The Art of Hetty Fredrickson now accessible to all in Sayward Gallery

This article was originally published in the North Island Gazette June 25, 2013
On a recent trip down Island, I was pleasantly surprised to come across a new (to me) and exciting piece of North Island history.

During a routine stop at the Sayward coffee and ice cream bar (beside the gas station on the highway), we happened upon the small sign for the gallery located in the rear of the building.  Upon entry we were treated to numerous portraits and paintings, most of which were completed on round pieces of wood sawed off of the ends of logs - complete with bark attached.  These looked familiar to me, as I recognized the faces as the same style as those which used to be more plentiful on the sides of buildings we would see from the highway while travelling through Sayward.

When we dropped our donation in the gallery box the lady in the coffee shop commented how wonderful it is to now have a permanent home for so many of Hetty’s paintings.  Of course this triggered my curiosity, and I had to do a little bit more research!

Hetty Mulder – Fredrickson, the artist behind this prolific collection of paintings, is a familiar personality to many North Islanders.  For 25 years she ran the “Valley of 1000 Faces” in Sayward, which was a popular roadside attraction.

Hetty was born in Indonesia in 1921.  Her family was originally from the Netherlands, but lived for an extended period of time in South East Asia.During WWII Hetty was attending school in Europe when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, and the Japanese occupied Indonesia.  For an extended period of time she had no contact with her parents. Eventually she married, and then divorced.  Perhaps impulsively, without any concrete plans, she decided to pack up her two young sons and move to Canada.
Initially settling in Montreal, Hetty accepted a housekeeping job in the remote BC interior, the pay being only room and board for her and her children. Unable to save any money she felt trapped and isolated. Hetty started looking through the want ads in the paper and found a job housekeeping and child-minding for widower logger named Douglas T. Fredrickson.
The two eventually fell in love and married. During this period Hetty resumed the painting which she had abandoned earlier in life.
After a brief stint in Chilliwack, where the Fredricksons had the unfortunate experience of living in a house which was widely believed to be haunted, they moved to Sayward. In order to keep busy in the small logging community, Hetty offered painting lessons for the local children.  
She was also a prolific painter herself. To save money, Hetty’s preferred canvases were slices of logs. She was known to use common house-paint as a medium, and when paintbrushes were not readily available she would paint with her fingers. After painting a number of portraits, Hetty decided to hang them alongside the road.  They caused a bit of a traffic jam as people stopped to look at them, and many were stolen under the cover of darkness.
Hetty and her husband then decided to forge a trail through their 4 acre property, and filled the forest with portraits.  Cars would pull off the road to visit the outdoor exhibit which took patrons through a rainforest trail. The attraction was called The Valley of 1000 Faces, and for the 25 years that it existed patrons were only charged $1 admission.

Hetty passed away in 1994, and we are lucky that when the property was sold residents of Sayward had the foresight to collect and save a large number of Hetty’s paintings.  They are now accessible to all in the little gallery behind the espresso and ice cream shop just off the highway.  
Please stop in and take a moment to view this lasting piece of North Island history – and don’t forget to leave a donation.
A wonderful short film has been made about Hetty Fredrickson's life and is available on-line here: https://vimeo.com/31637357.
  

Interesting facts about Malcolm Island

This article originally appeared in the North Island Gazette in June 2013.

One of the things that attracts me to the history of the North Island are the unbelievable stories.  Just when I think I’ve researched something fully, a new piece of information surprises me. 

I have published a previous article on the early history of Sointula, but I was recently contacted by the group who is putting on a conference September 20 – 22: Culture Shock: Utopian Dreams, Hard Realities: http://www.sointulan.ca/ .  The keynote speaker at the conference, Dr. Ed Dutton of Finland, will be outlining his theory that the modern sociological concept of culture-shock originated from the personal experiences of Dr. Kalervo Oberg,  a pioneer in the study of anthropology who grew up in the utopian settlement of Sointula.

This conference looks like a very interesting opportunity for anyone interested in the history of the North Island to learn a little more about our unique area.  It has also encouraged me to pull out my files find some other interesting historical tidbits about Malcolm Island.

