ABOUT VOICES FROM THE SOUND
Chronicles of Clayoquot Sound and Tofino 1899 – 1929
by Margaret Horsfield
Remarkable characters from Clayoquot Sound jostle for attention in Voices from the Sound. Storekeepers and sealers, prospectors and priests, schoolchildren, settlers and native people — in the early decades of the twentieth century, their lives intersected in the small world and vast distances of Vancouver Island’s remote west coast. Now the voices of these people can be heard once again, in chatty and revealing detail. They come alive, just as cantankerous or eccentric, pitiable or brave as they were in their own lifetimes.
Discovered in long-forgotten letters, diaries and scraps of memoir, these “voices” tell their own stories in their own words, revealing in vivid detail what it was like to live on the west coast in the early 1900s.
“Excuse this writing as my only table is a gold pan,” a prospector cheerfully declares in one letter. “Send two cats, mice in flour,” snaps a storekeeper in an ill-tempered order for supplies. “There is a lull in the war in Tofino,” a settler remarks cryptically, writing to his fiancee. And a sick boy at the Indian residential school on Meares Island sadly comments, “I am sorry to say I am spitting blood for three days...”
Set against a background of rapid social and economic change, Voices from the Sound examines the years 1899 to 1929 on the west coast. These years saw the demise of the fur seal trade, the coming of scheduled steamships and the development of commercial whaling, logging and fishing. Zealous missionaries radically altered the lives of native people, while the upstart settlement called Tofino gradually eclipsed nearby Clayoquot as the dominant community in the area.
Voices from the Sound is based on thousands of first-hand documents, written by people in the area. When Margaret Horsfield began unearthing all these obscure west coast documents in unlikely locations, she found herself nearly deafened by a cacophony of voices from Clayoquot Sound. She draws us skilfully into their world, allowing these voices be heard, revealing the high hopes, bitter losses, and cockeyed dreams that dominated the lives of many people on the west coast.
SOURCES
“Searching out all these documents, dusting them off, deciphering the often difficult handwriting has kept me busy for nearly seven years,” Margaret Horsfield writes. “This has been an all-consuming project.”
Her research for this book has been exceptionally detailed, starting with the Dawley papers. Walter Dawley was the large, irascible storekeeper at Clayoquot on Stubbs Island, about a mile across the water from where Tofino now stands. For over thirty years Dawley kept all his inbound correspondence; a treasure trove of intensely detailed information about life and people on the coast. This collection of papers lay disregarded in a dark basement for decades, but it now occupies a staggering 8.3 meters of shelf space in the BC Archives. Containing over 15,000 letters, many of them personal, chatty notes, the collection also includes financial records, ledgers and telegrams.
Documents at Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon also kept Margaret busy for a long time. Benedictine priests from Mount Angel worked at Christie Residential School and at the Roman Catholic missions on the west coast during the early decades of the twentieth century. Their personal papers and hundreds of photographs are preserved at Mount Angel Abbey Library. These include letters from First Nations children to the priests, letters from priests working on the west coast, details of life at Christie School, and a hitherto unknown version of the diary of Father Charles Moser who lived and worked on the west coast from 1900 – 1930.
In addition to these two major sources, Margaret examined unpublished memoirs and family papers in her research for Voices from the Sound, including love letters, correspondence from soldiers overseas, even old account books. She also unearthed scraps of half-written articles, transcripts of interviews, records of mining, steamship travel, and medical treatment, as well as drawing on government reports, newspapers and old advertisements.
Keenly aware that the recording of our history in this part of the world has only just begun, Margaret writes at the end of the introduction to Voices from the Sound:
“This book does not pretend to provide a definitive history of the area, the period or the people. Here is simply a point of entry, a window onto one era in the history of the coast, a means of meeting some of the personalities who were part of that history and to hear what they have to say. A great deal remains to be discovered and written about coastal history; many sources are yet to be examined, many stories are still untold. The business of recording and assessing this history has only just begun.”
