126_Fleetwood-Jack_Cowichan.mp3

otter.ai

29.01.2023

yes, 11.03.2024

Molly Akerman

Ken Fleetwood 0:00
I'm here to talk to you. I see some familiar faces here. I think I've known Valerie Webb most of her life. And another person that I know quite well. I used to be very friendly with when he lived around our way, Bob Dodds. And of course, I've known Joe Garner for a long, long time, and I was most interested in his talk. Jack Fleetwood is my name. I come from the hub of the universe, Cowichan Station, where everybody knows what we think today, the world thinks tomorrow. I was born there. 1914. And I always counted myself being fortunate in being born in our part of the Garden of Eden.

KF 1:06
And I'm one of those odd people of Irish origin. Who believes in guardian angels. I know I have a guardian angel. He or she has helped me out of many difficult situations, many times. When my wife and I had the pleasure of giving a community car for to Cowichan station in 1958, BC’s first centennial. I honored my guardian angel with the name of Bright Angel Park. Last year, at our 29 acre park, we had over 80,000 visitors. This year, we will far exceed that. So, the Bright Angel must have been looking over our park. The piece that we gave contains over 1500 feet of river frontage and the last stand of big old growth, six, seven feet old growth fir and cedar. And it's very gratifying to see it so well used. But Joe's talk was more than interesting to me, because I can absolutely understand how he felt when he had lost his keys and had to make that [Indiscernible] down the mountainside.

KF 3:06
In 1934, I worked for several months off and on around the Fulford area, for a man named Adolf Trage. I did some falling and bucking down there. And it was a hard life. We didn't make much money because I understand that the sawmill that was operating at that time, that bought the logs, was getting $15, $13, $1000 for their ties. Needless to say, I did not make much money. But when the James family moved in 1930 from the Fernwood district to the Courtfield farm in 1931. I worked a season for James Canadian Seeds and a portion of the spring of 1932 and a bit of the summer of 1933. I started falling and bucking on a Japanese crew in 1933, at the end of Sooke lake with a [Indiscernible] lumber company that has a big sawmill there. The idea was to learn Japanese and they made sure I didn’t so that was sort of a lost cause. I went from there to a gold monitor at Leechtown, I don't think I made much money there either. But the Japanese knew that there was a war coming, the same as we did. We had been told years before that we some day, we will tangle with the Nipponese.

KF 5:26
Our district has quite an interesting history. We know that our first citizens came to the district around 4000 years ago. Probably a contingent of them came down the coast. And they settled. They saw what they liked. They liked what they saw. And like Brigham Young, in 1847, when he led his Mormon band over the Wasatch Mountains and look down on the valley of the Great Salt Lake. He said, This is the place and no doubt, our first citizens said indeed, this is the place. They had everything. When the tide was out, the table was set. They bay teamed with fish, the woods filled with...getting back to Cowichan tongue...the bay teamed with fish and the woods teamed with deer. And they lived the good life. They hadn't got the struggle for existence. And they were called the fierce Cowichan. I am fortunate enough to speak the Quw’utsun tongue, not that is an advantage now because the young people do not speak it, and they think I'm an oddity because they speak their language and I don't. I speak their language and they don't, I’m getting tangled up here.

KF 7:26
Our first European settlers were in the Mill Bay Area. They were two French Canadians, Francis Xaviar [Indiscernible] and Gene Baptiste [Indiscernible], who had worked on the fort in Langley in 1827. And on the fort in Victoria in 1843. As a gratuity for their efforts, they each were given a 100 acre grant, under fur trade grant number one is the Hudson's Bay Company in the Mill Bay Area. They were our first European settlers. Mill bay was an interesting place. It also was the site of the first whaling station on BC coast, very briefly. 1866, a man named James Dawson started a whaling station to process the California whales that were at that time, there was a number in the Gulf of Georgia. And in 1868, he took in as a partner an experienced whaler from San Francisco called Captain Abel Douglas. When I was on Salt Spring in 1934, I knew two brothers, Verner and Abel Douglas, I rather think they were probably grandsons of that first whaling captain. By 1869 the whales, the whale population had been depleted. So Dawson and Douglas move their operations to Cortes island, where whale town is now.

