Notice: Sportsmen are requested not to shoot the cattle on this property.
—W. E. OLIVER, LESSEE
IN THE FALL OF 1916, after the cougar attacked the Ashburnham and Farrer children, people at the lake changed their minds about the big cats. It wasn’t that cougars had been held in any particular regard before that attack—most people believed that if there were going to be any deer around for hunters to shoot and for people to eat, then the fewer cougars there were the better. It was just that before that old she-lion lunged at the two children as they walked along the trail towards Bear Lake, people thought that although cougars would attack cats, goats and chickens, they would never attack a human being.
After Charlie March had dispatched the old girl and she had been stuffed and photographed for a fund raising postcard by the Esquimalt Red Cross, men who hunted cougars gained new status in the eyes of other lake people. But it took another six years for government officials to raise the bounty from twenty-five to forty dollars and several more years before they appointed official cougar hunters. In 1916, however, twenty-five dollars for every animal he shot was enough to provide Ike Holman, who lived a spare life on his trap line, with a good portion of his income.
Ike was the oldest of three brothers from a family that lived in Westholme at the foot of Mount Sicker, in the closest approximation to hillbilly life that could be found on Vancouver Island. The brothers were rough men but men of many talents, piecing together a living by farming, hunting, trapping, prospecting and killing cougars for the bounty.
Ike’s brother Albert married a local woman and raised a family, but Ike preferred a more reclusive existence, spending most of his year in the wild country at the head of Cowichan Lake, ranging out from his shack on the Nitinat River to prospect for copper, trap fur-bearing animals and shoot cougars. Occasionally he returned to the family enclave, where he shared a cabin with a black friend from Tacoma who bore the unfortunate sobriquet of “Chip the nigger.”
Everyone at the lake knew Ike Holman and his cougar dog, Whis-kers. The two had a reputation for getting a lot of panthers, as the big cats were also called, and Ike’s shack had accommodated so many other trappers and hunters that it was known as Ike’s Hotel. In 1914, when the CNR was trying to push its grade through to Alberni, there had actually been a trial at Ike’s Hotel. One of the contractors had sued the railway for changing the right-of-way, and the judge and his horse had come up to the head of the lake on a scow and trekked up to the river and on to Ike’s place, which was full of timber cruisers, prospectors, trappers and anybody else who could get there.
The trappers and prospectors who inhabited the triangle of wilderness that lay between the head of Cowichan Lake, the head of Nitinat Lake and the flank of the Alberni canal formed a small and thinly populated community, as tightly knit as a group of fundamental loners could be. They spent their days and nights by themselves but shared cabins and food if necessary, kept track of each other in case one of them got hurt or lost, and knew at least a little of each other’s business. So in the fall of 1916, when Ike Holman started to have some remarkable success prospecting, it was pretty general knowledge.
There had been a couple of developments that explained the heightened interest in mining claims at the lake. The most important one was the extending of the CNR grade towards its ultimate destination at Alberni. In the summer of 1914 the railway company, although in deep financial trouble, had been pushing the grade through at the urging of local business interests, who were mindful of the tremendous potential in minerals and logging in the untapped area beyond the head of Cowichan Lake.
Before the railway began to build its grade and accompanying tote road through, the trail used for generations by First Nations people travelling from Nitinat Lake to hunt and fish and to carve canoes from the big cedar trees at the lake had been rendered almost inaccessible by huge fallen trees. The grade and tote road changed that. In the summer of 1914 it had become only a matter of time before a few bridges spanned the rivers and streams and the grade ran all the way to Alberni. The grade that was already constructed provided a pathway to the head of Nitinat Lake and opened the country to prospectors.
Even though the First World War had put an end—temporarily, everyone hoped—to the laying of CNR steel, prospecting had continued at full force. And although there had been mineral claims staked in the area between Duncan and the West Coast since before the turn of the century, it wasn’t until the war years that some successful mines went into production—the second development that encouraged prospec’ tors. They looked to operations like the Blue Grouse mine and they wanted a piece of that kind of success.
The Blue Grouse mine sat on the mountain of the same name, a mile back from the shore of Cowichan Lake near Gordon Bay. In the last weeks of 1915, people in the village who took a boat ride up to the bay had been able to see the road the company was building from the shore to the bunkers at the foot of the mountain, where a 335-foot chute brought copper-bearing ore down from the mine. People in the village could hear the blasting at two o’clock in the morning, and those who weren’t upset about the loss of sleep and the passing of a quieter era saw it as a sign that there would be two ways now to make it big at the lake—logging and mining.
The following spring, along with a lot of other people, Ike Holman headed for the newly accessible hills between the head of the Cowichan Lake and the Nitinat. On the eastern side of the railroad grade, where it ran along the Little Nitinat River about ten miles from Francis Lake, Ike discovered an outcrop of sufficient size to indicate that thousands of tons of rich ore ran in at least four veins along the slope of a steep hill. The valley below was filled with boulders of ore that had crashed down from time to time. Assays showed 8 per cent pure copper. But Ike was not interested in becoming a miner. By the time he had registered his claims with the Ministry of Mines, he had already found a buyer for them.
