. Port Alice Landslide

In 1975 the entire community of Port Alice (a population of 1500 then) loaded onto buses and were evacuated as the mountain perched next to town let loose mud, rocks, and trees.

250mm of rain had fallen in the previous 24 hours and it showed no sign of slowing down. The creeks became thick mudslides and cut off the mill where a skeleton crew fought to save the town’s single major employer from destruction.

The mayor called the scene a “disaster area” as mud came against the homes built high on the hills. Only two years earlier a similar but less destructive landslide prompted the town to construct berms, but these were quickly overrun. Despite extensive damage, nobody was killed in either of the slides.

Today Port Alice has a new series of berms to protect the town. Landslides remain one of the town’s top threats.

Know of other Natural Disasters on the Island not mentioned here? Share in the comments.