On a grey day threatening rain, try, if you can, to be down near the waterfront in Tofino. Look out over the harbour, over its many scattered islands, into the distance beyond, with Lone Cone Mountain looming in the background.

Groups of tourists brighten the scene, ungainly in their survival suits as they board specially outfitted boats and head towards the outer coast of Vargas Island to watch for whales. Swarms of kayakers come into sight, paddles flashing in synchronized rhythms. A wide, curving wake divides the water behind an aluminum motorboat that zooms across the harbour, effortlessly avoiding all the navigation buoys. The deep-throated engines of a large new water taxi mutter at the dock, while a handsome old fishing boat motors into its berth. A float plane takes off, its noisy crescendo briefly overwhelming the scene before fading as the plane banks steeply, bearing visitors away on a scenic tour of Clayoquot Sound.

Silence descends and then the rain starts to fall, an obscuring, misty drizzle. The horizon closes in, blurring in the dull light, and as the view becomes increasingly indistinct, something strange happens. Perspectives shift, perceptions change.

Through the colourless and transforming lens of the rain, the harbour seems suddenly empty. The contemporary bustle is nowhere to be seen or heard. Present realities dissolve. The kayaks, coffee shops and tourist attractions of Tofino fade away like an insubstantial dream; the sounds of boats and float planes ebb into the distance. Time disappears.

Look again at this watery coastal landscape, lying before you as it did a century and more ago, and know that, in the rain, much can be seen, much understood.

As you watch through narrowed eyes, blinking the rain away, a number of small dugout canoes may come slowly into focus. They are arriving from all directions, heading towards the Tofino dock. A black-robed priest awkwardly paddles one canoe. Several native children are in another, racing easily ahead of two unkempt prospectors struggling hard against the current in their canoe. A few rowboats emerge in the distance, joining the canoes, and the harbour fills with activity.

The boats are all coming to meet the coastal steamer, just now entering the harbour, black smoke belching from its funnel. An ear-splitting screech of the whistle announces its arrival, and within moments, dozens of people converge on the dock in a cheerful melee. Schoolchildren shout to each other, running pell-mell along the muddy, stump-strewn trails of the rough settlement on their way to the harbour. The steamer comes alongside, the gangway lowers with a clang, greetings fill the air, passengers disembark and the children scramble on board, heading for the commissariat to buy comic books and treats. Wooden crates swing overhead as they are winched off the ship and onto the dock, and people eagerly open their parcels amid a hubbub of news and gossip.

A short distance across the water, over at Clayoquot on Stubbs Island, the portly storekeeper checks his pocket watch and waits his turn. He stands behind the store counter, writing a last-minute letter to send on the steamer up the coast to his branch store at Ahousat, along with an order of groceries and some empty barrels for dogfish oil. Soon the steamer will call at Clayoquot, and sales will be brisk in the hotel saloon, next to the store, while goods are unloaded. The storekeeper expects a new bull calf to arrive on this boat—poor creature, it is tethered on the deck of the steamer right now, over at Tofino, plaintively bawling—along with several tons of flour and a large order of fresh produce. He must remember to check the oranges right away to see if any have spoiled; the last batch was mouldy. The Chinese kitchen workers gather on the hotel porch in anticipation of the steamer’s arrival; he can hear their chatter and their laughter from the store.

From where you stand you can see, you can sense, all of this, and just for a moment—suspended in the eternal rain—times past and people long gone are visible, audible.

Such moments cannot last. They are fleeting, ephemeral—some might say imaginary. Yet the people you have glimpsed, and their stories, were once all real —as real as rain. And sometimes, truly, they can be heard.

A mixed crowd of people vie for attention in this book, striving to be glimpsed and to be heard. All of them are from the west coast of Vancouver Island. Some of them were friends, some strangers, some had nodding acquaintance with each other or did business together. Only a few of these people are well known in the annals of British Columbia’s coastal history, and many were obscure figures even in their own day.

Their lives intersected during the early decades of the twentieth century. They drifted in and out of the same territory, often just on the periphery of each other’s vision, inhabiting many different realities within the small world and the vast distances of Clayoquot Sound. Frequent travellers and fellow travellers on the west coast, the lives of these people are linked by accidents of timing and geography; they are also connected, unknowingly, by various papers they left behind— letters, diaries, scraps of memoir, disjointed notes.

