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The History of Cusheon Cove

Chris Hatfield, 14 September 2005

Chris Hatfield portrait

Salt Spring Video on youtube.

Accession Number 2005.033.001 Interviewer Address to the Historical Society
Date September 14, 2005 Location Cusheon Cove, property of Mr. Hatfield
Media digital recording Audio CD
ID

192_Hatfield-Chris_Cusheon-Cove.mp3

otter.ai

11.03.2023

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Unknown Speaker 0:00
I'm sure all Mr. bloemen would have been very flattered to have this kind of turnout of people to that would be interested in his entrepreneurial activities down here. And it's a very interesting adventure that I kind of started only three summers ago actually looking into the history of the mail here and things like that I'd read things that were in various books around that Charles and others had written about the mail here, but most of them had the same two or three paragraphs that yeah, there was a sawmill down here and started in around 1908. And that ended in 1930, sometime, and there was a fire and there was a wharf collapse and things like that. But there wasn't really a lot of other information about it. And so my adventure over the last three years has been to try to get more information. And although it's very hard to come by, before I get into the presentation itself, I'll just cover a few things around here. Toilets, there's a an outhouse, just over the hill here is an outhouse over by the bar in there. And then there's toilets in my house, which is going to be open to people to go in and out of anyway, because some of the displays and things I have in there. So that's very important guys can go anywhere, of course, it's a nice thing about the properties. We also have a couple of other staff members here, Steven Lewis over there, that guy with the camera, he's a, he's the manager here and almost cheap, and things are his responsibility. And he'll be floating around just kind of helping people pointing things out, showing me showing you around. We also have Kelly, Bruce, who is the guy at the gate, when you came in to him, you'll be here in a minute. And he was he's a former caretaker here, he was here for five or six years and knows his way around. And this is his wife, Terry Bruce. So they can give you a hand if you have any questions. We also have some drinks over there and the cooler, better cool drinks. It's kind of a hot day. So if you need some there, right there. And this is Luke, he's my dog that's very friendly and, and likes hanging around getting scratched intended. Any smokers, I'd appreciate, if you just make sure that the slide is out before you get rid of it, obviously, things are still pretty dry. So we're afraid of that around here. Okay, there's only been two or three property owners, between me and the Bowman. And I'm still trying to piece together exactly. Who were property owners and who just lived here. But the Bowman family didn't actually sell the property here until the 1950s is my understanding. Some people here in the audience, I'm a little intimidated by this gray hair that I see here, because you probably know better than I do. But what I've been able to piece together is what I have here, so correct me if I'm wrong. And then there was a couple of other owners, between them and and when I bought it in 1985. It just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And I'm not an independently wealthy person. And that's why we had to start a fish farm and all that sort of thing to try to try to make a go of it as a business rather than just as a landowner. But I'm glad I did. It's been a great experience. And about three summers ago I knew that there was a number of garbage kits and things around on the property and and but I was so busy trying to pay for it and everything at the time that I didn't really get a chance to do something as frivolous as dig around in the garbage. And so about three summers ago, I started doing that. And over here there's a little cold called, it's known locally as kind of big. And just around the cove, I started digging up all these ceramic pieces, which I thought at the time were Chinese. It turns out now that I've done a little more research, they were Japanese. And I started there and then that led to other buildings around the site. And now I'm looking at the old property is sort of a research project and research the history of it and everything else. About 100 acres here that that I have, yeah, it goes up over the hill and around I'm here. Bollman himself had a crepes that that went away down to Christian Creek. And there's an app in the house here that you can see that. So he owned a lot more and I guess over the years must have sold them off. So the first owner, the property was a fellow by the name of Desi Krishnan. I'm not sure what his real first name was, maybe Gordon knows, but it kind of sums it up. He was a bit of a Wheeler Dealer, real estate developer, I think. And he wanted to preempt 1000 A year from the government and create a an industrial community that there was a great place for sailing ships to anchor off the property and not sure quite what he had in mind, but he kind of moved away and and gave up about the time that Bowman's bought the property, I guess, and I'm still researching exactly how that transition happened. But that's why fishing river Cushing Creek and Goshen lake are a mile from here. And Christian Cove is down here. And back in the turn of the century. This whole waterfront here was known as Christian Cove. It wasn't just the little cove over in the corner. There's some of the old maps.

