Tofino Chapter 6 notes

Enter the Missionaries - Notes on Sources

This chapter draws heavily on letters and other documents held at Mount Angel Abbey Archives, and on material held at the Archives of the Diocese of Victoria: these include the personal papers of Father Maurus Snyder; Vera McIver’s unpublished booklet Bishop John Charles Seghers 1839 – 1886: The Roots of the Church on Vancouver Island; the privately printed booklet about Bishop Jean Lemmens, Insulis Quae Procul Sunt.

Quotations from Father Brabant’s diary come from Charles Lillard’s edition of Brabant’s diary, Mission to Nootka 1874 – 1900, from Father Joseph Van der Heyden’s Life and Letters of Father Brabant: A Flemish Missionary Hero, from Father Charles Moser’s Reminiscences of the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Seghers spoke out against the John Bright executions in a lecture cited in the British Colonist, April 28, 1886.

“The Ahousath chief seemed happy…,” letter from Brabant to the Portland Sentinel, reprinted in the British Colonist, July 5, 1876.

Instructions for the mission at Hesquiat, from Reminiscences of the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

Quotations from Father Nicolaye come from “Reminiscences of Early Days on Vancouver Island,” Historical Number of British Columbia Orphan’s Friend, date unknown.

Quotations from and about Father Lemmens come from Insulis Quae Procul Sunt and from his diary written in Kyuquot Sound, 1883-1886, BC Archives MS-2742, Reel A 1677, Item 2.

Brabant’s letter to Seghers concerning Matlahaw’s body, from a reprint in the British Colonist, July 5, 1876.

Brabant’s 1903 letter commenting on the behaviour of some unnamed Catholic priests is located in the papers of Father Maurus Snyder at Mount Angel Abbey Archives. Father Maurus’s papers contain many letters from Father Brabant.

For more about the early missions see Margaret Horsfield, Voices from the Sound: Chronicles of Tofino and Clayoquot Sound: 1899-1929; Jim McDowell, Father August Brabant: Saviour or Scourge?; Andreas Eckerstorfer, To Do Some Good among the Indians, Master’s Thesis, Theological Faculty of Mount Angel Seminary, Oregon.

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