Midnight March 3, 1913

Stooped in the coved entryway of the Fraser and Bishop General Store in Union Bay, a man yanks a skeleton key from his pocket. He gropes for the door’s lock and shoves the key in. The door groans open. Cloaked in midnight’s shadows, he and a second man slink inside, their footfalls deadened by soft-soled shoes. Once more, the man sinks a hand deep into the pocket of his Mackinaw coat. With a wink of his electric flashlight, he exposes the unguarded loot.

But before the men can stuff their sacks, a lock jiggles at the store’s second entrance and the two freeze. The first man again thrusts a hand into his coat. This time he wrenches out a .44 calibre Colt revolver. Their hearts thump. They crouch between counters filled with dried goods and breathe air choked with spices and sweat. The man aims the Colt at the second entrance.

***

What happened next? For over a century, various writers have recounted the story of one of Vancouver Island’s most infamous shootouts. From the first time I read about the notorious pirate and smuggler nicknamed the Flying Dutchman and his exploits in Union Bay, I wanted to write my own version of the tale. I began my research by scouring the handful of published versions out there. But I noticed inconsistencies between them. Unsure of which ones to believe, I quested for the truth. The source documents I unearthed from both Canadian and American archives, prison records, and newspapers not only illuminated the small details but also called into question whether the gunman deserved his final judgment: execution.

***

In 1870, over forty years before the general store robbery at Union Bay, one of Louisiana’s newest residents was a squalling baby named Henry Ferguson Sastro. The baby looked up at his German-born parents through steel-grey eyes. Other distinguishing features included a mole on his right cheek and bow legs that never straightened out. In 1882, his father died, followed six years later by his mother. Eighteen years old and parentless, Sastro possessed a face that looked as if it could take a punch. Standing 173 centimetres (5 feet 8 inches) tall and weighing in at eighty-two kilograms (180 pounds) of muscle and bone, no doubt he could deliver punches too. At some point he joined the U.S. Merchant Marines, a civilian organization responsible for international and domestic seaborne trade. Here he became steeped in the life of a seaman.

***

A decade before the robbery, on October 18, 1901, two police officers scrambled from their boat at a Whidbey Island dock in Puget Sound. The officers rushed a nearby cabin and flung the door open, guns drawn. Inside, Sastro and another man raised their hands. The officers charged Sastro with the theft of thirty-five sacks of oats from a warehouse a year earlier. Long since a Scotsman’s breakfast, the oats were a minor, easy-to-prove offence. In court two months later, Sastro admitted to a more wicked crime: smuggling nine thousand pounds of opium from Canada to the United States over a number of years. The judge sentenced him to fourteen years of hard labour at Walla Walla State Penitentiary.

The penitentiary was a prisoner-run, self-contained city that produced goods for sale—like grain sacks for oats. Inside, Sastro met the man who would eventually become the number one witness in his murder trial. In 1903, William Julian got three years hard time for grand larceny. Of Welsh heritage, Julian was born in the same era as Sastro. His lustrous black hair sat atop a baby face with a Celtic complexion. In contrast to Sastro the slender man stood at 5 feet 3 inches and weighed 135 pounds.

Sastro was released in 1908 for good behaviour, but that behaviour failed to extend beyond incarceration. In 1909, a “Wanted” poster pegged Henry Ferguson (by now he had dropped Sastro from his name) as the prime suspect in a post office robbery in Washington State. He and two other men had snuck in at night and stolen $176.80. A self-taught locksmith, Ferguson gained entry with a skeleton key and worked a safe. Police captured the other two culprits, but “Water Pirate Henry Ferguson, alias ‘Jack the Flying Dutchman,’” escaped. The alias Flying Dutchman comes from sailors’ tales of a ghost ship that has haunted the seas for centuries. Sighting the ship foretells doom. The people of North America’s Pacific Coast affixed the name to Ferguson somewhere along his travels.

The poster explained that he “wears a black cap when in boat and a light-coloured canvas hat when on shore” and “is generally armed with a Colt .44 revolver and a double-barreled shotgun.” Known to be handy and clever, Ferguson would sometimes repaint and refit the cabin on his 16-foot boat, the Spray. With a three-horsepower gasoline engine and small sail, the Spray was quick and nimble.

The poster referenced Ferguson, William Julian, and a woman of mixed Indigenous ancestry, “all of whom are supposed to be in Nanaimo, BC, or vicinity, as their plan was to rob a company store at that place. Both of these men are desperate characters, and I am informed left here about a week ago for B.C. for the purpose of murdering two men and committing a robbery.” The poster said that “Ferguson is well posted in the B.C. waters and on Puget Sound. He talks about Yulu Island, Frazer River, and Bring Berge Island” (a misspelling and likely reference to Lulu Island—one of the seventeen islands that make up modern-day Richmond—the Fraser River, and Bainbridge Island, west of Seattle). For the Washington authorities, his capture was “of the utmost importance on account of the crimes he has committed and for those he threatens to commit.”

This heat is perhaps what drove Ferguson and Julian into Canada, where U.S. law enforcement could not follow. But BC was no safe haven. They had jumped from a sinking ship into a heaving sea. Their Wanted poster trailed the pirates north into Canada, where a man hardened by decades of policing on the coast readied himself.

***

Chief Constable David Stephenson began his job in 1881 as the Island’s lone BC Provincial Police officer, stationed north of Esquimalt. Before immigrating to Canada, he had been a member of Queen Victoria’s Guard of Honour. He looked every part the Canadian frontier cop—a smart uniform, stabbing glare, and thick, drooping moustache on an otherwise clean-shaven face. In the early days, he travelled the coast alone by canoe to take prisoners to court in Nanaimo. Whether they helped paddle is unknown.

In the years after the Wanted poster’s publication, pirates marauded the BC coast, committing a string of burglaries. On October 12, 1912, the Daily Colonist reported that thieves blew a safe in Victoria and made away with nearly six hundred dollars. Vancouver saw safe-breaking attempts in the same month. On December 15, burglars broke into the safe at Nanaimo City Hall. Up Island in Union Bay, around the same time, a woman named Mrs. Bishop was working in a hotel kitchen. She heard a noise and went down the hall to investigate. According to The Friendly Port, a book about Union Bay’s history, a burglar was breaking in and heard her coming. The burglar ducked into a bedroom and hid in a wardrobe. She never did find him, but “Mrs. Bishop’s brother was up staying, and he had an old pair of comfortable pants. One day he went to put them on, and they weren’t there.” Police found the pants months later at the Flying Dutchman’s hideout.

With an area eight times larger than Puget Sound under his care and few officers to help him, Stephenson had found it impossible to apprehend the culprits. He needed a break in the case. Convinced the pirates would hit Union Bay again soon, he planned a trap. For this he enlisted two undercover officers. The first, Gordon Ross, had fought in the South African war as a Lovat Scout. The Scottish sniper regiment was famous for being a pioneer of the ghillie suit, a type of camouflage that helped wearers blend in with their background. The second, Harry Westaway, hailed from PEI. Up until his thirtieth birthday he lived with his parents. According to the census, he worked as a painter before becoming an officer. Stephenson posted the two men in Union Bay at the beginning of February 1913.

***

On March 3, 1913, the Farmers Institute on Lasqueti Island was holding a meeting. Two reputable Lasqueti community members, Henry Wagner and William Julian, told their neighbour in Scottie Bay they were leaving to attend the meeting. At four in the afternoon, Wagner’s wife and children watched them motor out of the bay. The next time they saw Wagner, he would be behind bars.

The Flying Dutchman’s true name depended on who you asked and where you asked them. The desperado’s actions necessitated aliases to elude the authorities. In Washington State, he answered to Henry Ferguson Sastro and Henry Ferguson; on the Canadian side of the line, Henry Wagner.

With his three-horsepower engine, Wagner could travel a little faster than a horse could walk. He never intended to make the Farmers Institute meeting. From Scottie Bay, the most direct route to Union Bay led him west to Hornby Island. Here, he hooked slightly south around Denman Island. One of the few nighttime guides, the blinking Chrome Island lighthouse, lay to starboard just offshore from Denman’s southern end. Darkness shrouded the headlands and shoals as they sputtered northwards.

