1 Calne to Cowichan
In the last years of the nineteenth century, the terrace above Slocan Lake that would become the Bosun Ranch attracted a prosperous young Englishman and a good deal of British money, a tiny edge of a vast outpouring of educated people and capital during the late heyday of the British empire. It was a bare moment in time, but long enough during the decades before World War I to establish the surplus young of comfortable British families in many corners of the world. Within this general exodus, the particulars were always different. In the case of the Bosun Ranch, they led back to Calne, a small town in Wiltshire, England.
In Calne, as elsewhere in the British Isles, the advent of the industrial age opened a route to wealth and power independent of landed property, commercial capital, or positions in government or the Church. The men who developed the new equipment and built the new factories tended to come out of the trades, and relied on practical ingenuity and business skills for their success. Such was the case of the Harris family in Calne. The first about whom there is any information, John Harris (1760–91), was a modest pork butcher. Out of this beginning the family built a pork-curing business that, before the end of the nineteenth century, processed more than three thousand pigs a week, supplied the royal family with hams, bacon, and sausages, and shipped worldwide. The Harris factories became by far Calne’s principal employers; for years one Harris or another was usually the mayor. In less than a century, the family rose from obscurity to prominence, and it was from this background of new wealth and privilege that, in the fall of 1888, Joseph “Joe” Colebrook Harris, my grandfather, was sent to the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph to learn to be a farmer.
He left Guelph a year later, crossed the continent on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and settled in British Columbia, first in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island, later in the Slocan. The following chapters turn around the farm he made above Slocan Lake, and the people who lived and worked there. But he came from Calne, and I begin there.
In Calne, the Harris family turned a location on the route by which Irish pigs were shipped from Cork, Ireland, to Bristol, England, and driven to the London market, into the principal point where they were slaughtered and processed. How they did it is not entirely clear, but by the 1830s and early 1840s, as their business enlarged and shifted from butchering to curing, grandsons of the original John Harris travelled to Ireland to secure business contacts, and Harris bacon became known in London. When the Irish famine struck and the supply of Irish pigs dried up, one of the grandsons, George, then only twenty-two, visited the United States on an uncle’s credit and with letters of introduction, intending to buy cured bacon and ship it to England. Ranging as far west as St. Louis, Missouri, he met the most important American meat packers, and visited several ice houses used for curing bacon in hot weather. The Harrises had cured bacon in winter, then hard-salted it to last through the summer. The intended advantage of the ice house, with ice on iron floors above and curing rooms below, was a mild-cured bacon available all year round. For a decade after George’s return, the family experimented with various ice house designs, and eventually patented one of them: a large, thatched, barn-like structure built of iron and stone with charcoal between double walls, capable of holding up to one thousand tons of ice.
In the late 1880s the Harrises adopted a mechanical and chemical process for cooling brine, then used as a coolant. The ice houses became redundant, but during their time they apparently had been the Harrises’ main technical advantage. Thomas Harris, my great-grandfather, thought that his younger brother George, who brought the idea of the ice houses from America and died at the early age of forty-five, “was the smartest business man of any of us; he was the means of lifting us out of the old rut, and he laid the foundation of the new system and its prosperous future.”1 For many years there were two Harris firms that between them were the principal suppliers of pork products in the British Isles. In 1885 my great-grandfather, the owner of one firm and getting on in years, brought his three eldest sons into the business: Thomas Harris & Sons.2 Joe was then fourteen years old, too young to be considered for the partnership, but probably already sized up as an unlikely businessman.
In 1865 Thomas bought a three-storey, eighteenth-century house at a prominent Calne intersection, enlarged and embellished it, and named his acquisition “South Place.” From the street, South Place was an awkward mass linked at a central corner by bay windows and a parapet; from the walled gardens at the back, a much more elaborate, somewhat Italianate, mid-Victorian creation with its own fernery and grotto. South Place had nothing to do with landed gentry. It was a prosperous businessman’s urban residence, quite large enough for a numerous family, their servants, and events for company employees. Joe and his many surviving siblings—four by my great-grandfather’s second marriage, four by his third—grew up there.
