Lost Shoe Creek meets the ocean at Florencia Bay.

4. The Fortune Seekers Arrive

TRAVELLING WEST toward the coast on Highway 4, the road twice crosses Lost Shoe Creek as it nears the Ucluelet-Tofino T-junction. This creek starts in the hills north of Ucluelet and, thirteen winding kilometres (eight miles) later, empties into the ocean at Florencia Bay. Not surprisingly, you can often see a shoe or two propped up on one of the bridge railings, left by passersby—a gesture that might amuse W.E. Sutton, were he here today. The creek got its name in a very literal way when Sutton passed by in February 1903, en route to visit his brother’s mining claim. Sutton fought valiantly to wrench his way through the wall of salal to get to the beach at Florencia Bay, finally deducing that it was more effective to roll over the barrier than struggle within it.

Successful as that technique might have been, he promptly lost a shoe while fording the creek that spilled out onto the beach. As he later stated matter-of-factly in a lecture in Victoria, “I named it Lost Shoe Creek because I lost my shoe there.”

I think of Sutton whenever I visit this creek where it meets the Florencia Bay sands. I also wonder if he would recognize the place and the forest that surrounds it, for much has changed in the century since he waded here. Today, Lost Shoe Creek could be aptly named Lost Salmon Creek, as a walk along its lower section reveals.

In the late 1960s, when the federal and provincial governments were negotiating to have land put aside for a national park, Western Forest Products, which held tenure in much of the Crown forests at the time, began “highgrading” near the creek. They cut wide swathes of forest but removed only the most lucrative trees. The rest were left on the ground. Before the boundaries of the park reserve were finally agreed on in 1970, more than 26 percent of the land in what is now the Long Beach Unit of the reserve had been clear-cut in this way, including much of the land around Lost Shoe Creek.

The area was later replanted at one go, but the tree seedlings were never thinned. (Moreover, much of it was replanted with Douglas fir, a species that grows well on drier parts of the island but not on the wet west coast.) The result: a forest of even-aged, crowded, spindly trees. So dense is the growth that little light can reach the forest floor. Where a plush, three-dimensional understory would be found in a healthy rainforest, here is a comparative desert.

As if the cut-and-run madness wasn’t injury enough, the removal of trees right up to the creek’s banks in some sections both destroyed streamside (riparian) habitat and clogged the creek with post-pillage debris. In the coastal forest, riparian vegetation is critical to a healthy stream and its salmon runs. Conifers and shrubs such as salal and huckleberries shade streams, regulating their temperature for salmon and other species. The plants’ roots stabilize stream banks, minimizing erosion and siltation. Their bark, leaves, needles, and berries rain into the streams, feeding insects, which in turn feed the salmon.

After the logging, Lost Shoe Creek, and Sandhill Creek up at Long Beach, were left an ecological mess.

Fortunately, there’s now hope of righting the condition of the creek and its adjoining lands. Today, more than forty years since the damage was done, the Kennedy Watershed Restoration Project is making progress in restoring the hydrological, biological, and ecological integrity of Lost Shoe Creek and other watercourses in the area. By removing the choking debris and thinning stands so that sunlight can once again reach down to the photon-starved earth, crews are restoring the ecosystem to the way it was when W.E. Sutton tumbled over the salal and made his way down to the mouth of the creek.

This quick grab for trees before the land was locked up in a national park was an echo of an earlier time at Lost Shoe Creek, when men were also trying to make a buck from the region’s resources.

Gold!

Klih-wi-tu-a was the first to find what so many men were scouring Vancouver Island’s western shores for. It was the summer of 1899, and steamships chugging up and down the coast were a regular sight, smoke trailing from their stacks. The steamers ran a scheduled service out of Victoria, delivering passengers to an array of new settlements springing up: trading posts at Ucluelet and Clayoquot, a sawmill in Ucluelet Harbour, a Catholic mission at Hesquiat, scattered pre-emptions here and there, and hotels at Clayoquot and the head of the Bear (Bedwell) River.

The fur seal trade and missionary work brought many newcomers, but the big pull at the end of the nineteenth century was prospecting, with waves of men arriving to seek their fortune in the rocks of Vancouver Island. Almost any mineral in quantity piqued interest, but “Tyee Jack,” the English name given to Klih-wi-tu-a, started the area’s first major gold rush when he spotted sparkles in the sand at Florencia Bay.

Tyee Jack wasn’t alone the day he discovered gold. He was helping Carl “Cap” Binns deliver the mail from Ucluelet to Clayoquot. It’s not clear whether Jack already knew there was gold to be found on the beach and just happened to spot some and point it out to Binns that day or whether this was indeed a discovery for both men.