Andrew Wright of the Victoria suburb of Uplands represented a consortium of investors that included Matt Hemmingsen. The legendary boss logger, recently in possession of extra funds due to the boom in logging at the lake and looking for some excitement, had been interested in becoming involved in the burgeoning mining business. It looked as if he had found a winner—a rich deposit close to a potential transportation corridor. Matt and his partners got their copper deposit and Ike Holman got what he wanted—a big grubstake.
Such good fortune called for a celebration, and Jimmie Rooke was available as a companion. Jimmie and Ike were related by marriage in a shirttail sort of a way, and they were in fine form as they repaired to the Riverside Hotel to drink to Ike’s recent acquisition of several thousand dollars, which he carried with him for safety’s sake.
Ike and Jimmie left the Riverside some time later, and Ike was never seen alive again. People said later that he had been advised to go to his shack on the Nitinat River, and they assumed that that was where he had gone. By the time anyone missed him, there had been four or five days of heavy rain, not an unusual occurrence in November, and in 1916 a welcome one after a dry October with many bush fires, but hard on a man who might be lying injured in the woods.
There were two likely ways to get to the head of the lake in those days—by boat or by walking the trails along the south shore. Searchers made the assumption that since it had been late at night when Ike left the Riverside, he had probably fallen while walking in the dark. He could be injured and in need of help. But search parties found no trace of him on the trail, at his shack or in any of the logging camps en route.
Two weeks after the night at the Riverside, Ike’s brother Albert came up to the lake to investigate, but he found nothing except Ike’s purebred bloodhounds baying and hungry at Ike’s shack. A month later, there was still no sign of Ike Holman and, aside from a report the following March that he had been seen in Vancouver and a mention by the inspector of mines in his annual report that Ike had died of exposure, there was no more mention by officialdom of Ike Holman and his missing grubstake.
It was obvious that the inspector of mines knew or thought he knew something about Ike’s fate. Ike’s nephew Frank, the official family historian, says that a skeleton was found in the bush with a gold tooth in its skull—a gold tooth in the same place that Ike had one. Albert had made a positive identification, according to Frank.
Frank Holman makes it his business to find out about things that concern the family, but his theories don’t always add up. Frank figures that Ike travelled with someone up the lake in a boat, and that that person killed him and struggled to get the money out of Ike’s pocket before dumping his body in the lake. Frank can’t explain how the skeleton ended up in the bush, but he does explain, in a matter-of-fact tone, that the way a murderer makes sure a body won’t surface after it has been dumped into a lake is to puncture the stomach with a knife so that gases inside the body can’t build up and make it buoyant.
Frank’s brother Fred has a different theory, one that is supported by Joe Garner, another man with a good knowledge of the bush. Fred and Joe are prepared to bet money that Ike chose to go back to his shack by way of the trail along the south shore. They argue that that was the way he would have travelled with his dogs. The person who killed Ike somewhere along the trail, according to Fred and Joe, would have had an easier time getting the money out of Ike’s pocket but a harder time disposing of the body.
Neither Frank nor Fred knows for sure what happened to Ike Hol-man in November of 1916. All they know is that he never showed up again, and that Jimmie Rooke suddenly had lots of money to spend. That knowledge doesn’t answer all the questions or account for the theory that many old cougar hunters would probably have favoured—that Ike Holman, full of liquor in the middle of the night, tired or drunk or a little of each, was stalked by a curious cougar. When Ike lay down or fell down, the cougar attacked him and did him in.
The number of cougars killed for bounty did not lessen with the disappearance of one cougar hunter, albeit a good one. There were plenty to take Ike’s place. And the two hunters who stand out do so more for their personalities than for anything distinctive about their style of hunting. The fact that they were both called “Dad” points to the fact that a certain amount of venerability tended to enhance their reputations.
“Dad” Janes probably didn’t need the revenue from the bounty, but he surely did love to kill cougars. He kept bread on the table by owning the Lakeside Hotel which, for convenience’ sake, he had converted to tourist apartments with a big communal kitchen in which the guests could do their own cooking. Janes had a sort of hunting partnership with Bill Pourier, who drove the stage in the early 1920s. Whenever Pourier saw a cougar on the road during one of his trips, he would notify Janes as soon as he could, and the two of them would get the bloodhounds and go out after the cougar. That was how most cougar hunters found their prey by that time, though earlier hunters had prided themselves on knowing the favoured trails and habits of each one of their quarries.
Most hunters considered the cougar a worthy opponent, but it was a grudging accolade. Cougars killed a deer a week on average, and most hunters felt that the animal did it just for the sake of killing. Once it was agreed that cougars should be exterminated, it became acceptable to kill them all: males, females and even the kittens. The hunter received a bounty on dead kittens if they were old enough to have had their eyes open. And a female cougar with a litter of five was a lucrative prize indeed. A female cougar in heat attracted males from many miles around—another bonanza for the hunter.