Thomas Harris’s family belonged from 1866 to what was known as the Free Church. The local Anglican parish had been served for years by an evangelical minister, but when he died and the Bishop of Salisbury replaced him with a High Church minister, many of the congregation, the Harrises prominently among them, strongly opposed him and eventually established their own evangelical church. Evangelical Christianity was in the South Place air. Morning and night, family and servants assembled for prayers; Sunday was given to church and little else, and cards and alcohol were always proscribed. Thomas was president of the West of England Temperance Society. The family gave heavily to the evangelical London Missionary Society, and two of its daughters went to China as missionaries. Deaths, even of the very young, were somehow God’s will, and heaven was beyond. However inscrutable, God’s will was always done, always for the best.
One senses a particular religious fervour when Thomas’s third wife, my great-grandmother, arrived in 1866. My father said that his grandfather married first (Susan Reynolds) for love, second (Sophia Mitchell) for business, and third (Elizabeth Colebrook) for religion. Elizabeth came from a well-known Nonconformist family near Guildford in Surrey. Her father, a businessman and farmer, was also a lay preacher esteemed for his devotion to Calvinist principles and commitment to social service, which apparently ran deep in the extended Colebrook family.3
Thomas Harris was a Liberal, and politics a substantial part of his life. He never ran for national office, but vigorously endorsed Liberal candidates, contributed financially to their campaigns, and often chaired political meetings. Economically, he believed in free trade and open markets; politically he supported universal suffrage (for men), the elimination of rotten boroughs, and home rule for Ireland; and socially he supported measures to alleviate the lot of the poor. Prosperous as he was, poverty was not many generations behind. At the end of his life, it was said of him that he opposed “everything that savoured of oppression and intolerance.”4 He was a staunch supporter of William Gladstone, even when the country turned against his plans for Irish home rule and many members of the extended family joined the Conservatives. He was elected five times as mayor of Calne.
Encouraged one suspects by his third wife, Thomas attended innumerable peace meetings, prayer meetings, and temperance meetings, and gave a great deal of money to a variety of causes. “Enos Gale our old coachman,” Joe remembered years later, “was forever driving father with a party of supporters to public meetings until my Dad became known as The County Chairman.”5 He supported the local Free Church, small Nonconformist chapels elsewhere in Britain, the London Missionary Society, and sanitariums for convalescing missionaries in China. He supported temperance organizations. He bought and converted a public house into a coffee house. He poured money into Calne: almost a quarter of the cost of a new city hall, a public recreation ground and pavilion, a reading library for working men, money for the poor to be distributed at the discretion of the town council. He provided in various ways for his employees, apparently paying them fairly well and organizing annual excursions, dinners, and gifts: a Bible to each of them after one company dinner, clothing for needy families at Christmas. In an after-dinner speech to employees, friends, and prominent townspeople he is reported to have said that he had grown up from boyhood with some of his workmen, hoped to be their master for a good time yet, and considered that the bond between master and men would not be merely mercenary as long as the interests of both were promoted.6
Life at South Place, the family seat in Calne, coupled reformist zeal and business achievement. “Our home,” Joe remembered years later, “was large and very comfortable indeed, with the most solid and British type of comfort. It was jammed into the little town of Calne with its fair-sized and wonderfully-well-kept garden. Calne was full of Harrises, some quite rich and all in comfortable circumstances. We had an amazing number of visitors; it [South Place] was like a hotel. Most of the speakers on peace, temperance, religion, and liberalism who came to Calne seemed to find their headquarters at South Place. Mother was more especially interested in religious matters and especially missionaries, so we saw very many most interesting and often amusing people.”7
Joe and his siblings were all sent away to school: the two girls (Bessie and Mary) to Miss Fletcher’s School, an outstanding private school for girls; the boys (Willie, Joe, and Alec) to Mill Hill, a Nonconformist school in London—both carefully chosen to avoid the danger of Darwinian contamination. At Miss Fletcher’s the atmosphere was relentlessly Christian, and missionaries and missionary work greatly esteemed. Mill Hill was expensive and flourishing, a school where the sons of the newly rich were intended to be rendered into gentlemen. Suspicious that the new science was undermining religion, Thomas carefully inspected the school and met one of its masters, Dr. John Murray, who later became the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Murray was a Liberal and a temperance man; apparently the two got along and Thomas was reassured. At Mill Hill, Willie and Alec became impressive young scholars and Joe excelled at cricket and rugby.
