The Promise of Paradise. Эндрю Скотт

in a winter rain that now fell in earnest, the whistle of the departing Princess Louise must have made a mournful sound.

      Saugstad and his fellow Lutherans were not the only Norwegians to attempt to set up a colony in British Columbia that year. A small group from Fargo, North Dakota—also in the Red River valley, and not far from Crookston—had heard great things about Canada’s west coast, as well. This company, which styled itself the Nova Co-operative Society, was less cohesive than Saugstad’s following. It lacked a charismatic leader and was not united by intense religious beliefs. But the community founded by the Fargo colonists—Quatsino, on northern Vancouver Island—has managed to retain a rare air of rugged pioneer independence.

      The original impetus for the colony of Quatsino—the name is a Kwakwaka’wakw word for the area’s original inhabitants—came from a Swede, Christian Nordstrom. He had attended the 1893 Chicago exposition and met an Englishman there named Jobe Leeson. Leeson, one of Quatsino Sound’s first settlers and a bit of a promoter, had a trading post at Winter Harbour, near the stormy west coast of Vancouver Island. He wanted to turn his remote sanctuary into a metropolis called Queenstown by selling lots to immigrants such as Chris Nordstrom.

      Nordstrom visited Victoria and liked what he saw of BC. He heard about Colonel Baker’s proposed immigration leases and, returning to North Dakota, convinced nine other families and single adults—about twenty people in all, mostly Norwegians—to emigrate. He and his fourteen-year-old son George quickly headed back to Victoria in the fall of 1894. Almost seventy-five years later, George Nordstrom would recall in a BC Outdoors interview with Will Dawson that his father’s “big argument was that the States was getting too crowded. British Columbia sounded just right.” By November, in collaboration with Leeson and another Quatsino Sound pioneer and trader named Edouard Frigon, the hardy band chartered the steam schooner Mischief and set off to look for a place to live.

      Queenstown did not suit their needs, nor did Koprino Harbour, where Frigon’s post was situated. Captain Foote of the Mischief suggested that the group spend the fast-approaching winter at Coal Harbour, near the head of Quatsino Sound, where they could stay in some empty mining cabins and explore the surrounding coves and channels by renting canoes from the local First Nations people. It seems incredible that these recent prairie farmers, with minimal supplies and tools, could adapt to such a wet, swampy, rocky place. Yet, by mid-December, they were writing to Colonel Baker, cheerfully asking him to set aside a stretch of shoreline between Quatsino Narrows and Drake Island, and also to cut a trail to the east coast of Vancouver Island, so that the potential colony could have access to shipping routes.

      Baker was supportive but noncommittal. He didn’t want to lose the new settlers. “It is important to make things go as smoothly as possible for them,” he wrote to a fellow politician, “as other Scandinavian colonies are to be encouraged to settle in other portions of the Province, and they make the best of immigrants.” But at the same time, the magic number of adults and families required to secure a lease had been pegged by the government at thirty, and the Nova Co-operative Society had not reached that mark.

      Several more prospective colonists arrived over the next few months. In March 1895, Nordstrom travelled to Victoria with a letter appointing him as the colony’s official representative. It bore twenty-three signatures, including those of the caretaker of the Coal Harbour mine and the captain of the Mischief. Eleven of the names were distinctly non-Scandinavian, giving the impression that the Nova group was becoming somewhat of a ragtag assembly in its increasingly desperate quest for a quorum.

      Colonel Baker, perhaps feeling that twenty-three settlers, with more on the way, was a good start, allowed the colonization attempt to proceed. Nordstrom returned in triumph with a government surveyor, Hugh Burnet, who spent the next three months laying out thirty half-quarter-sections (thirty-three hectares) around Hecate Cove and westward along the north shore of Quatsino Sound. As a result of constant entreaties by Nordstrom and Halvar Bergh, the colony’s main spokesmen, Baker directed Burnet to stay on an additional four months and survey a road between Coal Harbour and Hardy Bay on Queen Charlotte Strait. Many colonists earned two dollars a day over the summer working on this fourteen-kilometre link.

      The rest of their energy they put into cabin construction. Distrustful of tides, and all too familiar with the Red River’s frequent floods, they built well back from the shoreline. They shuttled back and forth between Coal Harbour and Quatsino by canoe, chancing the risky currents of Quatsino Narrows on each trip. By the fall of 1895, the settlers were permanently installed at Scandia Settlement, as they called Quatsino. They cleared land for vegetable gardens, brought in poultry and livestock, and hunted and fished to supplement their modest food stocks. A sawmill was erected and, in December, a merchant named Thomas Norgar arrived with a boatload of goods. His waterfront store soon expanded to include a post office and government wharf, and became the hub of the new-found community.

      In 1896, Scandia suffered a setback in its drive to attract more members. Great Britain and the US were threatening to go to war with each other over a minor South American border dispute; although the disagreement was short-lived, it discouraged prospective American settlers from joining former neighbours in a British colony. Halvar Bergh wrote articles singing the praises of Quatsino for Norwegian-language newspapers in Iowa and Washington, and pleaded for more colonists. Colonel Baker had given the group until the end of June 1897 to attract the thirty families and single adults it would need to receive the land for free. He warned Nordstrom that if the magic number was not reached, he and his compatriots would either have to leave or pay five dollars an acre for their property.

      The looming deadline hung like a rain cloud over the embryonic village. Its residents continued to work on the wagon road to Hardy Bay, which they considered essential for bringing in cattle. They managed to process and export to Victoria several shiploads of salted salmon. Friendly relations were maintained with First Nations neighbours. A school was built (which still stands), and the region’s rich mineral resources were explored. Across the sound at Comstock Mountain, for instance, Nordstrom, Bergh and another colonist staked the initial claims for what would later become the Yreka copper mine, which operated intermittently until the 1970s. But the colony’s correspondence with the authorities took on a forlorn, testy tone.

      “We are now afraid to advise anybody to come and get free land,” Bergh complained to Baker in January 1897, “as long as the possibilities are that the Government will charge for it. There are people here now who would not have come if they had thought they would have to pay for the land … As pioneers we have to endure many kinds of hardships, as you surely know, therefore we think it would be nothing but right to let us have the land free, the same as the rest of the colonies in the Province.” Bergh argued that Quatsino, with twenty families or single adults and a total population of forty-three, was close enough to the required size that the deadline should be extended or eliminated. Baker remained unmoved.