Later, at McLoughlin Bay just south of Bella Bella, we visited the site of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort McLoughlin, where from 1833 until 1843 the company maintained a fur-trading post. In 1843 they moved their personnel and trade goods to Fort Victoria (their new post on southern Vancouver Island) which was somewhat more successful as a white settlement. First Nations people set fire to Fort McLoughlin when the company moved to Fort Victoria.

We were given a tour of the Band’s new fish-processing plant at McLoughlin Bay, built with Japanese capital and with the aim of processing fish and seafood caught in local waters. This shiny and efficient facility is built virtually on the location of Fort McLoughlin.

In the evening we were treated to speeches and to a feast of herring roe, salmon (smoked, baked, fried, or poached), potatoes, and oolichan oil or grease at a church hall in Bella Bella. At the end of the speeches I made a small speech on behalf of the Clavella and her guests. All I could bring myself to say was that we’d seen great desolation at the Rivers Inlet canneries, at Namu, and at Ocean Falls, and that our experience in those places contrasted unfavourably with the recent First Nations achievement in the same region.

What I wanted to say was that my recent experiences on the central coast had not made me proud of being a British Columbian. Twenty or thirty years ago, when those communities were still thriving, I might have thought differently. But how can one feel proud of a society and culture that has been wilfully reduced to rusted metal and bulldozed rubble? When the people to whom it was home have put down roots elsewhere, often in other provinces? When magnificent resources have been wasted? What happened at Ocean Falls could happen — has happened — to many settlements on the coast.

(L-R): Margaret Murdoch, Mary Blade, Eleanor Clifton – June 1988

As a teenager I hitchhiked through the Kootenay region of British Columbia where I saw ghost towns dating from the mining era of a century ago. But I never expected to see such emptiness on the coast, which, after all, was so abundant in natural resources that it supported the richest material culture in Native North America.

I could only conclude, regretfully, that wherever whites had obtained access to pulp and timber leases, to fish and water licenses, the result was the same: the devastation of renewable resources. Communities had appeared which were fated to extinction and their inhabitants fated to eviction. Profits earned from those commercial and industrial undertakings did not go toward the creation of stable and permanent white communities.

Canada must be full of people, many of them young, whose birth certificates state that they were born at Ocean Falls or Namu, Ceepeecee or Tumbler Ridge, Rock Bay or Bralorne. Canadian literary theorist and critic, Northrop Frye once said that Canada is full of ghost towns, “…visible remains unparalleled in Europe.” It is impossible to produce a distinctive or stable culture in such transient communities.

In opposition to the themes of eviction and loss of culture that run through the history of the white settlements is the much more positive experience of the First Nations towns on the central coast. Several of these communities are exhibiting a resurgence and revival of material and spiritual culture including schools and “cultural education centres.” The cultural renewal that is taking place on the coast is paralleled in the construction of the fish processing plant, where renewable resources like salmon and seafood are developed for local consumption and for export.

Perhaps we could learn a lesson. First Nations people are not about to disappear after 10,000 years of successful adaptation to changing coastal conditions. This is their home, not a “frontier” ripe for exploitation. Only concerted conservation efforts will help restock the rich maritime and forest resources of this, the empty coastal corridor.

The alternative is truly a bad dream.

Author’s Afterword
I wrote this article in the summer of 1988, when I was a PhD student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and submitted it in turn to Raincoast Chronicles, Equinox, This Magazine, Canadian Geographic, and The Canadian Forum. I had never had an article returned before, let alone by six magazines with such different perspectives. I showed it to my colleagues at UBC, who found it unfair and polemical, and gratuitous and simplistic in its criticisms of the “white” achievement. Similarly, one editor considered it a “cheap shot,” adding that

“Cant about the noble savage vs. rapacious white I find too boring to read, let alone publish. [Our magazine] is founded on respect for the ordinary white settler who came to the coast in search of an honest living or place to carve an independent niche. Short-sighted, indifferent government and exploitative capital we carry no brief for.”

Eventually and reluctantly I shelved the article, but I never really understood what I’d done wrong. The verdict seemed to go against the evidence. In May-June 1987 I was presented with a “random sample” of settlements on a portion of coastal British Columbia, and in my opinion I reported fairly and objectively on them. I contrasted, with some reluctance, the profoundly deserted settler communities with obviously resurgent First Nations communities.
 