After Mill Hill the question of what to do, common to the numerous progeny of prosperous English families, was suddenly in the air. Joe was a strong, athletic young Englishman, and an outstanding rugby player,8 but he had no obvious vocation. Three sons by his father’s second marriage had filled the available positions in the family business, for which, anyway, Joe had neither aptitude nor interest. Willie and Alec were headed to Cambridge. In these circumstances, Thomas turned to the empire. He heard from a friend about the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, Ontario, made extensive enquiries, and decided to send his son there. Joe, born in January 1871, was eighteen years old. Like the other young Englishmen at the Ontario Agricultural College, he knew absolutely nothing about farming in Canada.
After Mill Hill and London, Joe found the Ontario Agricultural College rough and ready and Guelph drab but friendly. His fellow students at the college were young, transplanted Englishmen—most from private schools and many with aristocratic pedigrees—or solid Ontario farm boys. Most of the former, he wrote years later, were good at games, concerts, and play, but “few of us had the slightest notion when we arrived what farming in Canada was like and imagined ourselves riding about on dashing steeds and shooting game in the company of Indians and cowboys.” Many of the young aristocrats he considered foppish, and one, a nephew of the Duke of Norfolk, among “the slickest blackguards and good-looking highly-trained genteel scamps I have ever met.” The Canadians were “jolly good fellows,” if, for the most part, unmannered and from uneducated homes. Compared to the English, however, they knew far more about “the real business of life.”9
Joe’s academic record at the agricultural college was mediocre, but as captain of the rugby team and editor of the OAC Review, he became a fairly prominent student. He seems to have made friends easily, principally among them Robert Musgrave, who had come to Guelph from a large sheep farm on Saltspring Island, near Victoria, British Columbia. The Musgraves were an old, titled Cumberland family with a branch in Ireland to which Robert’s people were attached. He and Joe became fast friends, sharing a fondness for games and sport and a disinclination for study. Joe thought that his friend Robert had “a wonderful lot of experience in life,” whereas his own life in Calne had been too sheltered. If so, a solution was apparently at hand. Robert invited Joe to spend the summer holidays with his family on Saltspring Island, and gave him explicit instructions about getting there. As soon as Joe’s year-end examinations were over in 1889, he set out from Toronto, travelling in a colonist car full of central European peasants on the recently completed transcontinental line of the CPR. He had brought no bedding, and slept as he could on a plank upper berth.
The trip west was full of entirely new sights and peoples, and the destination a veritable paradise. Joe took a coastal steamer, the SS Joan, from Victoria, called in at “strange little ports and landings,” saw “Indians” in canoes and on the wharves, “Chinamen” in pigtails, whales “spouting and jumping almost like trout,” hair seals, “eagles circling around and osprey diving for fish,” and eventually arrived at Musgrave Landing on Saltspring Island.10 Before the day was out, he was playing tennis on the Musgraves’ wooden tennis court, then deer hunting.
The Musgraves considered it improper that a guest work, and with the exception of a few days during the sheep drive (the Musgraves ran 1,200 Merino sheep), Joe’s summer with them was an extended holiday. He and the Musgrave boys fished, hunted, swam, and played tennis. Jim, “the house Chinaman,” did much of the housework; Lum, the outdoors man, did much of the garden and yard work. Joe did take on a large, somewhat rotten cedar, and after hacking at it with a dull axe for hours managed, amid cheers from the Musgraves, to fell it. He also helped for a couple of weeks with haying on a farm belonging to the family of another Guelph classmate, Pat Johnson, at Hall’s Crossing (later called Westholme) in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island. There he got to know Captain C. E. Barkley, RN, prominent among the retired Royal Navy officers in the Cowichan, “a real old sea dog and a tremendous talker … only always on the Conservative side.”11 Essentially, this was a summer of play. The Musgraves had a good rowboat and a fishing smack (the Jabberwock) with an auxiliary engine, and on Saturday mornings used one or the other to get to the tennis courts at Cowichan Flats. Tennis was the settlers’ principal sport, and the weekly convergence at Cowichan Flats a major social event. There was also a midsummer tennis tournament in Victoria, to which the Musgraves repaired in the Jabberwock. Joe and the Musgrave boys stayed with the Crease boys in Judge Crease’s large, Italianate house, Pentrelew, on Fort Street. Crease was a former attorney general and a justice in the BC Supreme Court; his wife, the daughter of an English literary critic who was a friend of Charles Dickens, had often sat on Dickens’s knee while he and her father talked. Tennis, dinner parties, dances in Victoria—an expatriate, upper-class English life that readily accepted Joe and into which he easily fit.
