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"The hanging of the Tsilhqot'in Chiefs in 1864 is a tragedy which, if we are to move forward with respect and in good faith, must be recognized." - B.C. Attorney-General Colin Gablemann
Near the outset of High Slack: Waddington's Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (1996), Judith Williams describes the strange, jelly-like substance known as Bute wax that appeared on the waters of Bute Inlet and Toba Inlet during the winters of 1922, 1936, 1950, 1951, 1955 and 1956. Bute wax had absolutely nothing to do with Alfred Waddington's attempt to build a road to the Cariboo gold fields, commencing at the end of 48-mile Bute Inlet, and nor does it explain why six Chilcotin Indians were hanged for the murders of fourteen members of Waddington's road crew and seven other whites in the area. But Williams introduces Bute wax to serve notice she intends to explore the murky middle ground of history in the realm of creative non-fiction: Everything can't be explained and mystery is an important part of life.
After describing her own explorations of Bute Inlet - mentioning a Homfray Channel sea serpent and petroglyphs - Williams recreates a journal kept by surveyor Robert Homfray whose Hudson's Bay Company contingent of six visited Bute Inlet in the winter of 1861 with only two muskets and one canoe. Shivering beneath 13,260 ft. Mt. Waddington's ice fields, 100 miles northwest of Vancouver, Homfray's expedition was easily over-powered by "six half naked Indians." Homfray was rescued by the local chief of the Cla oosh tribe who guided them to the Homathko River. Relying on Aboriginals for food, protection and transportation back to Victoria, Homfray was barely able to complete his two-month journey-whereupon the Admiralty in London, in its wisdom, named Homfray Channel, near Desolation Sound, in his honour.
Looking for vestiges of Waddington's infamous road, Williams enters the Homathko River at high slack. "High slack, when the tide has risen to its highest point and pauses before it ebbs, is not just a good time to fish. I have used it as a metaphor for a pause in ideological currents, a time to collect ourselves and perceive, not just what we have been taught to see and know, but to imagine what might be if our socially acquired filters evaporated."
Halfway through the book, the author has yet to describe the so called massacre of 1864. Instead we learn tidbits about Alfred Pendrell Waddington. Born in 1804 in England, Alfred Waddington was educated in France and Germany. He arrived in Victoria in 1858 and published the first book to be published by a named author in the new Vancouver Island Colony. Waddington helped draft Victoria's charter and was a superintendent of schools. The Canadian government bought his surveys for a cross-Canada rail route designed to terminate at Bute Inlet. Waddington obtained a contract from Colonel Moody in 1862 to construct a mule trail from the head of Bute Inlet to the Fraser River, to be completed in 12 months. Waddington's spent his final years in Ottawa, where he died, trying to convince the federal government to build a transcontinental railroad. The government of John A. Macdonald subsequently began construction of the CPR, taking a route to Burrard Inlet instead of Bute Inlet. Today the highest mountain in the province is named in Waddington's honour.
In April of 1863, Waddington's 91-man party of roadbuilders left Victoria for Bute Inlet aboard the steamer Enterprise. After members of Waddington's road crew were butchered in their sleep after they had reached their destination, news of the attack shocked Victoria. Governor Seymour issued a proclamation calling for volunteers to help apprehend the perpetrators, dead or alive. Nearly 150 men, including many Indians and Governor Seymour, chased Chilcotin through the mountains until white vengeance was satisfied. Williams indicates the Chilcotin were justified in defending their territory from Waddington's business plan, according to her representation of Homfray's journal, "The terrible massacre was caused by the ill treatment of the Indian women by Mr. Waddington's party who were making the road." This is the central thesis of Slack Tide. Conjuring forth an operatic chorus of weeping women, Williams notes that dozens of male participants in the events of 1864 can be named, but it is difficult to track the names and fates of any women involved. "Both historical and contemporary native statements," she concludes, "force one to attend to the claim that the sexual abuse of the daughter of a chief caused the war." In the summer of 1993, the Nemiah Band of the Tsilhqot'in Nation (the Xeni qwet'in) demanded from the Province of British Columbia an official pardon for the hangings overseen by Judge Begbie. An official apology was delivered. Williams' book arose from an invitation by Rosa Ho, curator at the UBC Anthropology Museum, for Williams to create an installation of paintings, sculptures and "book works" generated by her upcoast and archival explorations in and around Bute Inlet. Williams, Ho and Greg Brass also organized a symposium of 150 people at UBC First Nations House of Learning in 1994 called "The Tsilhqot'in War of 1864 and the 1993 Cariboo Chilcotin Justice Inquiry." Cumulatively High Slack is like a mural. A variety of elements are depicted and it's up to the eye of the beholder to determine where emphasis ought to be placed. Different readers will make different interpretations.
