The Place Names of British Columbia

Paranoia Poetica

The Place Names of British Columbia written by E. A. Lucas

Celebrities in Transit

From The Canadian Forum, April 1921, p. 209

In comparatively modern maps the north-west corner of North America is left quite white, except for map-makers' legends to the effect that "Alle heere ys starke unknowne", and the like. So, when Captain Vancouver and the Spaniards met in this region in 1792 they issued a crisp new currency of names. They had a wide market, as British Columbia has more places to name to the square foot of map than any similar area in the world. The coast is filigreed with inlets of the sea and set off with thousands of islands; the interior is laced and slashed from end to end with rivers and lakes; while the whole is bejewelled with chain upon chain of mountains. And all these places required names.

The Indians were, so far as I know, the ones who began the big job, and their names are the finest we have. It seems that names should be beautiful — that is, appropriate expressions of something. The Indian names are so.

The Russians laid on the next strata of names, but their booming old 'wood-wind', three-and-five-syllabled names do not now belong to British Columbia, since we lost the Panhandle of Alaska. The Baranof Islands, the Kupreanofs and such are memorials of the Russian occupation.

Then came that thorough-going young explorer, Captain George Vancouver, with his little fleet of two ships on his way to meet Admiral Quadra at Nootka Sound. Within a year Mackenzie had crossed the mountains and reached this province by land. Then followed the Hudson's Bay Company, the Cariboo miners, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, and the Real Estate Agents, each taking a turn at naming up British Columbia, until the job, such as it is, is as we see it to-day.

It is rather too bad, I think, to translate Indian names. They mean much to the Indians, but in the bare translation, little of anything to us — that is to say little of anything that they meant to the Indians. The fact that Kamloops, being translated, means the Meeting of the Waters, and refers to the junction of the two forks of the Thompson River there, is material and relevant, but not stirring. To the Indians of the locality, it doubtless meant and suggested a whole chain of myth, in which they adorned the body of nature. For their beauty, then, and leaving to their past and passing bestowers the why and wherefore of the bestowing, I celebrate the Indian names: Tulameen, Lillooet, Chilcotin, Keremeos, Okanagan, Kootenay, Similkameen, Kelowna, Capilano, Songhee, Nechako, Skeena, Kildala. All up through the North and the Interior we find them — where the white man came late, and let them be.

Captain Vancouver leaves us in no such doubt. No "Our fathers called it so", or "It has always been named thus" lends so much as a whiff of mystery to his names.

"This channel, which," he says, "after Sir Harry Burrard of the Navy, I have distinguished by the name of Burrard's Channel" retains that specified distinction. He called the California Oregon Coast [p.210] New Albion and the British Columbia country New Hanover. Obvious young man he was. But before he got well inside the Straits of Georgia, he perpetuated a fairy story; and it was on this wise.

Vancouver had it from a book by a clergyman named Samuel Purchas, and the book was called "Purchas, his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages and Places", and so on and so forth. So it must be true. Purchas had it from one Michael Lok, who had it from a sea-faring man whom Mr. Lok met in some waterfront hole in Venice. The sea-faring man allowed that he was named Juan de Fuca, which sounded very fine, but the fact was that his name was Apostolos Valerianos. Be that as it may, however, he went on that he had been a pilot in the Spanish treasure fleets for years, had been captured off the Californias in 1587 by an English privateer, escaped to the Viceroy of New Spain, and been sent by him to find the supposed Straits of Anian. Let Lok continue from this point:

"Also he said that shortly after the said voyage was so ill ended, the said Viceroy of Mexico sent him out again Anno 1592, with a small Caravela, and a Pinnace, armed with mariners only, to follow the said voyage, for a discovery of the same Straits of Anian, and the Passage thereof, into the sea which they call the North Sea, which is our North West Sea. And that he followed his course in that voyage West and North West in the South Sea, all alongst the coast of Nova Spania and California, and the Indies, now called North America (all which Voyage he signified to me in a great Map, and a Seacard of mine owne, which I laied before him) until he came to the Latitude of fortie seven degrees, and that there finding that the Land trended North and North-east, with a broad Inlet of Sea, between 47 and 48 degrees of Latitude: hee entred thereinto, sayling therein more than twentie days, and found that Land trending still sometime North-west and North-east, and North, and also East and South-eastward, and very much broader sea than was at the said entrance, and that he passed by diverse Ilands in that sayling. And that at the entrance of this said Strait there is on the North-west coast thereof, a great Hedland or Iland with an exceeding high Pinacle, or spired Rocke, like a piller thereon. Also, he sayed, that he went on Land in divers places, and that he saw some people on Land, clad in Beasts skinnes —"

But we must leave the dark and dubious Pilot to shake his oily locks and sprawl over the "Great Map" the while Michael sits, surreptitiously making notes. We must leave them, I say, to what had every indication of winding up in a wild dance about the tavern table, the upsetting of flagons, and so on, and come down to the prim-mouthed George Vancouver, carefully inscribing in his diary the explanation of why he immortalized this incredible old Greek Pilot.