Either way, the result was the same in a part of the world still in the grips of a forty-year bout of gold fever. Ever since gold had been discovered on the Fraser River in 1858 and soon after in the Cariboo, the west coast’s main port, Victoria, had been inundated periodically with men arriving, outfitting themselves, and heading out to the gold fields. By the late 1890s, they were flooding into Victoria anew on their way to the latest El Dorado, the gold fields of the Yukon.

At the time of Jack’s discovery near Long Beach, the area had few non-native settlers. The 1898 voters list for Ucluelet, for example, had only thirteen men on it: six farmers, two butchers, one carpenter, two lumbermen, one missionary, and one gardener. In no time, however, Jack and Binns’s news had ignited a small boom.

Binns had arrived on the coast in 1895 with William Thompson after the pair sailed from Ireland on the Lucipara. They rowed into Ucluelet harbour, and family lore has it that Binns disembarked in a foxtail coat and silk shirt. If so, he was wildly overdressed for his wild new home. He and Thompson started a small trading post together and each established a homestead.

Discovering gold handed Binns a new profession. Along with Thompson and a few others, he quickly formed the Ucluelet Placer Mining Company, and the group hightailed it back out along the rough trail to Florencia Bay. (Apparently, Binns graciously included a portion in the claim for his co-discoverer, but subsequent mentions of Tyee Jack are few.) Officially first on the scene, they hammered a stake into the ground with a notice of intent to file a claim. Sorting out the paperwork in Victoria would come later.

Binns and his partners weren’t alone on the beach for long. With the regular comings and goings of coastal steamers, glittering secrets were impossible to keep. In a matter of weeks, the Victoria British Colonist newspaper was shouting “Gold!” for all to hear. On July 13, 1899, it reported:

While all the world has been looking to the Klondike, Cape Nome, Galovin Bay and other equally remote and inhospitable corners of the globe for gold, the precious District has, it is said, been waiting to be won at a point on the West Coast of this island, not 100 miles from Victoria by direct line and if reports be true, in quantity sufficient to bring 10,000 miners to the field in half a year.

Early news reports from mining efforts were promising. Mr. McKenzie, a storekeeper from Dodger’s Cove in Barkley Sound, “cleaned up” $9 in a single day “with the crudest possible appliances.” And Joe Drinkwater, who had been sniffing around for gold up in Clayoquot Sound, “took up a pan of sand haphazard and washed it in the presence of an interested group, the return being $2.40.”

Carl Binns and James Sutton were two of the first Wreck Bay gold miners. Like other early miners of the area, they used simple tools initially, including gold pans and rockers, to separate the gold from the sand.

Claims were quickly made and partnerships forged overnight. Captain Hackett, of the fur sealing schooner Libbie, heard of the find while he was in the area looking to sign on a native crew for the upcoming season. Putting that search on the back burner, he headed down to Wreck Bay and there paid $50 for interest in a claim that had been staked only the day before. Soon after, Captain Victor Jacobson of the sealing schooner Minnie and Reverend Swartout of Ucluelet both invested in Hackett’s portion of the claim. And so it went.

That the gold occurred not as nuggets but more like powder introduced a wrinkle the area’s first miners hadn’t counted on. Trying to separate the gold from the sand was frustratingly hard work, like trying to sift pepper from flour. Still, this wasn’t enough to deflate big dreams, and for several months, enthusiasm over the possibilities for Florencia Bay’s lode continued to bubble. Almost daily, the British Colonist reported who was coming and going from the site. Tantalizing bits of information, such as the arrival in Victoria of “San Francisco capitalists” and “black sand experts” kept spirits buoyed. So did the steady reports on the value of the gold sent out from Florencia Bay in steamship vaults: $1,000 on July 14; $900 on July 18; $1,265 on August 12; $1,400 on August 19... Hopes also ran high that new techno-wizardry such as tubular amalgamators and “copper plate gold-savers”—machines that used electrolysis to capture the gold on metal plates—would soon see a serious boost to yields.

LOADS OF LUMBER FOR PANS OF GOLD

When a man finds value in a rock it affects his thinking. He may have seen only two dollars’ worth of gold but he’ll run around looking for twenty thousand to develop it.

–from the novel Florencia Bay, by James McNamee.

