Fifty-Seve IN THE Comox Valley Bv ERIC DUNCAN THE LIBRARY THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA The P. W. Howay and R. L. Reid Collection of Canadiana ®S«J^>V^ Fifty-Seven Years IN THK Comox Valley Bo ERIC 1)1 NCAN edition Illustrated by Renee Niles Foreword by J.B. Gilmer J. BARRETT GILMER, PUBLISHER © 1967 by B. & B. MARRIOTT and J. & J. GILMER Printed by SOS PRESS FOREWORD ver thirty years ago Eric Duncan wrote an authentic history (which he titled "Fifty- Seven Years in the Comox Valley") through his reminiscences of life in a beautiful and pri­ mitive country. His brief yet apropos recol­ lections may not have been intended primarily as a history, and probably for that precise reason this little book has enjoyed such pop­ ularity; it is what a history should be - and too few are! The families and the individuals who once claimed this eastern section of Vancouver Is­ land as their home become alive )n Mr. Eric's "ramblings" as are their many descendents now residing in and around the Comox Valley. I consider it fortunate to have associated with some of these descendents; it is to them that I dedicate this new edition. J *B *G• I Pioneers The Pioneers r«OMOX VALLEY was first settled by white ^ people in the summer of 1862. There were two bands, one of gold miners and sailors which came up from Australia, and another of emigrants from the British Isles which sailed around Cape Horn. The whole numbered about sixty, and all, except one Eastern Canadian named Bridges, were natives of the United Kingdom. Their at­ traction had been the Cariboo gold strike of 1858, but that excitement had died down, and Attorney- General Carey of Victoria advised them to try farming at Comox. They were all single men but two—James Robb, 50, from Aberdeenshire, with wife and grownup family of one son and three daughters; and Wil­ liam Harmston, 38, from Lincolnshire with wife and two small children, son and daughter. The Robbs left no descendants in the valley, but the Plantas of Nanaimo are kin. Harmston lived only four years after his arrival, but his son got a wife from Eastern Canada and left a large family, one of whom fell in France; and his daughter, be­ fore she was well grown up, married an English­ man from Nanaimo and became the mother of the husky household of the Cliffes, living to a good old age. Of the single pioneers, the most notable were Geo. Fawcett Drabble, middle-aged civil engineer from Derbyshire, who became Government Agent and laid out all the main roads and surveyed the farm lines; Reginald Pidcock, clerk, from London, who put up the first sawmill; and Reginald Car- withen from Devonshire who held a large tract of land, fetched a wife from Newfoundland and left a large family. Mention must also be made of Adam McKelvey, long thought to be single, but who finally brought out a wife and grown-up son from Ireland. He owned 300 acres of the best land in the valley, and | raised potatoes "as big as yer fut". His Australian life was a favourite topic, where "a drink o' wather an' a drink o' whusky cost you a shilling apiece, an' you'd ruther take the wath­ er." It wTould have been well for him if he had stuck to this maxim in British Columbia. After his wife died, the old fellow took a trip back to Ire­ land, and married the younger sister of his daugh­ ter-in-law. None of his descendants are left in the district. His next neighbor and countryman, James Clark, whose bright, bushy hair and white freckled skin reminded one of "Life in Death" in the" Ancient Mariner", lived in a log-hut sunk to the roof in a hillside. His only table tools were a big spoon and a butcher knife, and later, as an improvement on his oxen, he worked a pair of speckled cayuses with harness made from strips of green cow hide. Another peculiar character was Henry Ross, from Lancashire, little over five feet in height, with a long white beard, and noted for his love of animals. He used to ride four miles to the landing for mail and supplies on the back of a huge ox, an odd sight on the elephantine creature, and when he wanted bulky stuff, he hitched him to a home-made two wheeled cart. He was the first in the district to raise poultry on a large scale. Then there was John Fitzgerald, the Irish father of Joseph, the well-known timber cruiser, who was the original owner of the land now oc­ cupied by the Sandwick golf course, and who brought his Scotch wife and son up from Aus­ tralia. John Wilson was a bachelor from the Scottish border, whose whole religion came from Robert Burns. He sold one of the finest farms in the valley to become a travelling trader on the boats between Comox and Victoria, and for many years he handled the live stock and produce of his neigh­ bors with a good measure of satisfaction to all. He introduced Messrs. Alexander Urquhart and Joseph McPhee to the district, employing the former as farm manager and the latter as work­ ing partner in road and bridge contracts. Lastly we come to Willam Beech who outlived all his companions, and died in 1931 at the age of ninety-eight. He was a small, spare man from Staffordshire, and a sailor before locating here. In 1870 he sold one of the best farms to raise funds to go back to his native place for a wife— a wife who stuck faithfully by him through all his long after-life and now survives him. Return­ ing with his bride in 1872, he took up a section of good alclerbottom land and in over half a century did not sleep five nights off it. Beech had none of the modern fear of large families. "Children are wealth" he told the writer forty years ago, and just as soon as ever they were able, he set them to work on the land, and thence forward did little himself but supervise. Year after year he could be seen seated on his veranda, pipe in mouth, watching his boys and girls busy in the fields below. They married early and cleared out, but as fast as the older ones went, youngter ones took their place, and even grandchildren came back under the yoke. In early days huge droves of swine helped with the ploughing, and Beech never forgot that. He advised new-comers to get all the land they pos­ sibly could under crop, however roughly: "scratch or burnj or blacken the surface somehow, and throw in your seed". His tools and machinery were primitive, he lived substantially on what he^raised, he held fast to the maxim of old Polonius — "Neither a borrower nor a lender be"—and so he kept a carefree mind. Spry nearly to the last, he left a host of descendants. So much for individual pioneers. The First Cattle IN JANUARY, 1863, the settlers collectively pet-' * itioned the government to send them some cattle. The petition reads as follows: "Petition to His Excellency the Governor and Commander- in-Chief of British Columbia and Vancouver's Island. "We, the undersigned inhabitants of the Comox Valley, having located here late last season, not having time to get stock or prepare food for them for the coming winter, barely having time to build houses for ourselves, are de­ sirous of obtaining working cattle and seeds for the ensuing seas'on. As the road which is now in progress, will not be completed in time for forwarding cattle for the coming spring (Note: it was not completed till 1910), the only means which is left us is conveyance by water. Therefore the subject of this humble petition is to seek your Excellency's aid in the transportation of cattle to this place next spring. We beg also tr> inform you that a road through the settlement is very much required, and bridges made over several large creeks which inter­ sect it . As a voyage to this place in the spring time of the year is very precarious as well as expensive, and as most of the settlers here are of limited means, having only enough to make 'a humble beginning, if they had a cheap and safe mode of obtaining a ytoke of oxen, a plough and a few seeds, they may become cultivators of the soil instead of wanderers in the gold regions of Car­ iboo. Trusting that we have not anticipated too much in thus far seeking your aid that you will not only confer a great boon upon the settlers of Comox, but the country at large, and as the future of a new settlement greatly depends upon its commencement with a little assistance to our means with a goodwill, the land Comox, which but shortly ago wag a wild waste undisturbed by aught but the howl of the wild beasts or the formal tread of the deer and elk, ere a twelvemonth passeth over, may be­ come a fertile valley teeming with gladness, the perman­ ent and happy home of the sturdy farmer." This document was signed by a whole crowd, most of them personally known to the writer, though not the man who drew it up. That spring the schooner 'Douglas' was sent with a load of Durham cattle from the Tolmie farm near Victoria.