In Aboriginal cultures pictographs have a variety of functions, from signaling occupation to authenticating an event. In 1998, Dzawada'enuxw artist Marianne Nicolson scaled a vertical rock face in Kingcome Inlet to paint the 28 foot x 38 foot pictograph to mark the continued vitality of her ancestral village four miles away on the Kingcome River. Her pictograph is a modern and comprehensible work that incorporates traditional iconography taught to her by her uncle. Specifically, it contains the image of Kwadilikala, a wolf origin figure still considered an ancestor of Gwa'yi villagers. This new pictograph is located 100 metres from rock art done by Mollie Wilson, at Petley Point, in 1921 and 1927, to commemorate an illegal potlatch. Specifically, the Petley Point painting depicts Kwakwaka'wakw ceremonial 'coppers' confronting cattle bought from Ernest Halliday, founder of the oldest white settler family in Kingcome Inlet, whose brother William Halliday was the local Indian Agent charged with enforcing the potlatch ban. After Marianne Nicolson invited Judith Williams, a former Fine Arts instructor at UBC, to observe the process of creating the first new Kingcome pictograph to appear in 60 years, Williams wrote Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs, 1893-1998 (2001).
Judith Williams is also the author of Dynamite Stories (2003), a collection of oral history tales about how dynamite played a role in the lives of people in the area of Redonda Island and Refuge Cove where Williams befriended longtime resident Doris Hope. This collection includes a detailed description of the purposeful destruction of Ripple Rock on April 15, 1958, the most famous explosion in B.C. history.
Since 1989, Judith Williams has travelled along the West Coast in her two boats, Tetacus and Adriatic Sea, leading to Clam Garden (2006), an examination of Aboriginal mariculture that was informed by Klahoose elder Elizabeth Henry's descriptions of the clam terraces at Waiatt Bay on Quadra Island. Williams has looked at clam gardens in the Broughton Archipelago, Waiatt Bay and Gorge Harbour on Cortes Island to challenge the notion that pre-Contact Aboriginals on the coast were exclusively hunter-gatherers.
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Cougar Companions: Bute Inlet Country and the Legendary Schnarrs
(Raincoast Chronicles no. 24) by Judith Williams
(Harbour Publishing $26.95)
Review by Valerie Green
Judith Williams in her introduction to Cougar Companions, states that, “Of the settlers, prospectors, trappers, mountaineers and loggers who came to British Columbia’s remote Bute Inlet between the 1890s and the 1940s, few remained long.”
August Schnarr was the exception. Schnarr logged, and trapped in Bute Inlet for decades but he was also a photographer of note. His photo collection is probably his most important legacy. His pioneering story has been delightfully told by Williams.
Using Schnarr’s Kodak photographs and meticulous research, Judith Williams was able to tell the Schnarr’s family history, along with stories of other pioneering Bute residents. Possibly the most remarkable part of the story is told through the pictures in Schnarr’s albums of his three daughters (Marion, Pansy, and Pearl) with their pet cougars.
