Emily Carr’s BC: Vancouver Island Preview

Emily Carr’s B.C.Book One

Vancouver Island

Also by Laurie Carter

Grandma Wears Hiking Boots: A Personal Guide to the Okanagan Valley Gifts of the Okanagan (with Bruce Kemp)

Emily Carr’s B.C.Book One

Vancouver Island From Victoria to Quatsino

A Travel Companion

Laurie Carter

Little White Publishing

Emily Carr’s B.C.Vancouver Island From Victoria to QuatsinoA Travel Companion© 2015 by Laurie Carter

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency. For a copyright license, visit: www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Carter, Laurie, author Emily Carr’s B.C. : Vancouver Island from Victoria to Quatsino : a travel companion / Laurie Carter.

Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-1-927878-01-9 (paperback) 1. Carter, Laurie--Travel--British Columbia--Vancouver Island. 2. Authors, Canadian--Travel--British Columbia--Vancouver Island. 3. Carr, Emily, 1871-1945--Travel--British Columbia--Vancouver Island. 4. Painters--Travel--British Columbia--Vancouver Island. 5. Carr, Emily, 1871-1945. 6. Painters--British Columbia--Biography. 7. Indians of North America--British Columbia. 8. Vancouver Island (B.C.)--Description and travel. I. Title.

ND249.C3C37 2015 759.11 C2015-901601-0

Printed and bound in Canada.

C016245

For Dad

4 4

Port Alberni

Goldstream Provincial Park

Pacific Ocean

Johnstone Strait

Strait of Georgia

Strait of Juan de Fuca

4

Sproat Lake Provincial Park

Parksville

Comox

Courtenay

Sidney

Nanaimo

Ladysmith

Gold River

Yuquot

Quatsino

Coal Harbour

Port McNeillTelegraph

Cove

Campbell River

Cape Mudge

Lake Cowichan

Port Renfrew

SookeMetchosin

Albert Head

Duncan

Alert Bay

Gwa’yasdams

‘Mi’mkwamlis

T’sadzis’nukwaame’

Fort RupertPort Hardy

Ucluelet

Long Beach

Tofino

Queen Charlotte Sound

28

18

19

1

1

1919

14Esquimalt Lagoon

The GorgeMt Douglas

Victoria

Vancouver

Locations of Emily Carr’s Vancouver Island sketching trips from 1895–1942 and places visited by the author.

Vancouver Island

Author’s Note

As a journalist, I’ve steered away from both scholarly interpretation and navel-gazing about my connection with Emily Carr. This book is a travel story inspired by a woman whose work—and especially whose life—I admire enormously.

Wherever possible, I’ve chosen to let Emily speak for herself in words gleaned from her journals, stories and letters. The problem this presents is how to deal with her off-the-cuff spelling and eccentric punctuation. Correcting her work would have meant littering the text with square brackets, which I think hurts readability and detracts from the Emily experience. So be prepared to work your way through peculiarly punctu-ated sentences and inconsistent spellings, particularly in relation to place names.

Spelling has also been an issue with some First Nations words where more than one version is found in common use. When I’ve had to make choices, I’ve done so in the spirit of respect for current First Nations practice and ease of understanding for the reader.

Also in an effort to ease the path of readers, I have taken a page from the Emily Carr stylebook and sometimes conflated events. The travel for this book was spread over three years, producing a very jumbled time-line. The material is, therefore, presented with an eye to smooth narrative.

Contents

ForewordEmily Discovered 1

Victoria Victoria Map 10Wharf Street 12Emily Carr House 20The House of All Sorts 29Beacon Hill Park 40Walking Tour 47Inner Harbour 56Sundry Sites 64Art Gallery and Museum 70Ross Bay Cemetery 78

Southern Vancouver IslandSouthern Vancouver Island Map 82Mount Douglas 84Goldstream 90The Gorge 96Fisgard Lighthouse and Esquimalt Lagoon 102Gravel Pit, Albert Head, Sooke Hills 109Port Renfrew 114Lake Cowichan 121Duncan 128

Western Vancouver IslandWestern Vancouver Island Map 136Ucluelet 138Hitacu 145Pacific Rim 158Sproat Lake and Port Alberni 168M.V. Frances Barkley 174M.V. Uchuck III 184Yuquot 194

Northern Vancouver IslandNorthern Vancouver Island Map 212Campbell River 214Cape Mudge 222Alert Bay 231Telegraph Cove 244Kwakwaka’wakw Villages 248Port Hardy and Fort Rupert 265Coal Harbour and Quatsino 274

Emily Carr Chronology 290

Further Reading 294

Foreword Emily Discovered

Thick cloud screened the mountaintops as the Zodiac skimmed among floating islands of bulb-headed kelp toward a crescent of sand and pebbles. Alone on the beach stood a Haida watchman,

her red jacket a tiny beacon of welcome in the greyscale world. Gravel crunched and I lurched forward as we grounded. One guide vaulted over the bow to hold the boat steady while his partner helped us offload. When my turn came I grabbed my camera and, graceful as a land-bound penguin, hoisted myself over the bloated gunwale to plop into the shal-lows. My husband, Bruce, stood alongside with a hand outstretched, ready to keep me upright as I splashed ashore in oversized borrowed gumboots.