Despite reports of some people “cleaning up,” the majority of men working in the area were getting little return for their effort. Part of the difficulty was the lack of fresh water needed for the pans and sluices. Seawater wouldn’t work—it was full of sand and difficult to harness from the waves crashing onto the beach. In the summer of 1900, a group of miners banded together and came up with an ambitious plan. Pooling their resources, they proceeded to build a wooden flume almost a mile long, supported on a wooden trestle, to capture the flow of fresh water coursing down Lost Shoe Creek and carry the water along the length of the beach.

The Wreck Bay flume was an ambitious and expensive attempt to tease gold from the sand at Florencia Bay. At one point, twenty-five men were constructing the flume while another fifteen worked the sluices.

It was a significant project, reportedly costing $10,000, an enormous sum for the time. About 14,000 metres (45,000 feet) of lumber went into the posts and crossbars of the trestle and the long chute-like flume it supported, raised at some points as high as 4.5 metres (15 feet) above the beach. Two bridges also had to be constructed across Lost Shoe Creek: one 24 metres (79 feet) long and the other 46 metres (151 feet) long.

Building the flume structure took ingenuity. Unloading the delivered lumber from steamships offshore at Wreck Bay took nerve.

The miners had to row out to meet the ships. If the seas co-operated, the ship anchored in the entrance to the bay, staying well outside the zone of breaking waves. The miners then manoeuvred their rowboats alongside and scrambled aboard to help bundle and lower the lumber into the water, where they were towed in toward shore. The harder task was to get back through the breakers and onto land without letting the surf turn the lumber bundles into torpedoes that could flip or damage a boat and, worse, injure a man.

In the end, however, the grand installation was no match for the west coast’s conditions. The first blow came in late October, when storm seas and high tides tore away part of the flume. As winter set in, miner after miner retreated, frustrated by the wind and sea undoing a year’s work. The Colonist resumed with enthusiastic missives during the summer of 1901, but the possibility of a big strike at Florencia Bay never again reached the heights it had in 1900. Some men persisted for a few more years, working their claims using less grandiose methods than the flume—they were back to pans and sluice boxes—but most were eventually worn down by the west coast’s weather.

GOLD FEVER LEGACY: MORE SPECULATORS THAN SPECKS

Although the chapter of earnest mining at Florencia Bay was lean and short-lived, its greater, longer-lasting yield was the influx of new settlers. The 1901 census for Ucluelet lists 105 residents, including women and children. Less than 2 years after the discovery at Florencia Bay, a third of that population was involved in gold mining.

In all, about $40,000 worth of gold came off Florencia Bay in those first few years. However, a few ever-hopeful men continued to work their claims with pans and sluice boxes for years afterward, never quite able to release the dream. Alfred Carmichael, a former placer miner in the Atlin goldfields from 1899 to 1907, arrived on the west coast in the 1930s to investigate first-hand the scene at Wreck Bay. He sampled the sand and clay and had them analyzed at the provincial assay office. His samples revealed only a trace of gold.

Long after gold fever waned, Wreck Bay remained a popular day trip for the residents of Ucluelet, as shown in this photograph of a community picnic, circa 1912.

Carmichael kept a journal of his trip and later wrote short essays about his stay and the wishful miners he met there. “Found one,” he wrote, “an old Klondyk [sic] miner who lost his legs overseas, burning off the beach logs to get at the... sands. Later he told me that they found that there was gold caught in the rough wave worn skin of the logs and by burning them and sluicing out the ashes they got the gold.”

Carmichael also visited Andrew Murison, a Scotsman who had been working the beach for five years or so. On the back page of his journal, Carmichael noted that “Mr. Murison was one of the many in the mad rush to the Nome gold fields in 1900 and was one of the fortunate ones, but like many more of the real pioneers and prospectors who have the qualities to ‘go get it’ but not the capacity to keep it. And having mismanaged the first million, he went after another one, and is still at it.”

In the 1930s, ever-hopeful miner Andrew Murison built a comfortable three-room home at Wreck Bay and kept a well-established garden of carrots, turnips, potatoes, lettuce, cabbage, and mint. He diverted a small stream through a wooden culvert to flow across the front of his property.

Murison worked three sluice boxes, and Carmichael noted that he “found success in short shifts of work, eating when he felt like it. He always lay down after eating and had a pipe.” Murison also filled some of his days writing poetry, including this tribute to his home:

I love it! I love it and who will say nay, To the beauty and charm of lovely Wreck Bay. The sunsets are ‘luring, the breakers enduring. In calm and in storm it always has the form Of a Power that is greater than man can see, Which will ever remain a mystery. The horse shoe curve sweeps round so grand With Florencia Isle in the break of the band. Its setting is perfect. Oh who can gainsay, The beauty and charm of lovely Wreck Bay!