Williams reports that Pansy Schnarr, in a later interview with Maud Emery of the Victoria Times Colonist newspaper, recalled: “They were nice pets, we could pet them and they’d purr just like a cat, and they kept pawing at you. They didn’t like anybody but us three . . . they didn’t like my dad at all. They were just like cats to us; we didn’t think of them as anything special, nothing but a bunch of work.”
Today it is hard to imagine anyone considering having a cougar as a pet!
Judith Williams’ story of the Schnarr family begins with a telephone call she received in 2010 from Glen Macklin, saying he was Pearl Schnarr’s son and grandson of August Schnarr. He sounded angry because he claimed she had a photograph album in her possession that really belonged to him. The album in question had indeed been given to Williams several years earlier by another grandson of August Schnarr, the son of Marion Schnarr Parker. At the time, he had given her permission to use the album for research she was doing on a Bute Inlet project for the Cortes Island Museum.
“Well,” Glen Macklin claimed in that telephone call. “It’s not his … he’s not part of the family.” Williams remembered then that there was some dispute about whether or not Marion was actually August’s daughter.
Once this was all sorted out and Macklin slowly realized how much fascination Bute Inlet held for Judith Williams, “his voice softened and he became interested.” He wanted to meet with her. And that was the beginning.
Initially, there were actually three albums made by Marion Schnarr Parker; one each for her sisters, Pansy and Pearl, and one for her father. Once Judith Williams had agreed to return the album in her possession to Macklin’s mother, Pearl, they both agreed to tell her the whole story of life in Bute and between them they were able to piece the history together.
The book is not only flawlessly researched but beautifully designed and all the reproduced images are exceptional. I particularly enjoyed the style used at the beginning of each chapter with larger font, before dipping back into regular size font. It manages to draw the reader into the story in an unusual way.
I feel that this work will be used by other historians for research purposes, as well as being read right through by others as a story of pioneering life in Bute Inlet.
I particularly enjoyed the many colourful descriptions of Bute Inlet such as “nothing small ever happens in Bute. The wind blows the hardest, the temperature drops the quickest and furthest. The whole place is Guinness World Record material.”
Or, as Pansy Schnarr recalled, “It blew like heck up there all the time, summer and winter. I don’t know what he (August Schnarr) liked that awful place for, but that’s what he chose. The older he got, the more Bute belonged to him.”
Judith Williams of Cortes Island was well-qualified for this undertaking as author of High Slack: Waddington’s Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (1996), Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs 1863-1989 (2001), Dynamite Stories (2003), and Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada’s West Coast (2006), all from New Star Books.
Her research for Cougar Companions was carried out with her husband on many trips to Bute Inlet and the Homathko Valley where she conducted numerous interviews and searched through old diaries and photo albums. Schnarr’s collection of photographs also shows float houses and other residents with their fish catches, boats, log booms, and steam donkeys.
Cougar Companions captures the hard ordeals of homesteading on the remote B.C. coast and is told evocatively through the use of those interviews, diaries, and oral histories and will not disappoint. 9781550178623
Valerie Green has written more than twenty non-fiction historical and true-crime books. Her debut novel Providence (Sandra Jonas Publishing) will be the first in a series of four novels depicting a family saga arising from early B.C. history called The McBride Chronicles.
+++
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
High Slack: Waddington's Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864
BOOKS:
Williams, Judith. High Slack: Waddington's Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (New Star, 1996).
Williams, Judith. Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs, 1893-1998 (New Star, 2001).
Williams, Judith. Dynamite Stories (New Star, Transmontanus 11, 2003).