As essential to a hunter as his gun, and even more important than the actual kill, were the hunter’s dogs. And although more modern hunters have switched to the long-legged bluetick hound with its floppy ears and its oo-oo-oo howl of greeting, hunters like Ike Holman and Dad Janes preferred bloodhounds trained first to take a domestic cat, then a coon and finally a cougar.
Having been alerted to the presence of a cougar in a neighbourhood, the hunter took the hounds on a leash to where the animal had been sighted and he listened for the dogs to get the scent.
Their voice will change right away when you get close—row, row, ra, row, row, let ‘em go. Barking, ya … as soon as he smells it his voice would go up just like a man singin’.
As soon as the cougar heard the dogs it took off, but because cougars are sprinters and not endurance runners, the animal soon became winded and sought refuge in a tree. The chase seldom went farther than a mile, and once the hunter and the dogs were at the base of the tree, the pace slowed considerably if the cougar was well camouflaged by the foliage. The expert hunter would shoot as soon as he was sure he could fire a lethal bullet, since with a blind shot he ran the risk of having his dogs mauled by an injured cougar as it fell from the tree.
Some hunters skinned the cats right where they shot them. They kept the head and neck intact so that the hide would make a proper rug and let the dogs at the meat. “Oh, the dogs like the meat, ya. Good hound dogs crave the meat. It’s good meat.”
Charlie March preferred to carry the whole carcass home, and he accomplished this feat by suspending the animal from a pole that was to be carried over the shoulders of two men. Charlie shot fifty-one cougars in the Mesachie Lake area alone. Dad Janes killed seventeen in two years with the help of Bill Pourier.
Dad Janes’s wife was a woman distinctive in her own right for the umbrella-sized hats she wore and for the fact that she always carried a lantern and chewed gum. The couple soon wearied of the lake and left for Victoria, explaining that Dad had pretty well cleaned up on the cougars within a radius of twelve miles and besides, the whistles from the logging camps were getting on their nerves. They were back a year later with the gun and the cougar dogs.
Up the lake at Cottonwood Creek, Charlie “Dad” Caldwell knew his own mind a little better, and his wife was no slouch either. They lived, like almost everyone else at Cottonwood, on a float, but in contrast to the rest of their neighbours, they did not believe in working for wages.
Dad Caldwell, a.k.a. Cougar Charlie, a.k.a. Pop Caldwell, was getting on when he and his wife moored their floathouse in the mill bay, but they had learned how to provide for themselves. They built a separate raft of small logs, covered it with balsam boughs and towed it into the creek delta, where they covered it in ten inches of good black loam they hauled in wheelbarrows. Mrs. Caldwell planted a garden, and with the roots in the water and the leaves perpetually out in the sun, unshaded by trees as a land garden would be, the plants thrived. The couple sold produce, eggs from Mrs. CaldwelPs chickens and pelts from the animals her husband trapped. Added to the revenue from cougar bounties, which were by then forty dollars an animal, the Caldwells made a comfortable living.
The Caldwells soon were known to everybody for miles around. She was a crack shot and a fine gardener, and her home brew was considered to be the best in the community. He was not above allowing the commemoration of his birthday to be used on several occasions as an excuse for a community party. He smoked cigars that “would almost stifle a badger” and liked to emphasize a conversational point with the gesticulations of a hand missing all the fingers but one. By the time the new mill had been built and the name of the town had been changed to Youbou, Dad Caldwell was the official cougar hunter and was prepared to take on the occasional bear as well.
In October of 1933, when he was seventy-seven years old and his wire-haired terrier, Jude, seemed about the same age, Dad and Jude went hunting bear. With only one shot left in his gun, Caldwell fired at a bear but only injured it. The animal charged and sunk his teeth into the man’s leg. Charlie kicked the bear, forcing it to let go of the leg, whereupon the enraged bear grabbed the other one. While Dad rammed the gun barrel down the bear’s throat, Jude was ripping at and charging all over the animal, providing enough of a diversion that the wounded bear released Dad and took after the little terrier. This gave the man enough time to reload the gun and dispatch the bear. Dad Caldwell was only too pleased to show the tooth marks in his caulk boots to anyone who doubted his story.
Dad Caldwell was still starring in the community celebrations of his birthday when he was eighty. He had become larger than life and, like any sensible wife, Mrs. Caldwell kept his feet closer to the ground by reminding him that he tended to bend the truth a little. That tendency to shape the facts made it hard for people to know whether or not to believe his story about the two giant turtles that he had seen crawling around at the mouth of the creek on Ashburnhams’ beach. Charlie had been dozing in his rowboat in the dim light of early morning when he saw them—two turtles that he swore were between five and six feet long and four feet wide. They crawled slowly down the beach to the water, swam out two hundred feet and sank out of sight.
