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Bella Coola Area

Quatsino Area

Chapter 2

New Fjordland

The Norwegian Colonies of Hagensborg and Quatsino

My mind is now on Canada bent … On Bella Coola River is very likely my future home. There will latent powers possessed by me come forth, and the air castles of youth become a reality.

—Iver Fougner, diary

The walls of the valley rose steeply to a cap of grey cloud, which parted from time to time to reveal snowy highlands. A grey river raced through lush, lowland forests. Dozens of icy, long-tailed waterfalls coursed down the granite flanks of the surrounding mountains. Yet the mouth of the valley was at sea level, and the climate, influenced by an ocean fjord that burrows deep into British Columbia’s central coastline, was fairly mild. The name of this remote place did not derive from Spanish or Italian, as many have assumed, but from a neighbouring band’s description of the aboriginal inhabitants. Still, the words—Bella Coola—had a mellifluous lilt.

It was early June, and the weather was cool and wet, as it had been all along the coast that year. Peter Solhjell was showing me the sights. His great-grandparents, Ole and Johanna Gaarden, had colonized the valley in the mid-1890s, along with more than two hundred fellow Norwegians. The Gaardens emigrated twice—once from Norway, and then again from Minnesota—enticed by an “immigration lease” offered by the BC government. Free land was the main attraction. Provided they lived in a remote part of the province and met certain conditions of settlement, members of select foreign groups could, with five years of back-breaking labour, each claim a complimentary quarter-section of about sixty-five hectares.

Today, the Bella Coola valley reflects the perseverance of those early settlers. The region remains isolated, and the countryside is as rugged as ever, yet the valley bottom has been transformed into a patchwork quilt of fields, fences and neat homesteads. Many older log cabins survive, often with crisp window-curtains and blooming flower boxes. Vegetable gardens flourish and horses graze in sweet-smelling meadows. In the past, grain and cattle were raised, as well as cabbages, root vegetables and other crops. Bella Coola potatoes, said Solhjell, are famous far and wide for their flavour. Now, only a few people farm on a large scale, most having turned to logging and other trades. But the valley maintains a rare air of rural contentment.

There are many reminders of the first Norwegian colonists. In the graveyard, a large granite stone commemorates their leader, Reverend Christian Saugstad. On a clear day, you can look up from his grave and see the peak and glacier named after him. At 2,908 metres, Mount Saugstad is the highest in the region. And if you arrive at the Bella Coola dock and glance at the big Shell Oil tanks, Saugstad is the first name to greet you: his great-grandson Gerrald owns the local fuel agency.

Reverend Saugstad gathered the original colonists. He searched out the valley and inspected it personally in advance of the move. He drew up idealistic laws to govern his disciples, whose behaviour was stalwartly co-operative and, in many respects, communal. Only “moral, industrious and loyal Norwegian farmers, mechanics and business men” would be accepted, according to the colony’s constitution. More importantly, the rules prohibited, on pain of expulsion, “the use of intoxicating drinks.”

Bella Coola’s remoteness did not bother Saugstad, as he had in mind a place where upright Christians could grow in spirit and virtue, far from the evils of the world. His own devout faith carried him through the hard early years, and his tireless example and personal charisma carried the rest of the colonists. But the Lutheran preacher paid a high price for setting his utopian goals in motion: he was among the first to die in the new land, in 1897, aged only fifty-eight. His family flourished, though, and his dream lived on, even if it never quite gained the momentum Saugstad had originally hoped for, and veered towards cultural assimilation rather than spiritual refinement.

Nevertheless, all up and down the valley, Norwegian names prevail: Brekke and Brynildsen, Frostrup and Fredriksen, Harestad and Hansen, Knudsen and Nygaard. Few Norwegian descendants still speak their native tongue, but most continue to take pride in their heritage and customs. “My mother always used to say that you’re in this country now and that’s the way to go,” explained Merroly Frostrup, born a Saugstad. “It was hard enough eking out a living without worrying about your culture. As long as we had flatbread at Christmas, that was good enough.”

“And lutefisk,” added her brother Gerrald, referring to another much-loved Norwegian snack: cod preserved by soaking it in lye.

At the mouth of the valley, the Bella Coola River reaches saltwater in a maze of grassy mudflats. On the south bank, however, is a firm, flat area, where trading posts have operated since the 1860s. Now this spot is home to the village of Bella Coola, located beside the main reserve of the Nuxalk people, which extends to the east several kilometres. A picturesque old church sits beside a ceremonial longhouse, while derelict grave markers peek from a snarl of brambles along the riverbank.

