It was sort of cash money, you know. You got paid every two weeks or every month, whereas in other places you didn’t get cash money like that. As I say, it fitted both the employers here and the Indians.
—KARM SINGH MANAK
LT. COL. ANDREW HAGGARD SELDOM performed official duties, preferring instead to fish when at all possible. But once a year, on Empire Day, he allowed himself to be drawn out of retirement to address the schoolchildren of Lake Cowichan. That was why, on May 24, 1915, he stood before nine boys and girls, the entire student body, to inspire them with an account of the people of various races from the colonies and the dominions who were fighting side by side under the British flag. Drawing from his years as a soldier in Queen Victoria’s army, he recounted a story of how the “plucky little Gurkhas used their kukris to slash off the heads of their enemies.”
None of the children quite knew what a Gurkha was, but the name sounded exotic, like the word “Sikh,” and any one of the children who had been to Duncan had seen the Sikh man and woman who ran a “Try-your-luck” stand there. Any one of the children who had studied British history knew that the Sikhs were held in high esteem in that most British of Vancouver Island towns, because a lot of its citizens were retired British army officers who remembered with gratitude that during the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the Sikhs had stayed true to their oaths of allegiance.
Such loyalty had not done the Sikhs in British Columbia a great deal of good. In 1907, shortly after 5, 000 Indian men, 95 per cent of whom were Sikhs, arrived in the province, the attorney general of the day, William Bowser, had stripped them of their rights of citizenship, which they claimed by virtue of the fact that India was a part, indeed the most precious part, of the British Empire.
With the vote denied, access to the professions blocked and immigration curtailed, the number of resident Sikhs dwindled to about 700 by the end of the First World War. Those who stayed found work in the farm fields and lumber mills of the Fraser Valley and Vancouver Island and made regular trips back to India to visit wives and children denied entry to Canada.
When the restrictions on immigration were lifted in 1919, the response of the Sikh community was tentative. Rather than risk another change of political heart, Sikh men at first brought over only their eldest sons and nephews.
Karm Manak was nine years old when he arrived from the village of Bunga, district of Jalhinder in Punjab, to live in Vancouver with his father. He loved school and already knew his twenty-times table, but that did him little good at first in his new school in Canada, because he could speak so little English. But being the only nine-year-old in Grade One and the only Sikh in the school gave Karm sufficient motivation to learn English and to catch up with the children his own age. He got along well with his classmates, but most of all he loved the discussions that went on every night in the house where he and his father lived with several other Sikh men.
Two of their housemates were well-educated men who, because of the restrictions, could not get jobs in their chosen fields. Instead, they worked on a sawmill green chain, the mindless and repetitive pulling of lumber allowing them plenty of time for contemplation. By the time the housemates gathered in the evening, contemplation could be turned into conversation of a very stimulating nature. Inspired by the high level of discourse, Karm visited the public library frequently, read history and philosophy and become knowledgeable about subjects as far from his Punjabi experience as the French Revolution and Thomas Carlyle.
Gradually through the 1920s, Sikh women and children joined their husbands in British Columbia, but the other restrictions did not change. Educated Indians—doctors, lawyers, engineers—worked in lumber mills. And in the mills they were not working the machines—the saw or the resaw—but instead pulling lumber on the green chain or loading flatcars.
Given this situation, Karm’s father could not see any reason for his son to stay in school, despite his obvious affinity for learning. At sixteen the young man was working as a farm hand, and at eighteen he was working in a mill on Vancouver Island.
Of the resilient few Indians who came to British Columbia at the turn of the century and stayed, a handful were truly remarkable in their determination to do well under the oppressive conditions. All Mayah Singh Baggara had was his youth and some savings, but it took him only ten years of working hard and taking risks to place himself in a position to build his own mill. With his partner, Kapoor Singh, he purchased timber rights in 1916 from within the E&N land grant on a 650’acre site eight miles southeast of Cowichan Lake, along the CPR line to the lake that had just been completed four years before.
In his climb to financial success, Mayah Singh had socialized with Canadian businessmen who seemed determined to call him “Mayo” and, being a pragmatic man, he allowed them to have their way. So when travellers rode the E&N to the lake, and craned their necks as the train passed the new “Hindu Enterprise,” as the Duncan newspaper called the mill and its accompanying town, the sign nailed to the end of the station house read “Mayo.”
The essential ingredient of a community inhabited by people who follow the Sikh religion is the temple or gurdwara. Almost as soon as it had its mill, Mayo had its gurdwara—a place of worship, a base of operations, a centre of social activity, and a substitute for family life for the men whose wives and children still remained in India. One of eight gurdwaras in British Columbia at the time, the temple at Mayo provided a sense of place and community pride, and as the fight for citizenship and its attendant rights mounted, a headquarters for collective action.