Charlie’s theory of how those turtles got there borrows heavily from the legend told by Ditidaht Indians, who believed in a lake monster named Stin-qua that came from the ocean by way of a channel between Cowichan and Nitinat lakes. The fact that the lake is very deep gave Charlie Caldwell plenty of latitude for his theory that there must be warm springs at the deepest level, making it possible for this species of creature to survive unchanged from prehistoric times.
There is no lake in the world that hasn’t assumed some sort of mystery in the minds of the people who live around it. There are lakes with resident monsters that are seldom seen when there is a camera handy; lakes that have no bottom; lakes that bewitch and beguile. Cowichan Lake is larger than many, and by its very size seems to make room for mysteries and monsters. And like many other lakes, it can stir up storms of such fierceness that the bravest and the most rational can be talked into believing in supernatural forces.
Ken Gillespie had a more practical view of the lake, and he knew it as well as anyone did. In his boats, The Thistle, The Nomad and then The Meny Widow, he ran a passenger and freight service, covering the twenty-six miles from foot to head and back again.
Gillespie was an unlikely candidate for the life he led: running the boat, shooting cougars, trapping, guiding hunters and fishers. He was born into a bank manager’s family that sent each of its seven sons and one daughter to school in Scotland at the age of twelve. Each child in turn received a thorough but difficult education, staying at the school with no trips home allowed until graduation.
Ken had been introduced to Cowichan Lake on a family holiday before he was sent away to school. When he returned to the island as a young adult, the lake drew him back over and over again, the rough wilderness lake with its minuscule settlement at one end being an antidote to the stifling job he had at his father’s bank in Victoria.
Although he complained about his paltry bank salary, he managed to accumulate enough money to buy, in 1906, the Riverside Hotel and 160 acres of land around it in partnership with the ubiquitous Victoria politician and lawyer William Oliver. Though the two men parted company soon afterward, the division of the property between them left Ken in possession of the hotel and all the land on the south shore of the river, where a few years later the village took shape. In a move that engendered a furious response by his father, Ken left his job at the bank and moved to the lake permanently, where he patched together a satisfying life that included marriage to Alice Marboeuf and the raising of four children.
But though he served on the school board, built a nine-room house in the village and later sent his children to private schools, Ken was a backwoods man at heart. And there were people in the village who thought he enjoyed life far too much. His daughter, Lucille, is amused by that.
He would like to have [been playing around] and he did more of that in later years … but he worked very hard running that boat. I remember him going out in the middle of the night all the time.
After Camp Six opened at Nixon Creek at the far end of the lake in the late 1920s, men in the camps called Ken whenever they needed a ride. Those were the days when Camp Six gave very good parties. Ken Gillespie would load the Merry Widow so full of party-goers from the village that there was only an inch and a half of freeboard between the water and the gunwales. With an orchestra on board and a fair amount of alcohol, the four-hour journey passed by pleasantly. The dancing at the camp lasted until four in the morning, after which the boatload of exhausted celebrants travelled back down the lake, arriving home in time for breakfast.
As logging moved farther up the lake and an increasing number of log booms travelled down its length to be moored near the village for loading onto railway cars, the lake became increasingly dangerous to travel on, especially at night. The lights on the log booms were not always visible, and booms sometimes broke up, leaving drifting logs and eventual deadheads to catch boaters unaware. In the fall a pall of smoke often settled over the lake from the slash burning in the mountains on either side; in the winter there were fogs, relentless rain and windstorms.
When a gale-force wind came shrieking over the divide from the Pacific Ocean, it uprooted trees that fell over roads, railroads and telephone lines; it sent branches flying through windows and flagstaffs crashing to the ground. The winds were often laden with rain that caused the lake to rise as much as a foot an hour, filling streams and sending them roaring down to raise the lake even higher, floating dead trees and stumps off the shore. The floating debris clogged the entrance to the river, floathouses and boathouses broke loose, basements flooded, streets ran with water, and bridges floated away.
In the middle of a winter storm, when the lake was dark and ominous, when waves pounded the shore and rain saturated the forest floor, Ken Gillespie, alone at the end of the day in a trapline cabin with a leaking roof, would have ruminated about the choices men make and how different his had been from the men he worked with in the bank in Victoria.
One of those men had been Robert Service, who had been wandering around western Canada for a few years before he settled for a more respectable life and took a job at the branch of the Bank of Commerce where Ken was working. For a few months during the winter of 1903-4, the two worked side by side and talked about the future. The bank needed robust young men to staff their branch in Whitehorse and, mindful of the disagreeable conditions that awaited such persons in those early post-gold rush days, offered $500 extra pay, a supply of Hudson’s Bay blankets, and extra warm clothes to anyone who would agree to stay for two years.
Service jumped at the chance. Gillespie stayed behind. When the bank asked him to go two years later, it was no longer offering special incentives, civilization having been deemed to have reached the Yukon in that short space of time. Service got some of his poetry published and went on to become “the Canadian Kipling”; Gillespie went to Cowichan Lake and made a name for himself in a quieter way.