Dozens of names come tumbling from these documents. Here are storekeepers, settlers and sealers; First Nations residents and their children; priests, prospectors and fortune seekers. With few exceptions, the documents these people left behind were never intended for posterity; few had any official role or purpose, and their very survival has been largely a matter of chance. They have shown up in widespread and random places: in dusty boxes in a hotel basement, in a monastery archive, in a farmhouse attic, in public archives, in scrapbooks, shoeboxes and dark cupboards. Many of the letters were laboriously composed by people for whom writing was a severe struggle; their vocabulary, spelling and punctuation can be baffling. Yet as difficult to decipher as they may be, these documents are all vital strands in the fabric of West Coast history. Detailed, gossipy and colourful, they reveal long-lost stories of lives lived on the coast, radiating a sense of immediacy that is irresistible.

To touch the thin onion skin of a letter written over a hundred years ago by an infuriated storekeeper at Ahousat; to pore over a barely legible love letter sent out in haste from Tofino aboard the coastal steamer Princess Maquinna; to turn the pages of a crumbling diary written at Hesquiat by a doctrinaire and lonely priest; to learn, in a perfectly penned letter from a native student at Christie School on Meares Island, that he is spitting blood; to find a letter written on a First World War battlefield by a soldier worrying about an overdue account at the Clayoquot store—to view any or all of these documents is to be drawn into the past and to hear the writers as clearly as if they are speaking aloud, here and now. Laughter erupts in one letter, seething fury in the next, confused sadness in another. In a terse diary entry, the keening of an anguished mother is heard as her child is taken away to school; in a file stuffed with business letters, a storekeeper complains loudly because a box of raisins is spoiled by salt water; in a letter to his fiancée, a hard-working settler is pleased to report selling an island near Tofino for $150. A cacophony of Clayoquot characters emerges—people who seem just as vital and alive, just as cantankerous or pitiable or brave or eccentric as they were on the day they wrote their letters or diaries.

Chief amongst these are the Clayoquot merchant Walter Dawley and the missionary Father Charles Moser, who lived and worked at many locations in Clayoquot Sound. These two men kept records and preserved their documents; their papers cover the same era and the same area, and they often feature the same personalities. These two collections of documents provide the essential foundation on which this book is constructed. Immensely rich and detailed, the Dawley papers and the diary and papers of Father Charles have not been explored in much detail until now. Their usefulness and their historical value are such that they merit much greater attention in future.

Walter Dawley’s papers consist of a vast array of inbound correspondence, addressed to him, covering a period of more than thirty years from the mid- 1890s onward. Over fifteen thousand letters swell the files of this collection in the British Columbia Archives, many of them personal letters to Dawley, handwritten by customers and suppliers. Very little written by Dawley himself survives, certainly nothing of a personal nature.

By contrast, the single most important document left by Father Charles Moser is his extensive diary. Beginning the day of his arrival on Vancouver Island’s west coast in May 1900, and continuing until his departure thirty years later, the diary is an unparalleled source of information. Other papers of Father Charles, and those of his fellow priests—the correspondence addressed to Father Maurus Snyder in particular—are similarly valuable. All of these, along with a large collection of photographs taken by the priests, are located in the archives of Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon.

Sometimes these parallel sources of information dovetail perfectly, presenting different viewpoints of similar events or the same people. Sometimes they represent two starkly different realities. Either way, they offer continuous streams of information, remarkable for their detail and consistency, and they offer perspectives on the early twentieth century in Clayoquot Sound that become even more vivid when considered alongside other sources, other first-hand documents.

My aim in this book is to provide a sense of the vitality and humanity of the early twentieth century on the west coast of Vancouver Island, to people the landscape and to bring personal stories into focus. On the whole, the individuals who appear in the following pages are not movers and shakers, not decision makers or policy shapers; they were simply living on the coast and trying to make a go of it in a rapidly changing environment. They are also among the ones who left behind some sort of paper trail, some sort of documentation, however faint and incomplete it may be. Not everyone did so. Many who lived around Clayoquot Sound in the early twentieth century cannot be represented here in any detail, simply because few documents have survived—at least not in sources I have had access to—that allow their voices to be heard. Contemporary documents written by women, by Chinese workers and Japanese settlers, and most particularly by First Nations people are difficult to come by. The presence of all these people, especially First Nations residents of the area, can be strongly felt, their influence intuited, but they have left behind few, if any, papers. These few, however, are powerful: letters from native children at Christie School; requests for medicine; lists of goods purchased by sealing crews at the local stores. Although such scraps of information are partial and fragmented, they are unquestionably valuable, and I hope I have made good use of them.

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.

Any mistakes in interpreting the material I have used, from whatever source, are my mistakes and my responsibility alone. I only hope I have represented fairly the people I am writing about, and that to some extent I have succeeded in letting their voices be heard.

 

 

 

 

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