But despite his appreciation for the needs of his countrymen, Mayo Singh was a businessman at all costs. The pattern for hiring mill bands set by Mayo and Kapoor would be followed by each new sawmill established in the vicinity of Cowichan Lake: labouring jobs for East Indian, Chinese and Japanese men, machine-operating jobs for whites. One Sikh man was philosophical: “You sort of understood that there was a level at which you could function; beyond that it was out of your reach.”
But in the Vancouver Island mills of the 1930s, the workers from India, China and Japan were indispensible. Employers complained that as soon as a white man learned to do the job efficiently, he left, looking for higher pay elsewhere. And at the Mayo mill at least, the atmosphere was a tolerant one. “We did not come across racism in the mills because the white workers were well adjusted to working with us and it was not like our people were looking for trouble,” one man said in later years. And all workers in Mayo’s mill laboured under the same conditions: Mayo Singh set a very quick pace for the work, and he hired his relatives or close friends to make sure the workers didn’t slack off.
In that respect, the Mayo operation differed from other mills in that the bosses—manager, superintendent, woods superintendent and mill foreman—were Sikhs. The most important of all the bosses were Mayo and Kapoor. The fact that they were known by their first names only was a measure of just how important they were. Their residences were prominent in the village—handsome homes with all the modern conveniences. Such conveniences required electricity, which was provided in sufficient quantity to power not only the owners’ homes but the mill, the bunkhouses and the company houses for families as well. There were people who called those family houses dingy little shacks, but they were shacks with running water. Beside the row of houses was the building containing the company office, store and post office, and then, on the long street that bordered the railroad and parallelled a small stream dammed to make a log dump pond for the mill, came the temple, distinguished only by the floating yellow streamers that adorned its simple wooden exterior.
Mayo and Kapoor might have lived in comfort and even grandeur, but the majority of their Indian employees had no families with them, and so it was white families who lived in the company houses. The school that the villagers built with material supplied by their employer had only white children for students and only Canadian ideas about how to celebrate the official opening of a school.
The Hard Times Dance was almost indistinguishable from a hundred other dances that people in small logging towns organized to entertain themselves all evening and into the next morning. But each community strove for originality. Two pipers led the grand march of 250 partygoers who came from Mayo, the Yellow Fir mill, Sahtlam Station and Lake Cowichan to march past the costume judges—no less personages than two commercial travellers from Vancouver and Victoria—who awarded prizes and administered fines to anyone not in costume. When Mr. Mayo finally could be persuaded to join the party, the assembled crowd thanked him for his personal gift of a piano by singing uFor He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Within five years of that festive night, the racial composition at the school had changed. Performing at the Christmas concert, in addition to Tommy Beesley and Viola Wood, were Kuniche Toyota, Toshiwo Nakashima and Mohun and Sohun Singh. But despite a racial mix that reflected more closely the make-up of the work force, and despite the presence of a new gurdwara that stood in the centre of the community, two stories high and painted a gaudy yellow, the songs that were sung in the school that day were “Away in a Manger” and ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and the foods that were eaten were mince tarts and fruit cake.
The Nakashimas and the Toyotas were just two of several Japanese families who lived at Mayo. They were part of a large community of Japanese workers who had been immigrating to British Columbia since the 1890s and had been allowed, in contrast to Chinese immigrants and in recognition of the Canadian government’s wish to encourage trade with Japan, to bring their wives and children with them.
The comfort and normalcy of family life had encouraged the Japanese to make Canada their permanent home, unlike the Sikhs and Chinese who had come to Canada initially to make enough money to return to their own countries, buy land and live out their lives in familiar surroundings. By the time Mayo had been established for ten years, many of its Japanese inhabitants were second- and third-generation residents of Canada.
And it was just as well for the Sikhs who lived in Mayo or up the road towards Duncan around the Hillcrest mill or in the bunkhouse at the new mill at Youbou that the Japanese were so well established. The only way a Sikh man could get his hair cut by an expert was to go to the Japanese barber in Duncan.
Neither of the two Canadian barbers in Duncan cut East Indian, Chinese or Japanese hair. The one theatre in Duncan had a separate place for these groups in the balcony. The beer parlours in Duncan required Sikhs with turbans and beards to drink in a separate room.