"By my having continued the name of De Fuca in my journal and charts," he says, "a tacit acknowlegdement of his discoveries may possibly, on my part, be inferred; this however I must positively deny, because there has not been one leading feature to substantiate his tradition: on the contrary, the sea coast under the parallels between which this opening is said to have existed, is compact and impenetrable; the shores of the continent have not any opening whatever, that bears the least similitude to De Fuca's entrance; and the opening which I have called the Supposed Straits of Juan de Fuca, instead of being between the 47th and 48th degrees, is between the 48th and 49th degrees of north latitude ..." and so on. So that in the name of Juan de Fuca, there is perpetuated either an elaborate and a frightful "had" or the fact that Captain Vancouver was beaten to his supposed discovery by a round two hundred years.

But we must get on. When Captain George in his two high-pooped little ships had bobbed in through the straits, and reached the mainland coast of British Columbia, he was in the full flood of naming it, up one side and down the other.

"This point," on the 49th parallel "I distinguish by the name of Point Roberts, after my esteemed friend and predecessor in the Discovery (his ship)". Thereafter, until he had completely circled Vancouver Island he was in what are now British Columbia waters. When he arrived off where the City of Vancouver now stands, he fell in with Spaniards. "This Point ... in compliment to my friend Captain George Grey of the Navy, was called Point Grey". By the way, he missed recognizing the Eraser river — thought it was a swamp, so it was named later for the explorer Simon Fraser.

These Spaniards, Senors Galiano and Valdes, in command of the ships Sutil and Mexicano, were also bent on doing some naming. So they cruised on up the coast in company, the Spaniards naming generally everything in sight to Port, and Captain Vancouver everything to Starboard. Some of the Spanish names from South to North are: Haro and Rosario Straits, Galiano, Valdes, Lasqueti, Texada and Hernando Islands. While Vancouver on the Mainland coast named Howe Sound, Jervis Inlet, Bute Inlet, Nelson, Hardy, and Harwood Islands, and so on up to Johnstone Straits. Here the Spaniards turned back, and from thence North, the coast of British Columbia forms a vast Who's Who of the British Navy of that day. When he got around to Nootka Sound for his conference with Admiral Bodega y Quadra over the handing over of these parts to England, they named the great Island which he had circumnavigated, Vancouver and Quadra's Island.

[p.211] When the Hudson's Bay Company reached the coast, they established a fort at the harbour in the south end of Vancouver Island and called it Fort Victoria, after the late Queen. This place is now a city and is the seat of the Provincial Government. Sir James Douglas was responsible for this. Up the Fraser River they went, establishing Forts Langley, Yale, and Hope, as well as other posts in the interior.

In '58 gold was discovered in the sand bars of the Fraser River, and the miners named the bars, after vagrant fancies of the day, Dutchman's Bar, China, Boston, Pete's, and such like Bars, and so they are known to this day. Four years later, gold took hardy men away up into the Cariboo country, and this time it was creeks that wanted naming, and they were well and truly named: Lightning, Antler, Jack of Clubs, Little Swift, Keithley's Creeks, Ed Stout's Gulch — the Cariboo is studded with names that bring back memories of the hell-roarin' days of '62.

Well. . . . Life hurries on. And many a human in his progress through it in this country, has left a record of himself, one way and another, in the names of places. To a considerable extent it is a drab record. One senses the mediocrity of minds that named Fish Lake, Mud Lake, Bear Lake, Trout Lake, Gull Lake, Dog Creek, Hat Creek, Deep Creek, Long Bay, Centre Bay, Snug Bay, White Rocks, Bird Rocks — these were named by men who were thinking about fish and bear and rain and work and sleep — unshaven men, with eyes deeper than their thoughts. And they have their reward.

But Jimmy Chicken's Island, now! And Cape Roger Curtis, Kicking Horse Pass, Hole-In-The-Wall, The Euclataws (a nasty, dangerous tidal rapids), Tatlayako Lake, The Yoho River, hundreds of names such as these help to make up the atmosphere of this Province — a crude, ragged, blustery atmosphere, but one that somehow a man gets to love.

E. A. Lucas