The timber was however of the most magnificent description. Within an area comprehended by our eye was an easy fortune for any man of the most moderate means.
—ROBERT BROWN
WHEN FRANCIS JACOB GREEN FIRST saw Cowichan Lake, he was twenty-six years old and a world traveller. In the four years since he had left County Antrim in Ireland in 1883 because he didn’t get along with his father, Frank Green had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, ridden a train across the continent to San Francisco, worked his way up the West Coast selling odds and ends from a two-wheeled donkey-pulled cart, graded streets in Seattle, worked on a railroad survey party on Vancouver Island, and sailed to Australia and back to Victoria. During that time, having apparently forgotten why he left home in the first place, he had advised his parents and siblings to come to the island. Which is why, when he returned from Australia, he had a reason to come to Cowichan Lake—to see what two of his brothers and his sister were doing.
Annie Green was at the lake that summer to cook and act as hostess for her brothers Charles and Alfred, who had built a log hotel in the middle of a dark forest at the end of a rough trail. The trail, barely wide enough for a wagon and team, meandered for twenty miles from Duncan, the nearest outpost of civilization. The hotel sat on the bank of the Cowichan River less than a mile below where it left Cowichan Lake.
The lake lay in a cradle of mountains with its foot to the east and its head to the west. A large peninsula, called Bald Mountain for the steep rock face on its south side, projected out from the eastern end of the lake and, by almost touching the long southern shore, divided the lake into two sections: a seven-mile-long lower part and an upper part three times that length. At the foot the Lower Lake was narrow, then it bellied out into a large bay on the south side. At the point where the westernmost arm of the bay nearly touched the peninsula on the north side, a narrows led into the Upper Lake. From there it was open water to where a barrier of mountains guarded access to the wild country bordering the salty inlet of Nitinat Lake.
The mountains that cradled the lake on all sides were covered in a rough green velvet of fir, hemlock and cedar, its sameness occasionally broken by the valley of a river or stream. The base of the cradle was 22 feet below sea level, the surface of the lake 548 feet above. When storm winds came over the mountains, a large and deep lake such as this became wild and dangerous.
No one had ever laid claim to the largest fresh-water lake on Vancouver Island, not even the various First Nations peoples, the Ditidaht, the Somenos and the Kakalatza, who used the area as a hunting and fishing ground and a source of cedar logs for canoes, and a few of whose descendents now lived near its shores. Such a large body of land-locked water was bound to be the source of legends—of furious-eyed serpents that disappeared in the midst of a roaring wind down an underground passage to the ocean and of wild men who came from the coast, fierce and covered with hair.
In 1884 the Settlement Act gave the territory around Cowichan Lake, up to the height of land to the west, to the Esquimalt and Nanaimo (E&N) Railway. Two million acres of Vancouver Island and the timber on it, a forty-mile-wide strip stretching inland from the Strait of Georgia on the sheltered side of Vancouver Island, fell within the original land grant given to coal magnate Robert Dunsmuir, his sons and his associates, in return for building seventy miles of railway from Victoria to Nanaimo. Unique to timber acreage in the rest of the province, the grant land was deemed to be exempt from provincial legislation and yielded the province neither royalties nor taxes.
Dunsmuir’s main interest was in the coal rights he acquired with the E&.N grant. He was perfectly willing to sell the land and even the timber, unless it had some immediate use as mine props or railway ties. Frank Green was able to buy 164 acres of E&N land on the Cowichan River for a dollar an acre as long as he agreed to allow the company the right to exploit any mineral resources and to cut timber for railroad purposes.
Knowledgeable people said it would be a long time before a backwater like Cowichan Lake would have a railroad. That was fine with Frank Green. He was looking for solitude and peace. The wealthy tourists who were beginning to venture up to the lake would have liked a more comfortable mode of transportation than the horse-drawn stages that came to pick them up at the E&N station in Duncan, but the superb fishing made a little hardship worthwhile. Anyone interested in harvesting and transporting timber knew that most of British Columbia’s lumber needs were being met with product from Washington and Oregon. But there were Canadian lumbermen who weren’t intimidated by the American hold on the market or the lack of a railroad, who couldn’t resist the lure of the huge trees growing so close to the water, so easy to cut and send down the river.
Angus Fraser was such a man. He moved to the lake in 1889 with his pregnant wife, Annabella, and six daughters ranging in age from one to eleven. Having taken a contract to log the Sutton timber lease, named for the family who first acquired it, Fraser looked around for a place to house his large family. The log hotel on the banks of the Cowichan River, built by the Greens and known to all who stayed there and drank in the bar as the Riverside, was for sale for the second time in its brief existence. Fraser bought the hotel, installed his family, hired two Chinese cooks named Ah Lung and Ah Loi, and continued to offer food and liquor to any comers, among whom were some or all of the 125 men he employed in his logging operation.