Unknown Speaker 6:25
His name is douceur de UCI e Gan deucey Krishna. Okay, well, I

Unknown Speaker 6:31
heard dicey. So was that right?

Unknown Speaker 6:38
Okay, okay.

Unknown Speaker 6:40
Get up because he couldn't get the whole 1000 acres. Yeah. You went up to the caribou somewhere? Yeah, apparently. And yeah. And anyway, yeah, the government wouldn't give him his 1000 acres, they only gave him 250 is like everybody else. Yeah. Yeah. So William Bowman, took over in 1905. Or around that year. And he started the mirror Lumber Company. That was what it was known at that time. I don't know if he got the company from somebody else or, or what but if you look in my company records, that's what it started out as. And then they changed the name to the woman, Alison, wonder company. And Alison was his, his accountant. As far as I can determine, that has been the list of shareholders back then. That list Allison as an accountant, so probably much against his better judgment. And he was talking to putting some money into this sawmill. And then it became the Bowman Lumber Company, up until about 1918. And after that, I'm not sure if he actually went bankrupt, or he sold the mill interest to another entity or just exactly what happened. But an American syndicate took over one of those evil American syndicates. And they actually expanded quite a bit. And it was known then as I've got to two names the Northwest lumber company, or the Pacific Lumber Company. And I've researched both of them. And they're not very unusual names. So you get all kinds of information, but none of them had males on Saltspring island. So I kind of drawn a blank in terms of where we go from 1918 to about 1930s. But Bowman, I think still lived on the property and still own the land, then but the actual mill was being run by another company. There's a number of some of the information I got was were from some letters that were written by Mr. Bowman to a an investor in England, a brother in law's his who obviously had put some money into the mail. And these letters are out on the table over in my house there for people to read. They're there. They're very, very interesting, of course, but he's basically the rather mournful because he's explaining to the brother Brother in law, how he can't pay his loan back or he can't pay any dividends on the money. And this was his wife's brother. So you can imagine the family repercussions that they said as well. And it's quite funny to read about it. Anyway, progressing with the, the sawmill in 1926 Worth collapse, and everybody knows about that, I think on the islands and they lost a lot of their lumber, 2 million board feet of lumber river floating around the Gulf Islands here, I guess. And that was the beginning of the end. I think they tried to rebuild it and tried to get it going after that, but then the 1930s Depression hits, and they probably couldn't sell a lumber and everything else. And so that's when they really shut down for good.

Unknown Speaker 10:17
Okay, well,

Unknown Speaker 10:19
it's written in a number of the books. Yes, yeah. The, I'm just gonna explain where things were in a minute here. And that's what really did them in, I think, in the end.

Unknown Speaker 10:36
So the

Unknown Speaker 10:38
owners, or at least the, I think there was a family called the Saunders, that I know they lived here, I don't know whether they actually owned some of the land between the Bowman's and and the next owner, whose name was royal Smith. Royals master was the guy that I bought the property from. And he was a bit of a Wheeler Dealer based in Vancouver. I never did meet him, actually. But he was in the car leasing business. And I was warned to be very careful of him. So yeah, probably. Anyway, he, you know, he got into a bit of financial difficulty, which was good for me, because he accepted my offer at the time, and I was able to buy it, whereas otherwise, couldn't have got the property.