But if a Sikh man should cut his hair, shave his beard and cease to wear his turban, he could sit in the same room as the regular clientele. And when Karm Manak became a respected man in Duncan by virtue of his entrepreneurial skills and his community activities, and the Japanese barber had been interned after Pearl Harbor, Karm heard that one of the Canadian barbers was in need of some cash. So he bought a half interest in the Canadian’s barber shop in order to provide his countrymen with a place to get their hair cut.
Not every Sikh required a barber by any means. The Sikh religion requires that a man should not shave his beard or cut his hair. But most of the Sikhs who immigrated to Canada before World War II made the difficult decision to cut their hair. Karm’s hair had been cut when he came to Canada, because his father said it would be easier on him.
He was a more progressive type. But some of his friends were laughing, saying, “Oh well, we’ll let you stay like that while you’re at school, then you’ll have to grow long hair.” And you know, laugh about it, joke about it.
It was hard to laugh about something so fundamental, and many Sikhs were strongly opposed to what their countrymen were doing. But when the old-timers who had lived in Canada went home, as they customarily did, to visit their families and to escort new immigrants out of India and back to Canada, many of them counselled their charges to cut their hair. As a latter-day Sikh would say, “[It was] an offering given to make Canadian life a little easier.”
In 1937, when nineteen-year-old Darshan Singh Sangha left his family’s farm—four scattered acres in the village of Langeri in Hoshiarpur, Punjab, that were not big enough to feed his family—his mother’s last wish for him was that he would never cut his hair. Darshan’s uncle, who was from the same village as Mayo Singh and had emigrated at about the same time, had been so offended when Mayo cut his hair that he had gone on a hunger strike. Now that same uncle had come back to escort Darshan to Canada so that the young man could make lots of money and send it back to his family.
One way for a would-be immigrant to enter Canada legally was to be accepted at a university as a student. Darshan’s uncle had applied successfully on his behalf to the University of British Columbia and then using the acceptance to convince Canadian officials that Darshan was a student. The fact that Darshan spoke very little English and had been unable to complete his schooling in India, because he lacked the school attending fee, did nothing to deter his university acceptance. No one in Canada, it seemed, had any objection to an Indian attending university, even if his credentials were rather dubious; it was only when Indians wanted jobs after graduation that things became difficult.
It was a journey in four stages that Darshan and his uncle took from India to Canada. The first stage was by train to Howrah Station outside Calcutta, where they were met by local Sikhs and accommodated at the gurdwara while they arranged passage on a freighter headed for Hong Kong. Once on the freighter, Darshan, already overwhelmed at the strange sights he had seen in Calcutta and the thousands of strange faces, now had to adjust to strange countries as the freighter stopped in several ports on its slow passage to the Crown colony.
The gurdwara in Hong Kong was a beautiful building, and a salubrious place to stay while they obtained clearance to immigrate to Canada and Darshan underwent a medical examination and an interview. It was necessary to bribe certain local officials, a disagreeable task that underlined the wisdom of the Sikh custom of having an experienced traveller accompany each newcomer. Darshan’s uncle had made this trip several times before and knew what was required.
After one month in Hong Kong, the two men caught a boat to Shanghai—a six-day, storm-tossed passage in a rundown ship that rolled so far to each side that knee-deep water ran over the decks. When they finally reached Shanghai, they found themselves in the midst of the war between Japan and China. The Japanese had just gained control of the city and their tanks could be seen in the streets, but no one bothered the ship’s passengers, who stayed on board waiting for the time when they would get on the Canadian Pacific steamship Empress of Japan bound for Canada.
While on the old ship tied up in a Chinese city under Japanese occupation, Darshan decided to cut his hair. One of his shipmates had been to Canada before. “What are you going to do there when there will be so many people there and you will have a turban?” he asked. Darshan’s uncle was opposed to what Darshan wanted to do. The uncle had not cut his own hair and said he would die if someone cut it. His own son had short hair, however. Darshan didn’t know what to do. He remembered his mother’s admonition. Finally, before he could change his mind, he went and sat in the ship’s barber chair.
The barber took no time in cutting all my hair off. I ran my hand over my head and I couldn’t believe there was nothing there. After I saw all the hair on the ground I felt guilty for getting a hair cut. But then I thought to myself, there is nothing I can do now. So I went to my bunk and I went to bed to forget what I had done.
Soon his hair was the least of his problems. When he arrived in Canada he had to find work so he could save money to go to university, that being the understanding upon which he had gained admission to the country. After a brief stint at Kapoor Singh’s operation in Sooke, he was hired as a whistle punk in the logging part of the Mayo operation.
Just the year before Darshan arrived, the village of Mayo had been given a new name for an old reason. The Dominion Post Office was unhappy with the name “Mayo.” It could be confused with other names, the Post Office decreed, and so Mayo Singh changed it to “Paldi”—the name of his home village in India.