During Wagner and Julian’s northbound journey up Baynes Sound, Constables Gordon Ross and Harry Westaway played cards and drank beers in the Nelson Hotel. As the port for the Cumberland coal mines, Union Bay’s long wharf welcomed ships from all over the world. A short stroll away, the hotel faced the sea. Its bar was a fine place to spend the evenings, drinking and chatting to travellers. Ross and Westaway had waited for a month, night in and night out, for criminals to appear at the Fraser and Bishop General Store next door. At night, the white building, with its high false front, sat dark and quiet.

At midnight, the officers noticed a light. They walked into the post office adjoining the store to investigate. Once inside, they heard a creak in the store proper, as if someone had stepped on a floorboard. Westaway clutched a pistol. Ross gripped a flashlight and baton. Unknown to them, Wagner was peering down the sights of his Colt .44.

***

Union Bay’s local police officer was on duty not far away at the colliery dock when he heard someone yelling for help. At the store’s entryway, the door’s shattered glass crunched under his feet. A shadow beckoned him inside. The officer clicked on his flashlight to behold Gordon Ross standing by the door. Beyond him waited a grisly sight—a captive lay unconscious on the floor, bloodied and beaten to a pulp, and Harry Westaway lay dead in a pool of blood.

Chief Constable David Stephenson happened to be in Cumberland that night, visiting another constable, his son, Albert. They received a call about an incident in Union Bay. A bumpy thirty-minute drive down Royston Road and what is now the Island Highway and the two officers arrived on the scene. Someone poured cold water onto the prisoner. Stephenson identified the barely conscious man as the Flying Dutchman.

Wagner was brought to the Cumberland lockup, where he asked to have a reporter sent to take down his story. He planned to sell the story and give the money to his wife. Permission was not granted.

On March 13, 1913, an officer named George Hannay shepherded Wagner to the Nanaimo Gaol. George Hannay and the entire force had had a busy March. They had scoured the area for an unidentified second man who had escaped from the scene of the burglary. After the botched burglary, Julian had taken the Spray’s skiff and started rowing the thirty miles back to Lasqueti Island. On March 7, with two aching arms from three days of rowing, Julian arrived on land, only to find Hannay waiting for him, pistol drawn. Perhaps it was Wagner who told police where to find him.

***

Proceedings in Wagner’s trial began on May 13 at Nanaimo’s courthouse. The doctor who arrived on scene early in the morning after the murder testified that Westaway had died from a gunshot wound through his right lung, but was unsure from which direction the bullet had entered. A bullet’s exit wound is typically much larger than the entry wound. However, Westaway’s two deadly holes measured about the same. As well, the doctor found two gashes about two inches long on the top of Westaway’s head. He also noted how Wagner had taken a thrashing while Ross had no marks on him.

Gordon Ross came to the stand next. His testimony went like this: He and Westaway entered the post office and heard the creaking floorboard in the store. Ross pointed his flashlight into the store but saw nothing until he directed the beam to his left, where he found himself looking down the barrel of Wagner’s Colt .44. Wagner was crouched on one knee in a narrow corridor between the counters. Ross killed his light and rushed him. Wagner fired. The bullets missed Ross in this narrow corridor and hit Westaway, who was behind him. Westaway said, “I’m shot, Gordon, do you have him?” While Westaway bled out on the floor, Ross and Wagner fought for the gun, knocking supplies off the shelves. The crime scene photos show disarray. Eventually, Ross subdued Wagner, knocked him unconscious, and handcuffed him. Ross admitted during questioning to being punched several times by Wagner.

As the doctor noted, however, Ross was unscathed. He did not even have marks on his knuckles. Victor Harrison, the lawyer assigned to Wagner, raised this anomaly during cross-examination: “What was he fighting,” Harrison asked Ross, “the counter or walls? What was he fighting? You are not marked up. I don’t understand you.” Ross responded, “I don’t understand it myself.” Harrison asked Ross if he’d had anything to drink that evening. Ross sketchily admitted he’d spent the entire evening in the hotel bar but that he’d drunk only one beer. Post-trial, Harrison stated in a document that he sent to Ottawa to have the case appealed that Ross was a known drunk.

Another question raised by Harrison was how the bullet had missed Ross in the narrow corridor and hit Westaway, who was behind him. Ross did not know.

Wagner’s testimony contrasted with Ross’s. He claimed a drunken Ross had accidently shot Westaway while Wagner and Westaway wrestled. This version of events might explain why Westaway had two gashes on his head and Ross was unmarked, and it would also solve the bullet wound puzzle. A bullet entering from the back would add some credence to Wagner’s version.

The prosecutor asked Wagner about his past crimes. Was it true he’d been a member of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, the infamous American train-robbing gang? Wagner answered no.

Next, Julian came onto the stand. His story was short and simple. He entered the store behind Wagner, clutching his coattails in the dark. When a light flashed on them, Julian fled, and as he exited the store, he heard two gunshots. If true, the timing of the gunshots supports Ross’s version of events. As the number one witness against Wagner, Julian sealed Wagner’s fate with his testimony. Julian would be tried shortly afterwards for burglary only, not as an accomplice to murder.

In the Nanaimo courthouse, the judge addressed the court and described his take on the events: Wagner entered the store armed with a pistol to commit burglary. He had that pistol to avoid apprehension, if it came to it, and had long prepared to shoot someone. The jury, apparently split until the final minutes, took four hours to come back with a guilty verdict. Wagner was condemned to death by hanging, with his execution set for August 28 of that year.

The case was murky and evidence scant, but the Flying Dutchman had a reputation. After the trial, in the same petition Wagner’s lawyer sent to Ottawa to request an appeal, he claimed some jurors had made up their minds to have Wagner executed before the court case began.

***

The Flying Dutchman’s final months were not without drama, both in his cell and on Vancouver Island. Days before the trial, the Island’s coal towns erupted in riots. Coal miners demanded better working conditions and threatened to unionize. The situation prompted the Provincial Police to call in the militia, who made mass arrests. The prisoner records for the Nanaimo Gaol at this time are choked with miners’ names.

Beginning the day after the trial, guards watched Wagner around the clock. This was called a death watch. Unlike at Walla Walla, he was assigned no labour, hard or otherwise. In the months leading up to the execution, Mrs. Wagner and the children visited nearly every week. On one visit he gave her $250 from the sale of the Spray. She also took his watch, chain, and other effects. The remaining $50 from the $300 boat sale he kept. As with the gaols in Victoria and New Westminster at the time, prisoners condemned to death could purchase and cook their own food. Wagner regularly bought eggs, butter, and bacon, which the guards delivered to him.

After a final visit from his wife and children, Wagner attempted suicide by banging his head against the radiator in the shower. After that, guards shackled his legs with a chain so short he could only shuffle his feet.

***

Arthur Ellis, the Dominion of Canada’s official executioner, had hanged hundreds. Ellis was only the latest of many forefathers to undertake this grim task. Untold numbers met their end by his kin, who had been executing people for over three hundred years. The night before his current task, Ellis stepped into Wagner’s cell. He placed two fingers on the prisoner’s wrist—a touch to measure a pulse by the man who would steal it.

Due to the miners’ strikes, the execution was closed to the public. In the early morning of August 28, 1913, a handful of police constables, a Salvation Army officer, and Ellis gathered in Nanaimo’s gaol courtyard. Silence filled the dewy air. The assembled men faced the wooden gallows, where a noose, rigid and still, hung from the top beam. At the platform’s crest, high above the witnesses, the executioner grasped a black sack and leather straps. A door to the courtyard flew open. The Flying Dutchman stumbled into the sunlight.

The hanging began at 7:45 a.m. in the gaol’s courtyard. According to a first-hand account of the execution published in Outlaws and Lawmen of Western Canada, the conditions were right for Ellis to attempt a world record for the fastest hanging. Ellis had noted that the distance between the courtyard door and the gallows in Nanaimo matched the location in England where the current record was set by his uncle. He left the bottom of the gallows unscreened so the timekeeper could see the moment the condemned man’s toes hit the gravel.