During the winter after buying the hotel, Fraser attempted the first log drive down the Cowichan River. High water was essential for a successful drive, but in 1891 there was altogether too much of it. So fierce was the downward flow and so high was the river that many logs were lost, swept inland as far as a quarter of a mile. Downstream, nearer Duncan, the river and its burden of logs swept out roads and the bridges of the E&.N.
In the next fifteen years, other loggers would attempt the run, but no one matched Joe Vipond in his ability to “get the river right.” A logging contractor with a reputation for being difficult to work with, Vipond seemed to know when the level of water in the river was perfect. The big red-haired man had another advantage, too, in the expert French-Canadian river men he hired to guide the logs. But the river was not well suited to log drives. It descended too fast and was marked by too many shallow rapids. And the wealthy visitors who fished the river complained that the constant changes wrought in its course by log jams were destroying spawning and feeding grounds for sports fish. The returns for the logging industry didn’t justify the aggravation of river drives. What was needed was a railroad.
In the meantime, what the wealthy visitors needed was more accom-modation. The Riverside Hotel was often filled to overflowing, and extra guests had to sleep on shakedowns of clean hay and blankets on the floor of the stable. Only the good-quality Scotch whisky sold in the bar made up for such primitive conditions. The building of a second hotel, the Lakeside, in 1893 relieved the shortage somewhat, and its location, one mile up the lake, made it a salubrious location for the distinguished guests who arrived in the stage owned by the hotel, fished in the river, and then returned to Duncan in canoes guided down the river by Kowutzan Indian people, who lived near Duncan on the east side of the island and whose forebears had been navigating the river and portaging around its rapids for generations.
Queen Victoria’s third and favourite son, HRH Prince Arthur of Connaught, availed himself of the experience, as did Lord Aberdeen and his socially conscious and controversial wife, Ishbel. Lord and Lady Homick fished in the lake and deemed it rather ordinary, but that may have been because their trip down the river had to be cancelled due to the Kowutzan guides being away picking hops. The titled pair had to return via the road in a special rig, as did the nephew of former British Prime Minister William Gladstone. Lady Grey was more fortunate. Not only were the guides available for her downriver trip, but someone in her party was able to shoot a bear. The then governor-general’s wife was so pleased she insisted on hugging the carcass, and the train was delayed in Duncan while the animal was skinned so she could take the hide home as a trophy.
The Duke of Sutherland and Lord Charles Beresford; the Viscount and Viscountess Castlereagh; the Marquis of Stafford—the list of illustrious visitors prepared to brave the terrible trail and the swift-flowing river to sample the delights of Cowichan Lake grew. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, whose death would soon precipitate a world war, arrived in a car pushed by the gentlemen of his entourage, the car having broken down three miles short of its destination. Surely with so many important guests, there should be a railroad.
There were a growing number of remittance men resident at the lake who didn’t care whether there was a railroad or not. These were men whose backgrounds were nobody’s business, who found at the lake a place where they could live as they wished and where, with any luck at all, the only communication they would get from the outside world was the regular cheque from home, payment for staying where they were.
Percy Pickett was a preacher’s son who came to the lake because he was a disgrace to his family. He was a good dancer, a good singer, a good piano player—and a bad drinker. So was R. A. Meade, but Meade called himself a farmer and settled on a ninety-acre spread to raise horses at the head of the North Arm on the other side of Bald Mountain. Years later, when his remittance cheque languished in the post office for three weeks, a search party went over the mountain to see if he was all right. They found him dead, frozen stiff, the whiskey bottles that were his nemesis stuck neck first into either side of the path that led to his door.
Bill Swinerton was no remittance man, but he came to just as bad an end. Although he was one of the first settlers to arrive at Cowichan Lake, he was never able to make much of a success of his life. At least when he committed suicide at the Duncan hospital with a revolver he had hidden in his suitcase, he was kind enough to do it outside on the grounds where it was more private.
Most of the settlers were less self-destructive, but few of them succeeded in clearing enough land to make a living at farming. Many of them made their marks, however, leaving their names on various points of the map. James Abernethy’s farm at Marble Bay would retain his name long after he sold it. The farm was just to the west of Craig’s Landing, where Francis Craig liked to moor his boat when he came across the Lower Lake from his land on the south shore. He lived not far from McKenzie Bay, where John McKenzie settled for a time. Capt. Edward McCallum gave his name to a point of land that jutted out into the lake just above where the river began. William Robertson settled along the river that bears his name. Four creeks—Shaw, Nixon, Meade and Wardroper—were all named after early settlers.
Capt. Walter Frederick Wardroper had an advantage over the others. He was retired from the military and had a pension. His land lay on the north shore of the Upper Lake, fourteen miles from the Foot, as the small collection of floathouses and buildings that clustered around the river entrance had been nicknamed. Accompanying him were his wife, Emily Catherine, and his sister, Edith. His eight-room house was by far the best at the lake and, as the only house on the Upper Lake, by far the most isolated.