Williams, Judith. Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada's West Coast (New Star, 2006). 1-55420-023-7 $19
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2006] "Local History" "Anthropology" "First Nations" "Indianology"
Near the outset of High Slack: Waddington's Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (1996), Judith Williams describes the strange, jelly-like substance known as Bute wax that appeared on the waters of Bute Inlet and Toba Inlet during the winters of 1922, 1936, 1950, 1951, 1955 and 1956. Bute wax had absolutely nothing to do with Alfred Waddington's attempt to build a road to the Cariboo gold fields, commencing at the end of 48-mile Bute Inlet, and nor does it explain why six Chilcotin Indians were hanged for the murders of fourteen members of Waddington's road crew and seven other whites in the area. But Williams introduces Bute wax to serve notice she intends to explore the murky middle ground of history in the realm of creative non-fiction: Everything can't be explained and mystery is an important part of life.
After describing her own explorations of Bute Inlet - mentioning a Homfray Channel sea serpent and petroglyphs - Williams recreates a journal kept by surveyor Robert Homfray whose Hudson's Bay Company contingent of six visited Bute Inlet in the winter of 1861 with only two muskets and one canoe. Shivering beneath 13,260 ft. Mt. Waddington's ice fields, 100 miles northwest of Vancouver, Homfray's expedition was easily over-powered by "six half naked Indians." Homfray was rescued by the local chief of the Cla oosh tribe who guided them to the Homathko River. Relying on Aboriginals for food, protection and transportation back to Victoria, Homfray was barely able to complete his two-month journey-whereupon the Admiralty in London, in its wisdom, named Homfray Channel, near Desolation Sound, in his honour.
Looking for vestiges of Waddington's infamous road, Williams enters the Homathko River at high slack. "High slack, when the tide has risen to its highest point and pauses before it ebbs, is not just a good time to fish. I have used it as a metaphor for a pause in ideological currents, a time to collect ourselves and perceive, not just what we have been taught to see and know, but to imagine what might be if our socially acquired filters evaporated."
Halfway through the book, the author has yet to describe the so called massacre of 1864. Instead we learn tidbits about Alfred Pendrell Waddington. Born in 1804 in England, Alfred Waddington was educated in France and Germany. He arrived in Victoria in 1858 and published the first book to be published by a named author in the new Vancouver Island Colony. Waddington helped draft Victoria's charter and was a superintendent of schools. The Canadian government bought his surveys for a cross-Canada rail route designed to terminate at Bute Inlet. Waddington obtained a contract from Colonel Moody in 1862 to construct a mule trail from the head of Bute Inlet to the Fraser River, to be completed in 12 months. Waddington's spent his final years in Ottawa, where he died, trying to convince the federal government to build a transcontinental railroad. The government of John A. Macdonald subsequently began construction of the CPR, taking a route to Burrard Inlet instead of Bute Inlet. Today the highest mountain in the province is named in Waddington's honour.
In April of 1863, Waddington's 91-man party of roadbuilders left Victoria for Bute Inlet aboard the steamer Enterprise. After members of Waddington's road crew were butchered in their sleep after they had reached their destination, news of the attack shocked Victoria. Governor Seymour issued a proclamation calling for volunteers to help apprehend the perpetrators, dead or alive. Nearly 150 men, including many Indians and Governor Seymour, chased Chilcotin through the mountains until white vengeance was satisfied. Williams indicates the Chilcotin were justified in defending their territory from Waddington's business plan, according to her representation of Homfray's journal, "The terrible massacre was caused by the ill treatment of the Indian women by Mr. Waddington's party who were making the road." This is the central thesis of Slack Tide. Conjuring forth an operatic chorus of weeping women, Williams notes that dozens of male participants in the events of 1864 can be named, but it is difficult to track the names and fates of any women involved. "Both historical and contemporary native statements," she concludes, "force one to attend to the claim that the sexual abuse of the daughter of a chief caused the war." In the summer of 1993, the Nemiah Band of the Tsilhqot'in Nation (the Xeni qwet'in) demanded from the Province of British Columbia an official pardon for the hangings overseen by Judge Begbie. An official apology was delivered. Williams' book arose from an invitation by Rosa Ho, curator at the UBC Anthropology Museum, for Williams to create an installation of paintings, sculptures and "book works" generated by her upcoast and archival explorations in and around Bute Inlet. Williams, Ho and Greg Brass also organized a symposium of 150 people at UBC First Nations House of Learning in 1994 called "The Tsilhqot'in War of 1864 and the 1993 Cariboo Chilcotin Justice Inquiry." Cumulatively High Slack is like a mural. A variety of elements are depicted and it's up to the eye of the beholder to determine where emphasis ought to be placed. Different readers will make different interpretations.