Shipwrecks and Rescuers

The body of a well-dressed man was picked up on Long Beach near Schooner Cove, Clayoquot, by George Gray, an Indian. Papers were found in the pockets with the name George Woolridge, also a bible... , a book of blank bank checks, silver watch, Canadian Pacific Railway ticket and $60 in cash. The body is in very bad shape and held together mainly by clothing.

–February 9, 1906, the British Colonist

From the late 1800s, the increased interest in the west coast for missionaries, traders, miners, settlers, and entrepreneurs led to an increase in ship’s traffic—from small sloops to multi-sailed barquentines to steamships. It also led to an increase in shipwrecks.

For dozens, perhaps hundreds, of shipwrecked mariners and passengers, the treacherous west coast of Vancouver Island, including Long Beach, became their last resting place. The bodies of some were found and identified, but most disappeared into the watery depths, taking their names and stories with them. Woolridge was a victim of the wreck of the Valencia, which took two agonizing days to break up off Pachena Point, south of Bamfield, after wrecking there January 21, 1906, leaving at least 117 people dead. Many bodies were never recovered. In that respect at least, Woolridge was one of the lucky ones.

Vancouver Island’s west coast is often referred to as the Graveyard of the Pacific. Dozens of shipwrecks are known about, but many others went unrecorded. Several of the known wrecks came to rest on or near Long Beach. Most notable of these are the Mustang (1866), the General Cobb (1880), the Carelmapu (1915), and a mysterious Spanish “ghost ship” that apparently appeared and disappeared for years in the shifting sands between Green Point and Incinerator.

In peril, the Chilean barque Carelmapu hoisted flags signalling distress into the rigging. Shortly after leaving Tofino, the ship was noticed by Captain Gillam of the CPR passenger steamship Princess Maquinna, who made several attempts to assist the vessel.

Common to many of the stories of the plight of these ships were the efforts of the area’s residents, native and settler, who time and again went to heroic lengths in their efforts to rescue shipwrecked sailors. Search parties went looking for survivors and gave them shelter, water, and food. Bodies found were buried. This was the case with the Carelmapu, a three-masted Chilean barque that ran into trouble near the entrance to Juan de Fuca Strait on November 23, 1915. A storm blew the ship off-course up the coast, shredding its sails in the process. For two days, the lame ship drifted as the storm continued to push it perilously close to Vancouver Island’s rocky outer shores. On November 25, now close to Long Beach, the crew had no choice but to drop anchor in the pounding open seas to try to keep the vessel from being heaved ashore.

Despite the wild sea conditions and having a complement of passengers, the CPR steamship Princess Maquinna made a valiant attempt to save the barque’s crew, but it was forced to give up and leave when it, too, came in danger of wrecking. Those on the Maquinna could only watch as life boats lowered from the Carelmapu quickly flipped in the heaving waters, tossing the occupants into the sea and to certain death.

Eventually, the battered Carelmapu ground ashore near Gowlland Rocks, up the coast from Schooner Cove at the north end of Long Beach. As it listed, more crew members were washed overboard and lost. Only four men, the cabin boy, and the ship’s dog (a Great Dane) miraculously managed to swim through the heaving seas to the beach. (One of the men was a Hawaiian seaman, Antonio Okione. According to local lore, he surfed ashore using a plank from the wreck.) The survivors took shelter in a shack there and were rescued by three Tofino men who had hiked through the night to the get to the wreck site. Over the next few days, the remains of several of the Carelmapu’s crew washed ashore, usually terribly battered by the sea and, more often than not, headless. Local residents helped in searching for them and in burying them on the shores of Long Beach.

In the wreck of the Carelmapu and in countless other wrecks, native people along Vancouver Island’s west coast proved invaluable. They relayed word of the location of wrecks, helped recover and bury bodies, and conducted rescues themselves. The significant efforts of the native people in helping survivors of the wrecked General Cobb in January 1880 received particular recognition. The American barque ran aground near Portland Point at the northwest end of Long Beach. Several Tla-o-qui-aht men rescued the ship’s crew by canoe and delivered them to Clayoquot. There, the survivors rested for a few days before being paddled to Barkley Sound by their Tla-o-qui-aht rescuers where they boarded the schooner Alert for Victoria. Six months later, the U.S. consul travelled to Clayoquot to personally thank the Tla-o-qui-aht people for their bravery and generosity and to present them with a large quantity of rice, “hard bread,” molasses, and sugar.