One by one our group gathered, standing awkwardly in the dark green foul-weather gear and bulky orange life vests issued by the tour company. The watchman waited for us to assemble, looking considerably more comfortable in her red rain jacket, emblazoned with the symbol of three watching figures like the ones I’d seen atop Haida totem poles. Small and round, the woman could have been anywhere between forty and sixty, her grey hair and wise eyes completely at odds with baby-smooth skin.

“My name is Mary,” she said. “Welcome to K’uuna Llnagaay. You likely know this place as Skedans.”

Mary led us across a narrow neck of land to a second beach, where a small cedar-plank cabin faced the sea. Though a far cry from the tradi-tional great houses, it was still unmistakably Haida. There she introduced her husband, Walter, a grey-haired man with a neatly trimmed white

2 Emily Carr’s B.C. Vancouver Island

moustache, who took over as guide. As we toured the scant remains of a village once home to some thirteen hundred souls, I was barely aware of the conversations going on around me until Bruce’s voice penetrated, speaking to Walter.

“Do you know anything about the painter Emily Carr coming to Skedans?”

Walter looked back over his shoulder. “Yeah, she came,” he replied, in his slow, quiet way. “My grandparents brought her.”

Out of habit I wrote in my notebook: Grandparents brought Emily Carr.It would be so dramatic to say that the idea for this book burst from

my brain in that moment, but it wouldn’t be true. As Bruce and I contin-ued on our tour of Northern British Columbia, I was oblivious of the fact that we were visiting many more sites where Emily had sketched. The embarrassing truth is that I didn’t know much about her. As a Southern Ontario child of the ’60s, my sense of art appreciation could easily be encapsulated in one phrase: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven.

I remember my Grade 5 teacher, a severe spinster who showed pas-sion for nothing except her rhapsodized accounts of Thomson packing his easel, paints and canvases into the wilds of Algonquin Park. Every school I ever attended was so liberally adorned with scraggly-pine-cling-ing-to-desolate-rock prints, I now wonder if somebody in the ministry had a relative in the art reproduction business.

Not only did I learn nothing of Emily’s paintings, I’m further embar-rassed to admit that I made it all the way through university without having a clue that Emily Carr ever wrote anything more ambitious than a shopping list. Somewhere along the line, however, she did enter my consciousness, if somewhat obliquely. By the time I moved to British Co-lumbia decades later, I was at least vaguely aware of an art school bearing her name, though I couldn’t have told you with certainty whether it was in Victoria or Vancouver.

Bruce finally made the direct introduction. While he was another product of that Group of Seven indoctrination, he had managed to ac-quire a broad knowledge of art history. On one occasion Emily Carr came up in conversation and, realizing my woeful ignorance, he took matters in hand. “There’s a Carr exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery,” he announced. “We’re going.”

A visit to the gallery was a lot more complicated than a quick ride on

Emily Discovered 3

the Skytrain, but our conversation took place in one of the few months when crossing the two mountain passes between the Okanagan Valley and the Coast wasn’t likely to involve a life-threatening weather event. I agreed to go, more for the prospect of a weekend in Vancouver than any expectation of enlightenment.

What happened in that gallery shook me. Although I admit to emotional outpourings over weddings and sappy commercials, I was astounded to find myself standing in the middle of a public space so overwhelmed I could barely see Emily’s trees for my tears. Bruce beamed. Not personally a big Carr fan, he was nonetheless delighted to see me react so strongly to any art. Expanding my cultural horizons even further, he added the astounding nugget that this renowned artist was also an acclaimed writer.

I had to find out more. When we left the gallery, instead of following the pattern of any normal woman who’d landed on Robson Street for the first time in a couple of years, instead of ditching Bruce to shop ’til my Visa stroked out, I steered him toward the nearest bookstore.

The collection I bought contained four of Emily’s books: Klee Wyck, The Book of Small, The House of All Sorts and Growing Pains. Realizing that Emily and I shared an interest in First Nations culture, I dove into Klee Wyck with high expectations. I read the foreword and hurried on to the first story, Ucluelet. That’s when things began to go wrong. I found myself jumping up to feed the cats, start a load of laundry, put the kettle on — anything but reading Emily’s words. Although I forced myself to continue with Tanoo, I simply couldn’t find the same connection I’d felt with her art. Truly disappointed, I abandoned the book without noticing that the next story was titled Skedans.

If I’d read on, the penny might have dropped when I received a press release announcing the opening of the Haida Heritage Centre on Haida Gwaii. Regardless, I was certainly interested in the centre and resolved to make a trip to the islands. It took a couple of years and Emily was no-where in my thoughts when I finally did make the arrangements. Armed with some preliminary researched on the Haida, I organized a tour and set up a visit to the abandoned village of K’uuna Llnagaay, a.k.a. Skedans.