Not long after the three of them settled in, a young man entered their lives. Henry March was from Lancashire, tall, black-haired and well educated. In 1887, the same year as Frank Green, he had come to the lake, a twenty-year-old with so little money that he had walked from Duncan so he wouldn’t have to dip into his grubstake.
With three other settlers, he rowed a boat up from the Foot to where the Lower Lake widens into the large bay that his family would eventually name Honeymoon Bay. The land he settled on had forty acres “open to the sky,” but his early attempts at raising sheep and goats were frustrated by hungry cougars and wolves. He made a deal with Angus Fraser to log his land in order to enlarge the open acreage. When burning the slash left behind by the loggers, March managed to destroy his home which, though possessing only a dirt floor and a hole in the roof where a stovepipe ought to have been, was all the house he could manage at the time.
Even for a man who enjoyed his own company, the isolation of Honeymoon Bay was difficult to bear. Nights could be especially bad, with the constant howling of wolves accentuating the wildness and emptiness of the place. When March heard that Captain Wardroper had a sister, he began to visit, rowing the long stretches through the narrows and across the Upper Lake, sometimes against such strong winds that he was exhausted when he arrived and had to lie down to rest. When he proposed marriage, Edith refused him. What woman in her right mind would leave the comfort of an eight-room house and a brother’s pension to marry a man seven years her junior able to afford only a one-room cabin?
Henry proposed again and again. Each time Edith refused. Finally, desperation took hold of the soft-spoken young man. He rowed her out to an island and refused to take her back until she accepted his proposal.
Two sons were born to the Marches: Jack and Charlie. The farm began to bring in some money as Henry raised cattle and sold them in Duncan. Edith became an expert in the pioneer arts of soap- and candle-making, bacon curing and butter churning. That she made the most of her reluctant decision to marry was confirmed by a young visitor in 1912, who said, “Her manners unchanged by all those years in the jungle, [she] kept the house spotless, fragrant with blossom from her garden, and shiny from much polishing.” Her three men were expected to measure up to her strict standards: a proper dinner no matter how late they had to work outside, preceded by a bath and a change of clothing; no food to be consumed until she had asked the blessing. The same visitor was impressed with the quiet man who was Edith’s husband. Henry March, wrote Bruce Hutchison when he had become an esteemed journalist, was “the most successful man I ever met.”
Henry March and Frank Green were the only ones of the early settlers at the lake who stayed the course. Frank had lived alone at Greendale, his acreage by the river, for almost twenty years when he married at the age of forty-eight. His bride was twenty-six. Louisa Spencer was an energetic and capable Englishwoman who had come to Victoria after her job with a family in Russia had ended due to the illness of her employer. Through family connections she met Frank’s siblings, who spoke of their reclusive brother living a Waiden Pond-like existence near an isolated lake up island.
Louisa came to the lake with a friend and camped in a tent at Greendale. In accordance with Frank’s agreement of sale with the E&N, some of the trees had been cleared, leaving the stumps as annoying obstacles to any future use of the land. Several years before Louisa first saw Greendale, Frank had built a large barn to shelter his cattle. He had also built a second cabin.
That [cabin] was just one room with what I suppose you would call a loft or a garret with just room enough to store things in, no ladder, no proper stairway, and there was exactly one window and one door and a very, very low lintel over the door so that anybody who was a reasonable height was bound to crack his head …
Frank and Louisa were married, with only Henry and Edith March in attendance, at St. Peter’s Church in Quamichan, an enclave of retired British Army officers outside Duncan. The birth of two sons, Brian and Trevor, necessitated adding onto the cabin, whose low-linteled door continued to give the house a frowning aspect on the side that faced the river.
There were very few other houses along the river in 1909 when Louisa came to live there. Her closest female neighbour was Ethel Haggard, whose reclusive husband would order Ethel back home whenever she came to visit Louisa. Further upstream, wealthy Victoria businessmen like Biggerstaff Wilson and William Oliver were building vacation homes, but their wives would be there only in the summer. There were just a few women in the village, that collection of shacks and floathouses clustered around the two hotels at the junction of the river and the lake. The residents had chosen to call the village Lake Cowichan, but since that name could easily be confused with Cow-ichan Lake, most people referred to it as “the Foot.” Some of the villagers and all of the businessmen were impatiently awaiting the arrival of the railroad.
The railroad was just what the lake needed, according to the spec-ulators who were buying land from disillusioned settlers or from the E&N itself in anticipation of a logging and real estate boom once the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), new owner of the E&N, built the seventeen miles of track from Duncan to the lake. In 1907, the presence of a mere survey party had created a sensation. In 1908, construction was “almost assured” to start that very summer. Two years later, when the contract was let for the clearing and grading of two sections, logging companies and land speculators breathed more easily: it would not be long now before they were all very rich.