***

When Wagner stumbles into the courtyard, those gathered lift their hats, not out of respect for the convicted murderer but because it is the law. As soon as Wagner reaches the trap on the gallows, Ellis yanks the sack over his head, pinions his legs with the strap, and jerks the noose tight behind his ears. Before the Salvation Army officer can say four words of the Lord’s Prayer, Ellis springs the trap. The Flying Dutchman’s third vertebra snaps, his toes graze the gravel below the scaffolding, and he meets Death instantly.

Ellis thrusts his hand into the air. “Time!”

***

Published versions of this story have invariably painted the Flying Dutchman as a cold-hearted desperado and the police as heroes. This is a common narrative in any story where a police officer is murdered, but truth is rarely so cut and dried. The BC Provincial Police both protected and acted against the public. According to volume three of British Columbia: From the Past Times to the Present, a biographical account of prominent community members, Chief Constable David Stephenson was respected and generally considered a fair officer. Conversely, a common photo of Stephenson shows him leading a gang of mounted constables, ready to quell the strikes in Nanaimo.

In the case of the Flying Dutchman, Stephenson managed to stop the crime spree, but one of his officers paid for the victory with his life. What Stephenson thought of the justice Wagner received, we don’t know. Other problems were likely at the forefront of his mind. The strikes continued, only abating during the First World War. In 1916, Stephenson retired at his own request after thirty-six years on duty. After the war ended, the strikes worsened.

Other BC Provincial Police constables were indistinguishable from the criminals they arrested. Not long after the Flying Dutchman was hanged, William Julian pled guilty to breaking into the Fraser and Bishop General Store and served a five-year sentence. Shortly after his release, police scoured the coast for two pirates who were robbing communities in the same manner Wagner and Julian had. Police caught up to Julian on February 18, 1920, and arrested him. The next day they arrested his accomplice: George Hannay, the officer who had arrested Julian on Lasqueti Island in 1913.

More Great Stories Await! Buy Book Here

Excerpted from A Place Called Cumberland by Cumberland Museum & Archives. Edited by Rhonda Bailey. Copyright © 2024 by Cumberland Museum & Archives. Essay by Dave Flawse. Excerpted with permission from Figure 1 Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Sources

All sources can be found in A Place Called Cumberland where this story appears.

Peruse the “Local Reads” section your neighbourhood bookstore or the BC Ferries giftshop and you’ll notice it’s stuffed with memoirs. These personal accounts are often set in coastal BC and framed around two themes: fishing and logging.

Even if you’re someone who feels they’ve read enough about catching salmon and cutting down trees, these memoirs are usually worth picking up. You never know what you might find in them; historical treasures frequently hide in their pages.

Take Jon Taylor’s Fried Eggs & Fish Scales, for example. In 30 or so stories, the long-time fisherman chronicles his 50 years in remote Sointula on Malcolm Island. In one tale, Taylor solves a thirty-year-old mystery that stretches back to WWII. I love little tales like these. This one in particular speaks to much more than just the two men involved.

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Harbour Publishing was kind enough to send an excerpt for your reading pleasure:

War Story

My first trolling skipper had spent World War II in the gumboot navy, alternately catching fish to feed the troops and patrolling for Japanese submarines. He said it was a good life most of the time, lots of hunting and fishing, and lots of time to explore every bay on the coast. He said he spent half his time in a skiff.

The problem was that they were always hunting for a rumoured Japanese sub that kept getting reported in the area. Since a sub would definitely outgun their patrol vessel, they had to take it by surprise. This frequently meant stopping on one side of a point and sending a man to the beach in the skiff, so he could look into the bay beyond to be sure the sub wasn’t waiting in ambush. If the day was nice the recon would go on for some time. Naturally, it being wartime, the scout always took his .30-30 along (the fly rod was more difficult to explain). If the scout came upon a few deer or trout while reconnoitring, well, it was just natural to share his good luck with his shipmates.

There were, of course, black nights and horrible gales that threatened to put an end to all the good times. But those times being in the past, it was the good times scouting the bay that remained strong in his mind. Except for the damned “Jap sub.” Over time, they had interviewed dozens of good, reliable people—loggers and fishermen mostly—who swore that they had seen the damned thing. But the skipper and the crew never got a glimpse or whiff of it. They spent the whole war chasing an illusion, and thirty years later it still hurt.

At that time I had five acres of land and a house that was falling down. I decided to clear some land and build a new house. Toward that end I hired a local Cat driver. He brought in a friend. The friend was a school principal by profession, but loved to spend summers up the coast, anywhere away from the city. As we talked, it became apparent that he knew every nook and cranny on the inside coast. I asked him how, and he told me.

Most people don’t know that during World War II, Canada had one submarine on the west coast. High authority decided that rather than send it off to sink the enemy, a duty from which it was very unlikely to return, it would better serve as a means of testing coastal defences.

“It was horrible,” he said. We popped up in every bay and village on the whole coast anywhere there was a log boom or a shack, made all the noise we could; then we’d dive and run elsewhere. We’d cruise back and forth under the gillnet fleet at night with our deck lights on. No one ever saw us. We did everything possible to get reported, but as far as we know, not one single report was ever sent in.

I told each of the men about the other’s story, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. The futility and frustration was too deeply ingrained. I even arranged for them to meet, but it never happened. Even when they were in the same town and knew exactly where the other could be found, they never saw each other.

Excerpt from pages 199-200 of Fried Eggs & Fish Scales by Jon Taylor (Harbour Publishing, 2024). Reprinted with permission from the publisher.

Interested in getting a copy of Taylor’s book? Click here. (I don’t get any kick backs for sharing this link, just sleep better at night.)

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A flip through Collin Varner’s Invasive Flora of the West Coast, and everything you thought you knew about plants blows away on the wind like a dandelion puff. Varner’s latest book about plants, but first book about the invasive ones, isn’t just a field guide, it will alter how you see the botanical world: invasive plants are everywhere.

An invasive plant is a non-native plant that has adapted to its new environment. Sometimes these plants outcompete native ones, but not always. Just because it’s invasive, doesn’t mean the plant is undesirable in certain contexts.

The book is split into two sections: herbaceous plants and woody ones. As with Varner’s other field guides, each page contains a picture and lists some important details: common names, Latin name, description, traditional use, etymology, season, reproduction, concerns, and last but not least, origin.

The origin descriptions tease the reader with tantalizing snippets. Consider this one about the domestic apple:

All this from the humble apple!

This is where I take an off-ramp. I had to learn more about these origin stories. And I’m going to share what I learned with you. I set up an interview with Varner to ask him more about these origin stories. Our conversation didn’t disappoint.

The most notorious invasives, Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry, have been widely discussed in other places, so I asked Varner about other plants readers will likely recognize.

Common Apple

DF: I found the origin story of this one pretty fascinating. I had assumed the apple was a native plant.

CV: We have only one native one here. That’s Malus fusca. It’s about a quarter of an inch across. That grows along the coast here and is quite common. If you do the West Coast trail you see thickets of it. You go around Beaver Lake and Stanley Park, and our native apple is in there. But there’s 10 to 1 of the domestic apples, from people throwing their apple cores away.

And apples don’t come true from seed. You have to graft them. And that’s what happened over how many thousands of years. Romans were the first one to start grafting those. And that’s why you’ll go along the old railway lines, especially like Britain. The kids throw their apple cores out the windows. Then you wonder why there are orchards of them growing everywhere. But the apples aren’t very good.

In Vancouver they have the Arbutus Corridor. It used to be a little train that went through Vancouver off to Lulu Island, which is Richmond. That line is now a Bicycle Path, and there must be over a thousand small and big apple trees growing along that line, just from people discarding their apple cores.

When we went across Mongolia. Kazakhstan, that’s where the original apple is. That’s Malus domestica. I didn’t get to find them in the wild, but I had a bowl of them given to me, so I photographed those.

It’s amazing history on those. It’s only been in the last 200 years that the Granny Smith, Delicious, and all those have come out. And now the University of Washington State, they’ve been working really hard on the hybridization. They’ve come out with the Cosmic Crisp.