Mink was the first inhabitant of the island.  When he arrived, he thought the island was too flat, so he collected many rocks and built a mountain that rose to the clouds.  Then Mink collected plants and bushes, but when he tried to plant them on the mountain they kept rolling down the sides.  Mink eventually became frustrated, and he kicked and pulled apart the mountain until nothing remained.  That is why Malcolm Island is so flat.

Some geologists postulate that Malcolm Island is actually a fluvial deposit from a once great river, perhaps the Nimpkish. In pre-history times the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples used the island extensively for seasonal food gathering, including the harvest of clams, berries, and halibut.  There are numerous petroglyphs on the island.

Sointula means “place of harmony” in Finnish.  Malcolm Island is named after Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm of the Royal Navy (1758-1838).

In the late 1800s the provincial government offered pre-emptions to settlers who would travel to the rural and remote parts of the BC coast and make improvements on the land.  Many travelled across Canada and the United States and boarded boats with all their worldly possessions to take on this challenge, never having seen the land or the coast where they would settle.

This was also the age of utopian communities in North America.  Numerous groups (many ethnic Scandanavian who had struggled with their home countries’ deep divisions related to communist ideas), frustrated with the economic downturn in the 1890s, sought out these pre-emptions looking for a better way of life.  On the North Island this included the Danish settlement at Cape Scott, the Norwegian colony at Quatsino, and the Finnish colony of Sointula.

The first utopian group to arrive on Malcolm Island was the Christian Temperance Commonwealth Society, who arrived in 1885.  They had disbanded many years before a group of Finnish settlers, many of which had grown disillusioned working in the Nanaimo coal mines, decided to move to the island under the auspices of the Kalevan Kansa Colonization Company, the group that founded Sointula.

History built with Haddington Island stone

Haddington Island quarry late 1890s

This story originally appeared in the North Island Gazette May 23, 2013

Haddington Island lies just offshore of Port McNeill.  If you have ever taken the ferry to Malcolm Island or Cormorant Island you will have travelled past this historic location. 

Haddington Island is within the traditional territory of the ‘Namgis First Nation.  It is named after Thomas Hamilton (1780-1858), the ninth Earl of Haddington, who also served as the First Lord of the British Admiralty.

The island is most well known for its quarry of andesite, similar to limestone. When the BC legislature buildings were being designed in the early 1890s, renown architect Francis Rattenbury selected the unique originally selected stone from the Koksilah Quarry, near Cobble Hill. 

The initial budget for the legislative buildings was $500,000, although the final costs exceeded $950,000. First, Rattenbury rejected deliveries of the Koksilah stone as unsuitable, and it was subsequently used to build the Royal Jubilee Hospital. 

The Haddington stone was preferred, in part due to its colour, as well as its ability to hold intricate carving, while withstanding frost and harsh weather.  It is noted to have a unique yellowish-grey appearance.

Challenges began almost immediately with the supply of the stone.  During construction, the contractor responsible for procuring the stone, Fredrick Adams, struggled to keep up.  At one point he and Rattenbury got into a shoving match, which ended in Adams being charged with assault, and fined $25.  Pushed to meet production deadlines, Adams was drowned when shipwrecked in bad weather while maneuvering the barge used to tow the stone to Victoria.

The project was completed one year behind schedule, largely due to issues procuring materials.

From 1895 to 1966, Haddington Island stone was a popular building material, and can still be seen in many buildings in downtown Vancouver.  Tonnes of the material were also used in less glamorous projects such as the Ogden Point breakwater in Victoria. 

Haddington Island stone quarry - 1903/04
BC Archives I-56378

Men working in the Haddington Island quarry during the WWI era would have made between $3.00 and $4.25 for an eight hour shift. Granite was, and still is, extracted using a drilling and blasting method, which separates the stone in large blocks.

One of the last major construction projects which used the stone in the mid 1900s was Vancouver City Hall.  After that, architects moved to favour steel and glass as building materials. In 1966 the quarry was closed.

In 1967 the brand new ferry, the Queen of Prince Rupert, ran aground in dense fog on Haddington Reef, while negotiating the Kelsey Bay – Prince Rupert run.    The ferry was refit and returned to service.