In Aboriginal cultures pictographs have a variety of functions, from signaling occupation to authenticating an event. In 1998, Dzawada'enuxw artist Marianne Nicolson scaled a vertical rock face in Kingcome Inlet to paint the 28 foot x 38 foot pictograph to mark the continued vitality of her ancestral village four miles away on the Kingcome River. Her pictograph is a modern and comprehensible work that incorporates traditional iconography taught to her by her uncle. Specifically, it contains the image of Kwadilikala, a wolf origin figure still considered an ancestor of Gwa'yi villagers. This new pictograph is located 100 metres from rock art done by Mollie Wilson, at Petley Point, in 1921 and 1927, to commemorate an illegal potlatch. Specifically, the Petley Point painting depicts Kwakwaka'wakw ceremonial 'coppers' confronting cattle bought from Ernest Halliday, founder of the oldest white settler family in Kingcome Inlet, whose brother William Halliday was the local Indian Agent charged with enforcing the potlatch ban. After Marianne Nicolson invited Judith Williams, a former Fine Arts instructor at UBC, to observe the process of creating the first new Kingcome pictograph to appear in 60 years, Williams wrote Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs, 1893-1998 (2001).
Judith Williams is also the author of Dynamite Stories (2003), a collection of oral history tales about how dynamite played a role in the lives of people in the area of Redonda Island and Refuge Cove where Williams befriended longtime resident Doris Hope. This collection includes a detailed description of the purposeful destruction of Ripple Rock on April 15, 1958, the most famous explosion in B.C. history.
Since 1989, Judith Williams has travelled along the West Coast in her two boats, Tetacus and Adriatic Sea, leading to Clam Garden (2006), an examination of Aboriginal mariculture that was informed by Klahoose elder Elizabeth Henry's descriptions of the clam terraces at Waiatt Bay on Quadra Island. Williams has looked at clam gardens in the Broughton Archipelago, Waiatt Bay and Gorge Harbour on Cortes Island to challenge the notion that pre-Contact Aboriginals on the coast were exclusively hunter-gatherers.
+++
Cougar Companions: Bute Inlet Country and the Legendary Schnarrs
(Raincoast Chronicles no. 24) by Judith Williams
(Harbour Publishing $26.95)
Review by Valerie Green
Judith Williams in her introduction to Cougar Companions, states that, “Of the settlers, prospectors, trappers, mountaineers and loggers who came to British Columbia’s remote Bute Inlet between the 1890s and the 1940s, few remained long.”
August Schnarr was the exception. Schnarr logged, and trapped in Bute Inlet for decades but he was also a photographer of note. His photo collection is probably his most important legacy. His pioneering story has been delightfully told by Williams.
Using Schnarr’s Kodak photographs and meticulous research, Judith Williams was able to tell the Schnarr’s family history, along with stories of other pioneering Bute residents. Possibly the most remarkable part of the story is told through the pictures in Schnarr’s albums of his three daughters (Marion, Pansy, and Pearl) with their pet cougars.
Williams reports that Pansy Schnarr, in a later interview with Maud Emery of the Victoria Times Colonist newspaper, recalled: “They were nice pets, we could pet them and they’d purr just like a cat, and they kept pawing at you. They didn’t like anybody but us three . . . they didn’t like my dad at all. They were just like cats to us; we didn’t think of them as anything special, nothing but a bunch of work.”
Today it is hard to imagine anyone considering having a cougar as a pet!