DF: Oh, I haven’t heard of that one. [Interjection: since this interview, I’ve tried a Cosmic Crisp: highly recommend.]

CV: To me it’s the best apple out there.

DF: Better than the Honeycrisp?

CV: Yep. It’s part Honeycrisp.

Canada Thistle

Dave Flawse: As I understand it, this plant is native to Europe. How did it get here?

Colin Varner: It first came over to Eastern Canada from Britain by boat in a tainted seed or bale lot of hay, clover, or alfalfa. Some of these tainted or contaminated seeds or bales were sent over to Wisconsin and New York where the thistle germinated. So, the Americans called it the Canada Thistle. You know, if that would have been a good plant, it would have been called the American Thistle.

DF: How did it arrive on this side of the continent?

CV: It came across Canada the same way in tainted or contaminated seed lots or bales of hay, clover, or alfalfa.

Giant Hogweed

DF: The specific date of introduction in the book was interesting to me: 1950. How do you know that exact date?

CV: The seed came in as an ornamental, and it was ordered from one of the seed catalogs, and they brought it into a Seattle garden. It really is a beautiful plant. But it’s photo toxic. I ended up in the hospital when I was 12. I took down half acre of it with a machete up in Prince Rupert. The sun came out and I was in the hospital for three days. It was horrid.

One time, I measured a 14-foot-high clump down at Jericho Beach, which by the end of summer was all gone. The parks board came in and removed it. I think it was an overreaction, really.

DF: Why do you think it was an overreaction?

CV: Unless you’re going there and cutting it down and getting the juice all over your body and it’s a sunny day, it’s fairly innocuous. I will not grow it in my garden only because I’ll get shunned by the neighbours.

Morning glory

DF: It’s hard to miss morning glory, those beautiful flowers that are roadside, in gardens, and—

CV: Everywhere. We have a native species here that grows on the beaches. But the rest of them came over in seed lots. Most likely the big flowering one, Calystegia sepia. This is probably brought over as an ornamental because it is quite beautiful. It’s one of those ones that if it’s contained, it’s just fine.

DF: What surprised me was the line in the book that said it is one of the top-ten most-invasive plants worldwide.

CV: Yeah, they call it bindweed because it does bind all the other flowers and everything around it together. And they did use it as cordage to wrap up the hay bales at one time. So, it does have a purpose.

DF: And how do you feel about Morning Glory? Similar to Giant hogweed or do you have a different viewpoint on it?

CV: No, it’s nasty in fields once it gets in there. If you got a damp, low-basin field, it’s horrible to get rid of. It ruins crops, there’s just hundreds of millions of dollars a year of wasted on chemicals to get rid of this stuff.

English Ivy

DF: When you look around English Ivy is everywhere.

CV: And it’s in the top ten noxious weed. People think they strangle the trees and kill them. They don’t. They smother them. They knock out the light, and that’s what kills the trees, especially conifers.

Conifers can’t outgrow their natural shape. Whereas as a big leaf maple or birch, if they start getting English ivy (If you want to call that. It’s actually Persian ivy. Another misnomer.), they can actually grow their limbs to get away from the ivy. They know what’s going on. And you’ll see one limb going about 30 feet sideways. It’s very seldom you’ll see one of our native maples be killed by it.

But Doug firs and our grand firs and hemlocks, they can get taken over. But a mature Douglas fir, there’s nothing that can get up to 200, 300 feet. Even the English ivy can only get up to about 80 feet. I’ve climbed a lot of trees and gone up and looked at the ivy, and it’s pretty interesting: if the bark is really thick and has got crevices, the ivy actually re-roots and starts to regrow again at 60, 80 feet.

DF: This is a question I’ve always wondered, if people disappeared tomorrow, what’s going to happen with the English Ivy in the in the forest? Is it going to take over, or is it going to be impeded by something?

CV: Wouldn’t it be nice if we all disappeared?

DF: I know right.

CV: The English ivy can go ballistic as it wants. But really, the first forest fire that comes along, they’re gone. They are not used to forest fires like a lot of our indigenous plants. There is a dozen of our native plants, like fireweed, that have their seeds on the ground, and the forest fires come through and then they thrive. The seeds germinate.

Whereas the English ivy, those seeds get burned right to toast. So, I would think you’ll have isolated spots of the English ivy, but it will never become prolific.

DF: Thanks, Collin!

To learn more of the fascinating world of invasive plants, check out Varner’s latest book!

In 1979, at the same time when nuclear anxiety from Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island reactor meltdown consumed the public, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) promoted nuclear power in British Columbia. “Vancouver Island,” according a 1979 AECL study, “appears to be a logical area for the application of nuclear power.”

Organizations such as AECL presented nuclear power as an inexpensive and safe alternative that would spur economic growth, yet many Canadians expressed concern about the risk to public safety and environmental consequences of the technology.

Canadian environmental activist David Garrick, also known by his pen name, Walrus Oakenbough (a name he created while writing for Vancouver’s alternative newspaper The Georgia Straight), worked for over a decade raising awareness of the dangers of nuclear activity.

Garrick had been educated as an anthropologist in Ontario at Trent University, where he also studied the sciences and ecology and developed his research skills. His interest in environmental issues was further stimulated by a move in 1971 to Vancouver where he became involved in a protest against a Four Season’s hotel development at the entrance to Stanley Park.

Here, he met early creators of the fledgling Greenpeace movement such as Rod Marining and Paul Watson, who remained lifelong friends. Marining and Watson would join Greenpeace’s first campaign to stop atomic bomb testing in Alaska in 1971. Then in 1975, Garrick and Watson joined the Greenpeace crew on the organization’s first whale campaign. They set out on the fishing vessel Phyllis Cormack to search for Russian whaling ships, with the intent of disrupting their hunt. In 1976, they travelled on the converted minesweeper James Bay in search of Japanese whale hunters to again protest harvesting whales. These two campaigns brought Greenpeace world-wide attention.

Garrick then travelled across the Pacific with his partner, Taiko Miwa to create a Greenpeace branch in Japan. He visited health institutions where patients still suffered the effects of radiation poisoning, thirty years after nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Upon his return to Vancouver in 1977, in his role as a Greenpeace director, Garrick organized protestors to rally against the planned Trident nuclear submarine station in Bangor, Washington State. On his third trip to join the protests there, authorities arrested and jailed him, along with Miwa and Watson.

This experience motivated him to increase public awareness of the detrimental effects of nuclear energy and uranium mining. When news reached Garrick about plans to mine uranium in BC, he attempted to convince other Greenpeace directors to recognize the importance of anti-nuclear education. Unsuccessful, Garrick left Greenpeace and instead formed an anti-nuclear alliance with SPEC (at that time SPEC stood for the Canadian Scientific Pollution & Environmental Control Society), the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, the Voice of Women (VOW), First Nations groups, unions, and church organizations.

At Clearwater, BC, he mobilized support and documentary coverage for a decisive town meeting where seven hundred community members successfully blocked the proposed Birch Island open-pit uranium mine.

In October 1978, the Vancouver-based environmental group, SPEC, hired Garrick as a coordinator of its Public Nuclear Awareness Program where he enlightened the public to the hazards of BC’s nuclear development.

Around this time, VOW members alerted Garrick to proposed nuclear plant developments on Vancouver Island. Since the post-war years, at a time when many feared atomic war between the West and Russia, VOW had been educating the public on the hazards of radiation.

Garrick travelled to the proposed sites on the Island’s northern end: at Port McNeill and False Head, near Port Hardy. He had previously visited the area while on a Greenpeace voyage and was aware the Port McNeill plant would be on ‘Namgis First Nation’s territory. At Alert Bay he informed ‘Namgis elders of the plans.

Despite AECL’s assurance that environmental impacts would be low and that “the level of radioactivity found in the environment, especially outside the exclusion area, as a result of reactor operations would be a small fraction of that existing prior to startup of the nuclear plant,” those who lived in the area expressed concern. Fresh in the public mind were the Three Mile Island reactor incident, and, in 1952, the world’s first nuclear meltdown in Deep River, Ontario at the Chalk River facility. The facility would melt down again in 1958. Those involved in the cleanups suffered from various cancers, most notably leukemia.