It fell to Bruce to ask Walter Russ the question that started me thinking about the artist/author once more. From then on Emily kept poking the back of my brain, bossily demanding attention. By the time we returned


from the northern trip, I knew I had to give her another chance. This time when I opened Klee Wyck, the phone went unanswered, meals were left uncooked, and the cats nearly starved.

Maybe it was because I’d now seen some of the places in her stories for myself. Who knows? All I can say is that I powered through all four books and went looking for more.

When I’d read every published word written by Emily — stories, jour-nals, letters — I started on everything written about her. I smashed my piggy bank to splurge on art books and started plotting more gallery visits. Bruce was ecstatic. Before long I could spot an Emily Carr half blindfolded and her life story was so familiar I was beginning to think of her as “Millie.”

She was born in Victoria on a snowy December night in 1871. Apart from the few years she lived in Vancouver and studied in San Francisco, London and Paris, Emily spent her whole life within walking distance of the Carr family home, dying in a nursing home just a block away in March of 1945.

Emily soldiered through most of her career without much recognition and even lived her own version of the starving-artist-in-garret cliché, although she happened to own the attic in question. The Emily Carr caricature sprang from these years. Everybody I talked to knew at least one of the stories: stogie-smoking landlady hanging out the window of her apartment house, shouting abuse at tenants; chairs suspended by pulleys from the ceiling of her studio; plump middle-aged lady surrounded by bounding dogs, pushing a wicker baby carriage around the streets of Victoria with a costumed monkey perched on her shoulder. Even if her work had never been recognized, people were going to remember a character like that.

When Canada’s eastern art establishment finally woke up and smelled the cedars, Emily was celebrating her fifty-sixth birthday. Even then big money didn’t come rolling in and nagging self-doubt left her constantly questioning her work, always striving to go deeper, to express more. She would have been gobsmacked at the notion of one of her paintings, The Crazy Stair, selling for nearly $3.4 million. Apart from the enormity of such a sum to a woman who had battled poverty much of her life, Emily would still have been second-guessing the work itself.

This constant striving drove her time and again to the Native villages,

Emily Discovered 5

forests and seashores where she found material for the two great themes of her work. The first was her self-appointed mission to record the mon-umental art of British Columbia’s indigenous peoples before it vanished, swept aside by settler society and government policy. “I shall come up every summer among the villages of B.C.,” she wrote, “and I shall do all the totem poles & villages I can before they are a thing of the past.”

Emily made a strong start, yet survival trumped art during the “bitter years” and the mission faltered. After her “discovery” and initial contact with the Group of Seven, she came back to the subject in a different way. Before, “I worked for history and cold fact,” she wrote. “Next time I paint Indians I’m going off on a tangent tear. There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness, the Western breath of go-to-the-devil-if-you-don’t-like-it, the eternal spaceness of it. Oh the West! I’m of it and I love it.”

Emily Carr was about to become British Columbia’s most enduring cheerleader. “I know they are building an art worthy of our great coun-try, and I want to have my share, to put in a little spoke for the West, one woman holding up my end.”

Over time she moved beyond the spirituality of Native motifs to her second great theme: the spirituality of nature itself. “What language do they speak,” she asked herself, “those silent, awe-filled spaces? I do not know. Wait and listen; you shall hear by and by. I long to hear and yet I’m half afraid. I think perhaps I shall find God here, the God I’ve longed and hunted for and failed to find.”

Emily’s search brought the forests, landscapes and indigenous peo-ples of British Columbia to an international audience, first as Emily Carr the artist, then as Emily Carr the writer. In so doing she’d become Emily Carr the traveller, and what a traveller! By my calculation, the woman logged over twenty thousand kilometres in British Columbia alone. She made her way to settlements, canneries, and Native villages in Haida Gwaii, Naas and Skeena country, and on both coasts of Vancouver Island, as well as venturing into the Interior.

This intrigued me. I found myself wanting to learn what lay behind her work. I wanted to follow her path; to see if I could find echoes of her inspiration; to personally encounter the peoples and places; to see what the decades had changed and what remained the same. I wanted to thoroughly explore the British Columbia she knew so well. The trip


on which I met Walter Russ was just a tease. Everything I’d learned since simply underscored how little I knew, although now at least I had an idea of what questions to ask and what leads to pursue.

I loaded Emily’s journals and stories into my iPad. They would be my guide, along with some important help from biographies and letters. The only problem with this approach was Emily’s insistence on telling a good story. Not that she fabricated events; she simply didn’t let pesky details like names and dates get in the way. Along with the inevitable changes wrought by the passage of so much time, these omissions pro-duced some intriguing mysteries and some of the best encounters of my travels with Emily Carr.

Emily Carr’s BC: Vancouver Island Preview

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