The Canadian Historical Review
Volume 91, Number 3, September 2010, pp. 581-583
By Ruth W. Sandwell
In Voices from the Sound: Chronicles of Clayoquot Sound and Tofino, 1899–1929, Margaret Horsfield supplies readers with a delightful romp through the extensive and varied archival record documenting life in that region of western Vancouver Island at the beginning of the last century, providing a 'point of entry, a window onto one era in the history of the coast' (xvii). The book is organized around an eclectic variety of themes: the difficulties and delights of buying and selling goods and labour power through the general store, commercial sealing and whaling, subsistence activities, Christie Indian Residential School, prospecting for gold, farming, finding a spouse, 'priests at sea,' and other adventures in ocean travel. Horsfield's aim was 'to provide a sense of the vitality and humanity [in that place] in the early twentieth century . . . to people the landscape, and to bring personal stories into focus' (xvi). In this she more than succeeds...
Vancouver Sun
November 19, 2008
Clayoquot History Brings to Life the Sound's Settlers
Margaret Horsfield's new book serves up a feast of stories about the area's colourful characters
By Stephen Hume
In the shape-shifter's landscape that is British Columbia's outer coast, a place of ghost-like mists that drift between grey seas and grey skies, catching in sodden tree tops and muffling the gulls' cries, things are never what they seem to be.
Peer into a fog bank one minute and the next you're staring at Catface Mountain. Listen to the soothing suck and glug of slow-swinging Pacific swells among the sea caves in the morning and by afternoon, you hear only shrieking wind and the ground-shaking percussion of the storm surge.
The human geography is equally unfathomable, a palimpsest of beached sailors, gnarled loggers, dreadlocked tree huggers, the proud whaling chiefs of the original peoples, explorers, plundering traders, saints, sinners, fur sealers, crabbers, prospectors and charlatans.
Once, long before it became a national park reserve and then a playground of up-market tourists, the west coast of Vancouver Island was the edge of the known world.
You might say that Tofino is its capital, although folks at Ucluelet or Ahousat might argue the point.
Clayoquot Sound, over which environmental battles raged a decade ago, has always been the mysterious, mystical centre of this west coast, a place where the contemporary myths of spiritual ecology are embroidered upon the ancient myths of the land's first inhabitants, themselves overlaid by the myths of faith and enterprise inscribed by settler society.
Eight years ago, Nanaimo writer Margaret Horsfield won the Roderick Haig-Brown Prize for giving shape to one of those elusive west coast legends with her luminous account of pioneer Ada Annie Rae Arthur and her 1915 homestead at the head of Hesquiat Harbour.
Cougar Annie's Garden is into its third printing and has sold 22,000 copies, Horsfield told me when we met for coffee as I was passing through Nanaimo.
And now she's back with a new social history, Voices from the Sound: Chronicles of Clayoquot Sound and Tofino 1899- 1929. Once again it looks like a prize-winner.
The book is a sumptuous, splendidly illustrated production, filled with rare and unusual photographs provided by west coast families and excavated from obscure collections.
Its pages gleam with the faces of early merchants and their customers, missionaries and the souls they sought to save, a brass band in a dugout canoe, schooners stopping to pick up sealers, ship landings where there were no docks, snapshots of lovers and scores of documents written in the hand of the people she writes about.
Ultimately, the text becomes the real feast, for Horsfield's story of Clayoquot Sound delivers what it promises, the clear, unvarnished voices of the inhabitants in their own sometimes dreamlike, sometimes arrogant, sometimes avaricious, sometimes tender, always eloquent words.
Here you find Clayoquot merchant Walter Dawley, who left more than 15,000 letters, many of them personal messages from his customers, from which Horsfield was able to deftly construct a social outline of the community, often by noting what was absent as much as by recounting what was said.
Father Charles Moser, the Roman Catholic missionary who followed in the footsteps of the legendary Father Auguste-Joseph Brabant, is a towering and influential figure in the landscape of spiritual colonization and in the same tradition as his predecessor left an extensive diary.
But you'll also find the strangely evocative figure of Frederick Tibbs, an Englishman with a severe facial disfiguration who showed up before the First World War and built a faux castle on an island he called Dream Isle.
Tibbs went away to the war, returned, drowned while servicing a harbour light and left his property -- including a 30-metre-high spar tree he'd climb and sit atop while playing his cornet -- to two young girls who were, apparently, the objects of his never-expressed and unrequited love.
It's to the writer's credit that she understates this astonishing story, for, in truth, it's only one among the many that glimmer and gleam in her lovely book.