The expression of gratitude didn’t stop there. Almost a year later, a large contingent of Tla-o-qui-aht people gathered in Victoria to watch the U.S. consul present a medal to “Schewish, chief of the Clayoquots” in honour of their efforts to “save, kindly treat and care for the poor wrecked seaman.” Gold medals or not, native people continued to assist those who needed help, on the Long Beach shores and elsewhere along the west coast.

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Salal: Curse of the Coast

W.E. Sutton’s ordeal during his trek to Florencia Bay was par for the course for early travellers in the Long Beach area. Gaining access to the shoreline from land or to the land from the shore inevitably meant doing battle with that seemingly innocent brush foe: salal. This densely growing shrub of shiny, leathery evergreen leaves is found in most marine edges of the Pacific Northwest, but on outer coastal regions, it grows and spreads at its magnificent, robust best. Reaching heights of five metres (sixteen feet) and often tightly interwoven with its neighbours, it can form a glossy green, near-impenetrable wall.

George Smith, a timber surveyor in the area in the 1890s, described his feelings about the plant this way: “It was the toughest work I believe I ever had. It was almost continual sallal [sic] anywhere from six to ten feet high... The sallal nearly got us! When we boarded the steamer at Ucluelet, we were a tough looking outfit. A very nice old lady in Victoria asked me why so many young surveyors take to drink and I said I didn’t know, but that there was a plant on the West Coast called sallal that might easily account in part for it.”

Today, salal can still be a formidable obstacle for anyone hoping to bushwhack or clear a trail through the coastal forest. Once established, it grows fast, spreading vigorously via underground stems, so any previous hard work to eradicate it can be obliterated in short order. Nevertheless, its abundance and the fact that the shrub’s branches and leaves hold their shape and freshness so well makes salal popular greenery for flower arrangements.

Two friends learned this in 1996 when they went for a walk at Long Beach and saw a large container from a commercial ship in the breakers near shore. They knew the container could be filled with all manner of goods that are shipped overseas—computers, televisions, sports equipment, and such. What bounty awaited them? Just as they arrived at the container, it bounced in the surf and hit the beach, and the doors flew open. Inside was revealed boxes of “florist-grade” salal destined for New Zealand, picked in Washington State.

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The Rainforest’s Giants

In the open spray zone close to the ocean’s edge, Sitka spruce thrives in the constant saltwater misting, growing into thick, stunted, wind-sheered wedges that collectively create a spruce fringe. Along with natural barricades of salal, these walls of Sitka spruce must have made any shipwreck survivor staggering ashore think this was deliverance to just another version of Hell.

Yet, tuck in behind the spruce fringe on a windy day and you’ll find a place of relative calm. The corps of volunteers dug in along this front line in the spruce fringe windbreak is what enables the forest behind to get on with the job of growing upright, very tall, and very old. Here, the sheltered Sitka spruce excels, with some specimens counting among the largest trees in the world. On nearby Meares Island, just off Tofino, stands a Sitka spruce that measures 13.7 metres (44.9 feet) around at its base and 48.8 metres (160.1 feet) from the ground to its broken top—about the height of a 10-storey building. The world’s tallest Sitka spruce, at 96 metres (315 feet), is just down the coast from Long Beach at Carmanah Creek, on the boundary of the West Coast Trail section of Pacific Rim National Park. Many of these giants are more than 800 years old.

While Sitka spruce may win in the coastal rainforest’s height category, western hemlock receives the award for greatest number. It is the most common tree species here, distinguishable by its short, flat, densely packed needles and the permanent droop to its tip. Meanwhile, western redcedar, the tree most closely woven into the fabric of Nuu-chah-nulth culture, completes the triumvirate of coastal rainforest conifers.

Shade for all of these conifers is not a problem. Their small but abundant needles provide hectares of photon-capturing surface area per tree so that whatever light filters through the dense forest canopy can be gleaned. And, unlike the long taproot of other trees, the roots of these species spread horizontally, searching for and taking in nutrients in the shallow, acidic, nutrient-leached soils.

While the coastal rainforest’s huge conifers garner most of the ecosystem’s glory, they owe much of their health and survival to a complex support network of smaller plant species of varying ages and sizes. Even dead trees, standing or fallen, provide critical habitat for new growth. Nearly 97 percent of western hemlocks, for instance, get their start as seedlings on a fallen log.

In a west coast rainforest, the tips of the giant trees, mostly western hemlock, western redcedar, and Sitka spruce, comb the air around them for moisture. Fog and mist condense on the needles and drip to the forest floor.