Ken didn’t begrudge Robert Service his success, but he did marvel in later years at how his one-time friend had become “the Poet of the Yukon.”
Robert W. Service made a lot of money with his poetry. Of course, in my estimation he wrote this stuff and strung it together darn good, yes, but he got all this dope from the miners and trappers up there. Robert Service would get lost in a twelve-acre field, I believe, and he was just a little namby-pamby devil… And what did he do when he sold his book and got some money?… He went to Paris and lived in Paris—a soft life there. Mind you, I had nothing against him, but he wasn’t the outdoor type at all, really.
An “outdoor type” more to Ken’s liking was Robert Service’s cousin Tommy. Tommy and Ken had barely become acquainted when Tommy and two other trapper/prospectors broke into Ken’s hotel. It was an act of the most pragmatic kind. When Ken owned the Riverside, he ran a small store on the premises that stocked overalls, chewing tobacco, bacon, sugar, flour and not much else. Tommy and his friends had rowed all the way down the lake to buy some of those things and found the place locked up. So they broke a window, helped themselves, and left a list of everything they took and the money to cover the cost. As far as Ken remembered, they may even have replaced the window.
Tommy Service had a little house in the village, but he was often away prospecting and trapping. As soon as war was declared in 1914, he joined up; he served the full four years and was the first Cowichan Lake soldier to return in 1918. When he and Merlin Douglas discovered a manganese deposit a few months later, he named it Hill 60 after one of the places in France where he had fought. For a while it looked as if manganese was going to make a lot of people rich, but the demand for hardened steel fell off a few years after the war.
The war was responsible for making a lot of economic dreams come true in businesses that flourished briefly and then collapsed after the armistice. One of the most dramatic was the harvesting of Sitka spruce for the production of airplane bodies. In the final year of the war, the Imperial Munitions Board encouraged the harvest of the clear, resilient wood of this largest of spruce trees, which commonly reaches heights of 175 feet and circumferences of 19 feet but can grow as large as 280 feet high and 40 feet around at the base.
Instructions came directly from England, bypassing the Canadian War Protection Board and infuriating its head, one Harvey Reginald MacMillan. MacMillan was doing his bit for his country and didn’t like the fact that the inspector and purchasing agent, Charlie Marston, worked directly for the Munitions Board. Charlie was an expatriate American who had tangled with H. R. MacMillan when they both worked for VL&M, and he was quite prepared to stand up to the former provincial chief forester and future lumber magnate.
Marston and his wife made many trips to the West Coast that year, she working as his “tally man,” he buying spruce logs and marvelling at the perfection of the wood.
In those days all the wing beams and all the structural parts of those planes were all wood and it had to be practically perfect. Oh, there was some beautiful stuff. Especially that wing beam stock.
According to their representative, Major Austin Taylor, the Imperial Munitions Board required an unlimited supply of spruce. Prospects looked rosy for the logging companies involved, the only problem being the transportation of the huge logs to market. Ironically, the easiest part was getting the logs out of the forest and into the water, a process accomplished by building a fore and aft road—laying smaller logs end to end to form a trough. The obvious route was down Nitinat Lake, over the Nitinat Bar to the Pacific Ocean, and along the coast to Victoria and on to Vancouver. But that route presented two major obstacles: first, the ferocity of the ocean, which accounted for the loss of many valuable logs, and second, the difficulty of making passage through the dark and twisted channel, its water shallow, its bottom rocky, that connected Nitinat Lake to the ocean. In that passage the surf was always running. A strong current alternated directions with every one of the four daily changes of tide, making it very dangerous to tow the big logs through.
Although four million feet of spruce did make it to Vancouver, an appreciable amount didn’t. The losses were too large to endure. The Imperial Munitions Board decreed that the Wilson-Brady Company, one of the contractors, should build a six-mile railroad to connect its camp at the head of Nitinat Lake with the CNR grade that had been abandoned at the beginning of the war. When the war ended and the market for airplane spruce collapsed one month afterward, all that stood in the way of the completion of the connection was one rocky bluff.
But Wilson-Brady’s loss turned out to be an asset for hikers and settlers travelling on foot between Cowichan Lake and communities on the West Coast. There was now an almost complete “highway” to the head of Nitinat Lake. At the Cowichan Lake end, for the first few miles, travellers used a trail that wound through mixed forest. Soon they came upon the CNR tote road so recently abandoned and already covered with grass, clover and thistle that had grown from seeds clinging to the hay brought in for the construction horses. Encroaching bush overhung the grade itself, which was barren of ties and rails.
Although most of the streams on the CNR route in this area had never been bridged, a lone trestle sixty-five feet high allowed easy crossing of Vernon Creek, after which the trail began to pass abandoned railroad camps. Evidence lay, strewn everywhere, of the days not so many years before when hundreds of men had worked out of a series of railway camps that stretched from the lake to Alberni. Even though hunters and trappers had scavenged hundreds of pounds of food, tools and dynamite that had been left behind, as if the CNR wanted to make a quick getaway, much still remained: cooking utensils, stoves, heavy equipment and the office files that still contained Carrall Street employment slips, bearing evidence that thousands of men had worked there and almost nothing was known of them but their names.
None of the several contractors who had won the right to build stretches of the grade cared who the men they hired were. There were so many labourers and so many more where they came from. English was the mother tongue of only half of them, and a fair number, Italians mostly, spoke no English at all. All that mattered was that they were strong and needed a job. The contractors provided good food and clean bunkhouses, which was more than the logging camps were offering. The only real gripe among the workers in the railroad camps was the money they had to pay for medical care.
Every man paid one dollar a month medical coverage, but in June of 1914, on the entire eighty-four miles of railroad construction, the CNR employed only one doctor. A twelve-bed hospital at the Alberni canal and a six-bed unit at the head of Cowichan Lake were each staffed by a male nurse. The doctor was supposed to visit each camp regularly, but few of the one thousand workers then employed in the twenty-three camps saw the doctor or thought much about him until someone got sick or injured and died for lack of medical attention. Then people started doing some arithmetic and asking some questions.
One thousand men paying one dollar per month added up to one thousand dollars. The doctor’s salary was about one hundred dollars, and the two nurses were paid somewhat less. The provincial Master and Servant Act said the money deducted from the men’s wages had to be paid to the doctor, and although the physician and the company denied it, it looked as if the company was making a profit on the medical deduction.
Itinerant working men were not likely to insist on their right under the act to inspect the books, and probably no one would have made much of a fuss if it hadn’t been for what happened to Reginald Charles Nutt.
Discontent had been brewing for a year or so before Captain Nutt met his end. Most of the unhappiness centred around the lack of identification available when a railroad worker was killed. People remembered the time one of them was smothered under a load of snow when the roof of the halfway house on the Cowichan Lake Road collapsed early one Sunday morning. The only thing anyone could tell the authorities about the man was that he was thirty-two years old. No one knew where he came from or who he had left behind.
The only way anyone knew who Robert Raeburn had left behind when he drowned in the lake was by reading the letter from his sister in Glasgow that the young engineer had been carrying in his pocket. The CNR had no personal information in its files. And when an Italian labourer came upon a dead man lying face down in a creek, he could find no papers at all to identify the man, and no one who even knew his name.
After each incident, the inquest jury made the same recommendation: that employers be compelled to fill out a form for each employee. The editor of the Cowichan Leader was in no doubt that this was the solution.
The case in point brings before us once again the absolute necessity of some system of proper identification of men working in railroad construction camps. Many are foreign and do not speak English. Many of them are of a rather low caste of human being…, but for all this they are human, they may have wives and relatives to whom they are dear.
Captain Reginald Nutt was no “foreigner”; he was an English gentleman, son of a vicar in Cambridge, England, a former resident of Henley-on-Thames and a veteran of the Boer War. There were a number of such men working on the grade, and the reasons why they chose to be there were considered to be nobody’s business. Still, people did wonder why a gentleman would be driving a dump car on a down grade at CNR Camp 97.
It was 8:30 in the morning on a June day in 1914, and the work was in high gear. Nutt noticed that the points of one switch in the rails were wrong. He leapt from his car to kick them over and the car struck his leg, breaking it in three places. The fractured ends of at least one of the bones protruded through his muscle and skin, having severed a large blood vessel in the process.
The foreman had no medical supplies in the camp but the hospital was just two miles away at the head of the lake, so he sent for Ernest Freeman, the nurse in residence. While Nutt waited for help to come, someone took a boot lace and used it as a tourniquet to check the flow of blood that spurted from his leg wound.
When Nurse Freeman finally arrived on the scene, he could do nothing but send Nutt down to the Foot in the hopes that a doctor could be found there, the CNR doctor being too far away at the Alberni end of the grade. Thinking he should not leave the hospital unattended, the nurse arranged for Nutt to be transported by boat down the lake unaccompanied. In the course of the trip, the engineer of the Gretna noticed that the tourniquet was slack and that Nutt was bleeding.
When the Gretna arrived at the Riverside, her only passenger was unconscious. It took some time to locate the village doctor, and Nutt bled to death while he waited. He was thirty-eight. The usual inquest followed his death, and then an indignant Leader editorial, this one demanding better employer records and medical care. Every man from Camp 97 went to Duncan for the memorial service specially arranged by the Church Camp Mission. Nutt was well-liked, “in the pink of condition,” and an English gentleman. But being an English gentleman rather than an anonymous foreigner had not saved his life.
A world war and a few years later, the grade where Reginald Nutt had worked was already overgrown and the dumpers that he had driven lay abandoned and broken, alder and maple saplings beginning to grow through the large wheels. No living creature remained from the prewar construction days—the horses, which had been turned loose in the CNR’S rush to leave the grade behind, had died one by one in the jaws of hungry cougars.
Cougars gave Jack Anderson a lot of sleepless nights. He was a trapper who had been appointed special guardian of a herd of elk that the province was hoping to protect on a reserve encompassing the Shaw Creek watershed to the east of the lakehead. How Jack was supposed to protect a bunch of elk from cougars was anybody’s guess. It was a good thing he had a sense of humour. The sign on the door of his cabin on the Nitinat River offered hospitality to all travellers hiking the abandoned grade, but warned in no uncertain terms against the stealing of any of his possessions.
You are Welcome to Use this shack and what is in it. Please leave things as you find them! God help you if you pack anything away.
Jack’s cabin was on the Pacific side of the height of land—the backbone of the island—beyond the E&N belt and into old-growth timber. From there to the ocean it was all downhill for steep mountain streams and for intrepid hikers as well. Where the Wilson-Brady grade joined the CNR, some six miles from the head of Nitinat Lake, postwar travellers left the tote road and turned in a southerly direction. The trail they followed soon ran along the precipitous shore, the water deep below, across bridges made of one felled tree each, which tested the vertiginous, through swamps and along donkey-engine haulways until it reached a logging camp.
The next section of the journey to the coast was covered by the boat from the logging camp, through the fiordlike length of Nitinat Lake—twelve miles long and half a mile wide, the shores too steep for railbed or road—then around Windy Point and into Brown’s Bay. Having left the boat, hikers walked the split-cedar elevated sidewalks necessary to navigate the mile and a half of high salal and dense undergrowth between Brown’s Bay and Clo-ose.
In the 1920s the smattering of English and First Nations families that populated the beach settlements—Clo-ose, Clovelly, Whyac—of this stretch of the West Coast were connected to the people of Cow-ichan Lake in an artificial, bureaucratic way by the fact that they occupied the same electoral and school districts. Since the CPR steamship Princess Maquinna offered the only way out of the area for freight or passengers short of the trail to Cowichan Lake, the community was isolated and its inhabitants hardy and resourceful.
But even the most resourceful people have need of the outside world. Sensing that their tenuous connection with Cowichan Lake might be the coastal community’s only avenue for alerting the government to their demands, community spokesman David Logan wrote a regular column in the Duncan newspaper, making sure that the people inland understood the problems of the people on the coast.
Logan and his wife, Sarah, both Scots, had settled there by default, having agreed in 1894 to look after the farm and store of a white settler who left for a holiday and didn’t return. The Logans stayed on the coast for the rest of their lives and raised their family there. By the 1920s they were approaching old age, but Logan still worked as the repairman for the telegraph line. His other occupations included being justice of the peace, rescuing survivors from the frequent shipwrecks common to that rockstrewn coastline, keeping the lifesaving trail that ran from Bamfield in the west to Port Renfrew in the east free from the ever-encroaching salal, and issuing death certificates to hunters who earned money by killing the birds that fell under the Noxious Bird Act—-a dollar each for eagles and owls, twenty cents for magpies and crows.
Many of the problems Logan reported to his readers in the newspaper were beyond anyone’s control—hurricanes, floods—and many were accepted as part of the life most of the inhabitants had chosen: the impossibility of clearing the woods for farming, the necessity to build and rebuild the ramps and sidewalks that were the only possible way to get from one part of the settlement to another, the difficulty in obtaining medical care. But there were some injustices that needed to be remedied, and David Logan made sure the outside world heard about them: the thirty-six eligible voters had to cast their ballots in the presence of a returning officer and clerk who were outsiders; the only employment available to most people was at the cannery, which opened and closed at the whim of markets; when the government built a lighthouse or a new trail, outsiders were brought in to do the work; the government had promised a road from Bamfield to Victoria for so long it was a joke; and teachers for the Clo-ose White School lasted only one year before they fled.
The dependence on “landings” was by far the biggest problem, and the one least likely to find a solution. The ferocity of the surf and the lack of a sheltered harbour meant that landing day schedules were difficult to predict. The Maquinna made thirty-six trips a year. During each trip there were two chances to load or unload at Clo-ose—on the way up from Victoria to Bamfield or on the return journey.
On both up and down boat days, the beach was crowded with local people and canoes waiting to see if the captain of the Maquinna deemed it possible to effect a transfer of people and materials. The men of the community were usually more daring than the captain. They would take their canoes out to the waiting ship in weather that would have defeated lesser men. Once through the surf and alongside the bigger ship, the canoes rose and fell in the ever-present swells, while freight and passengers were transferred precariously between the Maquinna and the smaller vessels.
It was a common occurrence for loaded canoes to upset and for passengers to have to endure the freezing surge of the surf until they were washed up into water shallow enough to stand in. And it was even commoner, predictable in fact, that from November to January few if any landings were possible, meaning that Christmas was often a deprived time and a time when residents added up the days of isolation in a litany of complaint like the one sent by telegram from the resident Methodist missionary to the newspaper—”29th day of isolation from the outside world”—as if the mere telling of it would somehow quell the storms and bring it to an end.
The missionary was there to minister to the Ditidaht people, who had been there for centuries and were untroubled by the isolation. Their contact with the rest of the world had been by cedar canoe and portage trail through to Cowichan Lake, where they hunted elk and built villages in what the Kowutzan regarded as their territory. From the Ditidaht village of Whyac, which lay within the entrance to the Nitinat narrows, they had worked as whalers and hunters and, after European contact, rescuers of shipwrecked sailors. By the 1920s they supported themselves by fishing, working in the cannery and, each year in June, sending Ditidaht women and children to pick berries in the fields belonging to white farmers in Washington and southern British Columbia.
By far the most popular occupation for Ditidaht men was trapping. In 1922 there were fifty Indian trappers and seven white trappers in the district, each running his own trapline, each keeping out of the others’ way, and each offering the hospitality of his trapline cabins, occupied or unoccupied, to anyone else who needed them.
Ken Gillespie had a cabin at the head of Nitinat Lake during the years of the Great Depression, and one winter he shared it with an Indian trapper whose name he didn’t mention but whose generosity he would always remember.
[W]e’d meet once in a while and he was really a pretty decent old Indian and he did lots of things for me like I’d tell him, “Gee, I like crabs. There’s none on the Nitinat here, but bring me some up next time.” He’d bring some up, you know. Next time I’d see him, “Gee, I’m running out of mountain bait. I want some of those big black squaw ducks.” He’d bring me some. Of course I used to treat him pretty good. We’d have a couple of drinks of rum every time we went there, which wasn’t too often ‘cause he’d be there sometimes and I wasn’t there, but he left everything all right and that was that.
Ken had a reputation among other men of the woods as a good trapper and hunter, meaning he was hospitable and he killed lots of wolves, martens, wolverines, raccoons, deer and cougars. In addition, he enhanced his reputation among the people at Cowichan Lake with his prodigious appetite for the game of poker.
Negley Farson called Gillespie the “most dangerous poker player on the Island,” but the novelist meant it as a compliment. Charlie March, no mean woodsman himself but no poker player, remembered once when he stayed at the Riverside Hotel overnight. As he went up to bed at 9:00 P.M., he noticed Ken and some other men playing poker. The next morning when he left the hotel, they were still playing.
It is likely that Ken was playing poker with the Lomases. Alfred and Edward Lomas were members of a pioneer Cowichan Valley family. The brothers were typical of many of the male residents of the village in that between them they had done a lot of different things to support themselves: owned one of the hotels for a time; served as fire warden; prospected and staked claims; and worked for more than one of the companies that came in to make big money from logging or mining. Those big companies changed the lake from a quiet place, where trappers and prospectors could live their lives in the best way they saw fit, to a noisy place where loggers worked hard and took their time off seriously. For Ken Gillespie, it was all summed up in the way poker came to be played.
Poker doesn’t owe me any money. I was pretty lucky over the years … Today these fellows working in the logging camps have about five hundred dollars in their pockets and they sit down and it’s too damn serious.
By the 1920s, only the type of vehicle travelling the trail cut through the big trees to the lake forty years earlier had changed. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE HP-77847
The Rundquist family made ends meet in the village by offering room and board to single loggers, transportation on the White Star stage and bootleg alcohol. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 983.3.2
Ensign fluttering, and rapids and portages yet to come, Indian guides convey two wealthy tourists down the river in 1928. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE G-01047
At their land-bound floathouse in 1928, Carl Swanson (right) and Annie Swanson (back left), owners of a floating dancehall, entertain family and friends amid extravagant blooms. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 995.24.1
A shadowy Frank Green poses with his wife, Louisa, and his sons, Trevor and Brian, around the new 1929 Model A Ford Phaeton bought with Louisa’s money. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 988.35.1
Bachelor loggers leave the lake during the summer shutdown, having shaved and changed into clean clothes in preparation for doing the town on Skid Road in Vancouver. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 984.2.1m
Long Oscar (third from left) and his friends pose for the camera in 1926, when most loggers were single and many were Scandinavian. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 984.2.idd
Local investors celebrate the success of the Blue Grouse copper mine, which would soon operate around the clock, leaving local residents to mourn the passing of a quieter era. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 993.49.136
Though isolated in a barren valley, Camp Three was still a good place, in 1939, for a young married couple to earn a living and start a family. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 987.9.3
One of many versions of the speeder. These self-propelled railroad cars carried people to work, to dances and to the doctor until roads were built into the camps. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 990.67.96
Clarence Whittingham (second from left) works with his crew preparing railroad grade at Camp Six in 1929. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 985.13.1
In 1944, with the logged areas of the north shore in the background, Stan Anderson’s picket fence, built in 1937, still stands out among the Camp Six floathouses. * IWA CANADA LOCAL 1-80/GOLD COLLECTION
Like the Camp Ten fire the previous year, this fire, one of several in 1939, roared through a forest dry from the hot summer sun. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 987.9.8