KF 10:03
The first settlers that came into the immediate Cowichan area were probably those that came in 1858. [Indiscernible] was an Italian who came from Genoa, in Italy. He saw trouble arising from where he was on San Juan Island and decided to move back under the Union Jack. So he came to Cowichan Bay that year 1858 with his wife. And he, in 1859, started the first store in the Cowichan district as a trading post. It was built on Clem Clemlutz reserve, the first Indian reserve that you come to on TZOUHALEM road. I remember the building when I was a small boy, it was overt in angle. It had a rather fascinating stained glass door in it. And apparently it had it been intact for probably 40 or 50 years. Could that happen now? Not a chance. That same year 1858, the first Resident priest, Father Peter Rondo, a Quebequois came to the district in December of that year. 1859 he built the first Catholic Church, first St. Anne's Church on Quamichan Hill. It was reputed to have been able to hold 400 people. Although by the looks of the picture, I rather doubt it.

KF 12:13
He was a very progressive man. And shortly after he came, he started clearing or had workers clear for him, what was known later as the Priests Farm. In 1864, when the Dr. Robert Brown expedition came into Cowichan Bay to work on surveys of the Cowichan and the Koksilah Rivers. Captain Bernie, who brought the expedition in notes in his diary that he enjoyed tobacco grown on the priests farm and wine from the grapes, in the priests vinyard, 1864, only five years after he had come. And the priests farm also yielded sugar beets that was able to do for the ration of sugar. Our first landed settler, who bought land from the Hudson's Bay Company, you must remember that the Hudson's Bay Company in 1849, had taken over the colony of Vancouver's Island, and were instructed by the colonial government to try and induce as many settlers as possible into the southern part of the island. The Hudson's Bay Company didn't live up to their obligations. So in 1858 when the Gold Rush started, and Governor Douglas saw the possibility of there being an abundance, an overabundance of American gold seekers. He asked the colonial government to declare Vancouver Island as a crown colony.

KF 14:46
So the Hudson's Bay Company did sell land in the Saanich area, and also to a settler, a Kentish man called John Humphrey, who was indented to the Hudson's Bay Company for five years at 17 pounds a year. He bought 100 acres on bordering on Quamichan Lake, what is now Maple Bay Road, at one pound per acre, and it's always been a puzzle to me how he managed to pay for that land when he only got 17 pounds per year for five years. I knew his family quite well. He married the daughter of a Quamichan chief. And I remember being shown by his daughter, where his cabin had stood when he built it in 1858. John Humphreys died in 1905. The following year 1859, a man from Derbyshire in England, came into the scene, Samuel Harris, he built our first hostelry in the Cowichan District, the John Bull in on the shore of Cowichan Bay, where the Masthead restaurant now stands. Beside the wharf at Cowichan bay.They were our first settlers. Harris was the first hotel man, he sold whiskey, and he also sold to the Indians and when they got drunk he would jail them because he was also the first constable. So he made a two way profit.

KF 17:22
Settlers began to drift in and the government was paged to open the land of the Cowichan and Chemainus valleys to settlers, which they did in 1862. In August of that year, approximately 78 prospective settlers, accompanied by the HMS Hekate, the war ship stationed in Esquimalt, and also accompanied by Governor Douglas landed at the mouth of the Cowichan River. Those prospective settlers that took up lots. They drew lots for the land, half of them to the north of the river, half of them to the south of the river. A man named James Mearns from Montrose and Scotland took up the land where Fairbridge farm is now. And WC Duncan, who gave Duncan its name, took up 100 acre grant a mile south of the pier at Cowichan Bay. However, he left and went to the gold diggings and didn't come back until 1864, found out that his land had been usurped by somebody else, told that there was land available north of the river and took 100 acres of the grant that comprises most of downtown Duncan. Shortly after, he took that land up, Welshman David Evans took another 100 acre grant and that comprises most of the northern part of Duncan and part of the municipality.