A job at Paldi usually meant a job in the mill. Sikhs were less likely to work in the woods, but that was where Darshan was sent—to the jungle, as he called it. Since camp work was more dangerous than mill work, workers in camps were paid higher wages. But white workers were paid ten cents an hour more than Indian, Chinese or Japanese workers. It was all in the way the owner chose to interpret the new Minimum Wage Act, and the injustice turned Darshan, already interested in left-wing politics, into a militant union man.
With the successes and failures of the 1936 loggers’ strike still very fresh in everyone’s mind, unions had been gaining ground among the camp workers. But most Asian and Indian loggers and mill workers were not as convinced as Darshan was that a union was a good idea. They were never free of the worry, justified or not, that the immigration department was just a step behind them, waiting for them to make a fatal mistake. Sikhs thought that union membership might jeopardize this already precarious situation. They were also afraid that by joining the union they would lose their jobs, and they were not alone in this fear. Chinese men had been unwilling participants in Vancouver Island labour confrontations for fifty years. Union membership held no particular appeal for them either.
In 1906, in the early days of logging in the Cowichan area, Chinese loggers had commanded a daily wage of $3, a reasonable sum, but an amount that outraged local farmers, who saw their supply of cheap labour being lured away to the logging camps. One farmer suggested indignantly in language offensive to modern ears that rather than depend on “independent chinks,” farmers should hire a “Scots or Irish lass” to do their work.
There are plenty waiting for such a chance and they will milk their cows quicker and cleaner, hoe more mangels, pitch more hay, sheaves or barn manure and saw more wood than any chink. They might be a little awkward at felling timber and grubbing stumps but now with the stumping machine you don’t require that and they would clear and level up ground after the machines as well as any chink …
William Oliver might have agreed if he could have found a Scots or Irish lass willing to perform such punishing labour. A man careful with his money, he required workers who did not charge exorbitant fees for their services. In 1909, Oliver cautioned his hotel manager against hiring a Chinese cook for the winter when no revenue was coming in to his hotel. An “outside Chinaman” would do just as well, according to Oliver—such a man could do all the rough work and be taught to cook in the bargain—and he would cost less money. Having thus instructed his manager, Oliver then proceeded, in a fashion typical of him, to do the hiring himself, instructing Wing On & Son of Victoria to send two “outside Chinamen” to the lake at wages of $30 a month, board and one-way fare.
Oliver needed the second “outside Chinaman” to look after the farm that he had bought from James Abernethy. The unfortunate Chinese worker was just one of a succession of men hired to run this isolated farm at Craig’s Landing on the way to Marble Bay, not one of them so far being quite able to measure up to Oliver’s exacting standards. In 1918 the object of his vituperation was a man named Yee.
Find out if Yee will stop for $55. He is not worth half that wage but it is next to impossible to get anyone just now. His chief value is that he does not mind living at the farm in the winter and by himself.
And in 1920, just months before his death, William Oliver was still insulting his Chinese employees. In a letter to Frank Green asking him to instruct his Chinese hired man to medicate a sick horse and including a step-by-step set of instructions, he wrote, “[T]ry to get that stubborn blockhead Wah to get as near to these directions as he can.” Small wonder that Mr. Oliver had to hire new Chinese employees so frequently.
The level of Chinese immigration to British Columbia had declined from its peak during the years of railroad building, helped along by the infamous head tax, which began as a levy of $50 per head and by 1904 had jumped to $500. Such a tax not only deterred immigration of men but made immigration of families virtually impossible. Since the intention of the Chinese was to remain in Canada only as long as it took to earn enough money to retire comfortably back in China, most men left their families behind, seeing them only on infrequent visits. With the population of men growing older, the number of working-age Chinese in British Columbia gradually decreased, a decline that was sharpened when Chinese immigration was completely cut off in 1924. And while there were still enough Chinese to provide servants for wealthy homes, section hands to build and repair logging railroads, and cooks for camp bunkhouses, there were soon no Chinese loggers. It was common, however, for each community to have a few resident Chinese men who made a living by providing some necessary service.
The most memorable Chinese man at Camp Six was a bachelor, but though William Yen lived alone, he wasn’t isolated from his countrymen. The bunkhouse for the Chinese section gang at Camp Six was not far from Pigpen Point, where Yen ran the piggery that supplied pork for everyone in the camp. Yen’s idea of fencing was to pile brush across the neck of the point to enclose his succulent charges. He hadn’t allowed for three factors, however. First, that the brush was penetrable; second, that pigs can figure out how to go around the end of piles of brush; and third, that pigs can swim. Hildur Grip, who lived nearby, was always having to chase pigs back to where they belonged.