He greatly admired Mrs. Musgrave, and was pleased that, in spite of his politics, she rather took to him. Her husband was more distant and less approachable—“rather awesome, quite the old aristocrat”—and judged to be ruled by his liver. The Anglo-Irish Musgraves were staunch Conservatives: Irish home rule anathema, Gladstone an evil monster. In such company, Joe apparently held to his opinions. He got on well with the young Musgraves, liked the two Chinese servants, Jim and Lum, and liked what he saw of the local Indigenous people. When they came to assist with the sheep drive, they were “a picturesque sight” around their campfires and seemed friendly and full of fun. He wished he could understand their jokes. He said that the settlers despised them, considering them lazy and degraded, but noted that when he got up at three a.m. to fish they were always on the fishing banks before him.
Overall, and for all his fondness for the Musgraves and delight in a summer that reshaped the course of his life, his analysis of settler society was critical. “It seemed to me that the outlook on life was extremely narrow and intensely conservative. They [the Musgraves and their Victoria friends] tended to despise Eastern Canadians and Americans and had a little circle of similarly minded friends in Victoria who had become completely fossilized without the slightest idea of their condition. It was a great contrast to the sentiments and mental outlook of South Place, Calne.”12 British Columbia’s abundant nature and exotic mix of peoples had captivated my grandfather, not the transplanted English society that had treated him so well.
After such a summer, Guelph was a huge letdown. College life was dull, and English students were often blamed for playing poker and drinking in the smoking room. In these circumstances, my grandfather wrote to Pat Johnson in Westholme, whose family he’d helped with haying, to ask for a job, received an encouraging reply, and announced that he was leaving. When asked why, he said that Englishmen appeared to be unwelcome at OAC, a response that caused much consternation at the college and much anxiety in Calne, and that eventually he much regretted. Basically, he longed to return to BC. When he left in early December, the college president wished him well and the college matron packed him a basket of food. After buying another colonist car ticket and, this time, a cheap straw mattress for an upper berth, he was almost broke.
On the Johnson farm in Westholme, he found himself alone with Pat, who was by then working the farm for his father. He and Pat batched in a shack set on cedar blocks. Pat was a worker, as was Joe, but they do not seem to have gotten along. Nor was there much connection with neighbours, whom the Johnsons and the Barkleys judged inferior. Pat left for Victoria at Christmas, leaving Joe to reflect on Christmases at South Place, where “far too much was done for us.” Then Captain Barkley, also alone (save for his Chinese cook), came over to invite him to Christmas dinner. Joe liked Captain Barkley, “a fine old fellow,” and accepted with great pleasure. Although politically they disagreed “profoundly but politely,” he long remembered this Christmas dinner, served for two by a Chinese cook at an edge of the emerging settler landscape in British Columbia, “a glorious evening, just we two.”13
Joe remained on the Johnson farm well into the new year, and in so doing got to know another English family, the Gibbs, who lived some four miles away. The Gibbs were impecunious gentry. A Gibb grandfather had been “a ‘Queen’s Messenger,’ some sort of very confidential royal servant and they had not got over that unfortunate start, for Queen’s messengers were rather out of place on a Vancouver Island stump farm.” When Joe first met the Gibbs, two of the sons “and an old fellow named the Bosun,” who took on odd jobs in the area, were clearing land with a stumping machine. Joe lent a hand, thoroughly enjoyed himself, and stayed for supper. “Bosun baked a fine big batch of biscuits … Afterwards we had a great sing song. Old Bosun knew very many good old sea songs and was a very good singer. I knew all the Guelph songs, mostly quite new to the Gibbs.”14