Unknown Speaker 11:34
It was a lot had been paying it off for the rest of my life. But it's worth a lot more now, believe me. So anyway, when the Bowman says, established here, I have huge admiration for this guy. And then he came down here, and this was probably all virgin forest. And they he cut all the clear cut all the trees off it. And then he had to, they had to build the mill, and they had to build the places where they were living, and all the other outbuildings, and somehow, at the same time, feed his family. And you'll see some pictures of his family. But I've got over in the house in a minute. And just put this whole thing together. And I've been a minor entrepreneur all my life, being an environmental consultant, running a company of about 50 people. And I know all the ups and downs that running a company are about and running a company where you're cutting lumber, out of trees and trying to make a living out, it would be even trickier I think back in those days, and somehow still trying to feed yourself while you're going through all this. So right from the beginning that people here were farming the land. And all this field that you see around here was actually even larger than it is now. It's grown in a lot since the Bowmans actually had the property. So they had cattle and they grew crops and and some of the original drainage ditches and things that you see around here on the land, you can pick out from aerial photographs from the 1930s, which is very handy for me trying to track down where buildings were and things like that. And back in those days, of course, there was a very different attitude toward industrial sites, as well. And I have a quote that I came across in the Sydney and Gulf Islands review, which is very good newspaper that was printed in Sydney DC from 1912. And they have all the editions of the paper in a room behind the apartment buildings there and you can go and look up all the past editions. And there's a quote there from 1924 about the sawmill that I just started up again in Sydney there was one right in pretty much downtown Sydney I guess at that time and the middle of shutdown for some reason and had to lay off all their staff and maybe the lumber prices weren't very good or something and and then they started up again. And the report it was saying the song of the song biting into for an each band and is placed and performing his function with regulate, regulate, regulate clarity and precision, present the poetry of industry in its most vivid and appealing form. I don't think I saw me alongside Springwood quite get that receptive today. So

Unknown Speaker 14:58
the main features of the actual facilities that were here comprise they saw me all that was right down just beyond where you parked the car right down where my log home is today, right where the home is was where the sawmill was. And there's a little cove in, in beside it that they used to bring logs booms in and and then pulled the logs out of the coal into the sawmill to cut them up. There was several versions of the mill, as I say it was here from 19 Oh, wait till 1930s. So Bowman himself, improved it quite a bit in the years that he was operating it. And he refers to some of the improvements in this letter where he's writing to his brother in law and and saying that, this year, he can't pay him back any money either. But, of course, the letter gets more and more optimistic as it goes through and next year is going to be better and we expect the profits to be better. And we've made section section improvements and things like that. So the mail was quite a going concern by the 1920s when the American syndicate owned it, and you can see some of the photographs of the male that I have there. That actually was a tube smokestack male at later stages when they got bigger, and at its height is employed 150 men. So you can imagine 150 People living down on this property. I mean, this was a major, major industrial site, back then it would be a major industrial site today. And it's it's very difficult to get information about the whole thing, in spite of it being such a big place because and being so many people here because it was basically water access. And as far as I can figure out, there weren't any roads here until after the Second World War. Certainly, when the mill was here, I don't think there was any roads down here. And that there was there was some old horse trails and things which I can pick, pick off the 1930 aerial photograph that you can see over in the house. And and then the community here didn't really socialize with the rest of the island. I thought when I first started looking at the Sydney and Gulf Islands review, and they had been used as detail like Mrs. Jones had tea with Mrs. Smith, and a good time was held by all and Fulford and all of that. So I thought, Oh, this is going to be great. They're going to have all this information all about the mail and everything else. I found two articles about the mail from 1912 to 1930. And both of those had to do with an accident that was in the mail where there was a Japanese fella was killed and whatnot. And so it was just totally cut off from socially from the island. And a lot of the island people I guess kind of knew that there was something down here sort of like now actually, but everybody knows that there's sort of something down here but nobody's ever been here, you know?