Judith Williams’ story of the Schnarr family begins with a telephone call she received in 2010 from Glen Macklin, saying he was Pearl Schnarr’s son and grandson of August Schnarr. He sounded angry because he claimed she had a photograph album in her possession that really belonged to him. The album in question had indeed been given to Williams several years earlier by another grandson of August Schnarr, the son of Marion Schnarr Parker. At the time, he had given her permission to use the album for research she was doing on a Bute Inlet project for the Cortes Island Museum.
“Well,” Glen Macklin claimed in that telephone call. “It’s not his … he’s not part of the family.” Williams remembered then that there was some dispute about whether or not Marion was actually August’s daughter.
Once this was all sorted out and Macklin slowly realized how much fascination Bute Inlet held for Judith Williams, “his voice softened and he became interested.” He wanted to meet with her. And that was the beginning.
Initially, there were actually three albums made by Marion Schnarr Parker; one each for her sisters, Pansy and Pearl, and one for her father. Once Judith Williams had agreed to return the album in her possession to Macklin’s mother, Pearl, they both agreed to tell her the whole story of life in Bute and between them they were able to piece the history together.
The book is not only flawlessly researched but beautifully designed and all the reproduced images are exceptional. I particularly enjoyed the style used at the beginning of each chapter with larger font, before dipping back into regular size font. It manages to draw the reader into the story in an unusual way.
I feel that this work will be used by other historians for research purposes, as well as being read right through by others as a story of pioneering life in Bute Inlet.
I particularly enjoyed the many colourful descriptions of Bute Inlet such as “nothing small ever happens in Bute. The wind blows the hardest, the temperature drops the quickest and furthest. The whole place is Guinness World Record material.”
Or, as Pansy Schnarr recalled, “It blew like heck up there all the time, summer and winter. I don’t know what he (August Schnarr) liked that awful place for, but that’s what he chose. The older he got, the more Bute belonged to him.”
Judith Williams of Cortes Island was well-qualified for this undertaking as author of High Slack: Waddington’s Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (1996), Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs 1863-1989 (2001), Dynamite Stories (2003), and Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada’s West Coast (2006), all from New Star Books.
Her research for Cougar Companions was carried out with her husband on many trips to Bute Inlet and the Homathko Valley where she conducted numerous interviews and searched through old diaries and photo albums. Schnarr’s collection of photographs also shows float houses and other residents with their fish catches, boats, log booms, and steam donkeys.
Cougar Companions captures the hard ordeals of homesteading on the remote B.C. coast and is told evocatively through the use of those interviews, diaries, and oral histories and will not disappoint. 9781550178623
Valerie Green has written more than twenty non-fiction historical and true-crime books. Her debut novel Providence (Sandra Jonas Publishing) will be the first in a series of four novels depicting a family saga arising from early B.C. history called The McBride Chronicles.
+++
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
High Slack: Waddington's Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864
BOOKS:
Williams, Judith. High Slack: Waddington's Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (New Star, 1996).
Williams, Judith. Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time: Kingcome Inlet Pictographs, 1893-1998 (New Star, 2001).
Williams, Judith. Dynamite Stories (New Star, Transmontanus 11, 2003).
Williams, Judith. Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada's West Coast (New Star, 2006). 1-55420-023-7 $19
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2006] "Local History" "Anthropology" "First Nations" "Indianology"
Articles: 2 Articles for this author
Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time (New Star $28)
Article
In 1998 Dzawada'enuxw artist Marianne Nicolson scaled a vertical rock face in Kingcome Inlet to paint the 28 foot x 38 foot pictograph that marks the continued vitality of her ancestral village on the Kingcome River.
Pictographs are rock paintings most commonly done by Natives. Many pictographs are indecipherable even to ancestors of the artist. Knowledge becomes scarce when elders die, leaving no written explanations of the intricate and iconographic designs.