Sometime in the spring of 1891 it was determined in Calne that Alec, Joe’s younger brother, would visit his brother in British Columbia during the Cambridge summer holidays, and they would tour America together before both would return to England. Perhaps it was a rescue mission. With his brother’s arrival in mind, Joe left the Johnson farm and went over to Saltspring Island for a few days to visit the Musgraves, then to Victoria to visit the Creases. He had a friend in Chilliwack, one of the Wells family, who had also attended OAC and had told Joe about the wonders of the Fraser Valley and of his family’s farm and Ayrshire cattle. Joe therefore thought to go to Chilliwack, meet the Wells family and see something of the Fraser Valley before meeting his brother there. On the boat travelling upriver from New Westminster, he met an Anglican parson who invited him to get a horse and ride with him the next day to meet some of his parishioners, which he did and met a young English couple in need of farm help. He stopped with them for a long month, and saw little of the Wells family. Shortly thereafter, his brother arrived by train from Montreal.
The two brothers went over to Vancouver Island where they fished, hunted, walked—twenty-two miles to Cowichan Lake—and visited Joe’s old haunts and friends. Alec had a Kodak camera, still unusual enough to attract attention, and took snap shots and pasted them in his diary: Macdonald’s logging camp on Cowichan Lake, the hay wagon on the Johnson farm, the Musgrave house on Saltspring Island, Musgrave children and Joe on the front steps, and, a mirror of transplanted English gentility on Vancouver Island late in the nineteenth century, afternoon tea on the lawn. They decided to go “up country,” crossed the strait to Vancouver, and took the train as far as Ashcroft. They arrived in the middle of the night, and woke up in what seemed a desert. Alec wrote in his diary: “nothing but sand was visible, sand everywhere, rising all around into lofty mountains of the same monotonous yellow, and the only growth was the wild musk plant, which looks in the distance like the sand itself.”15 In a middle-of-the-night rush to get the train on their return, they left the Kodak behind. Telegrams did not retrieve it. They waited a couple of extra days in New Westminster, then gave up and carried on to the United States.
In the United States, their small caps and other English clothing identified them as what they were: two young, sightseeing Englishmen. From San Francisco, they walked much of the way into Yosemite Park, then went south to Monterey. They formed strong opinions: American towns all looked the same; American girls were great flirts; the almighty dollar governed American life. They thought Salt Lake City a pretty town, felt after seeing the Chicago stockyards that they never wanted to look another cow in the face, and were overwhelmed by Niagara Falls. Alec thought Guelph and the agricultural college much more attractive than his brother’s letters had led him to expect. After Montreal, they went to New York and boarded a transatlantic liner, the Teutonic, for England. By the beginning of October 1891, they were back in Calne.
Calne seemed much as Joe had left it, and South Place “as solid and comfortable as ever.” England, too, seemed “secure and prosperous … on the surface at least.”16 Other than pike fishing with the headmaster of the older boys’ school, he had little to do in Calne, and soon went up to London to stay with his half-sister Bessie and brother Willie, both finishing their medical studies—Willie at Guy’s Hospital and Bessie at the London School for Medical Women at the Royal Free Hospital. He joined the Rosslyn Park Football Club, the premier rugby club in North London, was soon on the first team, and played against some of the best teams in England, and also against his former school’s team, the Old Millhillians. He took a course in English literature at University College, joined the University College Debating Society, becoming a leader of the radicals, and attended meetings of the Shakespeare Society. Overall, he was not impressed by University College: it seemed “a kind of knowledge shop, where everyone went to carry off lots of facts.” Even in London, he had time on his hands, and seems to have spent much of it with wealthy friends, particularly a young heir of a Lancashire cotton fortune, who, until redirected by an inheritance, had been a medical student with Bessie and Willie. While a mansion was being renovated for him on Hampstead Heath, he hobnobbed around London with Joe, paying most of the bills. They heard a young David Lloyd George defend Welsh language rights in parliament, and played a lot of billiards.