Unknown Speaker 18:20
Yeah, just getting getting that sheriff. And yeah, one of the other one of the features that they had here because it was a big sawmill was down there. And because it was a steam powered sawmill, they had big boilers and, and they probably burned their sawdust and scrap wood and everything to make the steam but they had to have a source of fresh water. And there's no big source of fresh water around here. So they built a pipeline all the way from Cushing Creek. And I have to talk to Kathy Rhymer or somebody to ask her if she knows where the intake is on the creek because it must be there still now. But if you go along here, there's a bench that kind of goes along that part of the property, you can find the old coils of the pipeline that ran all the way from the creek about an eight inch pipeline that they ran all the way over to the property here again, you know, a major construction undertaking and because they had the fresh water coming over here for the mill, they also ran pipelines to all the buildings on the site here. And so I can go out with my metal detector and pick up these steel or iron pipes that are about one inch pipes, I guess that went to even the little huts that were on the property that the Chinese and Japanese lived in. They had a little tight water system for that. And so we went through a lot of work these are all buried six inches the foot into the ground and and they're still there the sawmill also had a dock in front of it because that's what collapsed in 1926. And this dock was a, it was big enough that ocean going ships could come alongside the property here. And there's a great picture that I got from one of the woman and family have a ship at the dock loading lumber. And the stern of the ship is down by the president Cushing Cove and the Dow is way up here by the fish farm. And so these ships used to come in and they would come in parallel to the property here, I always thought of the dock is having 90 degrees out. But most docks are like that. But because the property is so the water is so deep here that ships could come rent right in parallel to the rock cliffs that are along here that Thanks, sir. So it was an ideal place. And they could pick up the lumber and then go straight to Asia or to Europe or wherever they're going.

Unknown Speaker 21:09
I should say that I got two major sources of information in the last, oh, six months, I guess, or eight months. One is this aerial photograph that I referred to earlier, from 1932. And in the library in Ottawa, took me months to go through the Abraca see, to find this. Eventually, you get somebody that, that you can feed in any coordinate in Canada, and they'll look up in their library there, what photographs they have. And much to my amazement, they have these, they had a stereo pair of aerial photographs in 1932. I mean, it must have been a guy in a biplane and leather helmets and everything else. And in that photograph, there's 15 buildings on this site. And I have blow ups of that photograph down in the house that you can have a look at. Yeah, yeah. 15 buildings. And so no, I haven't. I'm desperate for any kind of pictures, any kind of information, any kind of anything. So if anybody knows, yeah. And so that was a great breakthrough to find that. And I can go out with this photograph. And though it's not as easy as it sounds, because all the vegetation has changed. And there's different roads, and there's all this fencing, I built myself here. And it changes Oh, look at the property. So to get out here and actually locate things on the site isn't as easy as it sounds. The other big breakthrough was Dale Newman, wrote a little nice little blurb about what I was doing on the property here and the dig and everything. And that was published in the Victorian times column this was it in July? June? No, it was a few months ago anyway. And she put my all my coordinates and phone number and things in this article. And I got three or four calls from distant relatives of the Bowman's including one from the grandson and England. And somebody in Victoria, clipped this little article and sent it over to England. In this case, they got the phone and call me and, and the 67 now and is very curious about the property and everything else. And so he's dead needs some pictures. And he's the one that sent me these letters from Mr. Bowman, from 1910 to about 1915 or so. So in addition to the meal, there was a whole settlement here and all along that hill that you can see over there, there's quite a steep hill that goes up where the trees are there. It was a whole line of buildings along there. And if you remember the picture that was in it's been in a couple of the books about Saltspring certainly in Charles book and the other book on snapshots, which shows a picture of a lot of people in front of the cookhouse so that was taken over there and then you can see the some of the buildings that were in the line along there. And in those days, I think they reasonably put the buildings back areas they just wanted to be warm. They didn't care about views and all that sort of thing and they didn't have any insulation in the houses and they're all heated with wood. So basically that's where they established mean settlement. Man in addition to that, later on, they put the bunkhouse in here. That was the 1920s I think after Bowman had was wasn't active in the mill anymore. But somewhere along the line, there was a number of little huts were established around the property here that Asian people lived in. And I thought, oh, yeah, well, they probably didn't let them live in the bunkhouse where the white guys were whatever. But I think it's more probably their choice that they lived in the impacts, actually, because what I read is that they, they like to, of course, had their own culture and their own food and like to kind of be on their own. And they didn't like the white people's food and all of that. And so they just threw up these little huts that were just very crude little places, there was probably lots of lumber around them, they could build them. And there's two or three sites in the property here, I found pieces of rice bowls, and pottery and things around where these huts relocated. And one of them is right over here by what's known as China Bay. And the huts, as it turns out, were occupied by Japanese people, because I'm digging up Japanese ceramics. And I've had a number of Chinese people tell me that they're definitely Japanese, and they're not Chinese. And so all the artifacts that I'm getting that are the kind of a blue and white ones that you'll see in my museum down here. Come from that big down by this little bay. Am I a founding member of the Canadian Finance Historical Society over in Vancouver? There's three white guys like me and about 200 Chinese. And we had a little show in town last winter, and I picked some of my rants. Yeah. Yeah, I take some of my ceramics and things over there. And that's where the Chinese told me very definitely that a lot of them are Japanese, not not Chinese. But they're. I don't know. Well, probably the, you know, white people didn't know the difference, right? Yeah. So they're right over longside the bay there, if you when we break up here, you can walk around and in groups and go to some of these places I point out if you're interested. So Japanese are over there. And then from this aerial photograph, I saw some other little huts in different areas of the property. And one was right in this little point of land that sticks out right here where the road goes around here, and then it goes down to the fish farm. And right in there was a real hotbed for Chinese artifacts. And I found a chinese coin and a number of other things. Right in there, just beyond this surgery there.