Now, a generation later, the tone and findings of this article seem much more palatable and innocuous. Indeed, it has become almost an orthodoxy to contrast an ancient and resilient First Nations culture with a transitory, colonizing, dispossessing, and despoiling settler society. My article is perhaps somewhat polite and tame compared, for example, with the premises of books like Cole Harris’s The Resettlement of British Columbia or Ian and Karen McAllister’s The Great Bear Rainforest. The British Columbia coast had indeed been emptied of its natural resources, as my books Island Timber and Mountain Timber illustrate; but since the 1980s, concepts of conservation, sustainability, and eco-tourism have taken hold. Maybe the article was somehow ahead of its time.
 
I must thank Cole Harris, David Hill-Turner, Edward Higginbottom, Phillip Hobler, Jo Ledingham, Quentin Mackie, and David Spalding for their help and encouragement with the original voyage and article, and Susan Safyan, Randy Eustace-Walden, Doug Murray, Brian McDaniel, and Al Mackie for help with subsequent revisions.

Richard Mackie
rsmackie.com

Comments on A Voyage To The Past below. Thank you.

In the afternoon we reached Mackenzie Rock, half way along Dean Channel between Bella Coola and Bella Bella. I’d wanted to visit this site since I was a kid, when the rock appeared on a Canadian postage stamp. It was here that Alexander Mackenzie ended his transcontinental voyage, mixed some vermillion and grease, and wrote his famous inscription about reaching the Pacific from Canada by land in 1793. After scanning the channel walls with binoculars we located the site, and took the ship’s small boat ashore to the rock. Mackenzie Rock can only be reached from the water and is marked by a rusting cairn and a plaque, placed there in 1926 by the federal government.

Mackenzie Rock – June 4, 1988

The plaque states that this first transcontinental crossing was achieved thirteen years before the Americans Lewis and Clark made their crossing. This gratuitous display of old-fashioned patriotism, so foreign to this FREE TRADE era, left the Americans on our tour suitably chastened and reflective.

Not another boat was in sight. Clearly we were the first visitors of the year, for we had to beat a pristine path through the luxuriant stinging nettles towering over the site.

And it was here, again, that the First Nations presence asserted itself. The cairn had not referred to the First Nations people who called Dean Channel their home, but Mackenzie could not reach the open ocean because First Nations people would not let him go through their territory. The rock itself, we learned, was a First Nations fortified site; in 1983 Simon Fraser University archaeologists found house planks and joists still preserved in the earth some five feet below the surface. In other words, Mackenzie had the good sense to make his final transcontinental camp at a location that had been occupied in the relatively recent past.

The exact location of the rock remained unknown until the 1920s, when it was located by a federal government surveyor who made permanent what remained of the inscription by chiselling Mackenzie’s scrawl into the rock face. Thus an eighteenth century pictograph became a twentieth century petroglyph. To our delight we found three much older First Nations petroglyphs high on the beach in the tiny bay behind the rock, forming about the only material union of old and new cultures we found on the whole trip.

Margaret Murdoch and Richard Mackie – June 1988

In the evening we reached Ocean Falls, one of the first pulp mills on the coast, built as a company town at the turn of the century. Subsequently it was owned by Pacific Mills, an American company, which became Crown Zellerbach. By the 1970s, after nearly seventy years of feverish production, Crown Zellerbach closed the mill after cutting lumber towed from as far away as the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii). The provincial government administered the town for a while, but eventually it too abandoned the place.

The original company built a pulp mill and town on the waterfront at the head of the inlet and dammed the Link River, creating the Link Lake Reservoir. Workers were hired on the south coast, and for three quarters of a century the town thrived.

We had with us a history of Ocean Falls done for the 1971 provincial centennial. Bruce Ramsay’s “Rain People: The Story of Ocean Falls” told of the creation of clubs, schools, societies, and churches that served the town’s needs; a full-page photo was devoted to a teenaged girl from Ocean Falls who won a swimming medal at a Pan American Games in the 1960s.

Yet we found not a breath of the society portrayed in Ramsay’s proud history. We found instead an enormous industrial ghost town in the wilderness. Wooden houses, cement hotels, and cement apartment buildings remain, their windows smashed for several floors up, their gardens supporting miniature coastal forests. When Crown Zellerbach and the government left they simply bulldozed whole streets of houses of recent construction; they feared squatters, injuries, and lawsuits. We walked through the deserted streets, examined the gaping basements, the red paint peeling from fire hydrants in the forest, and realized that in another hundred years the forest will have taken over much of the town.

The pulp mill, an abandoned factory several acres in extent, sits in total silence while the water of Link River falls with a roar from the dam behind. This cascade lends a false sense of haste and activity to the town. The dam is still structurally sound, unlike the culture that produced it.