It was common knowledge in Camp Six that William Yen sold bootleg liquor, but the Grips didn’t drink, so they had no occasion to sample his wares. When their daughter Lucille was old enough for high school, she had to board in Youbou, and she discovered that Mr. Yen had moved there and was living in a shack behind the theatre, repairing shoes for a living and continuing his lucrative liquor business as well. Glad of a familiar face from home, she took to stopping in on a regular basis to talk to him.
Friendships between Chinese and white people were unusual at the lake. The majority of Chinese residents worked in one of the camps on a section gang, and though they walked through the camp every workday morning with their shovels and picks over their shoulders, and sat around outside their separate cookhouse on summer evenings, they seldom mixed with the other inhabitants. There were two exceptions to this rule, and though these occasions occurred in every camp, the Chinese at Camp Three seemed to do them with a special flare. The first exception was poker:
If there was a poker game in camp don’t think there wasn’t a Chinaman or two in it. It didn’t matter what the stakes were, the minute a Chinaman sat down I got up. They were the damndest gamblers and good gamblers.
The other exception was Chinese New Year. Every Canadian child who ever lived in a community with a Chinatown cherishes memories of the time each year when lonely Chinese men gave them gifts of delicacies from China. And every adult who lived in the logging camps at the lake has memories of Chinese New Year, too. Most people’s memories include a hangover.
A banquet with an array of imported delicacies, enhanced by a bottle of whiskey at every place setting, was a sure way to reach across the racial barrier in a logging camp. But yearly banquets and prodigious hangovers did not change the fact that a racial barrier existed. Even the positive comments made about the Chinese by whites have the ring of insincerity. The statement made by a logger looking back at his days at Camp Three, “You couldn’t find more honest, clean people … Everybody thought the world of them,” sounds too good to be true.
A Chinese bull cook at Camp Three named Happy was the victim of some heavy-handed pranks. A bull cook did all the odd jobs around camp, making beds, cleaning bunkhouses, lighting stoves and wheeling sawdust to the hopper. Some of the white loggers thought it was hilarious to distract Happy while someone else nailed the wheel of his barrow to the plank walk.
We always played tricks on him. He would come in wearing fresh underwear and someone pulled out his pants and put two eggs down and smacked him to break the eggs. Was he mad!
It’s not surprising that some Chinese men chose to live and work by themselves, but it can’t have been a happy existence. Lum Yet was a railway tie cutter working and living on his own in a cabin at the end of the Mayo Lumber Company railway ten miles from the mill at Paldi. Although he had lived in British Columbia for twenty-seven years, his wife still lived in China. Every night when he went to bed he marked another day off on the calendar. That was how the search party knew that he had been dead for two weeks when they found his body in the woods, where he had been hit by a snag while felling a tree.
Twenty-year-old Darshan Singh knew what it was like to feel alone when he left the logging camp at Paldi to enroll at the University of British Columbia in 1937. He was the only Indian on campus, and his English wasn’t good enough to understand the technical things his professors were saying in their lectures. But he found kindred spirits in the young Communists who welcomed him to their sparsely attended meetings, and he found a place downtown at Main and Hastings where he could buy enough Communist literature to feed his voracious appetite for Marxist rhetoric.
An avid interest in Communism wasn’t enough to get him a pass in his university courses, however; having failed most of them, he was no longer eligible to remain in Canada. His illegal status became known to immigration officials when someone who had heard him speak in the passionate after-prayer debates at the Vancouver gurdwara turned him in.
It was the immigrant’s worst fear—being in the country illegally and having his whereabouts revealed to the authorities. Darshan headed back to the greater anonymity of the Vancouver Island woods, getting a job as a watchman at one of Kapoor’s mills that had been closed because of a fire.
One day a car pulled up. The immigration official inside rolled down the window and displayed a picture of a bearded man in a turban. Darshan recognized himself, but since he was now clean-shaven and wore no turban, he escaped detection. When asked if he knew the man in the picture, Darshan said he did and that the man lived in one of the houses near Kapoor’s camp. Later, having learned from his friends that the immigration office had him on a blacklist, and fearing that no mill in British Columbia would hire him, he headed for Alberta under an assumed name.
As the world headed stubbornly towards another war, Darshan spent long months in several isolated logging camps, reading, talking, thinking about his beliefs and convincing himself of the validity of his trust in Communist doctrine. Those beliefs were sorely tested by the Soviet-German nonaggression pact.