Unknown Speaker 27:59
It was in the bunkhouse was right.

Unknown Speaker 28:03
The other side of the Fish Farm road, and I presume it was all white guys that live there. And you know, they use the lumber from the build.

Unknown Speaker 28:11
Right. Which which promptly burned down. I think it was burned back. Yeah, right. Yeah. It was mostly man, there was a few of the

Unknown Speaker 28:31
top people in the middle like the foreman and the highly skilled jobs, I guess, like the Sawyer and people like that had their families down here. And they were some of the houses in that line of buildings that were along the hill, they were family houses. And I dug up some pieces from those houses to which I Museum has spread from the top of the garage to the basement of my house over there now too. So all the white guy stuff is in the basement of the house and all the Asian stuff is in the top of the garage, so I've kind of been separating. And, and then another place you'll see just right through here, there's a sort of a disturbed soil anywhere where you see a disturbed soil place on the site and you'll see a couple of my white buckets there. That's where I've been digging and, and I don't have a very probably method. Very organized way of digging, I sort of do it when I'm inspired to dig in a certain place. And so I like having all my things out there where I can get at them. But right in there, there was some Chinese huts as well. And I've got a number of pieces there and I'm working on a beautiful piece that is a Chinese teapot that stands about that high and it's a white ceramic with a very deep blue kind of pattern. Next, which is unusual for the Chinese stuff, because the other blue and white stuff is all Japanese. But I've got about half the pieces, I need to complete it there. And wherever the God of the earth is, I can't remember the Greek god, but he's really been making it difficult for me to find the other pieces

