Remembering Walhachin

An interview with former MP Nelson Riis

Mark Forsythe: How did Walhachin become established and why was it there?

Nelson Riis: It was basically set up as a land development company by some very entrepreneurial individuals from the United Kingdom. They had all sorts of lovely brochures extolling the virtues of this part of British Columbia, most of which was untrue or photographs of other places. Nevertheless, they did attract a number of people from England to journey out and buy estates and set up large apple orchards and other fruits, including tobacco. I guess we’d call them gentlemen farmers; they didn’t do much of the actual work themselves but they hired Chinese labourers as well as other labourers from the surrounding communities and ranches. They carried on a very genteel lifestyle.

Mark: Some of them were remittance men?

Nelson: They were sort of two categories. Older men, who for whatever reason had decided to seek their fortunes in this part of Canada. And then a large number of young men in their twenties who had gotten into different kinds of difficulties back home and their families decided it would be better for their family to have them leave England and go out to the colonies—in this case Canada—and maybe run their landed estate in the Walhachin area. So they were really almost forced to be there, and receiving an allowance from home.

Mark: We’ve heard stories that some of the regular folk weren’t allowed in the hotel bar. How much was the British class system alive?

Nelson: I don’t know if it was ever formal policy, but the settlers that settled at Walhachin weren’t much interested in the surrounding countryside. They weren’t interested in mixing with the ranchers; they were certainly friendly, but they had their own parties and balls and their own newspaper. They had their own lifestyle that had very little to do with the surrounding community but more to do with the communities back in England.

Mark: Something like the Raj?

Nelson: Very much like the Raj and people viewed them as kind of curiosities. Many stories in the local newspapers would refer to them as the “unusual group of people,” and they spent a lot of their time dressed up. For the men, a great part of their time was taken up with sports and military exercises.

Mark: Then World War I comes along and what happens?

Nelson: Things happen very quickly. As soon as war was declared, of course, the call went out to the colonies to support England in the venture and, immediately, I think virtually every single male in the community signed up and returned to fight for England. Some women stayed behind, some of the workers stayed behind, but for the duration of the war there were no original men there. And then afterward, a few trickled back, but they didn’t stay very long.

Mark: Why was that?

Nelson: Many went off to various parts of the empire, taking up different positions—a police chief in the Sudan, another person a plantation manager in Jamaica. They had gone on to other pursuits, perhaps more appropriate to their status in England. The ones that did come back stayed two or three years and then realized the folly of this Walhachin settlement as a viable agricultural endeavour. It was never set up properly; it just had too many things going against it; and of course mainly the people there weren’t committed agriculturalists to start with. It was too late for them to get back into that mode of lifestyle.

The latest technology at Walhachin. Courtesy of the Clarke family

Mark: So it was a genteel idea, but Walhachin didn’t have the right soil conditions or water supply?

Nelson: Always a major concern was the water supply; it’s a very arid part of the country. Very little rainfall or snowfall. It was pretty well doomed to failure from the beginning. The romantic explanation is of course the men enthusiastically volunteered to go back to England to fight for the country, which of course was true, but I suspect that they were more interested in leaving Walhachin behind as a bad dream. It failed for many, many reasons. The soil problems, the agricultural potential for various types of fruit never suited to the area, water was a major issue, markets were an issue, expertise—and also they had a lot of bad luck. Bad engineering in various irrigation works and they never worked properly. It was a logistical, economic nightmare. Walhachin was basically a fraudulent land scheme from the very beginning, designed to make money for the shareholders of the English company primarily, but it was never set up to be a successful agricultural settlement—like so many land schemes.

Nelson Riis wrote his master’s thesis on Walhachin.

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