Garrick organized two rallies to educate the public on the dangers of radiation poisoning. At the first, on September 17, 1978, he addressed 2000 onlookers in Stanley Park on the topic, Radiation and Survival. Outside the Vancouver Planetarium he again addressed 1500 people on the topic, Organizing Against Radiation Hazards in BC. In 1980, as part of the Vancouver City Day of Anti-Nuclear Protest, he addressed a crowd of 5000 on similar topics.

As coordinator of SPEC’s anti-nuclear awareness program, Garrick sought to ban uranium mining in BC and forged the Environmental Alliance Against Uranium Mining (EAAUM), a voice to participate in the technical phases of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Uranium Mining in BC. He would also assist the Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere prepare a funding proposal to participate in the inquiry.

The EAAUM planned to present environmental findings to the Royal Commission. However, the Commission perhaps found enough information without EAAUM’s input, because they adjourned the inquiry in late 1979 and placed a seven-year moratorium on uranium mining in BC.

The province has never lifted the moratorium on uranium mining, and BC’s uranium deposits lay untouched. Due to efforts by those such as David Garrick, today there are no nuclear power stations on Vancouver Island, nor in the entire province. Anti-nuclear activists in BC had successfully convinced the public and province of the dangers of nuclear power.

About Catherine

Catherine is a historian and best-selling author in British Columbia and has a passion for uncovering the untold stories of the province’s past. 

A graduate of the University of Victoria, Catherine earned a master’s in public history. Her most recent book, A Journey Back to Nature, a History of Strathcona Provincial Park, based on her thesis, was published by Heritage House Publishing in time for the Park’s 110th anniversary. Her other local history about the Second World War in the Vancouver Island region, Yorke Island and the Uncertain War, Defending Canada’s Western Coast was published in 2012 by Ptarmigan Press.

Catherine is currently working with David Garrick, aka Walrus Oakenbough, on the story of his life from his role in the formation of Greenpeace in the 1970s, followed by his involvement with numerous ecological campaigns throughout the 1980s and work in Ottawa on parliament hill, to his ground-breaking recent study of culturally modified trees on Hanson Island, BC.

Help bring this important book to life by supporting her work here!

More about Catherine here.

Sources

Bates, David, James Murray and Valter Raudsepp. Royal Commission of Inquiry, Health and Environmental Protection, Uranium Mining. Commissioners' Report Volume I, Victoria, BC: Queens Printer, October 30, 1980. (David Garrick collection) Available at https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/13/695/13695554.pdf

Garrick, David. All Season’s Park; After the Referendum, unpublished journals Volume I and II 1971. David Garrick collection.

Garrick, David ed. “BC Uranium Inquiry”, Spectrum, Vancouver BC: SPEC February 1979.

Garrick, David. Unpublished autobiography, 1981. David Garrick collection

David Garrick, interviews with author, from October 2020 to April 2023.

Guillemette, Mélissa. “Chalk River: The Forgotten Nuclear Accidents,” The Walrus, July 13, 2022. www.thewalrus.ca/nuclear-accidents/

Hunter, Robert and Rex Weyler. To Save a Whale: The Voyages of Greenpeace, San Francisco CA: Chronicle Books, 1978.

Nuclear Power for Vancouver Island, Atomic Energy Canada Limited, Ottawa, ON: April 1979. https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/04/043/4043948.pdf

*This story also appears in CV Collective.

Over a century ago, on a Monday in late September, crowds of young and old thronged Vancouver’s sidewalks. Mothers fussed over their children’s hair. Dressed in their Sunday best, onlookers peered over shoulders and jostled for space close to the street for a better view.

A motorcar sputtered by, and the throng hooted, clapped, and waved the Union Jack. From the back seat, a young man in full military dress tipped his hat to the admirers. Here he sat, the great-grandson of Queen Victoria, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, next in line to be king of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire and Emperor of India, Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David.

The prince was hurrying to official royal business: he was going dancing. At 25 years old, and on the tail end of a two-month Canada-wide tour in 1919, the eligible bachelor and Great War veteran had no shortage of dance partners and admirers. To date, the dance was the largest gathering in Vancouver’s history, with a guest list of 10,000—one out of every ten residents—who foxtrotted until their feet blistered.

Later in his Canadian trip, he sailed to Victoria and toured Vancouver Island in a single day. On his ride along the E&N Railway, he stopped at every town to give a speech and declare that children had the next day off school (because royals can do that, I guess). 

He spent an entire three hours in “Courtenay and District” and filled those hours with the best offerings from the area, first stopping to throw rocks at salmon off the 5th Street bridge. Just like they had done in his other Canadian stops, nearly every loyal Anglophile lined the streets and waved. In a special visit to Merville, where veterans were clearing the newly established community for settlement, the prince pressed a plunger to blow up 22 stumps. The townspeople then lit a 50-foot-high bonfire to honour him. Besides a few stunned fish (now long departed) the prince left a legacy during his brief visit that lives on today.

According to a local history book, when the prince opened Merville’s brand-new schoolhouse (which builders rushed to finish in two weeks to match up with his arrival), he planted an acacia tree at the bottom of the driveway.

The school no longer stands—it’s been replaced by a simple house—but an intriguing tree remains in the driveway.

Its crown stretches out from a thick main trunk cross-hatched with deep grooves. The thing looks, well, really old. I identified the tree as a black locust. A beekeeper’s favourite, this non-native flowering tree also goes by the name false acacia. The slight misnomer aside, I’m pretty sure this is the royal tree.

Maybe it’s no surprise the royal tree has faded from memory. (Even the homeowner was unaware of its historic roots.) Does the average Islander care that an entitled aristocrat planted a tree over a hundred years ago? Probably not.

What’s more, this particular prince turned out to be not so charming. In January 1936, he became king, but abdicated the throne after less than a year. He believed in the superiority of the British and European cultures, and in 1937, he took a special trip to Nazi Germany, where he drove past crowds of adoring fans—only these ones waved swastikas and gave him the Nazi salute, which he returned. He dined with high-ranking Nazi officials and met in private with Adolf Hitler. The Brits suspected him of devising a plot to overthrow the British Crown and, in 1940, shipped him off to become governor of the Bahamas, where he could not influence the war.

Nowadays, over half of Canadians believe we should get rid of the British Crown as head of state. Barbados did so in 2021; several other Caribbean nations intend to follow suit. Even in the United Kingdom, nearly half of citizens (especially the young) believe the monarchy should be abandoned. 

We could be witnessing the final links in a chain of rulers that stretches back to the ninth century, a dynasty some 600 years older than the modern English language. The black locust in Merville may yet outlast the monarchy that planted it.

The Kus-kus-sum site on the Courtenay River estuary is accustomed to change. As the liaison between ocean and river, estuaries live in constant flux—a ritual of ebbs and floods but also a centuries-meandering as the river forges new pathways through its delta. However, the Kus-kus-sum site hasn’t always existed in an estuary, nor above sea level.

Take a holiday to Vancouver Island 14,000 years ago, and you wouldn’t lack for ice. You’d find yourself shivering on an ice sheet that’s over one kilometer thick in places. This is not a quiet place. Chunks of glacier creak, snap, and splash as they break off into the sea.

Where would you find the Kus-kus-sum site on your visit? Well, that’s difficult to untangle explains Jerome Lesemann. The Vancouver Island University Earth Science Professor completed his PhD on glacial landforms and is interested in reconstructions of ancient environments.

At that time, major ice sheets began to melt across the globe. You can think of the glaciers as big storage containers for water, and as they melt, “the glaciers shrink, and water goes back into the ocean. So, what we tend to see is sea level rising.”

Another effect of ice sheets comes from their weight on the Earth’s crust. “They actually depress it,” says Lesemann. “They basically create these huge divots in the land and regress the crust downward.” Over time, the weight on the crust lessens.