In Native cultures pictographs have a variety of functions, from signaling occupation to authenticating an event. Nicolson's pictograph is a modern and comprehensible work that incorporates traditional iconography taught by her uncle. It contains the image of Kwadilikala, a wolf origin figure still considered an ancestor of Gwa'yi villagers.
Nicolson invited Judith Williams, author of High Slack and Dynamite Stories, to observe the process of creation during several visits. Williams, a former Fine Arts instructor at UBC, considers Nicolson's work to be the largest and most finely painted pictograph on the coast in Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time (New Star $28).
After spending much time in the last remaining fully occupied Kwakwaka'waka inlet village called Gwa'yi, Judith Williams was also able to speak with a Gwa'yi man who attended the (illegal) potlatch that a 1920s pictograph commemorates. Molly Wilson allegedly undertook this large, two-part work in 1921 and 1927. (Potlatching was banned by the federal government in 1884 and actively suppressed as of the 1890s. This ban was dropped from the Indian Act legislation of 1951.)
The 1921 face of the pictograph portrays a Native copper. "It's a cross between a gold brick and a bank note,"; says Williams, "and it functioned as both an aesthetic piece and a system of currency in the Native economy.";
The 1927 side shows eleven white cows approaching the copper-an oddity for a culture that didn't keep cows. Williams unravels the story of this painting as the flashpoint of Native-White relations in the middle of the potlatch ban.
Williams believes that studying the limited information available on pictographs might lead to an enhanced ability to interpret other pictographs not yet dated or understood. Her concerns are both artistic and potentially political.
"I was delighted to find work in the wilderness,"; says Williams. "Pictographs are conceptually interesting-and not just as Native iconography-but as paintings period.";
After studying many paintings all over B.C., Williams discovered she could never stay fixed on the image; she was always looking back and forth between the image and the surface. "The art is embedded in the landscape; embedded in the stone,"; she says. "Observing pictographs, I find myself wondering where one goes with painting in contemporary art, with the notion of the flip between image and ground.";
Born in Vancouver in 1940, Judith Williams has been a member of the Refuge Cove Land and House Co-op since its inception. In High Slack (1995) she explored the conflict between Natives and newcomers in 1864 when entrepreneur Alfred Waddington tried to build a road from Bute Inlet to the Cariboo gold fields. 0-921586-78-7
[Lisa Kerr / BCBW 2001]
High Slack: Waddington’s Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (New Star $16)
Article
At the beginning of Judith Williams' High Slack: Waddington's Gold Road and the Bute Inlet Massacre of 1864 (New Star $16) we learn a strange, jelly like substance called Bute wax appeared on the waters of Bute Inlet and Toba Inlet during the winters of 1922, 1936, 1950, 1951, 1955 and 1956.
Bute wax has nothing to do with Alfred Waddington's attempt to build a road to the Cariboo gold fields, commencing at the end of 48 mile Bute Inlet. Nor does it explain why six Chilcotin Indians were hanged for the murders of fourteen members of Waddington's road crew and seven other whites in the area.
But Williams introduces Bute wax to serve notice she intends to explore the murky middle ground of history in the realm of creative non fiction: Everything can't be explained and mystery is an important part of life.
After describing her own explorations of Bute Inlet - mentioning a Homfray Channel sea serpent and petroglyphs - Williams recreates a journal kept by surveyor Robert Homfray. His Hudson Bay Company contingent of six visited Bute Inlet in the winter of 1861 with only two muskets and one canoe.
Shivering beneath 13,260 ft. Mt. Waddington's ice fields, 100 miles northwest of Vancouver, Homfray's expedition was easily over powered by 'six half naked Indians'. Homfray was rescued by the local chief of the Cla oosh tribe who guided them to the Homathko River. Relying on Indians for food, protection and transportation back to Victoria, Homfray was barely able to complete his two month journey. The Admiralty in London named Homfray Channel, near Desolation Sound, in his honour.