It was very confusing. I was very upset. But we were able to rationalize that [neither] Britain nor France would form an alliance with Stalin, so what was Stalin to do? … There was a very strong anti-fascism movement throughout the world and I detested fascism.
While the Communists rationalized and put up a brave front, the Japanese inhabitants of the Cowichan area listened to their radios, read their newspapers and wondered if they would have to suffer for what the government of Japan was doing.
The anti-Japanese agitation on Vancouver Island had begun many months before the declaration of war in Europe. Early in 1938, there were rumours of secret caches of Japanese arms hidden all over the island. One weekend the Canadian Scottish regiment was reported to have “raided Japanese homes at Paldi and Hillcrest and seized hidden stores of arms.” Officers of the regiment dismissed the reports as “tommyrot,” but the rumours of Japanese fifth-column activity persisted.
When the war in Europe exploded in the spring of 1940 with the German blitzkreig across Belgium and France, Germany’s ally on the Pacific was still importing fir logs from Canada. Rumours had it that Japan was using junk logs to make nitrocellulose, which was a basis for explosives. Meanwhile, in Paldi, Japanese, Sikh and white schoolchildren held a successful bazaar and concert to raise money for the Canadian Red Cross. The entire Cowichan district participated in a blackout test, which eliminated every form of light except the big sawmill burners. To extinguish those fires for any reason but the real thing would have shut down mills that were rushing to get out war orders. War was good for the logging industry, and the industry needed all the labour it could get, but its Japanese workers lost their value in the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in December of 1941.
As the island became part of the war zone, as windows were covered with dark blinds or tarpaper and headlights masked with quick-drying black enamel, leaving only a strip three inches long by one quarter inch wide, as people were urged to “Know Your Air Warden,” the Canadian government began to send Japanese people away from the coast.
Darshan Singh and his fellow party members did not say a thing. Although the Soviet Union had been an ally of the West since the previous June, membership in the Communist Party was still illegal, and no one wanted to make themselves too noticeable.
No one felt any sympathy for the Japanese people … Absolutely no one said a word. Not a thing. They were ordered to leave. Even though they lived here and it was not their fault …
On April 21, 1942, in Paldi, under the supervision of a plainclothes R.C.M.P. detective and several provincial police constables, 104 Japanese men, women and children loaded their suitcases and bedrolls onto an Island Freight Service truck, then climbed quietly onto Vancouver Island Coach Line buses. A small number of white, East Indian and Chinese neighbours—fellow workers and classmates—watched from the sidelines.
The buses drove to Chemainus, where the Paldi people joined 366 Japanese from Duncan, Hillcrest and Chemainus waiting to board the S.S. Princess Adelaide, which was moored at the wharf. Smartly dressed women carrying babies and leading small children; loggers, mill workers, market gardeners and barbers dressed in business suits and fedoras; very old people and very young filed onto the ship and lined the rails to wave good-bye.
The sending of the Japanese population of the province to internment camps alarmed the Sikh community. Dedar Sihota, a young man who lived at Hillcrest, said,
It seemed to me this was another way to get at Asiatics … I had heard our people say, “Don’t count on permanency in Canada. If it could happen to [the Japanese] it could happen to anybody.”
By this time Darshan’s situation had changed dramatically. He had received landed immigrant status through the advocacy work of a politician from India, and he had been the first East Indian man to be drafted into the Canadian army. Although he had gone through basic training at the Vernon Military Camp, he had been released right afterward when the gurdwara challenged the right of the Canadian government to require service from people who did not even have the right to vote. Having departed from the army, Darshan agreed to a request by the IWA to organize Chinese and East Indian mill workers.
World War II changed things for East Indian workers in the mills especially. Because they did not have to join the armed forces if they chose not to, they were in a position to fill the labour gap and move into the better jobs—but at lower pay than white workers received. Despite this inequity they were very resistant to the union, and when Darshan came to talk to them they would say “that they had heard the unions talk before and nothing ha[d] come of it yet so what was the point of joining the union.”
And there was no solidarity between the various groups in the mills. Chinese, East Indians and whites worked together with little animosity, it was true. Interracial clashes within the mill happened seldom enough that, when they did, it made the newspapers. Outside the workplace, such disturbances were even more rare, because the different groups had almost nothing to do with each other.
The situation in Youbou illustrated this clearly. East Indians and Chinese had replaced Norwegians and Swedes on the green chain when the big mill at Youbou was only a few years old. The bunk-houses—each built to the same design, each providing two-man rooms, hot and cold running water and inside plumbing—accommodated whites, East Indians and Chinese separately. Each group had its own cooking staff and the East Indians had two—a Muslim and a Punjabi.