The Haddington Island stone quarry was reopened in 2004, and once again produced andesite to be used in buildings and monuments around the Northwest. It was used in the construction of the Air India monument in Stanley Park, hotels, and more modern buildings at UBC and SFU.

Tale of Desperation at Vernon Lake

Published in the North Island Gazette April 25, 2013
Vernon Lake is located in the top end of the Nimpkish watershed. In the traditional territory of the ‘Namgis First Nation, it was given its current English name in March 1924, named after the Honourable Forbes George Vernon, who served as Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works for British Columbia.

Today Vernon Lake is known for its small campsite and its fishing. Some also know it as the terminus area for the Englewood Logging Railway.

There is another, much more sad and desperate story linked to the history of this remote lake.

In July 1939 two trappers, James H. Ryckman (56) and Lloyd Coombs (27), chartered a plane to fly up to the Lake. They had a cabin, and brought in 1500 pounds of supplies and some personal gear. They planned to work their trap line for the summer, and then to hike down either to Nimpkish or Tahsis.

Unfortunately heavy rain and flooding in the fall prevented them from hiking out. On December 1 Coombs tried to hike out, but had to return after repeated effort to cross waist-deep and ice cold rushing streams frustrated his efforts.

The life of trappers was rough, and many died while working their traplines, but what is unique about the Vernon Lake story is that the trappers left a diary that chronicled, in detail, their last horrific months.

The pair’s food was critically low by Christmas, and they grew more and more desperate as they struggled to find enough to eat.

While they started off venturing from the cabin to hunt and fish, as they grew more and more weak they found it harder to catch any food. They resorted to luring warblers into their cabin with salt, shutting the door, and catching them. Eventually they were too weak to leave the cabin or even to split firewood.

On March 18 Coombs noted in the diary that Ryckman had died: “Dear mother, Jim died today at 2 pm. This might be the last I’ll have nerve enough to write so if I do anything wrong, please forgive me. I can’t stick it any longer.”

In March 1940 worried family members chartered a plane to look for the men. After struggling with low cloud cover, a plane finally did touch down on April 1, and found an SOS marker on the shore, and the bodies of the two men in their cabin.

When the Coroner arrived, he noted that the two men weighed only about fifty pounds each. One had ended his life with a gunshot.

In April 1940 newspapers across North America ran a syndicated story that quoted large portions of the diary.

The cabin at Vernon Lake where the trappers' bodies and the diary were found.  

It was later bulldozed by a roadbuilding crew.

https://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist0440uvic_3#page/n1/mode/1up/search/ryckman+coombs 

The Amazing Photographic Legacy of Ben Leeson

The North Island is very fortunate to be able to count Ben Leeson among its pioneers.  Many of the early photographs of this area, and most early photographs which are readily accessible today from the Quatsino Sound area were taken by Leeson in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Leeson was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, England in 1866.  His family emigrated to North America in 1875, and moved to Vancouver in 1886 (briefly moving to Williams Lake). Leeson was given a camera for his twenty-first birthday, and he became an avid photographer.  He took many photographs of the BC gold rush.  

Unfortunately the family business, a side-wheeler paddleboat grist mill, Transient Mills, was destroyed in a fire in 1891.  Many of Leeson’s photos and almost all of his glass negatives were lost.

The family moved to Winter Harbour in Quatsino Sound in the 1890s, where Leeson’s father operated a store and later a cannery.  

In 1894 Ben Leeson purchased a new camera.  While working with his father at their store, and later operating their clam cannery, he took hundreds of photographs in the Quatsino Sound area.  He sold many of his photos and had numerous photographs registered under federal copyright protection.  

When steamships came into the Sound, Leeson and his family would offer his local photographs for sale to the passengers.  Leeson photographed industrial activities, First Nations, and the natural surroundings.  He experimented with artwork in which he merged or combined images in order to get certain special effects.  He also hand-coloured many of his prints.

Many of his photos provide evidence of the tradition of head-binding among women in theQuatsino First Nations.

Much of Leeson’s collection has ended up at the Vancouver Public Library.  Leeson also published an article entitled “A Quatsino Legend” in the Canadian Geographical Journal.