Looking for vestiges of Waddington's infamous road, Williams enters the Homathko River at high slack. "High slack, when the tide has risen to its highest point and pauses before it ebbs, is not just a good time to fish,"; she writes. "I have used it as a metaphor for a pause in ideological currents, a time to collect ourselves and perceive, not just what we have been taught to see and know, but to imagine what might be if our socially acquired filters evaporated.";
Halfway through the book, the author has yet to describe the so called massacre of 1864. Instead we learn tidbits about Alfred Pendrell Waddington.
Born in 1804 in England, Alfred Waddington was educated in France and Germany. He arrived in Victoria in 1858 and that year published the first book in the Vancouver Island Colony, The Fraser River Mines Vindicated. As Vancouver Island's first author, Waddington helped draft Victoria's charter and was a superintendent of schools. The Canadian government bought his surveys for a cross Canada rail route designed to terminate at Bute Inlet. Waddington obtained a contract from Colonel Moody in 1862 to construct a mule trail from the head of Bute Inlet to the Fraser River, to be completed in 12 months.
Waddington's life is not examined any further. [He spent his final years in Ottawa, where he died, trying to convince the federal government to build a transcontinental railroad. The government of John A. Macdonald subsequently began construction of the CPR, taking a route to Burrard Inlet instead of Bute Inlet. Today the highest mountain in the province is named in Waddington's honour.]
Waddington's 91 man party of roadbuilders left Victoria for Bute Inlet in April, 1863, aboard the steamer Enterprise. We are led to conclude that if Waddington hadn't stubbornly pursued his unrealistic 'business plan', Interior Indians would not have been aroused to defend their territory. Specifically, according to Williams' representation of Homfray's journal, "The terrible massacre was caused by the ill treatment of the Indian women by Mr. Waddington's party who were making the road."; This is the central thesis at the heart of Slack Tide.
Conjuring an operatic chorus of weeping women, Williams notes that dozens of male participants in the events of 1864 can be named, but it is difficult to track the names and fates of women involved. "Both historical and contemporary native statements force one to attend to the claim that the sexual abuse of the daughter of a chief caused the war.";
After members of Waddington's road crew were butchered in their sleep, news of the attack shocked Victoria. Governor Seymour issued a proclamation calling for volunteers to help apprehend the perpetrators, dead or alive. Nearly 150 men, including many Indians and Governor Seymour, chased Chilcotin Indians through the mountains until white vengeance was satisfied.
In Chapter Five we are told that in the summer of 1993, the Nemiah Band of the Tsilhqot'in nation (the Xeni qwet'in) demanded from the Province of British Columbia an official pardon for the hangings.
B.C. Attorney General Colin Gablemann is later quoted in chapter eight, speaking at a 1993 meeting with Cariboo Tsilhqot'in leaders, "The hanging of the Tsilhqot'in Chiefs in 1864 is a tragedy which, if we are to move forward with respect and in good faith, must be recognized.";
Williams values oral history as much as written accounts. In her third chapter she attends her husband's Sliammon Seven Aside Soccer Tournament and questions elders. Coastal expert Jim Spilsbury is also included, recalling cutting shakebolts above Homfray Creek in 1924 with his brother.
High Slack grew from an invitation by Rosa Ho, curator at the UBC Anthropology Museum, for Williams to create an installation of paintings, sculptures and 'book works' generated by her upcoast and archival explorations in and around Bute Inlet. Williams, Ho and Greg Brass also organized a symposium of 150 people at UBC First Nations House in 1994 called "The Tsilhqot'in War of 1864 and the 1993 Cariboo Chilcotin Justice Inquiry."; Upon viewing the exhibition called 'High Slack', New Star editor Terry Glavin invited Judith Williams to expand her Bute Inlet findings into a book for his Transmontanus series.
Cumulatively High Slack is like a panoramic mural. All the elements are depicted and it's up to the eye of the beholder to determine where emphasis ought to be placed. Different readers will make different interpretations.
[BCBW 1997]
