My interest in the history of Tod Inlet began with pig teeth. As a young boy in the 1940s and ’50s, when our family boat, Squakquoi, was moored in Tod Inlet, I spent hours exploring the inlet’s shores and venturing up Tod Creek. It was along the steep banks of the creek, under the decaying leaves of bigleaf maples, that my brother, Jamie, and I first found the buried treasures that led to a lifetime of discoveries.
Pig skulls were our first trophies. As we dug into the loose soil to find more of the curving tusks in earth-stained jawbones—the real prize, we thought then—we discovered old bottles, broken pottery and chopsticks, and then beautifully glazed jugs, pots and rice bowls. Back at the anchorage, our questions to the old-timers led to faint vague memories of a long-deserted Chinese village connected to the abandoned cement plant at Tod Inlet. That’s when I became hooked on history.
From time to time over the years, as a schoolboy and later as a high school student, I returned to Tod Creek to poke through the crumbling remains of the village. Bricks and corrugated tin roofing revealed the location of some buildings. And down the steep slope of the creek bank, my friend David Neilson and I found a trove of discarded objects—a Chinese midden. Dozens of nail-studded workboots with weathered soles suggested this was a working man’s community, as did the hundreds of beer bottles—some from local sources, others from breweries around the world.
The discoveries fuelled my curiosity about the Chinese workers and eventually led me, as a student at the University of Victoria, to search the provincial archives of British Columbia. But I found no official records of the Chinese community at Tod Inlet, though one Vancouver Island directory mentioned 200 “Orientals” who had lived there 50 years before. Hidden in the forest parkland were the remains of a forgotten immigrant community, and hidden in the mists of history were the stories of the people who lived there.
Although two Chinese workers still lived in the abandoned community until the mid-1960s, in the only house still standing, I didn’t meet them when I was exploring in the area. It was through background information in official government reports on the Vancouver Portland Cement Company operations at Tod Inlet that I began to form a picture of the industry and of the labourers’ lives.
The old cement plant itself yielded more fascinating details. One winter day in the mid-1960s, while I was exploring the abandoned, windowless office building, I found remnants of some company files from 1911 and 1912 scattered on the floor: torn, wet, mouldy and priceless. Priceless because they contained details of the everyday life of the company, the ships and the workers, available nowhere else.
It wasn’t until after I moved to Ottawa in 1973 that I finally learned another of Tod Inlet’s secrets: the Chinese had not been the only immigrant workers there. The exciting discovery of a single photograph in Canada’s national archives depicting a Sikh cremation ceremony at Tod Inlet not only opened a whole new chapter of the story for me, it also changed my life, bringing both history and filmmaking into my career.
Shortly after finding the 1907 photograph, I was delighted to discover a trove of personal stories of life at the inlet. They had been written by Mary Parsell, wife of James Parsell, one of the cement company’s first engineers.
My picture of the Tod Inlet community sharpened further when, in 1978, I began corresponding with Mary’s son, Norman Parsell. Norman had grown up at Tod Inlet, had worked there for the cement company as a teenager and lived nearby until his death in 1987. After I interviewed him at his home in 1979, I also tracked down a number of other local “old-timers.” These men and women, who had grown up in the community or worked in the cement plant, taught me even more.
Desmond “Dem” Carrier, who grew up at Tod Inlet, and former gardener and cement plant worker Pat van Adrichem both shared their memories of Tod Inlet, especially of the Chinese workers they knew, during several fascinating rambles with me through the site of the old village and shantytown.
I talked with several Elders from the Tsartlip First Nation in 2001 and again in 2010 about their knowledge of Tod Inlet and its importance to their culture and history. I also interviewed the descendants of the Chinese and Sikh workers at Tod Inlet between 2007 and 2010 while researching my documentary films on the inlet’s history.
In the spring of 1989 I introduced my own children to the wharfs, shorelines and old cement plant ruins of Tod Inlet. At the wharf, we met two men who kept their boats at Tod Inlet, enjoying a peaceful day in the quiet surroundings. Tod Inlet’s future was then in doubt due to proposed commercial and housing developments, and I asked the two boat owners for their thoughts on it. One of them looked around at the quiet shores and the dark forests climbing up to the horizon, and said, “Nothing will change for a long time to come.”