And when Darshan Singh, on his special assignment with the IWA, came to talk to the Chinese and the East Indians, he talked to them separately, knowing that because their cultures were so different, they would be unable to relate to each other though they shared similar grievances. Every day that the war continued improved the bargaining position of these two groups, but each heard about the war in its separate way. Fung Jim Chow, who owned a radio and understood English perfectly, listened to the war news at 6:30 every morning, wrote it out in Chinese and posted it on a bulletin board before leaving for work at 7:30. The Punjabi translation was not as up to date, but Darshan supplied a written summary every two or three months.
The next five years were heady ones for the only East Indian Communist in the IWA. Writing for various publications, speaking across the country, he found it hard to keep his aspirations compartmentalized. Propagation of communist causes, recognition of the loggers’ union and a recently acquired interest in Indian independence tended to blur into one large vision of a better world. The young man who posed for a formal portrait at this time wearing a pin-striped suit and an elegant cravat that bespoke his newfound status was round-faced, thick-haired, with burning eyes that stared into the middle distance to some idealized but attainable future.
At first his activities centred on Vancouver Island. He spent his weekends visiting bunkhouses at Paldi, Youbou and the new mill at Honeymoon Bay. Realizing that the suspicion with which Chinese and East Indian people regarded unions would take a long time to break down, he just talked to them, working towards the day when they would feel comfortable in the IWA. His base of operations was the Duncan IWA office, and it was there, in the second-storey offices over Island Drug, that he met a young white woman and fell in love with her.
When they started to be seen together in public, people stared at the Indian man walking closely beside the young white woman. But the two young people convinced themselves it didn’t matter. His IWA supervisor was discouraging—something like this would only make their mission more difficult. The provincial secretary of the Communist Party was sympathetic—the party wanted this sort of intermarriage to take place. When the young woman said she would marry him, Darshan went to see her father unannounced. It was a cold meeting. “You can tell by a person’s facial expression whether or not you are welcome,” Darshan said later. The woman finally gave way to the pressure of family and friends and told him she could not continue the relationship.
Darshan Singh was not a man who should have married any woman. He was obsessed by his ideologies. He gave himself time to write by working for ten days in whatever factory would hire him and then living for the rest of the month on what he was paid. He gave speeches in crowded halls, he met with small groups, he stayed with friends but seldom socialized.
Although he had both Sikh and white friends, his friendship with Karm Manak was unusual. The two former residents of India who had worked as loggers on Vancouver Island should have had much in common, but Darshan was a Communist and a union organizer, and Karm was an entrepreneur and an employer.
Karm Manak had shown that he had an eye to the future when he bought a Ford two-ton truck, installed a special two-speed rear end, and welded fish plates onto the sides to strengthen the frame. The timber on the lower slopes was running out at the lake and along the corridor of the Cowichan Lake Road. Railroad engines couldn’t get up the grades that would be necessary to reach the timber on the higher slopes, so trucks were gradually taking over logging transport.
Because it was his own truck, Karm was able to work long hours—sometimes sixteen hours a day—and he paid off his truck in one year. He bought a house in Duncan and went back to India to marry. He installed his new bride, Indira, in the middle of a white neighbourhood in Duncan, where she was isolated from the few other women of her race who lived at Hillcrest and Paldi but befriended by her Scottish neighbours, the Auchinachies. Karm bought a small portable sawmill. It was about then that he met Darshan, newly arrived in Canada and far from the debonair man he would be in 1947 when he decided to return permanently to India.
Britain was about to yield to pressure and grant Indian independence. The challenges were huge, and Darshan felt that in Marxism lay the answer to many of India’s problems. But he recognized that Canada had shaped him. “I had worked my best years here and there was no doubt that I was more a Canadian than an Indian when I went from here…”
Having made his way across Canada and sailed across the Atlantic, he boarded a ship in Great Britain that arrived in Bombay after a twenty-three-day voyage. He stepped off the ship dressed in a suit, tie and hat, but his first act upon touching Indian soil was to purchase two pairs of kurtha-pyjamas, a mattress and a light blanket. With only eighty rupees left to his name, he travelled to Punjab, riding on the links between railroad cars or on the roof of the train.
Canada had shaped him, and the man who now plunged into a life of poverty and danger, living underground at first to avoid arrest, writing articles decrying Sikh extremism in Canada, eventually representing the village of Langeri in the Punjabi legislature, adopted the name of Darshan Canadian to show how important Canada had been to him.