Unknown Speaker 30:28
a few other things that were on the property, there was a blacksmith shop. Right down, you'll see some electrical height, just just outside of the of the, my garage down there. And I saw this little hide on the aerial photograph. And I thought, Well, what was that doing away by itself way out in the middle of the field. So we went out there and I started scratching around. And sure enough, I got about a stack of old metal pieces about that I that they obviously made up a lot of things on the side here because they'd have to be pretty self contained and make nuts and bolts and everything that they needed for their wooden structures around and you can see a lot of cinders and everything on the ground there as well from where they had the forge and things. In Mr. Bowman's letter to his brother in law in England, he also mentioned putting an electric power plant at one stage, which was before 1918. So somewhere that was around and a lot of things I dug up in the garbage pits and things are pieces of lamps in these from coal, oil lamps and things but I also have dug up a few electrical parts that indicated that, I guess later on in the development that the place was electrified. And I know when they even in the latter stages of Mr. Bowman's tenure here. They had a 24 hour operation of the mill. So they'd have lights at night so they could see what they're doing. And Mr. Bowman mentioned the drying drying film that they also built here and I I haven't located either the electrical male or the drying film. anywhere on the property, it could be one of the other buildings that I haven't really identified yet. They also had a steam cut called the SS beaver not the not the really famous SS beaver I thought you know, I thought somehow they're related at some point, but I guess they named it after the FSB that was really around in 1800s. And and they had three scouts called the beaver one beaver two and beaver three. I haven't got any pictures there or any anything of these, but they're referred to in some of the company. They list them as company assets. And I've all the Bowman lumber company records are in microfiche in company, registry and the Korea and you can print you know, the parts that you're interested in. It's quite a long record, actually. But back in those days, they also had to file their financial statement each year would be considered a huge invasion of privacy. Now, every company had to put, you know, private companies had to file their financial statements, but back in those days, I guess the they had to do that. And of course, every year, they list all their assets and all their bills and everything else. And so these assets are listed and the property then which I'm not sure it would be a much bigger piece of property than just the 100 acres that we own here now. I'd be going way over to Cushing Creek and things it's listed as an asset. I think it's worth $1,125 or something. Signs of change. Record. No. Yeah, they do actually. Yeah, yeah, there are some and I have the company records at least the copy that I was able to make from the microfiche on the table in the house there as well. So you can take your time and just sit down there's chairs or you can read these things that microfiche are are very they're barely legible when you read them on the machine and when you print them, they're even worse. So it's a little little tough to read some of the stuff

Unknown Speaker 35:01
Okay, yeah, the sailings on the site. Now, there's, there's a little hip roof building just behind the territory there to the right of the barn. And that was the original office for the male, when there's a picture of Mr. Bowman, in the office with one of his male secretaries, in front of a typewriter, and of course, being very English, they're all dressed in ties and everything else, even though they're way out in the middle of the bush, right. And so that was the office and the barn next to it was also built. These three buildings over they were built in 1905. barn was built in 1905. And then through the, all the trees there to the left of the barn, there's the original farmhouse, and I fix them up as best. We got the the barn and the hip roof house is probably good for another 100 years. But the farmhouse is actually Steven lives in right now. And it's definitely seen better day. So you can go over and have a look at those and, and apparently during the 1940s. One of the calls I got from from Dale's article was a lady that lived in one of these houses that no longer exists over here in 1946. And so there was, even when the mail shut down, there was still our community down here. And people lived in these houses through the 1940s and 50s. And then when the 60s and 70s came along, of course, everybody knows that this property was used by those about 30 people that squatted on the property when it was owned by this Royall Smith, who owned it for about 15 years. And he was just holding it for speculation that he could sell it for a lot of money, which he did to me eventually. And but it was a real haven for all the hippies to live down here. And you can see an aerial photographs from the 1960s or 70s that shows a circle out in the middle of the field there. They had a picket fence all around it when we bought it and then just to grow corn around the edges and grow their pot in the middle. Fill a mound he's got a helicopter and then that didn't work. But the property has been lived on pretty much continuously since the turn of the century by like somebody Yeah, Rodney era. Yeah. Now Rodney, the Mexican food guy and yeah, Ganges. Yeah, he was. He lived in the farmhouse. And he was a caretaker here for about eight years when all the all the hippies were here. They used to have nude volleyball games and all kinds of stuff. I often when I'm going around the island, but I'm talking to people and they find out from Christian COVID They get this dreamy eye and maybe look on their eyes

Unknown Speaker 38:09
okay, what are we going to see today? Well, we have the original buildings over there to have a look at if you want to scroll around there and have a look at them. You can also drive down there, if people don't feel they want to walk that far. So if you wanted to go back and get your car, there's a road that actually goes around goes right down to the old farmhouse there. Right in the if you look just up to the right of the hip roof plays over there is a kind of a trail that angles up the hill there and that's one of the original horse trails that shows up in aerial photograph in 1930. And the other trails were more or less obliterated because that's where they put the roads but there is one that was missed there and you can actually go up there and see it it's very distinct. Right in the hillside they're