The villages of the Nuxalk—who are more closely related to the Coast Salish, far to the south, than to any of their First Nations neighbours—once extended the length of the valley. The largest one was twenty-five kilometres upriver. The valley had a strategic location: the trails that allowed BC’s coastal bands to trade oolichan grease with those of the interior terminated there. (By following those trails, Alexander Mackenzie reached Bella Coola—and the Pacific Ocean—in 1793, the first European to cross Canada by land.) The Nuxalk were friendly towards the Norwegian settlers and welcomed them to the valley. The relationship between the two groups has always been co-operative; without Nuxalk help the colony might not have survived.

Due east of the reserve stand a handful of pioneer homesteads where enterprising white settlers put down roots in the 1880s: men such as Tom Draney, who worked at canneries up and down the coast, and young Fillip Jacobsen, who combed British Columbia collecting curios for European museums. For the next thirty kilometres or so, one passes the tidy farms of the former Norwegian colonists. A focal point for their strung-out community was established about fifteen kilometres east of Bella Coola and named Hagensborg, after Hagen Christensen, who built an early store there. The entire sixty-five-kilometre-long valley has a current population of about two thousand.

We stopped at Hagensborg to tour a heritage farmhouse, which the local Sons of Norway branch had helped restore and furnish as a typical turn-of-the-century valley home. The weathered building, constructed of massive, hand-trimmed ten-by-fifty-centimetre logs, once belonged to Andrew Svisdahl, another Norwegian pioneer. In 1988, with funding from several community groups, the house was purchased from the Svisdahl family and skidded three kilometres down the highway to its present location.

A heritage farmhouse at Hagensborg, restored and furnished by the local Sons of Norway chapter. The hand-trimmed logs, connected with intricate dovetail joints, fit snugly against one another and still keep the home warm in winter. Andrew Scott

Inside, the great Majestic stove, antique butter churns and simple period furniture recreated a pleasant atmosphere, but it was the exterior walls that impressed me most. Each giant slab of red cedar had been hewn into shape with nothing more than a broadaxe, then connected to its corner-mate with a wonderful dovetail joint. Each dovetail had a little extra notch or groove to keep the joint from slipping—an unusual touch but characteristic of valley workmanship. The logs were rounded at the top and concave at the bottom, and fit snugly against each other. Even after well over a century, scarcely any chinking was necessary to keep the house warm in winter.

As I explored the valley and met a few of its inhabitants, I began to understand how well that farmhouse represented Bella Coola and its pioneers. The simple, strong construction, so purposeful and dignified, was a symbol of self-sufficiency. This region wasn’t connected to the rest of the province by road until 1953—and that was more to allow outsiders in, one senses, than to let the locals out. Today, vehicles and their occupants can leave Bella Coola by ferry, visit Vancouver 425 kilometres to the southeast, and return across the Chilcotin plateau from Williams Lake via scenic Highway 20. The increased access is appreciated, no doubt, but visitors to Bella Coola may get the feeling that, if the highway suddenly vanished, the residents of the valley would still be perfectly comfortable.

The colonization of the Bella Coola valley really started with Adrian and Fillip Jacobsen, two Norwegian brothers who gathered enormous collections of First Nations artifacts in the 1880s, mainly for Berlin’s Royal Museum of Ethnology. They left gripping accounts of their individual journeys to remote British Columbia inlets and villages, usually made with just a First Nations guide. Besides buying artifacts, the Jacobsens were commissioned to hire a group of West Coast First Nations people willing to take part in one of the circus-style ethnic expositions organized by Hamburg impresario Carl Hagenbeck.

The village of Bella Coola, at the mouth of the Bella Coola River, is dwarfed by the valley’s high mountain walls in this postcard of the region, probably taken in the 1940s. Author’s Collection

Kwakwaka’wakw groups from northern Vancouver Island, understandably suspicious of this offer, had twice tentatively agreed to go to Europe, then backed out. Finally, in 1885, the Jacobsens persuaded nine men from Bella Coola, where Fillip had gone collecting several times, to sign up. This troupe sang and danced its way through Germany’s main cities, performing “games and recreations” and “showing the habits, manners and customs of the Indians.” They influenced Franz Boas, who studied them while working temporarily at the Berlin museum and decided to pursue the career in Northwest Coast anthropology that would make him world famous. The Nuxalk entertainers were, by all reports, treated well; accompanied by Fillip, they returned to Victoria a year later in good health. One participant subsequently built a longhouse in Bella Coola topped with cedar-shingled spires and carved gargoyles, supposedly modelled after Cologne Cathedral.

An old postcard of the Nuxalk village of Q’umquots or Komkotes, located at the mouth of the Bella Coola River. The shingle-roofed longhouse, second from the left, was modelled by its owner after Cologne Cathedral. Author’s Collection

Fillip took a particular liking to Bella Coola. In 1887, he talked the BC government into surveying the valley and starting construction of a trail. The next year, he pre-empted a quarter-section beside the Nuxalk reserve. