We’d travel up on the speeder and it would be great fun with singsongs. On the way back sometimes the speeder-man would get all snapped up—you’d be going around the corners like one of those crazy cars.
—MURRAY SMITH
AT MIDNIGHT, THROUGH A TUNNEL of tree branches weighed down by heavy coastal snow, a speeder equipped with a plow carved a path along the CNR tracks that connected Camp Three with Youbou. The light on the roof of the makeshift vehicle picked up what seemed to be an impenetrable white barrier, but the plow sent the snow on the track shooting up into the crisp black night, knocking the heavy white burden off the trees and allowing them to spring back and form a continually opening arch for the speeder and its occupants to slip through.
For the woman riding the speeder, with her logger husband driving, the midnight journey to clear the track of snow was a moment of beauty in a young life that had recently had to adjust to a great deal that was neither beautiful nor even comfortable. Her first home in Camp Three had been the house of a family that had gone fishing and never returned—their boat had been found but not their bodies. For forty dollars, Florence and Ron Watson had bought the house and all its contents, including the fruit preserved in jars by their predecessors.
The fortuitous acquisition of winter provisions did not make adjustment to Camp Three any easier for Florence. She made no secret of the fact that she hated the place. The camp was so isolated and, despite the beauty of the lake and the majesty of the mountains, so ugly. The camp was a mile inland from the lake, anyway, and the majestic mountains became threatening when cruel winds swept heavy snow or torrential rain down their slopes.
The broad valley in which the camp was situated had been cleared of timber by previous logging operations. Only bleached tree skeletons from forgotten fires remained, poking their dead poles above a low cover of scrub alder and maple. Where the forest remained on the steep slopes of the valley sides, newly prepared spar trees, stripped of branches and guyed with steel cable, awaited the fallers and yarders who had begun, in 1936, to settle on the site of the old Kissinger camp. Families lived in two rows of plain houses facing each other across a narrow corridor through which a railroad track ran in a straight line before it split into two, one arm going to the railway shops and the other to the single men’s quarters.
But despite the ugliness and isolation, Florence Watson grew to love the life at Camp Three. Most of the families were young with small children, little money, and the energy and inventiveness to overcome the primitive living conditions and the isolation.
The occasional older couple was there to share hard-earned experience. People used to call Tom and Marie Taylor the mother and father of the camp. In the days before everyone pitched in to build the community hall, the Taylors made their house available for parties. The women brought casseroles and baked beans. The men moved the furniture out of the Taylors’ bedroom so people could dance on the waxed congoleum floor. Young fathers took turns making the rounds of houses to check on sleeping children. Leisure hours were especially sweet to hard-working loggers and housewives drawn together by the lack of amenities into a tight community, and dependent on each other for fun and for help when things went wrong.
As in any community where most of the residents are young, the incidence of pregnancy was disproportionately high. And in a community where the only connections with the outside world were either the Island Coach Lines taxiboat, which took an hour and a half to travel up the lake from Youbou, or the speeder, which took the same length of time by rail, every young mother had hair-raising stories to tell about her journeys to Duncan for the delivery of her babies.
The CNR had extended steel in the 1920s to Youbou and twelve miles beyond to the head of the lake. For a few years passengers could ride in the gas car, but that service was discontinued in the early 1930s. From then on, logging trains and speeders were the only traffic on the old dead-end CNR tracks. But heavy snow or a rock slide could block the track, leaving a boat as the only alternative for the residents of the new camp in an emergency. And heavy weather could render the lake too dangerous even for that.
Once travellers had reached Youbou, a whole new set of problems presented themselves. In summer, there was a good chance that a forest fire would block the road. In winter it was floods. The Meade Creek bridge was always an uncertain link, crossing as it did near the end of the creek’s precipitous descent through logged-over terrain. The torrent often carried bridge-destroying debris that could hit at any time during the rainy season. And the road that led to Duncan, beyond the village at the Foot, was just as rough and fraught with disaster as it had always been. Every week someone’s car suffered broken springs, and during every storm fallen trees and raging streams could render the road impassible.
In order for mothers-to-be from the camps to be sure they would make it to Duncan in plenty of time, it became the custom for each to leave two weeks ahead of her due date. She would live in Duncan with relatives or board with Mrs. Kaiser on Tyee Street, at the bottom of the hill near the King’s Daughters Hospital.
Evelyn Hobson could tell lots of stories about getting pregnant women out to Duncan. And she had a few experiences of her own on board the speeder too. Speeders had no springs. They jarred their occupants on rail splices and creaked and swayed as they barrelled along, their engines making such a loud noise that their riders had to shout to be heard. A roughly finished speeder was no place for a lady, especially one who had on her best clothes. And yet some of Evelyn’s best speeder stories concerned trips to Youbou for dances—the women all dressed up and a lot of the men in progressive stages of drunkenness. Another of her memories was of learning to ski by clutching a rope that was tied to the back of one of those glorified boxcars. The story she remembered most vividly, however, involved the speeder whose brakes failed.
Evelyn and her husband, Harry, were coming home from Victoria with their one-year-old daughter on board the little speeder Kalamazoo. As they sped along the tracks nearing camp, they realized that the speeder wasn’t slowing down. The brakes weren’t working. Without hesitation, Harry grabbed their daughter and jumped to safety. Evelyn was slower to respond. As the speeder raced down the track between the two rows of houses, she looked desperately for a safe place to jump. All she could see were the little wooden stoops that projected out from each house, and they were flashing by much too quickly. She knew she had to act before the speeder reached the end of the line. She remernbered Harry saying, “Always jump the way the speeder’s going.” A stationary locomotive loomed up ahead. Evelyn jumped just before the speeder smashed into the locie. Harry needed first aid to his knee; Evelyn merely got her gloves dirty.
The presence of families in the logging camps at Cowichan Lake was a relatively new phenomenon when ITM established Camp Three at the head of the lake. As more and more logging operations built railroads to reach the timber growing inland from the shore of the lake, the tremendous expense involved in building grade, laying steel and purchasing rolling stock—Climax or Shay locomotives, skeleton cars, crew cars—encouraged the establishment of more permanent places to live. Larger camps that promised to stay for a while in one location invited the stabilizing influence of wives and children; wives and children needed houses, schools, playgrounds and community halls.
Skidders had grown in size and sophistication from the primitive donkey engines that first replaced horses and oxen. Railways made it possible to move these huge yarding machines from setting to setting, where one end of the skidder would be used to haul logs in to a central point and the other end to load logs onto railway cars. Those engines—Willamettes, Lidgerwoods, Washingtons—could reach 1, 000 to 1, 500 feet into the woods with their systems of spar trees and rigging. The system was efficient, and it was brutal in its effects on both the forest and the loggers.
At the cut, in the tangle of roots and branches that marked the logging site, chokermen and rigging slinger scrambled to set the turn, wrapping the ends of wire rope around a huge log. They leapt to safety behind stumps and faced the turn to watch for possible complications as the whistle punk signalled to the engineer on the yarder that all was ready. The yarder spewed steam, the main line tightened, the logs tore and smashed their way through the slash to the landing at the rail head, where the chaser released the chokers and a second crew fixed tongs to either side of the log to lift it to the skeleton car.
Each man knew what his job was and hoped that the rest of the men on the crew knew theirs too. But the machines and the logs were huge, and there was so much noise, and so much haste, so many cables and so many chances for something to go wrong. On a logging show, said an observer, there are only the quick and the dead.
Despite the danger, a job on the rigging crew was the one of choice, especially for a family man. The work was steadier and the crew was paid a daily wage, unlike the fallers, who were paid by the number of board feet they cut. But everyone who worked in a skidder camp, fallers and riggers, had to travel by speeder or crummy a great distance every day to get to and from work. That, coupled with the toughness of the job, meant that not everyone was cut out for work in the woods. According to Jack Atkinson, “You had to be a pretty skookum guy.”
The most skookum guy of all was the high rigger. He was in charge of the machine and the whole side crew of twenty to twenty-two men. He was the aristocrat of the woods, earning his title by performing the most daring of deeds—preparing and rigging the spar tree.
He stood at the base of a tree that was sound through its whole diameter and as high as two hundred feet. He carried a double-bitted axe and a saw, and he wore a heavy leather belt and, on the inside of his ankles, spurs pointing slightly inward. Encircling the trunk with his steel-cored lifeline, he flipped the loop of line away and ever higher, twitching his way skyward, growing smaller and smaller, lopping off branches as he encountered them after the hundred-foot level. Near the top he seemed to be a miniature man as he chose a place where the tree was still thick enough to be strong. He leaned away, feet braced, chopped the undercut with his axe, and sawed off the crown. As the top released and the tree shuddered in response, the tiny figure calmly rode the shaking out and then began his pell-mell descent. Only his deliberate slackening of the loop to accommodate the growing diameter of the trunk, and the careful planting of his feet every ten feet or so, proved that he was in control of his fall. The performance never ceased to impress:
Now I’m gonna tell you something. Believe it or not. That [high rigger’s] not afraid. He has no fear of heights. But a man that’s scared, frightened and does it, is brave. They got the highest pay.
While the spar tree was rigged and guyed, the railroad crew extended the track. Along the line laid out by an engineer, fallers cut the trees and powder monkeys blew out the big stumps. Then a steam shovel waded through the debris to dig out the smaller stumps and prepare the grade. The steel gang laid ties and evened the ground underneath with tamped gravel, then slid the rails into place. The work went quickly. A logging railroad was rough. Cars rode over the rails with a dull thunk, thunk, instead of a clickety-clack, but the railroad and the bridges that went with it were built for the short term to take very heavy loads, and they did their job.
When the best timber had been felled, limbed and bucked, the scrub timber had been knocked down, and the setting moved on to where the high rigger had prepared the new spar tree, all that was left behind was the slash. Like a giant’s game of pickup sticks, the detritus of logging in the 1930s was truly a devastating sight.
It was generally regarded as a “good idea” to burn the slash. Better to burn it in a controlled fashion every autumn than to have it ignite on its own and run rampant. Better to burn it when the winter rains were due than to leave it to catch fire accidentally from a stray engine spark the next summer when the woods were dry and nothing could stop the fire from consuming a forest of unharvested timber or an entire camp.
Summers at the lake were hot. In weather like that, fires were a certainty. To cut down the risk of a forest fire, camps shut down in early July for at least two weeks. Single men headed for the city, but married men tended to stay in camp and wait for work fighting the fires that would inevitably occur.
Sometimes there were as many as fifty fires burning in the area at once. Sometimes the smoke obscured the sun for days on end, dispersing only when a strong wind blew. One summer the smoke was so dense it was necessary to use a compass when running a launch on the lake. That was the summer of the spectacular fire at VL&M’s Camp Ten.
Camp Ten was a railroad camp of a different sort. The bunkhouses were on skids ready to be loaded into flatcars and moved to another location. In 1938, when Camp Ten was situated on Lens Creek about eleven miles from the village, the men lived in camp and the families lived in Lake Cowichan. A few of the married men built themselves a speeder so they could come home on Wednesday nights for the evening and on Saturday nights for the weekend. The speeder dropped them off in the village at the Crossing, the place where the VL&M tracks crossed the South Shore Road.
Ralph Godfrey always looked forward to coming home to Lillian, his wife of one year, and his new son. One weekend in August, Lil was waiting for him with the car packed up when he got back to the village on Saturday afternoon. They were going up island to South Wellington, where both of them had grown up. Because Ralph thought he’d seen smoke coming from the direction of camp, he was anxious to get going so that he could avoid being commandeered to fight fires. Driving out to Duncan, he and Lil almost collided with a car driven by the Camp Ten superintendent heading for the lake as fast as he could go. Knowing that only a fire could make the superintendent drive that hard, Ralph hoped he had made it by without his boss seeing him. Lil bought wallpaper and paint in South Wellington to decorate their little house. Ralph’s sister and brother-in-law agreed to come back to the lake to help her. When the four returned Sunday night they heard that Camp Ten was closed because of a bad fire. Now Ralph would be able to help decorate too. But he made a quick decision—he’d rather fight the fire.
The first speeder I hear up at the crossin’ I’m gone. I heard old 99 whistle at the crossin’ and I took off. Didn’t come back for a week. Actually you don’t do a heck of a lot of fightin’, fire fightin’. If a fire’s burnin’, it’s burnin’.
The logging operations were in an area two miles west of the camp. Much of the timber there already lay on the ground, felled and bucked. Several loaded skeleton cars sat ready to be taken out; excess logs waited in cold deck piles to be loaded as soon as the mill at Chemainus required them.
Between the logs and the slash lay evidence of just how hot the summer had been and how low the humidity. Moss that in winter hid the rocks in lush green camouflage was thin and brown and full of holes burned through by the sun.
At four o’clock that Saturday afternoon, two hours after the men had stopped work for the day, a fire started in a cold deck pile. A west wind fanned the flames. Then the entire countryside seemed to blow up as if it had been ignited with blasting powder. Dense black smoke filled the sky.
The felled and bucked timber lay like a sacrifice to the gods of fire. The flames travelled fast in an easterly direction towards the camp two miles away. Crews in the camp set to work creating a fire break at the most logical place—the railroad line that parallelled the camp at a distance of three hundred yards. But just as the backfire took hold, the main fire roared in to meet it.
To men in the camp only three hundred yards away, this was what hell must be like: the sun glaring through the smoke “like a hot eye,” the heated air exploding in claps of thunder.
When Ralph Godfrey got there twenty-four hours later, the fire still raged, but all the efforts of the firefighters were now focussed on saving the camp from the flames. The thunder was almost continuous. FruS’ trated men working under the constant roar began to notice twisters, miniature whirlwinds, forming and reforming in the tremendous draft of the fire. Whole trees spun in the air, roots and splinters flying in all directions. Elmer Tenney had never seen anything like it.
The big timbers on fire, how the fire would jump from one tree to another with the wind and the draft. As the draft would come up, the trees would start in a circular motion and pull ‘em right out by the roots. Would throw ‘em just like a stick.
Swirling dust darkened the all-pervasive smoke. One whirlwind hit the timekeeper’s house as he stepped outside, knocking him back into the house and saving him from a barrage of shingles torn from the roof and fragments of the porch as it flew off in a thousand pieces.
That night, the fire destroyed the pipeline that brought water from a creek west of the camp. Without water or bulldozers or tractors, the firefighters toiled fruitlessly through the night until a new pipe could be built to the swamps on the safe side of the track. Then four locomotives with water tanks, pumps and hoses finally checked the fire and saved the camp.
The collection of movable buildings and heavy equipment that constituted Camp Ten had been a fixture at the lake for over a decade in a series of locations, none of them very far from the Foot. This, and the fact that large areas of cleared forest were plainly visible to the south and west of the village, made Camp Ten synonymous with the logging industry in the minds of the villagers. When the camp finally closed three years after the big fire, Lil Godfrey thought that was going to be the end of logging at the lake.
But the big railroad camps were well entrenched by then. Camp Three had just opened, and Camp Six, the camp that most lake people remember best, the one situated just below where Nixon Creek ran into the lake, had been established for ten years and was in its prime.
Two-thirds of the way along the South Shore in the direction of the head of the lake, isolated except for access from the water, Camp Six sat on a shallow scoop of bay. Behind the camp, the Nixon Creek flats reached far back to row on row of mountains whose rugged heights still lured adventurers to the Nitinat country beyond. The valley held a fortune in fir, hemlock and cedar that had already been attracting loggers on and off for thirty years when Clarence and Jean Whit-tingham had first floated a steam shovel and a shack into the bay in 1927. For five months they lived there with just the grade foreman for company while Clarence carved four miles of rail bed up from the beach for the Cowichan Lake Logging Company.
The co-owner of the company and managing director of the new camp was Chris Gilson, an American from Seattle with a lot of experience at the lake and some good ideas on how a family camp should be run. Within a year Camp Six was in full operation, employ-ing two hundred men, working on three sides, producing forty-five cars of logs a day and sending them in booms over to the old Cottonwood mill. Cottonwood, in turn, sent floathouses to Camp Six. These, and some land houses built in the elongated fashion necessary for their transport on railroad cars, provided homes for single men and for the families moving into camp in increasing numbers.
Families brought children and children had to be educated—a new problem for a logging superintendent, but Chris Gilson set out to do things properly. In contrast to the borrowed and reused houses, the school building was brand new. Just a few yards from the boat landing, it sat in a clearing in the trees, a frame building that accommodated sixteen students in the six primary grades. Water came from a tap outside the school; pit privies stood back at a discreet distance.
When the school inspector, Mr. A. G. Stewart, made his first visit to the Nixon Creek School in January of 1928, he was impressed. “This is a very interesting school,” he wrote in his report. “The children are well-mannered, modest and courteous. They are also well up to standard in the various subjects.”
Such an exemplary report was unusual given the circumstances. By contrast, the school at the Foot was only just finding its way after a turbulent decade during which school trustees squabbled and teachers regularly resigned after one year. Only the arrival of Gladys Lomas, a local woman educated in the village herself and with a few years’ experience in isolated schools elsewhere, altered the pattern.
The inspector himself was a formidable man. Trevor Green said he “scared the hell out of the children.” They always had advance warning of his visit because he could be seen the night before climbing off the stage and checking in at the Riverside Hotel, his tall figure encased in a three-piece black suit and his ever-present umbrella marking him as an outsider. And the fear he instilled was not limited to the children. Teachers had been known to dissolve into tears during his visits.
The teacher at Camp Six was no less likely to be intimidated by the formidable Mr. Stewart. Mabel Jones had been only eighteen when she started to teach there the previous September. Nixon Creek School was her first posting after having spent nine months at the Normal School in Victoria, where she had qualified for her second-class teacher’s certificate, giving her the right to teach for three years.
Mabel came from Cumberland, where her father was a coal miner. Sam Jones had brought his wife, Mabel Ann, and his two children to Canada from England in 1913, arriving in Cumberland in the middle of the big Vancouver Island coal strike. Despite that inauspicious beginning, the family settled into the militant coal camp for the long term.
Like girls brought up in logging camps, girls who lived in coal camps had a limited range of options when they finished school: early marriage, domestic service or school teaching. The latter was a genteel occupation and it paid relatively well, so although Mabel was shy, and it was well known at Normal School that first postings were likely to be in isolated schools with limited facilities, she had chosen to teach school.
By all appearances, Nixon Creek School should have been one of the more desirable postings for a young teacher. The school was newly built and the camp manager a benevolent man determined to provide a good atmosphere for families. At first things went very well. Mabel passed her first inspection with flying colours. Mr. Stewart called her teaching “promising” and praised her for her interest in the students.
Nixon Creek School was an assisted school. This designation meant that the Department of Education only became involved in maintaining standards and providing the teacher’s salary after the community had built the school and enrolled at least ten children. Much depended upon local enthusiasm and support. In the case of Camp Six, Chris Gilson provided the building and the parents provided the enthusiasm. Getting support for the teacher was less easy. Parents at assisted schools expected to be able to exert more than the usual control over their childrens’ education, a situation usually resisted by the teacher. To further complicate the teacher’s existence, the women in isolated communities seldom warmed to the presence of a young, attractive, unmarried female.
Mabel was young and unmarried, and attractive in a quiet way. She began her life at Camp Six living in a room attached to the school, but soon Mr. Gilson provided her with her own three-room house. Camp Six was new and its residents were energetic, responding with voluntary labour to the company’s donations of money and materials to build a community hall.
On March 17, 1928, Louise Marboeuf, writer of flowery prose and reporter on lake events for the Cowichan Leader, was among the people from the Foot who travelled in a flotilla of boats up the lake to attend the opening of the Camp Six Community Hall. “It’s a little bit of Venice up there,” she burbled in her story about the event, “skimming over moonlit waters to delightful dances.” The gala opening had lived up to Louise’s expectations.
To a blare of trumpets and a clashing of cymbals, three hundred guests, including the local member of parliament, Mr. Charles Herbert Dickie, crowded into the hall. Adorned in coloured hats and accompanied by the six-piece Capitolian orchestra, they sang ‘O Canada,” gazing in wonder at the scene before their eyes: flags and bunting; clusters of electric lights overhead; bracket lights with frosted shades on the walls; a highly polished floor “smooth as glass”; miles of coloured serpentine. At ten o’clock hundreds of balloons of many colours floated down from the ceiling and a huge cake, decorated with tiny Irish flags in keeping with the St. Patrick’s Day theme, was served. Dancing lasted until four o’clock in the morning, a not unusual time of departure for parties at the lake. “It was,” said Louise, “a scene of brilliance and unalloyed joy.”
Except in the summer when it was too hot, dances were a monthly event. Weekly motion pictures became a staple too, thanks to steam shovel operator and man of many parts, Clarence Whittingham, who, seeing an opportunity to become his own boss, established a regular movie circuit for various camps—Youbou and Rounds, and, farther afield, Franklyn River and Great Central Lake—until he built a theatre in Youbou in 1943 and ceased his peregrinations.
Sometime early in her first year at Camp Six, at a dance or the movie, in a boat offshore or at the company commissary on the floats, Mabel Jones met Arthur Chester O’Neill, “Pete” to his friends. The two fell in love, became engaged and set their wedding date for the next summer.
As Mabel began her second year of teaching in the fall of 1928, a few clouds began to darken the couple’s sky. Fearing camp gossips, Pete and Mabel decided that they would not meet inside her home. Then Mabel’s mother became so ill that it was necessary for the young woman to send money home to help her family. For reasons she did not explain, Mabel told Pete she had a .22-calibre rifle and some cartridges. The final shadow came in the guise of the newly elected school board, two members of which, a man and a woman, let it be known that though the board had yet to have its first meeting, they were unhappy with the schoolteacher.
Mrs. Peck, the female trustee, was of the opinion that only a male teacher could do the job properly. When she talked to other mothers, they agreed. When she spoke to her fellow trustee Robert Magnone, she found an ally. He too was not satisfied with the progress of his children. The two decided against a summary dismissal, however, because Mabel was popular with her students. Perhaps, the board members thought, the inspector would do the job for them. Mrs. Peck stated her intention to speak to Mr. Stewart on his next visit.
In a small community like Camp Six it did not take long for the manager to hear about Mrs. Peck’s unhappiness and about gossip concerning Mabel and Pete. Remembering the inspector’s excellent report from the previous school year, Gilson dismissed the matter, assuring Mabel that she had a friend in him and that she could treat him as her second father.
On October 24, Inspector Stewart, black suit, umbrella and all, arrived at Camp Six on board the company launch Perdita. He noted that enrollment had increased by five students and that management had provided an excellent facility. He left the camp before Mrs. Peck had a chance to talk to him about the teacher.
On a Tuesday evening three weeks later, Pete O’Neill brought Mabel’s mail to her. While they sat on the steps of her cabin talking, Robert Magnone, in his capacity as secretary of the school board, approached them. Pete moved off to split some wood for Mabel, out of earshot but still able to see Magnone hand Mabel the school flag and a piece of paper. As the trustee walked away, Mabel disappeared inside her cabin to emerge a few minutes later, her face wet with tears.
According to Magnone, he had given Mabel a note stating that there were “a few complaints I wish you to attend to.” He had not spoken harshly and would testify later that he did not want to hurt her feelings. But Mabel seemed inconsolable, and Pete chided her for taking the note too seriously. Her concern was the children, she said, and how she could face them knowing that their parents had probably criticized her in their presence. Pete persuaded her to put aside her worries and come to a house party.
Chris Gilson was a guest at the party that night too. He noticed Mabel’s sad demeanour, but he had not been able to ask her what the trouble was by the time she left with Pete. Sitting on her steps again, Mabel told Pete she would like to end it all. He chided her, saying that it would be selfish to do such a thing. She said she wanted to leave the camp; he begged her to stay until Christmas and then they could be married. Mabel said she wouldn’t be able to afford a trousseau by then because she had to send money to her parents. She was impossible to console, but when Pete finally left her at 2:15 in the morning, he reassured himself by remembering that Mabel had mentioned her problems with the school board only once before and that her main concern seemed to be her mother’s illness. But his sense of unease returned when he remembered that she had told him she was not afraid to die.
The next morning Mabel did not appear at school. One of the fathers asked his wife to go to the teacher’s cabin to see if she was ill. When Jane Davy’s knock was not answered, she opened the door to see Mabel lying face up on the floor of her sitting room, her arms and legs outstretched. Near her left side was the .22-calibre rifle; running down her face from her nose and her mouth were trickles of blood.
At the inquest in the courthouse in Duncan, Robert Magnone admitted under cross-examination by the logging company’s lawyer that he had acted on the complaints of a lot of women. “I acted on hearsay,” he allowed. Mrs. Peck was unrepentant: she said she had good cause to complain because her children were not getting ahead as they should.
Chris Gilson testified that when Jane Daly took him to Mabel’s cabin, he had seen, lying across her breast, the paper bearing the list of the school board’s complaints: The school flag was left flying continually instead of being raised and lowered every day. The children were allowed to march into school in a careless manner. Discipline was lacking in the schoolroom. The teacher allowed the children to waste their scribblers.
Also found with Mabel’s body were two notes—one for Pete and one for Chris Gilson that ended,
I know this is a coward’s way of doing things, but what they have said about me almost broke my heart, and they are not true. Forgive me please. Say it was an accident.
Forty-nine floral tributes adorned Mabel’s funeral service in Cumberland. Chris Gilson attended on behalf of the company, but Pete O’Neill wasn’t there. He had quit his job and wasn’t heard of until a few weeks later when he was hospitalized after a car accident while driving through Washington in search of a new job.
Mabel’s death was not entirely in vain. It brought to public notice a problem experienced by many young women teaching in isolated communities throughout British Columbia. The Council of Public Instruction removed the Nixon Creek school board and appointed a trustee from outside. The Local Council of Women in Victoria asked the minister of education for better protection for young teachers. Responding immediately, the minister initiated an investigation into rural and assisted schools and within a month appointed a noted club woman, Miss Lottie Bowron, to be Rural Teachers’ Welfare Officer, whose job it was to visit the isolated communities and be an advocate for the young women teaching in them.
Mabel Jones’s successor took over within days of her death. Elaine M. Fox was just the person for the job. She had a first-class certificate, three years’ teaching experience and an indomitable spirit. Nothing seemed to faze Miss Fox, not the isolation, not the gossips, not the fact that to get away from the camp she had to cross the lake by boat, scramble up the bank to the Wardroper Station on the railroad and flag down the speeder, and certainly not the fact that she had thirty-six students in eight grades, three of whom could not speak a word of English.
Mauno Pelto was one of those three students. He had a Swedish mother and a Finnish father who had preceded him to Canada. When Mauno was eleven years old he and his little brother had travelled from Finland by ship to Stockholm, by electric train to Oslo, by ship to Halifax, and by train to Vancouver, where their parents had met them. Mrs. Pelto was horrified to discover that the boys had not changed their clothes during the entire two-week journey. Their socks had coloured their feet blue. Before the journey could continue by CPR boat to Victoria, gas car to Lake Cowichan and company boat to Camp Six, Mrs. Pelto “washed the hell” out of them and made sure they had a Finnish steam bath.
There was almost nothing a Finnish steam bath could not cure, except perhaps the anguish felt by an eleven-year-old boy, big for his age, who couldn’t speak English and was expected to start school in Grade One. Although he admired Miss Fox and was grateful all his life to her for the extra two hours she spent after school each day with the three non-English-speaking children, Mauno quit school as soon as he could and went to work in the woods. That he would prosper in life was a tribute to Miss Fox, his own determination and a goodly number of character-building steam baths.
By the middle of the 1930s as much as 40 per cent of the population of Camp Six was Finnish. Where there are Finns there are steam baths, individually owned but gladly shared. There were half a dozen in Camp Six—good-sized cedar buildings each with a big fireplace on one side to heat the rocks. Once the fire had burned right out and water had been poured on the hot rocks, people sat on benches of various heights—the ones who liked it hot at the top, and the ones like Mauno, who didn’t, hugging a crack in the door. The children went by themselves, then the men, and finally the women.
Because their English was poor, according to Mauno, “the Finnish women stuck together like glue and it was not a good thing.” But his mother seemed to be content, working hard to keep her three men fed and clean with only a wood stove and no washing machine.
Finnish men in Camp Six were just as close to each other. “If one Finn quit you’d often lose a bunch more; they’re clannish,” according to Mauno. The management of the camp realized that if they grouped the Finns together so they could communicate, the men would do a better job. Logging in Finland, where the third-growth logs were small enough to be skidded with horses and sometimes even with the brute strength of a man, was different from that in British Columbia, but the Finns learned fast.
Finns were stocky men and strong, but they were just as likely to die in the woods as any other logger, and when they died their bodies were taken to Ladysmith, where Finnish Lodge No. 17 took charge of the funeral. Finns from the woods and from the mines at Extension would join in a cortege forty cars long to take their countryman to the town graveyard at the top of the hill in Ladysmith.
A lot of Finns could be counted on to come to a union meeting, too. In 1936, when Lome Atchison was one of the few men in Camp Six to come out in the open with his interest in unions, he could always count on a reasonable number of Finnish faces in the audience whenever he called a meeting.
Stan Anderson was another one of those union men. He was always getting fired because of his union activities, but he always got rehired because his rigging crew wouldn’t go to work without him. Stan was pretty sure that Bert Peck, the man in charge of the camp then, wouldn’t stay mad at him for long, because they were both musicians. In fact, that was why Bert had hired Stan in the first place.
I’d been a musician and knew a little bit about musical instruments. Bert had bought a piano and that was his life. They’d had a party in the house and it had got damaged, and my first job was to repair it.
Compared to the big Finnish loggers, Stan was pretty small, but he was wiry and fast and he could play the saxophone, violin, banjo, guitar and trumpet. To Bert Peck that was important. Stan joined the camp dance band. When he moved his new wife, Gladys, into the floathouse he bought for $75, their home became a gathering place for all the musicians in camp every Saturday night.
One Sunday morning Gladys says to me, “Stan, you’d better get up. We’re moving.” I says, “We can’t be moving.” And I got up and there we were floating merrily down the middle of Cowichan Lake … We had had a storm that night and the guy lines were so rusted they broke.
When Gladys was expecting their first child in 1937, Stan took her into Duncan in plenty of time. The people at the hospital told them she wasn’t due for another three or four weeks and told Stan to go back to camp.
Before I got to Youbou, there was a message came over to me that my wife had given birth to a boy. So when I got to Shaw Creek, she’d given birth to a girl. And when I got back over to Camp Six she’d given birth to a boy. I thought, “Triplets.” I got down the next day to see her and it was a girl.
About eight months later, while Stan was working at the end of the Caycuse railroad line in the Nitinat, Gladys became very ill. Bert Peck came up by speeder to where Stan’s crew was working to tell him that they were loading Gladys into the taxiboat to take her to Youbou and from there to the hospital in Duncan. Stan’s head rigger was a big Finn named Henry Norman who insisted on coming back to camp with Stan and taking charge of the Andersons’ baby daughter in her mother’s absence. He issued orders to Stan:
“You pack that crib and follow me.” He lived at the other end of the float camp and he walked all the way down there, and instead of him walkin’ on the wharf to get to his door, he walked in the water, yellin’, “Mama, Mama, I got a baby. I got a baby.”
Henry Norman had come to the lake in 1913 with one of the first Lidgerwood skidder crews. Like many Finns he was interested in socialism, having been steeped in his father’s stories about Russia, which the older man had visited before the turn of the century.
Henry and his wife, Esther, were among the first people to come to Camp Six and were therefore hit hard when the camp closed down for two years because of the Depression. Although they continued to live in the camp and had enough to eat, there was no work. Intrigued by stories he had heard of prosperity on the other side of the world, Henry took his wife and children and moved to the Soviet Union in 1932.
One year later they were back in Camp Six with a bitter tale to tell. They had been sent to an isolated logging camp where Esther was expected to work in the cookhouse and their eldest daughter to work as a sealer. The entire family lived in one room and slept on rough boards. Rye bread, tea and vodka were the staples of their diet. The once-robust Esther came home weighing sixty pounds less than when she left.
Work had resumed in Camp Six by the time they returned and they counted their blessings, not the least of which was the presence of the Andersons’ baby daughter, who lived with them for eight months while her mother returned to good health. By the time the little girl went back to her parents she was starting to talk—in Finnish.
Stan liked working for Henry Norman. He liked playing in the band for dances, and he liked to dress well, too. One year he bought a new suit from Charlie York, a Chinese entrepreneur who was just one of several travelling salesmen who came on a regular basis to the logging camps.
He had suitcases and samples, picked out the clothing and showed us the different designs. I think they were already made up, to tell you the honest truth, back east somewhere. You could get everything, shirt, tie—lock, stock and barrel for $100.
Stan’s fancy and expensive ensemble came to an unfitting end when he wore it to a dance one night and consumed more alcohol than he could handle. Leaving Gladys at the party, he set out for home, tripped across the railroad track that cut through the camp and fell four or five feet into a sump hole used to drain locomotive grease. Somehow he managed to pull himself out of the hole, and dripping grease from his beautiful suit, shirt and tie, he staggered home, passing out on the living room floor. A friend who was staying at the house, mistaking the grease oozing out from under the unconscious man for blood, sent word up to the hall that Stan was bleeding to death.
The Anderson floathouse was moored with the other family homes on the left-hand side of the bay. Unlike other camps, where the houses shared a communal walk, each floathouse at Camp Six had its own connection to shore, so that mothers could quickly reach their children who were playing on land. Along the shore was a dock where the commissary was tied up.
Gladys Anderson’s sister Eunice visited them on a regular basis. On one visit she set out to do some shopping, taking the precious ten-dollar coupon book the family used as currency at the company store. Instead of going out the door that led to the walkway, Eunice went through a new door that Stan had installed to enable him to reach a private fishing spot on the back of the float. She plunged into the lake, the coupon book in her back pocket. Hearing the splash, Gladys feared the worst and raced to the new door to see what had happened. As Eunice came to the surface, Gladys reached out and pulled the coupon book out of her pocket, letting Eunice slide back into the lake for someone else to rescue.
Someone was always falling in at Camp Six, and the outcome was not always so hilarious. Little children, daydreaming adolescents, early-morning milkmen, late-night revellers, drunkards—many people fell off the walkways, and some of them drowned.
Alcohol and floathouses could be a lethal combination. And although it was not possible to buy liquor legally in the camps, and the company made it impossible to have it delivered from the liquor store in Duncan, somehow it always managed to materialize in time for Saturday night. Newcomers were regarded as a sure source. Stories of men arriving in camps with a hidden supply of liquor have assumed a legendary aura for the frequency of their telling and the similarity of their details: suspiciously heavy suitcases fall open on the dock, overloaded suitcases drop into the water, rum bottles break in men’s pockets, men with bottle-laden pockets fall in the water, men with broken bottles of rum in their pockets light matches and set their pants on fire.
Those who sought a more certain, if not more safe, source of alcohol for their weekend revels—seldom did people drink on the job—could always turn to the camp bootlegger. The quality of product ranged all the way from the crudest of home brew to distilled spirits of superior quality. Because no alcohol was allowed inside the community hall, men would stash their bottles around the stumps outside. There they would entertain their friends, almost never to be joined by the women.
Everyone in camp worked very hard, not least the women. “You never did anything but work,” according to Kathleen Crickmay. They cooked for men with hearty appetites from groceries delivered twice a week to the commissary; they washed clothes for loggers and children on washboards; they cleaned and decorated homely floathouses and converted bunkhouses; they attended Happy Hour club meetings every two weeks where they sewed and hand-worked articles to sell to each other at the yearly charity bazaar.
The arrival in Camp Six of a salesman offering gasoline-powered washing machines created a stir. The five families in camp with enough money or enough credit to pay $200 had their choice of either a Johnson or a Briggs and Stratton engine. Only the families who had paid cash and kept their receipts were safe, however, when the salesman absconded with the money and the washing machine company came to repossess the machines.
Not all the women in camp were married. Besides the teacher, there were women who worked as flunkies in the cookhouse. And although cookhouses in more modern camps after the Second World War would boast that they had been the first to employ women, Camp Six had them in 1929.
Winnifred Whiskin was Saskatchewan born and Vancouver educated as far as Grade Nine when she came to the lake with her friend Mamie Adams to visit the Whittinghams in Camp Six. Camp Six looked like a good place to stay for a while, and so Winnie got a job in the cookhouse making lunches for the loggers and waiting on tables.
“A flunkey is a man of all work” is the way Winnie liked to define her job. For thirty cents an hour, she worked from 4:30 A.M. to 9:30 A.M., 10:45 A.M. to 1:30 P.M., and 3:45 P.M. until “the crews were in and they were fed and you were finished.” She worked seven days a week. “The only holiday you had was the day you packed your suitcases and went away.” That was why she looked forward to summer shutdown so much, when “everyone” went to Vancouver to the races at Lansdowne Park.
Feeding two hundred men who put in a hard day of physical work was a gargantuan task. After a breakfast of fried eggs and bacon, the men filled their own lunch bags from a Lucullan array: ten or more choices of sandwiches, cakes, pies, cookies, tea and coffee. At the end of the work day, when they slumped off the speeder after a two-hour ride back from the cut, they sat down to another enormous meal: steaks as big as plates, sausages brown and gleaming, an array of cold cuts, heaped’up salads, steaming vegetables, pickles and relishes, mounds of fruit, baked goods oozing thick filling and milk, lemonade, coffee or tea to wash it all down. But when bone-weary loggers left the cookhouse for their bunks, the flunkies still had to clean up and ready the dining room for the next day.
Winnie stuck with the job until she married a logger. When he was killed in Yellowknife a few years later, Winnie came back to the lake and got a job in the dining room at the Youbou mill. She finally came back to Camp Six to keep house for a widower who eventually became her second husband. When all was said and done, marriage was seen as the obvious answer for a woman in those days. Marriage to someone she loved was the best of all possible solutions.
Lil Greenwell would have agreed. Like Mabel Jones, she had grown up in a coal mining town and had earned a certificate from the Normal School in Victoria. When Lil graduated in 1933, however, the only teaching jobs available were in northern British Columbia, and her mother would not allow her to go so far away.
Mum couldn’t see me staying in a little one-room school and having to get up and light the fires and be way up there in the north. Better to go hungry down here.
For the next four years Lil stuck close to home in South Wellington, a mining community between Nanaimo and Ladysmith. She cleaned the homes of affluent women in Departure Bay, did substitute teaching in her own hometown and fell in love with Ralph Godfrey, a local man who had been logging at Cowichan Lake ever since the coal mine he was working in closed down.
By the time Ralph and Lil were married in 1937 and he had brought her back to live at the Foot, big-time logging had been in full swing at the lake for over twenty years. In that time, horse and oxen skid roads had given way to donkey engine haulways and railroad lines. The rate of production had increased, and with it, injury and death in the woods. The anger of loggers grew, but so did the power of the blacklist. In the village at the Foot and in the isolated camps around the lake, the number of people determined to have a union was growing.