Barbara Prete at Ocean Falls, B.C. – June 5, 1988

This was a company town. A friend from Pender Island, who was born at Ocean Falls in the 1920s and grew up there, assures me that the town’s lightbulbs were stamped with the trusting motto “Stolen from Pacific Mills.”

Something about the place reminded me of the dozen or so sites on which I worked during my years of archaeology in British Columbia. It was the sad sense of emptiness and desertion, the absence of anything human other than cold artifacts of stone and, in this place, concrete and rusted metal. I used to gaze down at orange and ochre-tinted hearths that were thousands of years old, and wonder to myself, is this all we leave behind, this hard-packed, mottled, fire-stained earth? And here at Ocean Falls I had the same sensation; I wanted to reach out, to understand the people who left these artifacts behind.

It also struck me that the segment of white culture that existed at Ocean Falls for a portion of the twentieth century is every bit as dead as the deadest of First Nations sites. Any settlement abandoned for long enough will become an archaeological site. Like modern First Nations cultures, white culture still exists, but it does not exist at Ocean Falls.

At Ocean Falls there used to be an Indian reserve which was annulled when the pulp mill license was granted. The First Nations inhabitants were relocated to Bella Bella. An old woman at Bella Bella told us that before the dam was built, First Nations women used to pick berries on the Link River. Later they returned for berries but found the river flooded. The surface of the reservoir was stained red with pollen that had drifted up from their berry bushes, which had continued to grow underwater. Link Lake also contained a submerged forest for many years: in their haste to build the dam the company hadn’t bothered to log or even fell the trees.

A dozen or so loggers and their families remain at Ocean Falls. They are cutting the second and third growth timber around the reservoir, the inlet, and the town. Much of this timber must have been left standing for aesthetic reasons, but now with the place deserted even this veneer of conservation has been obliterated.

Recently In the early 1990s someone developed a scheme to export water by supertanker from Ocean Falls to the dry countries of the world, but the plan floundered when it was realized that these large ships would be unable to turn around in the narrow inlet. In British Columbia, technology and capital yield only to geographical constraints.

[RSM]

Up next… the fourth and final installment of A Voyage To The Past.

Depleted salmon stocks and improvements in technology combined to put canneries on the central coast out of business in the 1960s, forcing non-Native fishermen and their families to move elsewhere. In the old days, salmon was caught, sold, and canned locally while the fish was still fresh. Now, salmon is preserved in ice produced at places like Namu and taken to Prince Rupert or Vancouver for processing. Most are caught in the open sea; little comes from the river mouths and coastal inlets.

This meant that there was no further need for canneries on the central coast, or for the white, Japanese, Chinese, and First Nations workers. Namu is the most extensive ghost town in the area. Only a few families remain. I walked down to what looked like a natural beach and found to my astonishment that it consisted entirely of generations’ worth of eroded and broken bricks, glass, and rusted twisting metal. This would be an Eden for an industrial archaeologist.

This half a mile of water-worn garbage is actually stained throughout the intertidal zone a rust-coloured red with the occasional mottled green patch caused by discarded copper piping.

In the 1970s Simon Fraser University archaeologists found the remains at Namu of a First Nations settlement. Using C-14 radiocarbon methods they dated it at 9,720 years old, making it the oldest dated site on the coast of British Columbia. This ancient site is located beneath a sprawling ghost town that did not even exist one hundred years ago.

We left Namu in mid morning of June 2nd and headed up Burke Channel – one of those “Majestic Fjords of British Columbia” marketed so effectively between the wars by the Union Steamship Company.

Burke Channel, B.C. – June 2, 1988

In the late afternoon we anchored off a logging show at Kwatna Bay off Burke Channel. We learned from the ship’s library that the First Nations people of Kwatna were relocated, in the late nineteenth century, to Bella Coola and Bella Bella by the Department of Indian Affairs (now Indian and Northern Affairs Canada). The site still looks habitable. Where the meandering Kwatna River enters the bay is a wide delta, and at low tide mudflats and grasses make their appearance.

We took the small boat ashore to the logging camp, where we were met by the foreman who showed us around his muddy and utilitarian industrial camp. He told us that an abandoned logging railway can still be followed up the gentle valley floor, a remnant of an earlier era of logging activity. His crew was working far up the Kwatna River. We watched a logging truck rumble in from the mountains and drop its load near the water, where the logs are sorted before being taken to sawmills in the south.

We asked if First Nations people still visited the river; the foreman hadn’t seen any, but he remarked casually that loggers from the camp had ransacked burial caves near the river mouth.

