Many places mentioned in this book are known by, or have been known by, more than one name. A selective list of these follows. The official names, listed on the left, are taken from current marine...
Introduction
From across Canada and far beyond, visitors travel in great numbers to Tofino and Clayoquot Sound at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Inspired by spectacular images of old-growth rainforest, vast...
Chapter 1: The Lay of the Land
Immense, slow, and complex forces have shaped the land around Tofino and Clayoquot Sound. The scenery that has drawn millions of visitors to the west coast took its present form over eons of time and...
Chapter 2: The People of the Sound
Three Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations call Clayoquot Sound their home: the Hesquiaht, Ahousaht, and Tla-o-qui-aht. Their traditional territories, or ha’houlthee, extend from Hesquiaht Peninsula in...
Chapter 3: The King George Men
For European explorers, the northwest coast of North America remained terra incognita for a very long time. Their voyages of exploration took them far and wide around the globe, yet not into the...
Chapter 4: The Boston Men
The end of the American War of Independence in 1783 saw the newly fledged United States setting out to establish a triangular trade route linking the eastern seaboard of the United States with the...
Chapter 5: “Outrages and Disorders”
With the sea otter population depleted to the point of near extinction, few fur trading ships entered Clayoquot Sound in the decades following the Tonquin incident of 1811. The incentive to trade...
Chapter 6: Enter the Missionaries
By the time Charles Seghers returned to Hesquiaht, he had a new role and a clear purpose. Now bishop of Victoria, Seghers had decided to establish a permanent Roman Catholic mission on the west...
Chapter 7: The Sealing Years
The Nuu-chah-nulth always knew of the vast numbers of northern fur seals (Callorhinus ursinus) migrating offshore every spring as they travelled north from California to their breeding grounds in...
Chapter 8: Setting up Shop
Of all trading posts on Vancouver Island’s west coast, the one at Clayoquot on Stubbs Island emerged as the most significant. First established in 1854, and important for its central location on...
Chapter 9: “Alive with Fish”
When the first Europeans arrived on Vancouver Island’s west coast, the sheer wealth and variety of marine resources amazed them. “The Coast is alive with fish,” coastal trader Hugh McKay told...
Chapter 10: “Teeming with Riches”
The tantalizing possibility of finding rich mineral deposits gripped the imagination of many early settlers on Vancouver Island. “The West Coast lands teem with riches in the shape of gold,...
Chapter 11: The Hopeful Coast
The summer of 1895 found Victoria-based surveyor Mr. T.S. Gore slogging his way through the bush on the Esowista Peninsula, survey gear and notebook at the ready. As he and his crew beat their way...
Chapter 12: Disconnection
“Mr Guillod [the Indian agent] used to say to the Indians that there would not be any white people here,” Chief Jimmy Jim of Ahousaht stated in May 1914. “They will not come here; it is too...
Chapter 13: Separation
By 1914, the province of British Columbia operated sixteen church-run and government-funded residential schools for Indigenous children. Three of these stood on the west coast of Vancouver Island:...
Chapter 14: Community
“It was like there were three or four different villages,” observed Mabel Arnet, recalling Tofino in the 1920s and ’30s. “You knew you were in the Scandinavian group. Or if you were in the...
Chapter 15: The Japanese
“Boy, they were good,” Trygve Arnet declared in his 1981 interview with Bob Bossin. “They made all their own spoons [fishing lures]. They’d get these big pieces of brass and cut them and...
Chapter 16: Boat Days
No such vessel had ever been built in British Columbia. Anticipation of her imminent arrival on the west coast route gripped everyone’s imagination. The largest ship ever built in the province,...
Chapter 17: Wartime
When hikers walk two kilometres along the Bomber Trail, south of Tofino and just beyond the Radar Hill turnoff, they arrive at the wreckage of Canso aircraft #11007. This Royal Canadian Air Force...
Chapter 18: Peacetime
Disembarking from the Princess Maquinna at Clayoquot in June 1945, Ed Ricketts looked around at “a lovely place of green gold hummingbirds, I never saw so many in my life before, and thrushes...
Chapter 19: Lovely Road
On August 22, 1959, every roadworthy vehicle in Tofino and Ucluelet—all seventy-four of them—assembled to form an excited cavalcade and set off to make history. Carrying a total of 300...
Chapter 20: Adjustment
The spike in demand for herring roe took Tofino by storm in 1971. Highly valued in Japan for kazunoko, a traditional dish symbolizing fertility and family prosperity, roe became the most valuable...
Chapter 21: The War in the Woods
In the early 1930s, Tofino’s Rowland Brinckman composed a few lines of verse to protest plans to log Cathedral Grove, the stand of old-growth forest alongside the highway east of Port Alberni,...
Chapter 22: The Emerging Scene
As Tofino shifted from a resource-based to a tourist-based economy, the changes affected every person and every business in the town. The pilots of Tofino Air saw the change as clearly as anyone. In...
Timeline
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC...
Acknowledgements
We could not have written this book without help from many sources.Leona Taylor stands out. Her dedicated volunteer efforts have provided access to many sources of west coast historical information....
Selected Sources
The following is a selective list of the major sources for this book, not including newspaper and journal articles.
Private Collections and ArchivesMany unpublished documents and memoirs,...
About the Authors
Margaret Horsfield has written several books including Voices from the Sound (Salal Books, 2008) and Cougar Annie’s Garden (Salal Books, 1999), which won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. She...