In March 1892, Joe returned to Calne. “Everybody,” he later wrote, was “very kind and friendly, but I could never fit in such stodgy surroundings … I longed to get back to Canada.”17 He was now twenty-one years old, and, like his older siblings in their turn, had received a thousand pounds from his father on his birthday. With this considerable sum in hand, he went directly to Victoria, stopped there briefly, then went up-island to visit the Musgraves. “Newcombe Musgrave, who had been at school in England and who had visited us at South Place, travelled with me.”
He found the Musgraves in the process of moving from Saltspring Island to a farm near Duncan, and helped them with the move, then set about looking for land of his own. The process was not drawn out. The land across the swamp from the Johnsons’ farm was for sale, and Joe bought it for a thousand dollars. The higher land was entirely and heavily forested, the lower a bog with, in the middle, a lake of some twelve acres. There was no access road, not even a trail. Between what he had bought and a farm was an enormous amount of work.
Joe threw himself, sons of local farmers, hired Chinese workers, and even the Bosun at this land. He and four Chinese labourers cut out a passable, half-mile wagon road. He and a neighbour, Jack Windsor, the son of an Englishman married to a Salish woman, tackled the forest. The cores of most of the huge cedars and firs were rotten, and by drilling two-inch auger holes from either side and using hot ashes to light fires inside the trees, they could burn them down. Often there was no telling where they would fall. On the ground, the trunks could be burned into lengths by the same method, then split with blasting powder. With a brace of oxen, the remains could usually be piled and burned. As in pioneer settlements across the span of North America, the forest was an enemy. As were the stumps. Joe tried dynamite, and considered it “wonderful that I did not blow myself up.” Such work made the bog, which looked almost ready for ploughing if only the water could be got off, particularly attractive. A drainage ditch, at least a few feet deep and a good many hundred feet long, was needed. Joe dug the side ditch around part of the swamp, and contracted with Chinese workers for the main ditch. When both were finished, the bog on his side of the lake began to dry out.18
During the first summer, Joe lived at the Windsors’ house, but left in the fall when Jack’s father returned and went “on his usual big spree.” By this time the Bosun had reappeared, and he and Joe batched for a time in a shack on an adjacent quarter section. The Bosun had spent thirty years in the Royal Navy until, while drunk one night, he struck an unpopular officer and was put in irons. The crew sympathized with the Bosun and managed to spring him. Somehow he got to Seattle and then to Vancouver Island. His alias was Charlie King; his real name, according to my grandfather, William Dyer, and his home the Isle of Wight. He seems to have floated throughout the Cowichan Valley, staying for a time here or there, but increasingly with Joe. He was a good companion except when he went off on a drinking binge from which, sheepishly, he would eventually return.
Another to appear at this time was Arthur Cleverley, a lad from Calne who had worked as a gardener, then a groom. Initially he seemed puny and, with his broad Wiltshire accent, completely out of place. “He had looked,” wrote Joe, “such a mild and innocent youth when he arrived, but I soon found out that in comparison with him I was a mere babe in the woods.” He had worked for many wealthy people (including, as Joe put it, his rich and “rather awful Aunt Charles”), was full of stories about their more egregious doings, and had a lightning wit and an ability to mime and caricature. He played the concertina and liked to dance; he liked the ladies, and they him. And he could cook. He became useful and very popular.
In sum, Joe had assembled an unlikely crew, all of whom he considered friends: a “half-breed” increasingly disparaged by white society, especially its women; a deserter from the Royal Navy; and a cheeky lad from Wiltshire. For a time, he, the Bosun, and Cleverley lived together in a room in the barn.