When Darshan Canadian came to Canada for a visit in 1985, he was sixty-seven years old. His face was still round, but his thick hair was now grey and slicked back. Heavy black-framed glasses dominated his face, but the eyes still were fixed on the middle distance. The main purpose of his visit was to speak out against the extremism that was then shaping and warping the experience of Canadian Sikhs. The following year, riding his bicycle along a dirt road near his Punjabi village, he was killed—shot in the back by an unknown assassin.
High up on the Caycuse with the lake in the background, a Camp Six skidder crew poses in their soft hats and caulk boots in 1941. * IWA CANADA LOCAL 1-80/GOLD COLLECTION
In 1934, Winnie Whiskin (standing second from right) and her friends worked in the Camp Six cookhouse, but female flunkies were unusual at the lake until after World War II. * IWA CANADA LOCAL 1-80/GOLD COLLECTION
From the ridge behind Youbou looking east towards the Foot, the narrows are flanked by Bald Mountain on the left and Honeymoon Bay behind the hill on the right. * IWA CANADA LOCAL 1-8O/GOLD COLLECTION
Twenty-six-year-old Archie Greenwell brought a strong union background and a good education to his job as union secretary at Rounds, the only organized camp in B.C. in 1938. * ARCHIBALD GREENWELL COLLECTION
The McDonald and Murphy camp, blacklisted logger’s refuge, sits in a deep valley of cut-over land. Soon its owners would declare bankruptcy and sell to Rounds and Hunter. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE F-08949
Former E&N passenger cars provided unusual luxury to loggers travelling from the village to work at the M&M camp, where owner Neil McDonald was “tough but fair.” * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE F-08950
The Rev. T. H. Maynard and his family offered religious comfort at “The Ark,” scene of many raucous dances in its former guise as Swan Hall. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 994.3.2
Long before Sikh mill workers brought their families from India, the school at Mayo, brand new in 1921, had nine students, all from the families of white workers. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 990.28.7
Rigging slinger Kynaston Gisborne (standing sixth from left) poses in 1927 with the Camp Ten crew on the porch of one of the new eight-man portable bunkhouses. * VANCOUVER PUBLIC LIBRARY 1432
New parents Matt and Margaret Hemmingsen, he the legendary logger from Wisconsin, she a coal miner’s daughter from Cumberland, pose formally just before moving to the lake. * JOHN HEMMINGSEN COLLECTION
Matt Hemmingsen’s floating camp rests near shore in one of the many moorages used as he and his men logged the timber that grew close to the shore. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE F-08674
RIGHT
Bank manager’s son George Kenneth (Ken) Gillespie reveals his elegant past as he poses with his new bride, a wary-looking Josephine Alice Marboeuf, on their 1912 wedding day. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE ZZ-95054
BELOW
Ken Gillespie at 63, hunter, trapper, prospector, guide, freighter, boat captain and poker player, wears his favourite clothes and displays his favourite canoe. * IWA CANADA LOCAL 1-80/G0LD COLLECTION
The men of this section crew on the new E&N spur in 1913 are forerunners of the many Chinese men who will maintain the logging railroads soon to * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 984.2.1F
The Sikh and Chinese workers at the Youbou mill in 1939 performed the menial tasks, but labour shortages and the demands of war would soon ensure them better jobs. * IWA CANADA LOCAL 1-80/GOLD COLLECTION
Fallers in 1943 demonstrate a heavy two-man power saw made in Germany before the war. The bucker and the faller at left, wearing their old soft hats, were two of many who resisted adopting hard hats. * B.C. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE E-02892
At the 1944 Federated Auxiliary District Council meeting in Vancouver, Sister Lil Godfrey (second row, fourth from right), leads the largest delegation and stands behind B.C. district president Edna Brown. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 990.17.3
When June Ekert, 20, was crowned Lady of the Lake in 1948, she had already been an active member of the IWA Ladies Auxiliary for four years. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 995.23.1
Constable Smokey Parsley stands in front of the Lake Cowichan police station not long before it was abandoned and subsequently dynamited by person or persons unknown, * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 986.15.13
“Mr. IWA,” Hjalmar Bergren, first District One president, no longer operating in secret, showed his executive side in 1945 as vice-president of the B.C. District Council. * MYRTLE BERGREN ESTATE
Susan Harden Stoker, her stern countenance disguising her benevolent nature, wears her silver whistle, which she used to call her Chinese servants, but does not reveal her ear trumpet. * MARY STONE COLLECTION
Heavy winter rains can bring the level of the lake up as much as a foot an hour, turning the streets of the village at the Foot into rivers. * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 987.9.7
Tough and businesslike Alice (“The Green Hornet”) Pederson and her husband and partner, Ivor, drive “44 Taxi” or their bus to wherever the customers Want to go * KAATZA STATION MUSEUM 991-9-9