Given these two interacting factors, one raising sea level and the other raising the land, pinpointing the site’s elevation at this time is difficult, but around the Comox Valley, “the total amount of depression was probably roughly 150 meters,” putting the Kus-kus-sum site somewhere underwater.

As the centuries and millennia past, braided glacial rivers roiled and boiled grey blue. They forced sand, gravel, and stone downstream to collect at sea level. As the glaciers receded further, the Kus-kus-sum site emerged from underwater around 8,000 years ago.

The site has looked more or less the same for the last 5,000-6,000 years. Around this time, the North Coast Salish established permanent settlements across their territories.

Visit the Kus-kus-sum site before European settlers arrived, and you might have heard the soft cadence of the Pentlatch River Song rippling along a gentle moving estuary. Richard Hardy is a member of K'ómoks First Nation (KFN) and sings the Pentlatch River Song to me over the phone. He picks up the beat. When the rains come and the river’s flow picks up, so does the song’s timing, explains Hardy, who is also a KFN Councillor. “Even our songs are reflective of that area and the end of that River.”

Today, KFN represents the formerly separate tribes of the Sathloot (‘sath-loot), Sasitla (sa-‘seet-la), Ieeksen (eye-‘ick-sun) and Xa’xe (‘ha-hey) and the culturally similar but distinct Pentlatch. The ancestors of KFN occupied the extent of their territories which supported thousands of people who built a sophisticated and rich culture.

Hardy explains that KFN’s priority is water. “Water is so important. When we look at water from an Indigenous perspective, there’s the spirituality side of things. With water comes all the various animals that we have in our songs and dances. When we start to talk about that connection to water, that’s the importance of the [Kus-kus-sum] site from a KFN perspective.”

The entire estuary surrounding the site was a land of plenty and significant to KFN. “The Kus-kus-sum site was our gathering place for harvesting food,” says Hardy. But also a place where they placed mortuary boxes in trees, “so there’s a spiritual connection there.”

A man named George Mitchell was the first white settler to arrive in the estuary area sometime in the 1850s. He acquired a large waterfront acreage between the present-day location of the K'ómoks First Nation and the Kus-kus-sum site. According to Land of Plenty, A History of the Comox District, he finally pre-empted the land in 1862—a total of 150 acres.

More settlers arrived to pre-empt the best land, a naturally treeless area described by early European explorers as a “prairie,” along the Courtenay and Tsolum Rivers and on the east side of the Kus-kus-sum site. While they did not farm directly on the site, farmers did change the landscape around the estuary in the form of dikes and ditches to control the flow of water.

In the late 19th century, “a number of K'ómoks chiefs finally got the opportunity to meet with different Indigenous commissioners to start finding areas of interest for a reserve,” says Hardy. “That was a priority site for our chiefs at that time. And unfortunately, the property never did come back to K'ómoks.”

The site remained mostly unchanged from its natural state as seen in an aerial photograph in 1931. In 1947, brothers Ron and Roy, and their father, Clarence, started a sawmill on the site of today’s Arden Elementary. By 1949 they had striped the timber from the Kus-kus-sum site on the Courtenay River and established their sawmill there.

Over the following decades, the Fields Sawmill would change hands numerous times. As the operation grew, sawmill owners would thrust new pilings further into the estuary and infill behind the new wall to create more space.

In the 1970s the sawmill owners began to infill the site’s south side and into what’s now called the Hollyhocks marsh. Concerned residents stopped the further incursion into the estuary, and the provincial government purchased the land to become a protected area.

The mill produced lumber for the Japanese market. At one time, it was one of the Comox Valley’s top employers and an integral part of its economy. In the end, the specialization in the Japanese market would be its downfall as other specialty mills could produce the lumber cheaper.

In 2006, the mill shut its doors and the owners, now Interfor, auctioned off the equipment. The site went up for sale in 2008. In subsequent years applications to turn the site into condominiums was put to city council. Ironically, the development around the site saved it from that fate. Variances from the road and the flight path for the Courtenay airpark meant there was little room to build out or up.

Fast forward to September 2022. Where developers had once hoped condominiums would go, an orange Hitachi excavator reaches into a muddy pit and pinches a mud-covered log between its claw and bucket. There’s an odour of fragrant yellow cedar mixed with dingy soil. The site is wet, and the old sawmill’s steel retaining wall holds back the river. The huge machine struggles to pull the old-growth cedar from where it sat lodged in the mud for the last seven decades or so. With a crack and splinter, the former piling breaks free to be added to the pile of other pulled logs.

The logs and other compounding factors have slowed restoration work, explains Caitlin Pierzchalski. She’s a watershed steward, restoration ecologist, and Project Watershed Society’s executive director. Established in 1993, Project Watershed Society and its members are watershed stewards. They purchased the former mill site from Interfor in November 2020 and are holding it in trust for K’ómoks First Nation and the City of Courtenay, who will become joint title owners.

The plan is to restore the site back to natural grading. They determined the natural grading by looking at historical aerial photos and by surveying the Hollyhock Marsh. The marsh is in a natural state and also serves as an example for the types of vegetation they will plant.

The iconic hum of vehicles rolling over the metal grate on the 17th street bridge reverberates over the piles of logs and dirt. But walk into the Hollyhock marsh area, and the noisescape lightens. The thick roots from the many Sitka spruces sprawl along a forest floor that is bare of delicate plants. At times of high water, this area floods. The river flows across the feet of alders, cottonwoods, and Sitka spruce as it has forever. This is what naturally happened at the Kus-kus-sum site as well. One third of the site will be low-lying, while the other two thirds closer to Comox Road will be slightly higher in elevation and either flat or sloping. There are no plans to have a park-like setting or paths. This will be a natural site not made for humans.

The steel wall along the river was built in the late 20th century and replaced the former retaining wall of pilings and boards. Pierzchalski says the wall removal is planned for 2024.

The site will provide climate change mitigation in the carbon catching trees. But also provide salmon habitat and habitat for other animals. The trees they plant on the site will grow and “it will slowly restore itself over the next 20 years,” says Pierzchalski.

For Richard Hardy and KFN the site’s restoration means a circling back and a chance to re-establish their ties to an area that they’ve always maintained as a site of importance. “To me,” says Hardy, “this is a prime example of reconciliation because of the close ties that we had to that area, having it taken away from us, and now, through this particular project, the ability to have it come back to K’ómoks’s hands.”

As the tide rolls in and out of the estuary one more time, this place will begin to take on its old face and look more like it has for the past few millennia. Hopefully, it can live in peace for a few thousand years until the inexorable circles back, and a new ice age renews it again.

Interested in helping out? There are several ways to contribute to the restoration, like sponsoring a salmon, donating a used car, or by e-transferring to donate@projectwatershed.ca. Check out projectwatershed.ca for more information.

In the 1970s, Britain’s rising punk rock scene swept over the country’s rambunctious youth. Wildly popular bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash performed for massive crowds and their influence spread to North America.

A world away in Saanich, BC, Jade Blade, Carmen “Scout” Michaud, and Dale Powers listened to their rambunctious records and soaked in the anti-establishment punk rock ethos. In 1977 the three highschoolers formed a band—the Dishrags were born.

The Dishrags were one of North America’s first all-female punk bands. In a music genre that was already obscure, they were an oddity in the male-dominated punk-rock scene. Jade Blade wailed on the guitar, Carmen “Scout” Michaud beat the drums, while Dale Powers slapped the bass. They all shared vocals.

Some audience members failed to appreciate the all-female trio and even threw beer bottles at the 14- and 15-year-old teens. At some gigs, establishment owners wouldn’t want them to play on the venue drum kits or use the amps because they thought girls would break them.

But the punk scene was mostly positive. They played in what was considered to be Vancouver’s very first punk rock concert at the Japanese Hall. They would continue to perform in Vancouver the following year (while still attending high school) and in 1979 opened for a band they had only two years earlier admired from afar.

In January 1979 they opened for the Clash at the Commodore Ballroom. After that show the Clash invited them to open again at their next stop in Seattle.

The band began with covers then moved into writing their own songs and worked with Modern Records out of Seattle. They released two 3-track Eps: Past is Past in 1979, and Death in the Family in 1980.