By the spring of 1894 Joe had a small kitchen garden and a little land that could be ploughed, which he planted in oats and red clover. He also arranged to have a house built—just in time, as it turned out, for a contingent of Harrises from Calne. While Joe had been establishing himself in the Cowichan Valley, two of his sisters, Bessie and Mary, had gone under the auspices of the London Missionary Society as missionaries to Hankow, China. While there, both had married other missionaries. Eighteen days after Mary’s marriage, her husband died of amoebic dysentery, one instance among many of the carnage that disease and violence were wreaking among foreigners in China. In Calne, Thomas, the patriarch of the family, apparently decided to send out reinforcements, and also to give some of his children a trip around the world. Alec, who had finished a degree in engineering and physics at Cambridge, was available, as were Willie, who had completed a residency at Guy’s Hospital, and Sophie, Joe’s half-sister by Thomas’s previous marriage. They were to meet up with Joe on Vancouver Island and stay for a time, then Willie, whose fiancée was in London, would return to England, and the others would go on to China. After a visit there, Joe would take one of the Empress ships back to Vancouver Island, while the others continued around the world.19
This contingent descended upon Joe in September 1894, stayed for a month, and had a wonderful time. There was a spartan but fairly comfortable house, “a particularly attractive little Chinaman” called Golly to do the cooking, good hunting to occupy their days, and a surrounding society that Joe knew well and in the upper tiers of which they were entirely welcome. There were visits, teas, dinners, tennis, boating, and an abundance of nature that fit an English romantic imagination. Sophie, a fair artist, brought her oils and left Joe with two pictures of his new house: one amid ragged, burned-out stumps at the edge of a towering forest, the other from another angle and in a larger clearing, a space littered with the trunks of fallen trees and jagged stumps. The pile of logs in the foreground, inside the snake fence, is aflame. There is nothing yet like a farm.
The trip to China went ahead as planned. Joe was far more intrigued by the Chinese and Japanese people than by his sisters’ missionary work.20 After a couple of months in China, and long walks with Alec where they had been strongly advised not to go, on December 28 three Harris siblings departed in opposite directions from Shanghai: Sophie and Alec for India, Joe for Vancouver Island. Bessie and Mary remained in China where, six months later, Mary also contracted amoebic dysentery and died. Aboard the Empress of India, Joe finished Principles of Political Economy by John Stuart Mill (a gift from a Mill Hill friend) and found and devoured a well-worn copy of Protection or Free Trade by Henry George, a little book that “gave me my first real insight into the real problems of human relations.” By the time he docked in Victoria, he felt himself a very different young man, and when he returned to the Cowichan Valley he ordered all of Henry George’s writings. He had become, he said, a red-hot single tax supporter and a disappointment to many of his friends.21
As Joe settled back into the Cowichan Valley, their disappointment had reason to expand. A German neighbour, J. W. Hern, was a well-read and outspoken atheist and Marxist. He worked ostentatiously and noisily on Sundays, “was not properly respectful of his richer neighbours,” and held, so almost everyone thought, “atrocious opinions about property.” Joe liked Hern, considering him “wonderfully patient and good natured, a kind of ideal perverted Christian,” and the two soon argued about religion and politics. Hern, who knew a good deal of contemporary German philosophy, apparently had much the better of it. “German philosophers and Herbert Spencer were altogether too much for my religious convictions, and I got to the state of denying God and laughing at the mythical story of Jesus and his miraculous birth … Science was explaining many things and performing so many wonders, and no doubt it would proceed on its majestic way to settle all human problems. My poor former friends were greatly aroused and horrified by my fall from grace.” That was not all. Hern lent Joe a copy of Capital, and after some struggle to familiarize himself with Marx’s prose he was absorbed by this huge work, and became, he said, “a white hot socialist” bent on reforming the world. This while clearing land in the Cowichan Valley, “hardly the place,” he noted, “to be influenced by radical opinions. There were very many highly respectable people there, living on remittances and pensions, who felt that Their World had little need of reform, and certainly none of reconstruction and revolution.”22