Thirty men are employed here, as well as an unfriendly mongrel whose job it is to keep the grizzlies at bay. This community is not meant to be permanent, unlike the First Nations community that preceded it.

Everything about the camp is temporary and transitory. The men, who live in pre-fab ATCO trailers, come by float plane from the Vancouver area, where they leave their wives and children. They are lured north by short-term and high-paying contracts. When they have taken the last good trees from their lease, the camp will be closed, the men will go home, they will take their dog and their trailers and their pay cheques with them, and perhaps in fifty years’ time another group of loggers will have another go at the trees and burial caves in Kwatna Valley.

The Clavella is a well-known whale tour boat; John de Boeck, our skipper, was pleased that a photo of the ship appeared in a recent issue of National Geographic. We were thrilled to be able to follow a pod of killer whales down North Bentinck Arm to Bella Coola on June 3rd. John and his crew members Jack Pearson and Nicky Smith knew the killer whales of the coast by name. Since it became illegal to shoot these creatures they have multiplied, and this pod was following the salmon up to the Bella Coola River.

The Clavella at Duncanby Landing – May 31, 1988

At Bella Coola, we were met by a woman from the Bella Coola Nation who took us to the Thorsen Creek petroglyph site a few miles from town. Here, high up, we visited one of the most extensive displays of First Nations art on the continent. Before we walked up the long road and trail to the site we received permission from a group of Bella Coola elders, who performed a roadside ceremony in their language.

To my initial embarrassment the elders asked us to form a large circle, join hands, and to stand still while they explained the spiritual and cultural importance of the petroglyphs. I was embarrassed because this physical contact seemed to negate the formal relationship between tourist and guide, and between First Nations and white.

The elders apologized for the white owner of the site, who had recently hired a backhoe to dig a series of trenches across the gravel road in an attempt to keep trespassers off his property.

The site itself is magical. A trail winds between the exposed bedrock, sections of which contain petroglyph panels. Thick moss covers much of the ground, and the air is filled with the roar of Thorsen Creek, which at this time of year is more like a river. It has cut for itself deep and clear pools in the bedrock of the creek bed.

On our way back to the boat we were taken on a tour of the Nation’s new school and cultural centre. This magnificent building consists of three large longhouses built side-by-side with the inner walls knocked out or opened up to form spacious classrooms. The central longhouse is taller and larger than the other two and resembles the nave of a church; the longhouses on either side are like church aisles.

Later, someone remarked that of course “they” wouldn’t have been able to build such a school without federal money, a remark that to me cheapened the whole enterprise. Shouldn’t we congratulate “them” for using the sources of funding available to them, and for exhibiting some of the entrepreneurial spirit that is so valued in our society?

It was here that I first realized the full extent of the difference between those First Nations cultures and our own: First Nations societies and economies did not look to the outside world for their cultural and economic identity, such as we look across the border for our popular culture and economic salvation. Today, the central coast of British Columbia is inhabited by an indigenous, resilient, and rejuvenated First Nations culture existing alongside a failed and transient white economic order. We can make no such claim for the strength of our own identity.

[RSM]

Up next… the third installment of A Voyage To The Past.

As a historian, author Richard Mackie (also one of Wanderism’s ‘Adventure Team’) has had many experiences like this. But perhaps none so profound as a boat trip taken with an ‘eco-tour’ group along British Columbia’s Central Coast. A ’strange and vivid dream’, plus some sober reflection, has resulted in Richard’s excellent essay serialized here. Enjoy.

Back in 1989 I found myself in Winnipeg, where I had a strange and vivid dream. At the time I was visiting the prairie city on a research trip. It was January, and I had never experienced such intense cold before in my life. Rubber car tires squeaked over the frozen snow while I shivered in bus shelters.

I dreamed that I was standing on a beach on Vancouver Island looking westward across the Pacific Ocean. It was a late summer evening, the sun was sinking down, and the blues and greens of the forest, sea, and sky were magnificent.

Obviously my subconscious mind was compensating for the merciless Winnipeg weather. What made the dream strange was that this view was captioned like a scene from a foreign movie. The caption read, in bold letters, ALONG THE EMPTY CORRIDOR OF BRITISH COLUMBIA. But there was nothing empty about this view. It was a beautiful view of the coast I’ve known for most of my life. Puzzled, I woke up, wrote the words down, and went back to sleep.

I thought about the dream for a few days, unable to make sense of it. Words, let alone captions, don’t generally appear in dreams. And then, while still in Winnipeg, it suddenly made sense. In the spring of 1988 I had led a historical tour for the University of British Columbia to the central coast of British Columbia.