For the residents of the lake—the remittance men, the settlers and their families, the prospectors and trappers, the occasional retired army officer who had settled there in the past twenty years—the setting for the life they had chosen would soon be gone. In 1911, the less staid among them celebrated Christmas in the customary way: a shooting match at the Riverside Hotel on the twenty-fourth, a race between two launches on Christmas morning, and a dinner that night hosted by the owners of the hotel.
In the months that followed, the advance guard of the people who would open logging camps and run the railroad began to arrive. Cassie Beech and her foreman husband, Robert, moved into the E&N section house at the new station. Some of the older residents thought Cassie and Robert were a little “rough and ready,” but Cassie didn’t care. She loved the parties at Scholey Brothers’ Store, especially on a warm evening when, from the verandah that wrapped itself around the building, the dancers would cool themselves and look out over the lake.
Everyone used to go. Everything was wild and rough and everyone knew everyone else. There were only nine women here so we all had to get out and have a party.
Up the river in his log summer home overlooking the Big Pool, William Edgar Oliver, the once and future reeve of Oak Bay, expatriate Scot, lawyer, gentleman farmer and land speculator, was determined to become even richer than he already was. A hands-on employer, whether he was at the lake or in the city, he concerned himself with the most minute details involved in the operation of his various properties, which included, for a time, the Lakeside Hotel and Abernethy Farm. Having acquired as well a great deal of timber land, he had been delighted to hear, earlier in 1912, that the railroad was almost there.
In May of that year, in the civility and peace of Oak Bay, Oliver received a letter written from the rawness and confusion of Lake Cowichan by his hotel manager, Jim Girdwood: “The blasting up here has been hellish—timber flying all over the place right out into the lake and the river jolly dangerous.” Oliver’s man at the farm, a Chinese labourer named Chue Chee, would certainly have agreed with Gird-wood’s assessment. In a manner surprisingly vociferous for a member of a race expected, in British Columbia, to be submissive, he said he would not work any more because the boom and roar of the blasting that went on night and day had made him afraid “out of his life.” The very next day, Girdwood was able to report to Oliver that “the [E&N] engine is passing in front of the Riverside. [I]n a day or two the line will be finished.” The modern age had arrived noisily at Cowichan Lake, and a new era had begun.
One year later, on a hot June day, an impressive list of dignitaries boarded the official train in Duncan at 10:15 A.M. for an inspiring journey through magnificent stands of timber, mostly owned by logging companies and worth millions of dollars, to arrive at the Cowichan Lake railway station for opening ceremonies punctually at 11:15. On the platform a crowd of lake people jostled to get a good view of the visitors from Duncan, who seldom gave the people at the lake a second thought and who viewed them now from the windows of the train with curiosity and some alarm.
A cinematograph ground away recording every move as the dignitaries disembarked, muttering to themselves: “Where have these lake people come from?” A camera provided back-up stills just in case. “Who do they think they are, crowding in to be included in the official photographs?”
Not a moment too soon, launches whisked some of the visitors over the cool water to the Lakeside Hotel for lunch, and buggies trundled others to the Riverside Hotel. Later in the afternoon the entire party congregated at the Riverside, then walked back to the station across the bridge at McCallum’s Point to board the train for the return trip. Theirs was a unique journey, because the E&N had no plans to provide regular passenger service on its Cowichan Lake run.
One of those fortunate passengers was the editor of the Cowichan Leader, an ambitious and well-educated young Englishman named Lukin Johnston. Johnston, who liked to stir things up through his editorials, had been fighting a proposed government subsidy to improve the road to the lake. Certain Victoria businessmen with connections to the provincial government and, not coincidentally, a goodly amount of Cowichan Lake waterfront property were seeking this subsidy. One of them was Sam Matson, the owner of the Victoria Daily Colonist.
Lukin Johnston’s opposition to road subsidies angered Mr. Matson, who knew his own real estate holdings would not increase in value unless the road was drastically improved. One day Matson met J. Y. Copeman on the street in Victoria. Copeman was in charge of negotiations with the government on behalf of the Cowichan Lake property investors. Matson asked him how their road was doing. Copeman replied that the young editor in Duncan was causing them some difficulty with his editorials. Three months later, out of the blue, Lukin Johnston was offered the job of night editor at the Colonist, at a much larger salary than he was receiving at the Leader. Wondering at his good luck but delighted to be moving up in his profession, he accepted, moved to Victoria and turned his attention to the concerns of that city.
The young editor may have been the only person to benefit from that bit of investor interference. The road continued in its rudimentary state, narrow and full of dangerous curves often obscured by trees and heavy brush. And those lake people could only brace themselves for the changes the railroad would bring.