KF 19:52
David Evans and ourselves. His great great grandchildren are our great great grandchildren also. We have three great great grandchildren and 15 great grandchildren. Duncan city was nothing but a small agricultural hamlet when the railroad came through, the last fight was driven in on August the 13th, 1886. You've probably heard of the story of how the approximately 2000 settlers gathered at Mr. Duncan's Cattle Crossing. Paged Robert Dunsmuir, the builder of the railroad who had with him Sir John A Macdonald, who had driven the last bite at cliffside, five miles south of Shawnigan Lake completing the Esquimalt and Nanaimo railway. And they asked for a station at Mr. Duncan's Castle crossing. After the celebration was over, and the train was just steaming out to the north to Nanaimo and Wellington. Dunsmuir is reputed to have said in with his Scottish accent “Ai boys, you'll get your station”. He kept his word. The following year, they built a station in Duncan. But it wasn't until 1889, that Duncan was recognized nationally, when in October, the first of that year, a post office was established. Before that, the settlers had to go to Cowichan Bay or Maple Bay for their mail. Both post offices there had been established in July the first 1872. Then the following year, 1873, a post office was established at Somenos, two miles of where Duncan is now. The railroad company had no intention of making a town site or a town or a settlement at Mr. Duncan's Cattle Crossing.

KF 22:51
They had designs for a town site at Somenos, but hard nosed Scottish settler Archibald Keer refused to subdivide his acreage, his farm there, whereas William Chalmers Duncan was very amenable to that. So, AJ McKay, the surveyor for the railroad company, began in 1887, to lay out the village of Duncan or Duncan's, as they called it in those days. And the postmark as a matter of fact, was Duncan station until 1926, when they changed it to Duncan. Post offices, you know, give a national identity to a hamlet, a village, a town facility, and so many of them have disappeared nationally, now. The sleepy little town or village, agricultural village of Duncan owes it's a existence and its prosperity and springing into the 19th century to the discovery of copper on Mount Sychar in 1896 and 97. And by 1899, a mining was in force. The six and a half million dollars worth of ore that was taken out from Mt. Sychar on the various mines created Duncan so that more businesses were established there and became a focal point, distribution point. And the merchants in Duncan were not satisfied with the way the reeve and Council of the municipality of North Cowichan, which had was established in 1873, the third oldest municipality in British Columbia. So they asked to become a city. On March the 4th, 1912, Duncan became a city.

KF 25:37
From that time, they have never actually looked back. Duncan is a queer little place. It's an enclave that comprises only 858 acres, cut out of one corner of the municipality of North Cowichan. It can't expand any more because two and a half sides are enveloped by the municipality of North Cowichan and one and a half sides by the Indian reserve, Somenos reserve. I'm a director and a historian of the Cowichan Historical Society that runs the Cowichan Valley Museum in Duncan, and I'm also the Vice President of Shawnigan Lake Historical Society, as well as my wife and I both belonging to the Koksilah school Historical Society. And I'm chairman of the Fairbridge chapel Historical Society, and Secretary Treasurer of Bright Angel Provincial Park. So I generally have my time allotted for those places. I have very little spare time. And I've been asked several times to speak to your very worthy society here. And I'm very, very glad to have been able to do that today. And I'm also very glad to be able to give you my small book of poetry. I've been writing poetry for the last 73 years, I figured the other day. And it's only in the last year or so that I thought anything about bringing this out in public, however, in association, no, let me go back a little further.

KF 28:03
Three years ago, the Federal Forestry Association, who has their building on Burnside Road, Pacific Forestry center, I believe they call it, asked me if I would participate in an exhibition of wood products. And some of the items I have for instance, I have a whipsaw that belonged to the Coleman brothers. They made lumber at Cowichan station by hand in 1884, you know, a whipsaw was a fit down below. And Tom Coleman told me that two good men with the right kind of timber could turn out 250 board feet in a 10 hour day. Now, I also have the saw that it is reputed to have felled the first tree felled by a saw in the Cowichan district. Before that, they chopped the trees down and bucked them into lengths with a saw, but the Coleman brothers had come, Shetland islanders, had come from Colorado where they've seen a saw used and had purchased a saw, and were working on the farm and the hill bank valley of William forest. They’re sawing a tree down when John McPherson, the road foreman, at that time, came along, and he was appalled. He shook his hand to them and said, gentleman, gentleman, stop at it now. You [Indiscernible], however, they didn't [Indiscernible]. That was as far as we know, the beginning of the trees being felled in the Cowichan district with a saw. I retired for the first time in 1952. We'd had some good years of logging. And I said to Mabel, well, we've got enough now. We went east and picked up a new pickup waiting for us at Windsor, Ontario, went east o Prince Edward Island and all through the states and I didn't do very much till 1958 when I was invited out to Shawnigan division of [Indiscernible] to lay out blocks of timber, presumably for two months. I stayed 16 years, 1956, till I retired April 1972. And I was the superintendent scaler for that division and...