In these ways Joe increasingly stood apart from Cowichan society, but in other ways he did not. He was captain of the local rugby team (which played amid stumps on a field in Duncan) and helped organize a theatrical society and performed in its first play, Sheridan’s The Rivals. He admired Wilfrid Laurier who, he thought, had a vision of Canada that transcended the local, frequently anti-Canadian feeling common in the Cowichan Valley, and twice chaired political meetings in support of the federal Liberal candidate. And he actively supported a creamery, the first in British Columbia. But he was becoming restless, less because his religious and political opinions were seldom shared than because the agricultural economy of the Cowichan Valley was flat, there was little market for farm produce, and the outlook was not promising. People were leaving. The Musgraves sold their new farm and moved to Victoria; Robert Musgrave, Joe’s friend from Guelph days, went to McGill to study engineering. “Even the real old ‘hard work, pinch each nickel’ farmers were having desperate times, and the young people were beginning to drift into the cities more and more.” Joe, who thought the cities were filling up with useless people, did not want to join them, but what to do instead was a real question.23
It was during these uncertainties that his parents, who were getting old, asked him to come home. Sometime late in 1895 or early 1896 he went, sailing from New York. On shipboard he got to know a husky young fellow who turned out to be “Kid” McCoy, the world light heavyweight boxing champion. McCoy needed a sparring partner, and Joe, after insisting that he was a green amateur and urging McCoy to take it easy, did spar with him and apparently survived unscathed. After landing in Liverpool, he was soon back in the circle of the family: his aging parents; Sophie, who had become, virtually, a private secretary to her father; Willie, now a doctor in Shaftesbury; and Alec. Although “the crowd and company were not of my sort,” he hunted hares, rabbits, and partridge with a large party of shooters and beaters on Salisbury Plain. And he joined the Fabian Society, the institutional home of intellectual English socialism. He told his parents a good deal about his farm in the Cowichan Valley and also about its depressed economic circumstances. They urged him to try New Zealand, where a Harris relative had married a Maori princess who controlled four thousand acres of prime timberland. It was a matter, apparently, of finding the right spot in the empire. However, with the beginnings of a farm already on his hands, Joe returned to Vancouver Island.24 He would keep an open mind about the future.
Back in Westholme, he was again clearing and farm-making with the Bosun, Arthur Cleverley, and Jack Windsor amid the mixed society of the Cowichan Valley and a depressed economy. Sometime in the spring of 1896 a letter arrived from E. R. Pease, secretary of the Fabian Society, to inform him that two other Fabians, a Scot, Robert B. Kerr, and his English wife, Dora Forster, had moved to British Columbia and were living in New Denver, a new mining town on Slocan Lake in the Kootenay District of southeastern British Columbia. He suggested that Joe get in touch with them. He did; the Kerrs replied that they meant to settle in New Denver, but were going shortly to New Westminster, and accepted Joe’s invitation to pay him a visit. They turned out to be an extraordinary pair of eccentric intellectuals. Kerr, a gold medallist from Edinburgh University and a lawyer by profession, was a close friend of Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, had a vast knowledge of English literature, and looked, Joe thought, like a youthful Mr. Pickwick. He was terribly shortsighted, and would “go slowly along, rubbing his hands, his wonderful eyes blazing with intellectual activity and his big feet rising and falling as if he was always anticipating some unseen obstacle.” His wife wore an astonishing collection of unrelated colours. Dora seemed to be trying to be artistic, but in fact, Joe thought, “she just went her own way in great simplicity and awful untidiness.” When she arrived at Westholme she wore a “crushed and unhappy” hat she had made of lichens from fir trees. Joe liked and admired the Kerrs, but his neighbours found them very strange. Cleverley and the Bosun were greatly amused.25
Learning from Joe of the depressed economy in the Cowichan Valley, this incongruous pair strongly advised him to consider the Slocan, then in the full spate of a mining boom. There was, they said, a great lack of fresh fruit and vegetables, which commanded famine prices, and an inexhaustible market. Joe promised to visit them in New Denver as soon as his hay was in and he found someone to mind the farm. In a few weeks he set off, accompanied as far as Revelstoke by one of the Crease boys. From Revelstoke he took the just-built CPR spur line to Arrowhead at the north end of the Arrow Lakes, then a lake steamer to Nakusp, “a most forlorn looking spot with two very rough hotels.” From Nakusp, a dilapidated car, which seemed ready to leave the track at the slightest provocation, swayed and scraped against newly blasted rock walls along another new CPR branch line, the Nakusp and Slocan, and eventually deposited Joe at New Denver.