The band disbanded in 1980 for reasons known only fully to the band members. Fast forward to 1997 and they re-released all of their original recordings in an album called Love/Hate.

In 2010 the old band got back together. The documentary “Bloodied but Unbowed” spotlighted them, and in the same year they toured Japan with the Pointed Sticks.

Their legacy lives on in today’s rebellious punk youth. The group trailblazed for both the punk scene in BC and female punks. Today, women dressed in punk attire are sometimes referred to as dishrags.

Interview with the Dishrags in 2010:

1.      Evelyn Penrose

Evelyn Penrose possessed a special gift. From a young age, her father had taught her how to divine water. She could find aquifers without the use of divining rods and even estimate the depth of water with accuracy.

From her home in Cornwall, she took her water finding skills around the world. In the 1930s she visited the Okanagan where she found water for orchards. She traveled to California to divine for oil. The signal for oil was so strong it made her sick.

She eventually made her way to Vancouver Island where she not only found water but could find minerals by pointing at a map. In her autobiography, Adventure Unlimited: A Water Diviner Travels the World she claimed to be able to locate almost anything, including illness in the body and wanted criminals.

You can read more about her here.

2.      Frances Macnab

When journalist Frances Macnab arrived in Victoria harbour aboard the Empress of Japan in 1897, the evening light set the harbour in a serene calm. The scene transfixed her. She thought to herself, “What a heavenly spot to live in!”

Once she landed and met the locals, however, her opinion changed: “With Vancouver Island itself I was greatly disappointed, though many people tried to persuade me of its advantages.”

The Englishwoman traveled to BC across the continent on the CPR railway to gather information for her 369-page book entitled British Columbia for Settlers: Its Mines, Trade and Agriculture. As one of few female journalists in the British Empire, she had written similar books in other locations. She possessed amazing recall and a writer’s eye for detail.

Land speculation, it seems, stood near the top of her list of reasons for not liking the Island. She stated speculators “only intended to screw as high a price as possible out of the purchaser, but their influence in the Government was sufficiently strong.” (Some things don’t change.)

The drinking water situation in Victoria has improved now, but when Macnab visited, she called it “a disgrace and a constant menace to health.” Water was in abundance, but she claimed, “only the energy and enterprise is lacking to bring this much-needed blessing into Victoria.”

She lamented the poor roads and other infrastructure, including bridges that were “known to be unsafe, and only one vehicle at a time is allowed upon them, and that at a foot pace.” When an old-timer told her Victoria was the “London of the Pacific,” she “marvelled that no rumours of the existence of San Francisco had reached him.”

Macnab would continue by steamer to Port Alberni to examine the gold mines there and Nanaimo to the coal mines. After Nanaimo she took a canoe ride to Cowichan with two Indigenous guides. The two men “accidently” guided their canoe onto rocks and claimed she would have to pay more for them to continue. She was having non of it. The world traveler was accustomed to these types of schemes and held firm until they finally brought her to her destination. Despite this she thoroughly enjoyed the canoe trip and seeing the Island’s natural beauty.

3.      Norah Drummond Davis

Artist Norah Drummond Davis, famous for her scenes of wildlife around the Banff area, arrived on the Island with her two Airedale dogs between the two world wars. She lived in a small cabin in Sydney, and her two dogs pulled a cart full of paints and brushes around town. When these dogs got too old, she shot them. Then got two more to take their place.

4.      Agnes Deans Cameron

Born in 1863 in Victoria, Agnes Deans Cameron was the kind of teacher children feared but respected. She became a teacher at 18 years old and trained in Comox and Vancouver before returning to Victoria four years later, eventually becoming the first-ever female principle at South Park School.

Quick to the whip, she thrashed disobedient children. When one rebellious student complained to his father about a particularly bad beating, she doubled down in a letter to the editor in the local rag about the incident. “I whipped him severely,” she said. “Just as severely as I possibly could.” Despite this, many students said she was a great teacher.

She held firm to her beliefs. Eventually, she lost her job over defending children accused of cheating on an exam. After which she became a freelance journalist and traveled to Chicago to report on America’s industrial success. Two years later, she became the first non-Indigenous woman to travel up the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean. There she met with the Inuit and found them marvellous. She condemned the racism of the settler society and any thoughts of superiority. Back in Victoria in 1912 she fell ill with appendicitis and died after a few days after the operation.

You can read more about her here.

5.      Hannah Maynard

Born in England Hannah Maynard immigrated to Canada with her husband, Richard in 1852. In 1858 Richard struck gold on the Fraser River, and the couple moved to Victoria in what was then the Colony of Vancouver Island.

Hannah Maynard used her photo-taking skills around town. Throughout her career, she photographed almost every resident in the city, from street vendors to the Lady Douglas, Governor Douglas’s wife, and became recognized throughout Canada for her work which she displayed in her studio downtown.

She eventually taught her husband the trade and he became a famous landscape photographer as well. Photography in the 19th century took time and patience. She was one of the first to use back lighting from angles. In photo development, Maynard would play with multiple exposures and overlap photos to create surrealist art that was far ahead of the time. After the death of her child her art became more abstract.

In her later years she was the official photographer for the Victoria Police Department. She died in 1918 and was buried at the Ross Bay Cemetery.

6.      Mary Ann Croft

When the Discovery Island lighthouse keeper became too ill to continue with his duties in 1899, the federal government scrambled to find a replacement. The answer to their problems, however, was already solved. The keeper’s daughter, Mary Ann Croft had been performing his duties for years.

With these unofficial years in account, she is thought to be Canada’s first female lighthouse keeper. She would continue to keep the lighthouse at Discovery Island for 30 years, and in that time life’s events passed while her family lived a secluded existence on the craggy and broken islets off the coast from Oak Bay.

She raised and supported two daughters. Her husband was, according to one of her superiors, “worthless in sorry sense of the word,” and spent time in hospital. In 1919, and thinking about retirement, she enquired into what her pension would be in a letter to Ottawa:

“This is the case shortly put, as I do not believe in long and tedious stories. I think that after 23 years’ service in such employment as the Lighthouse Branch, a person is due for some rest and something to make that rest free from worry for whatever few years that may be left.”

“I could make an appeal a mile long about the desolate situation of the Lighthouse Keeper in bad and stormy weather, but you know the coast, and you know the circumstances as well as I can tell you, if indeed not a good deal better.”

“I hope you will be able to convince those warmly housed gentlemen at Ottawa that when 23 years are taken out of a woman’s life in a lighthouse, she is about due for a recognized and guaranteed rest.”

The reply came with a denial of any pension. She was forced to work until she couldn’t handle the duties at age 67. She did receive a medal and eventually a small pension and could look at the lighthouse from her residence in Victoria. Three years later she died.

7.      Phyllis Munday

Back in the days when some of the mainland’s coastal mountains remained unmapped, Phyllis Munday and her husband hiked Mount Arrowsmith on Vancouver Island. From the top they spied a mountain thrusting beyond the others across the Salish sea. They dubbed the mountain Mystery Mountain.

They explored the area at the head of Bute Inlet and bushwacked up to a glacier. Mystery mountain would not give its peak so easily, and after a few attempts, getting within 60 feet of the summit, they were forced to turn around.

This didn’t matter to Munday. She wasn’t a peak-bagger. She was in it for the journey and was happy just exploring the area of what would become BC’s tallest peak—Mt Waddington. “We didn’t go into the Waddington country just to climb one mountain and run out and leave it,” she wrote. “We went into the Wadington country to find out all we possibly could about glaciers and mountains and nature and everything about the particular area—completely unknown before we went into it—so that we could bring out the information for the interest of other people as well as ourselves.”

Munday began climbing mountains in North Vancouver at 16 years old. She met her husband while in the mountains and took their newborn child into the mountains as soon as she could hold her head up. With over 200 peaks climbed in her lifetime, Munday still wanted more when arthritis forced her to stop. In her eighties she still did lots of walking—just not in mountains anymore. She died in 1990.