Unknown Speaker 39:10
just they're heading over to Fulford and you know the rest of the the world out there somewhere you know. Yeah. The Japanese and Chinese ceramics and all bottles and pottery pieces and things that I found. Were down this way and in the attic of my garage over there, you'll see where I have my truck parked and and I'll spend some time over there trying to explain some of the things to people. When when we actually get to this stage of seeing these things, if you could break into groups of roughly eight or 10 or or seven or eight people or something like that. It would probably be better to go around to these different venues because my my attic there is a little small. certainly couldn't take this whole group In their your photos and maps and things I have spread out on tables in my house down there in the log home and the main floor, the doors open there, and you're welcome to go in and have a look at the photos. There's also bathrooms in there and all sorts of things that you need to use them in the basement of the home is that are the things that I've got from some of the the family houses that were over here and a few other places around the property where I found things that are obviously old white people's things that I can remember seeing a lot of stuff in my mother's cupboard that are very similar to what we have there.

Unknown Speaker 41:15
Yeah, there, if you look at the aerial photographs, and I sort of pieced this together at this location here, I actually found by one day I was walking along the road here and and I usually do my digging after my chores are over each day and four o'clock or so the guy CV with plain white buckets and my garden pools and walking along here getting going to do a couple hours of digging. And I was going over to my main dig, which was around trying to be there. And I looked up through the woods here and I saw a bunch of daffodils it was in the spring. And I thought well, gee, you know, we planted a bunch of daffodils around here, but they wouldn't plan on way up in the bush. And so I thought there must have been a building up there. So I went up there and I started pushing around in the leaves on my Surface might and things and sure enough, glass started showing up. And then ceramic pieces started showing up. So that's how I found this Chinese big place. And when I this was the floor, I had the Euro photographs. And when I got the Euro photograph, sure enough, there was a hot showing in the photograph just a little uphill from that location. Just went over here, there was two hats, there was one right about where the sheep shed is there. And then there was another one where the sheep are arresting just by the fence there. And I started poking around in there. And immediately I got a piece of this Chinese teapot there. And I didn't recognize it as a key part of the time. But it was a very interesting looking ceramic piece. So it kind of got more serious about digging there. And that about half the pieces now on this pot, and plus some other nice pieces in there. Some of the Chinese rice bowls, the ones with the one of the column, not squiggles, but I mean like that is the actual name of the pottery. And when I was over in my show Intel over in Vancouver, one of the Chinese guys offered me 1000 bucks. So these things are have some value. But I was just going to end off here by saying that all these things that I found and all the letters and all the pictures and everything else, I'm really going to turn it over to the archives or over to the museum or whoever can take it at the end because it's part of Salt Springs history and really should be kept here somewhere. I think one other piece of source of information was you know, I contacted somebody archaeologists in Victoria, somewhat had some trepidation about doing that actually, because usually bureaucrats say no, you can't do anything before they say anything else. And but they've been pretty indifferent to the whole thing. I've been rather surprised. They sort of say well, oh yeah, another Chinese big. We got lots of those around DC and and say well, what's the legality about dealing and everything laughs on your own property? Go ahead. You sign if you find one piece of First Nations you got to stop. And so officially, I haven't found any first. And it surprises me a bit and of course they kind of they are quite disdainful of an amateur like myself digging around doing something like that. They call me a philosopher or a mood or a bottle of a bottle digger or something like that. And that one RCL I'll just that has taken a bit of an interest in helped me a bit as a curator for the Barkerville, a guy that's building Barkerville. And they just gone through, they put a big addition on Barkerville, which includes a big Chinese section, because it was more Chinese people on Barkerville than white people actually during the time. And so very begrudgingly, this guy sort of gives me some of his time sometimes and, and then insults me the rest of the time. But a guy is a real source of information when I stopped in to see him last winter. And I got this thesis, which is about two inches thick. And that was written by this fellow down in New Zealand who earned his PhD thesis by digging up, Chinese digs down in New Zealand. I'd never heard of Chinese, New Zealand, but they went over and apparently worked in the gold mines and things there. And so this guy went and dug up these pieces there. And he wrote this thesis, which is just like a catalogue of every piece that he dug up, including all the bones and the buttons, and this and that. So I got this great guide now, because all the pieces I'm finding are all the Chinese pieces are the same as a piece of C spine. And I'm able to identify them right there. He's got all the dimensions and the sketches and everything.