The Quatsino and Port Hardy Museums are interested in raising funds to bring a collection ofLeeson’s photographs home to the North Island.  If you are interested in helping the North Island obtain high quality scans of approximately 50 of these very special photographs please contact me at storeysbeach@gmail.com.  

Smallpox and the Kwakwaka’wakw

Published in the North Island Gazette January 31, 2013

The arrival of European traders brought many new diseases to the North Island, including measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, and sexually transmitted diseases.

 

The most ravaging of these was smallpox, spread through droplet infection, usually through personal contact but also through contact with items like blankets.  Taking a month to run its course, symptoms included the presence of small sores all over the body and a high fever.

 

Smallpox may have first reached the Pacific Northwest in either the 1520s as a part of the Northern Hemisphere smallpox pandemic, or during the first recorded coastal pandemic of the 1770s.  There was some oral history reported to anthropologists that blamed the disappearance of the Hoyalas peoples of Quatsino on an epidemic illness around this time.

 

Indigenous peoples in North America were very susceptible to smallpox, as it had never been endemic to the area, and people had no natural immunity. 

Ethnographer Franz Boaz noted that there is a Kwakwaka’wakw word which means a man whose body “was covered all over with mouths which laughed and shouted all the time.”  This is believed to refer to the presence of smallpox sores.

 

In 1847 Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, George Simpson, reported after a trip to Northern Vancouver Island that “curiously enough, they (Kwakiutl) have been exempted from the small-pox.”  

 

Simpson noted that the HBC was in possession of a vaccine, which they offered, but local Chiefs refused.  Simpson noted that they did not push the issue, feeling “that our medicine would get the credit of any epidemic that might follow, or perhaps the failure of the hunt or the fishery.” First Nations did not possess quinine, which Europeans successfully used to treat the active disease.

Drawing of a person with smallpox by an unidentified aboriginal artist.

 

In March 12, 1862, the Brother Jonathan arrived in Victoria en route to the Columbia River. After the ship left on March 13 it was discovered that with the ship smallpox had arrived in Victoria. Shortly after, another steamer, the Oregon, also arrived in Victoria with smallpox on board.

 

At the time there was debate in the local Victoria papers about whether a quarantine should be enacted, but only a voluntary hospital was set up for those suffering from the virus. Legislators were concerned that a quarantine would unnecessarily restrict the liberty of individuals.

 

After it was clear that there was a full blown outbreak in Fort Victoria,  HBC officials banished the large population of Indigenous who had come to trade from the Fort, and told them to go home.  Some scholars estimate this population numbered between 2500 and 5000 Indigenous peoples. 

 

Although a vaccination was available at the time, and many missions along the coast had inoculated Indigenous communities successfully, many Indigenous people in the early stages of active infection were physically removed from the area of Fort Victoria and told to return to the North Coast, Haida Gwaii, and the North Island. They spread smallpox along their travel routes. 

Fort Victoria around the period of the outbreak of the coastal smallpox epidemic.

 

Unfortunately the official journal from Fort Rupert for the year 1862 has been lost, but the reports of many ships’ captains in the area at the time report the ravages of the disease.  They note that “hundreds were swept away within a few days” and “the tribe native to that section was nearly exterminated.” 

 

There were some reports that unscrupulous traders would unwrap dead bodies and re-sell blankets to other Indigenous communities, thus further transferring the disease. There is not a lot of evidence to indicate that this was a widespread practice, and the number of non-Indigenous people in many communities along the coast at this time would have been quite low, so it is not clear what, if any, measurable impact this practice would have had.

 

Young and healthy people were largely effected, which had an impact on reproduction rates for communities.  Survivors were identifiable because of their extensive scarring. The first case was reported in March and by December the epidemic of 1862 was over.

 

An 1850 census of First Nations in the area placed the Kwakwaka’wakw population at about 8 850, and in 1866 the estimate was 3 750, which would be an overall loss of 53%. Some reports put the impact as high as 90% of Indigenous populations. The impact was so great that some settlers at the time said that for many years afterward human bones littered the coast.

 

Some anthropologists have commented that it is remarkable that First Nations cultures were able to retain so much of their knowledge and cultural traditions with the loss of so many community members.  The Kwakwaka’wakw are truly a resilient people.