The events of this tour, I decided, had caused the dream. Instead of the magnificent scenery promised in the provincial government’s “SuperNatural British Columbia” campaign, I found an incredible desolation. I had found a landscape stripped of its natural and human history, plundered, and left behind for the gypo loggers, small-time operators, and depleted First Nations communities.

The contrast between the British Columbia coast that I knew so well and the coast I found on my tour explained the incongruity between the vision provided in the dream and the apocalyptic caption.

My boss, Jo Ledingham, and I were kept busy in the months before the trip. We booked a yacht (the 57-foot Clavella, out of Nanaimo) and planned a route from Port Hardy to Bella Bella via Rivers Inlet, Bella Coola, and Ocean Falls. We gave the tour the name “Coastal Villages: A Voyage Into The Past.” We wanted to emphasize both the First Nations and white settlements along the way. We designed and circulated a pamphlet bearing a photograph of a crusty old pipe-smoking fisherman posed on his boat at the McTavish Cannery on Rivers Inlet, as if meditating on the towering mountains and cannery pilings around him. We had no trouble finding seven adventuresome guests willing to forego their annual jaunts to Hawaii or Greece in favour of a local holiday.

The Clavella at Ocean Falls, B.C. – June 5, 1988

As a student of British Columbia history and archaeology I was keen to visit the central coast, anxious to visit places that had always exerted a romantic and a historical fascination. I also hoped to see what remained of the great primary industries of the west coast logging, pulp and paper, and salmon canning.

At this stage I felt a sense of excitement, and I read widely on the First Nations and white history of the central coast. We received permission from the Bella Coola and Bella Bella Indian Band Councils to visit their lands.

The journey began at Port Hardy, near the northeast tip of Vancouver Island, on May 31, 1988, and ended in Bella Bella on June 6. While the guests flew or drove in from Vancouver, Seattle, and New York, the Clavella’s crew brought the ship from Nanaimo to Port Hardy, and I drove up the coast from my home on Pender Island to meet the crew and get acclimatized.

We Happy Few (L-R): Eleanor Clifton, Richard Mackie, David Hill-Turner (front), Barbara Prete, Sara Jane Johnson, Margaret Murdoch, Barbara Brown (behind), Jean Beatty – June 1988

We left Port Hardy after breakfast on the 31st and headed across Queen Charlotte Strait for mainland British Columbia. Clavella, built in Vancouver in 1937, proved her seaworthiness in the rolling ocean swells we encountered off Cape Caution, but miraculously no one was seasick.

A few hours later we entered Rivers Inlet on the mainland coast, once the location of the greatest concentration of salmon canneries north of the Fraser River, but now known for its exclusive fishing resorts housed in converted canneries. Fortunately, I had a map of the Rivers Inlet cannery sites, and occasionally we could give names to clusters of pilings or rotten old wharves.

Former Goose Bay Hatchery at Rivers Inlet, B.C. – May 31, 1988

We put into the abandoned Goose Bay cannery, which is now a fishing lodge, but were told by the caretaker not to set foot on the property. The owners had given him strict orders to keep the place private. The resort season had not yet started so we contented ourselves by cruising up and down the inlet in front of the cannery. Instead of the antiquarian nostalgia experienced by some of the people on board, I felt a sense of disappointment and sadness at these remains.

Next we stopped at Duncanby Landing further up the inlet. Formerly a cannery, this site is now a refrigerating facility owned by B.C. Packers of Vancouver. The couple who managed the place let us wander around and even opened their tiny general store for us.

Duncanby Landing, B.C. – May 31, 1988

We had hoped to go further down the inlet to Wadham’s Landing and to Dawson’s Landing, but a storm was approaching outside and the skipper thought it best to go straight to Namu at the north end of Fitz Hugh Sound. With the rain beginning to fall in sheets, we continued on our way.

[RSM]

Up next… the second installment of A Voyage To The Past.

I was sort of mugged once. In New York City.

I say ’sort of’, because while the mugger in question pulled a knife, I ended up winning the day (and keeping my life and my wallet!) with a head-fake and a Bic pen. A story for another day, perhaps.

My point is, when faced with adversity and danger we never really know what’s going to happen next. How will we get through it? Will we survive? Is a writing instrument really an option when confronting an actual knife…? (Hey, it worked for Jason Bourne!)

Adversity and danger were definitely two feelings going through NatGeo photographer Paul Nicklen’s mind when he slipped into the frigid waters of Antarctica and came face to face with a massive Leopard Seal.

Now THIS is reality TV!

[REW] – [Source]