8.      Gilean Douglas

Similar to the more famous Cougar Annie, pioneer and writer, Gilean Douglas, was born in 1900. When her father died in 1916, she received a handsome inheritance. Three years later she worked as a reporter for the Toronto Star. She had relationships with several men at the same time. In 1921 she married her first husband, Slim, who took her last name, at her insistence.

The relationship didn’t last, Slim disappeared, and she assumed he was dead. When she married another man again in 1929, Slim reappeared and they started back up again only for both men to leave her a short time later. A few years passed, and she met another man. They moved into a remote cabin near Hope, BC where she authored Silence is my Homeland, an award-winning book. In 1947 her cabin caught fire and her life was uprooted.

She eventually moved to Cortes Island where she spent the final forty years of her life. She became widely known on Vancouver Island for her column in the Victoria Times Colonist. She would continue to publish ten books of poetry and prose. In 1993, two days after publishing her last book, she died at home.

9.      Rosemary Neering

Much of the research for this article was done with my copy of Wild West Women written by Rosemary Neering. Neering was born in England in 1945 and has spent over thirty years in British Columbia. Her impressive list of publications includes over forty titles, many of which are award winning (including Wild West Women). She writes non-fiction for all ages with a focus on history and exploring the lives of ordinary people. She’s been a freelance writer since 1981 and lives in Victoria. You can read her work here.

Know of other notable yet obscure women we should have included? Please tell us in the comments below!

This story also appears in Compass Magazine.

When Quentin Smith pointed the nose of a Cessna 172 towards the notorious Savary Island airstrip, he barely had 20 hours of flying time recorded in his training log. At only 700 meters long, the Savary airstrip would have made any pilot’s palms sweaty, not to mention the other challenges the sandy runway supplied. The dry sand could nosewheel an aircraft; dense salal grew right up to the edge, concealing skittish deer; and maintenance was almost unheard of.

From the passenger seat, his father, Daryl Smith, guided him through the necessary maneuvers for a smooth landing. The plane bumped and jerked down the yellow strip, and the wheels came to a rest before the brushy terminus. A few years later, news came that surprised no one—the airstrip would be shuttered for safety reasons.

This particular memory sticks out for Quentin Smith because his father “didn’t have a lot of time for personal flying,” he says in a phone conversation. “He was working hard, and we didn’t see him that often.”

Before jumping into a pilot’s seat, a young Daryl Smith jammed gears into cranky truck transmissions. He hauled brimming loads of old-growth Doug fir down muddy, vertigo-inducing plunges that could hardly be deemed roads.

Perhaps that thrill failed to sustain his lust for adventure because he left old-growth logging on BC’s mountains for a career threading a plane between them. In 1964, after two months of training, Tyee Air hired him to fly freight and his former co-workers in and out of logging camps.

Ever restless, the new pilot struck out on his own five months later. He and a pilot friend bought Wilderness Airlines, a one floatplane airline out of Bella Coola. By 1967, the pair added four more planes to their fleet.

With that success, Daryl Smith moved on to start another bush piloting company. Shortly thereafter he sold that one, worked as an employed pilot for a time, and finally in 1975 started yet another company in partnership with a different friend. Powell Air employed seven pilots and had six planes in the hanger.

Change came yet again in 1984 when Powell Air merged with Air BC to become Pacific Coastal Airlines. Eventually, that bush plane company grew to be BC’s small-town connector. Before Pacific Coastal operated dozens of planes and flew out of 17 airports, a young Quentin Smith got more involved in a business that was just starting to provide wheel plane service with one aircraft from Port Hardy and Bella Bella to Vancouver.

Quentin Smith joined in 1988, a year after his brother, Sheldon Smith. The brothers did whatever jobs needed to be done, he says. “We took reservations. We did the check in. We did the bag loading.” One day, after over a decade helping to build the family business, Quentin Smith received a call from his father who told him, “I’m going to make an announcement that I want to read to you.”

He learned that with a new millennium, change would come to the helm of Pacific Coastal. Daryl Smith stepped into the semi-retirement CEO role, appointing Quentin Smith as the company’s new president and operator of the day to day. Twenty years later Quentin says he’s not driven by titles and takes the example from his father: “it’s more about everyone just doing what has to be done.”

Covid provided exceptional challenges for airlines around the world, Pacific Coastal included, and, in their 35th year of operation, Quentin Smith is focused on bringing their traffic back to pre-pandemic levels. In the longer term he sees himself stepping back as president and into a semi-retired CEO role like his father did, joking, “I want to work 24/7: 24 hours a week, seven months a year.” Decades later perhaps he still remembers his father’s guidance for a smooth landing.

But other phenomena have slipped our memories…

1. The Time the Island Burned Tip to Tip

Rain-drenched Islanders may be surprised to learn that droughts are somewhat common on Vancouver Island. Since the 1500s, 21 severe droughts have occurred in this rainforest.

With drought comes fire. Devastating fires occur every 150­­­–350 years. These fires burn huge swaths of land. In 1668 a fire consumed most of the timber between Comox and Campbell River (and again in that area more famously in 1938). Over the 100-year period from 1550–1650, practically the entire island burned tip to tip.

Part of the reason Doug fir flourishes here is their thick bark. On old growth trees it can be nine inches thick—too thick for fire to penetrate. The tree’s canopy is also too high for flames to reach. Since Doug fir is shade intolerant it proliferates after other species are razed by fire.

You can still see charred bark on old growth trees today from ancient fires. Next time you’re in Cathedral Grove, at Miracle Beach Provincial Park, or anywhere else with old growth Doug fir, look closely and you’ll see the charred evidence of these destructive events.

2. The Other Big One

Indigenous communities’ oral histories from up and down the BC coast all feature a similar story—a great shaking followed by a great flood.

At 9 o’clock in the evening on Tuesday, January 26, in the year 1700, the big one hit. On this frigid night the earth shook for hours.

People became sick from the constant movement, homes collapsed, and the mountaintops slid into valley bottoms. In tsunami zones, a giant wave swept villages into the sea and wiped out everything 20 meters above sea level.

Anyone who was caught in the water and managed to survive faced sub-zero temperatures.

Big earthquakes like this happen every 300 years or so…

3. Ucluelet Tornado

The west coast of Vancouver Island isn’t the first place you’d expect a tornado, but on March 7, 1966, a tornado ripped through the seaside town of Ucluelet.

The 200 km/hr winds came as a shock to residents as a two-car garage was hurtled into the ocean. Roofs on several buildings were peeled off, boats capsized, and a metal spike embedded itself into a blackboard at a school being attended by students.

The wind knocked out the power, and that night a snowstorm hit Hwy 4. Nobody could reach or leave the town. Even though it caught the town by surprise, no deaths were reported.

4. Falling Stars

On September 5, 1908, fourteen-year-old Willie McKinnon barely escaped death. According to a story entitled “Message from Mars” in the Cowichan Leader, a meteorite struck the ground eight feet from where he stood.

As the chunk of rock plummeted to earth, he had been working in the garden. He heard a rumbling but had assumed it was a train. The meteor strike sent rocks flying and caused a mini earthquake. The teen rushed into the house.

His parents came outside, and there lodged in a crater appeared to be an ordinary boulder about ten inches in diameter, except it was so hot they couldn’t touch it.

The smoking meteor was smooth as a marble except for strange, deeply scored markings. The father thought it looked like hieroglyphics—a message from mars.

5. Port Alice Landslide

In 1975 the entire community of Port Alice (a population of 1500 then) loaded onto buses and were evacuated as the mountain perched next to town let loose mud, rocks, and trees.

250mm of rain had fallen in the previous 24 hours and it showed no sign of slowing down. The creeks became thick mudslides and cut off the mill where a skeleton crew fought to save the town’s single major employer from destruction.

The mayor called the scene a “disaster area” as mud came against the homes built high on the hills. Only two years earlier a similar but less destructive landslide prompted the town to construct berms, but these were quickly overrun. Despite extensive damage, nobody was killed in either of the slides.

Today Port Alice has a new series of berms to protect the town. Landslides remain one of the town’s top threats.

Know of other Natural Disasters on the Island not mentioned here? Share in the comments.