Unknown Speaker 46:33
No, I'm finding both finding both at one site I found over here, I buy that which was. Yes. And just just another, really a couple of other points to do with that. Somebody told me that there's a very good source of information. industrial sites and communities in DC if you go and look at the the old fire insurance maps, people probably know about that. But the fire insurance industry were the first people to map towns and communities and cities, they they started mapping the central London in the 1700s. Because they had their butts on the line in terms of what they were insuring, and everything else. So they wanted to have good records of the buildings that they're insuring and the materials that they're built out of and things like that. And so that kind of way of them, keeping track of their investments and keeping track of their clients spilled over to Canada. And there's there's a whole lot of wonderful fire insurance maps that are stored in the UBC Library. And I got a chance to go look at them a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, they don't have one of Cushing Cove, which I hope but they have these beautiful old English scripted maps all hand done and hand colored of many other communities and in BC, and one of the things Yeah, one of the things that I looked at one for beaver Cove, which is over in Vancouver Island, and one of the things they show is they have a bunkhouse. And then a cook house. And then they have a Japanese bunkhouse and a Japanese because they have a Chinese bunkhouse and a Chinese cook. So obviously, these ethnic groups live on their own. And we're quite separated in these places. I don't have the proof here on the map, but I certainly have the proof in their garbage because all the Japanese stuff is in one place and the Chinese stuff and another. And right, yeah, I've listened to these tapes. And, you know, some of that information is quite useful. But again, I mean, you know, if the guy was alive today, he could tell me all kinds of stuff. But at the time, they don't think these things are so ordinary that they don't think they're really of interest to people. So they don't really say very much nitty gritty things. Yes. Right. I don't haven't been up there for it. But if you've got a museum, there was some stuff and they haven't museum but all the Chinese stuff are back in the storeroom. So they hardly have any of it out. And they sort of have it all stuffed away. And yeah, they let me into the storeroom. Have a look at some of the stuff that you know up to now people aren't that interested in the Chinese and even the Chinese themselves the new immigrants and the old families well, yeah, that's part of it. And I think part of it is that the the ones that were, you know, were for four or five generation Canadians like us. They're a little bit ashamed of maybe their background that was a quite a modest back Background and they, you know Asians are very status conscious and all that sort of thing. So they don't really want to be reminded of it maybe. And all the new ones. They don't care about all the old immigrants. You know? I was a farmer at heart. Yeah. Everybody, everybody has this need to get out in the land, I think.

Unknown Speaker 50:27
Yeah. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 50:29
we have farm. We have farm status here and you know, with all the aquaculture activities, and then our sheep and yeah, we started that about four or five years ago. Yeah. Other money loser. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 50:49
Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 50:55
No, no, I'm just everything that you see here. I've done just myself. And I was going to end up my little talk here by saying that anybody would like to help me. Either with a deck or, or, or putting together pieces, I got this humongous jigsaw puzzle here with all these pieces of pottery and rice bowls and everything. You always find them in little chips, and then you have to glue them all together. So I've done quite a bit of quite a bit of it. You'll see my museum there that I mean, some people have asked me if I'm insane, or what can I say? Well, this is my thing that sort of keeps me from going insane. You know, we have a little we have the farm on tour here and they've in the summer and we give tours for 10 bucks for adults of aquaculture operations and also a big and playing so my big is becoming one of the main features of the tour actually people are more interested in that and a lot of the a lot of the aquaculture stuff, but if you have anybody that you want to bring down here anything we're only open in the summer to do that sort of thing. We're probably going to run it next year as well. And like an end up with a little commercial. We also have some seafood and some apples and some lamb and things like that for sale over there. If you're interested on the whale