• Cougar Annie's Garden
• Voices from the Sound
• The Author
• To Order

• About the Book     | 
• Cougar Annie     |  
• In the Garden     |  
• Excerpts

Cougar Annie

Ada Annie Rae Arthur’s reputation on the West Coast of Vancouver Island had plenty of time to develop.  She arrived to live at Boat Basin with her family in 1915, and stayed there for nearly seventy years, rarely leaving.  Her store, her post office, her family, her husbands, her skills as a hunter, and her garden became widely known up and down the coast.  Her mystique increased year by year, and by the time she was in her eighties and nineties she had become a living legend.  Small wonder. 

Even the bare outline of Cougar Annie’s life at Boat Basin defies belief.  Decade after decade her five-acre garden flourished in an isolated area on the remote West Coast, an area that to this day can be accessed only by water – no roads lead in or out.  She came out here with her first husband and three young children, travelling up the coast by steamer, landing on the beach by canoe, and taking up residence in a rough cabin in the bush.  As time passed, she cleared land for her garden, bore eight more children, established her store, nursery garden and post office.  She outlived and outworked four different husbands, shipped her plants all across Canada, became a cougar bounty hunter.  A tiny woman with bright blue eyes and large strong hands, she was a stubborn, wily, feisty and difficult character.  She was a survivor.

When asked about her life and her background, Cougar Annie proved to be a highly selective storyteller, sometimes a highly inventive one.  Different people heard different stories from her, and while the broad outlines sometimes agree, the details often do not.  Visitors recalling Cougar Annie in her later years have colourful and mixed memories of her.

“She was on the step with a gun, watching us, when we arrived.  We saw her from the end of that long boardwalk, and we made our way up, shutting the gates behind us, and when we reached the house she had disappeared,  Just like that.”

“It was dark and raining, and I was all alone in the middle of nowhere with a little old lady who looked like a witch and killed mice and chickens with a flick of the wrist.  And she claimed she’d killed seventy-two cougars in her lifetime.”

“She was very refined, a real lady.  She told me she came from an aristocratic family in England and they had a title that her father – or maybe it was her grandfather – renounced.  And her first husband’s family had a title too – but he was a ne’er do well…”

“She’s haunted me for years.  A huge amount of mystique surrounded that place – it’s the centre of a lot of energy, both good and bad.  And strange things happened there, all the time.  Granny had special powers, I’m convinced of that.”

“After all I’d heard about her, I expected to meet a giant of a woman.  But this tiny, birdlike old lady with bright blue eyes met me at the door wearing gumboots and a long dress and she was totally charming.  I helped chop some wood and she talked me into buying three dozen eggs that I didn’t even want.  A lot of them were bad.”

Born Ada Annie Jordan in Sacramento, California, on June 19, 1888, Ada Annie became a person of many names.  Through marriage she took on four more surnames:  in turn, Rae-Arthur, Campbell, Arnold and Lawson.  Her father, her first husband Willie Rae-Arthur and her great friend Robert Culver simply called her Ada.  In later years when she became famed as the Cougar Lady, sometimes she was called “Cougar Ada” but more often “Cougar Annie.”  As she aged, she would say to visitors and friends “Call me Granny.”

She was the only child of George Jordan and Margaret Elizabeth Coleman, both of whom came from Hastings, in England. Hers was a restless childhood: her family often shifted and moved according to her father’s whims and ever-changing ambitions.  She and her mother followed George Jordan from California to England, to South Africa, to Lloydminster in Alberta, to Winnipeg, and finally, by the time Ada Annie was in her late teens, to Vancouver, where her father took up work as a veterinarian. 

Cougar Annie maintained that her family in England had plenty of money, with wealthy, aristocratic relatives on both her mother’s and her father’s sides of the family.  Official records do not bear out these claims, and census information about the families indicate that they were working people, not leisured aristocracy.  Certainly Ada Annie’s first husband Willie Rae-Arthur did come from a good family: his father was prominent in civic politics in Glasgow, becoming Lord Provost (effectively Lord Mayor) of the city in 1869, some four years before Willie’s birth.

Ada Annie was well equipped for her life on the remote West Coast.  In her childhood, her father had taught her how to trap and shoot, and she also learned gardening skills at a very young age.  Although as a young woman she worked in the genteel occupation of clerk stenographer, employing the typewriting and shorthand skills she had learned at business school, she had an unusual and  cool self-sufficiency and an ability to look after herself that stood her in good stead in later life. For this she had to thank her restless and impatient father, who never tolerated his daughter showing any weakness, raising her to be strong and independent.

When she was helping out at her father’s veterinarian clinic in Vancouver, Ada Annie met Willie Rae Arthur.  They married in 1909: he was thirty-six years old, she was twenty-one.  Their first years as a married couple were in Vancouver, where three children were born.  The charming and well-educated Willie tried his hand at various jobs, without great success, tending to rely on an allowance he received from his family in Scotland – and hampered by the notion that gentlemen should not have to work.  His attraction to drink and to the opium dens of Chinatown landed the young family in financial difficulties. 

A radical solution was proposed to solve these problems. With the help of their families, Willie and Ada took up a tract of remote wilderness land, and removed themselves from the difficulties and temptations of Vancouver.  In April 1915, they boarded the coastal steamer Princess Maquinna in Victoria and travelled up the coast to Hesquiat Harbour.  There they unloaded all their worldly goods, a cow, and their young family into a dugout canoe, and paddled several miles into Boat Basin at the head of the harbor.  A somber and dense wall of rainforest faced them; a rough trail led a few hundred metres to a small cabin in the bush.  They had arrived, and here they would stay.

Gradually they hacked a five acre clearing out of the forest, and a rudimentary bush garden emerged.  They brought in goats and chickens, fenced the garden to keep out predators, planted fruit trees.  Between 1915 and 1931 eight more children were born there: three did not survive infancy. The garden expanded year by year, as Ada Annie planted more and more shrubs, trees and perennials, all of them coming up the coast on the steamer.  By the mid 1920s, Ada Annie had started up a small nursery garden business, and she opened a little general store to provision  the First Nations people from Hesquiat Village and passing fishermen. 

Shortly after Willie drowned in the harbor in 1936, Ada Annie opened the post office she had long hoped to establish at Boat Basin.  She had lost her husband, but she was determined to stay put.  Ever logical, knowing she was unlikely to meet a potential mate out in the bush, she advertised for another husband in the Western Producer.  Along came George Campbell, and they married in 1940.  George died four years later, and in 1947 Ada Annie married Esau Arnold – who had answered the first advertisement, but arrived too late.  After Esau died in 1954, again an ad appeared in the paper.  Robert Culver saw this ad, and tried to settle at Boat Basin with his children, but decided it was too difficult, and left.  George Lawson followed, and he married Ada Annie in 1961. They separated in 1967.  The kindly Robert Culver returned to Boat Basin when he and Ada Annie were both in their eighties.  He stayed there on and off for some years, but they did not marry.

Ada Annie Lawson was able to stay at her beloved garden until she was in her mid nineties. By then the garden was becoming radically overgrown and she was going blind, but she still tended to her chickens and her dahlias.  She died in hospital in Port Alberni in April 1985, some weeks short of her ninety-seventh birthday.