Historic Quakes and Waves on the North Island

Vancouver Island was created as a result of the earth rising due to the pressure of the Juan de Fuca plate and the Explorer Plate slowly travelling under the North American plate in the Cascadia Subduction Zone.  For the same reason, this is one of the most earthquake prone areas in Canada.

Large ‘megathrust’ earthquakes have historically taken place in the vicinity of Vancouver Island approximately every 500 years.  Scientists believe that quakes of this type took place around 600 BC, 170 BC, 400 AD, 810 AD, 1310 AD, and in 1700 AD.

The most recent megathrust quake took place on January 26, 1700 at 9:00pm.  This time has been pinpointed due to the very accurate timekeeping of the Japanese, who reported an ‘orphan’ tsunami (a tsunami without a quake) that took place the following day. 

The 1700 earthquake was estimated to have measured about 9.0 on the Richter scale, and struck near the Canada border with Washington State. 

Many First Nations’ oral histories tell of this quake.  The Nuu-chah-nulth on the West Coast of Vancouver Island have stories that tell of a great quake that happened before the first white men came.  Some Coast Salish tribes have stories that tell of a violent shaking of the earth that went on for 20 hours (this likely includes aftershocks), made houses fall down, and people on land get seasick.

A Makah storey tells of great flooding which covered the land up to the trees for four days.  Other communities tell of sand that shook until it swallowed things up.

Local First Nations have earthquake dances, which tell of the earth shaking.

The effects of more recent earthquakes have been felt on Northern Vancouver Island.    

A 7.0 quake centered in the area near the Estevan Point Light Station woke up people around the island at 12:41 am on December 16, 1918, but did not cause much damage.

Damage to the highway near Sayward following the 1946 earthquake.

A 7.3 quake in the mid-island area at 10:13am on June 23, 1946 knocked down 75% of the chimneys in the Campbell River/ Comox area, and caused a soil failure that ripped apart the highway near Sayward.  It has the distinction of causing the most recorded damage of any quake on the island in historic times. 

On August 21 at 8:01PM in 1949 a strong 8.1 quake struck in Haida Gwaii which reportedly knocked over cows near its epicentre, but this quake was not felt strongly on the North Island.

A 9.2 quake in Alaska on March 27, 1964 caused a tsunami that hit many West Coast communities.  Most people are aware of the damage that happened in Port Alberni, but a number of more northern communities also felt its effects. 

Damage in Zeballos after 1964 tsunami

Hot Springs Cove and Zeballos both reported a rising tide that would not stop rising.  The water kept coming until almost every building was knocked off its foundations, and some floated some distance. 

The Zeballos Iron Mine, which was on higher ground, served as a makeshift shelter.  Crew busses transported women and children from the village to the mine camp, and cooks provided hot food for the refugees.

Local accounts told of massive churning of waters around Tahsis narrows killing thousands of bottom fish, rapidly forced to the surface when their swim bladders exploded. 

In Port Alice an airplane dock, mail wharf, and oil float were all damaged.

The coastal float camps were largely able to ride out the tsunami.  The tsunami occurred at a low tide, and damage would have been much greater if the tide was higher at the time.

 Another more local tsunami took place in Knight Inlet around 1600 AD.  First Nations oral history tells of a massive landslide on the South side of the channel, on the side of a mountain the First Nations knew as “Tohu.”

A landslide caused 3 – 4 million cubic metres of rock to fall into the inlet to a depth of 500 metres.  This caused a tsunami wave somewhere between 3 and 10 metres in height that travelled across the narrow inlet in less than a minute, sweeping away the unsuspecting village of Kwalate.

The village was believed to have been home to more than 100 people, with four chiefs, who were all lost in this tragic event.  A number of the victims were recovered and were laid to rest near the entrance to Simoom Sound, and pictographs of four coppers painted on the nearby rock were believed to commemorate the event.

Archeological excavations found evidence of the old village site, including middens and firepits under 1 metre of overburden.  Covering the village site were tsunami deposits 1 – 5 cm deep, mostly of sand.  The village was abandoned after this event, and never recolonized.  Today the event is much studied by geologists, looking at the potential of tsunamis from above and underground landslides.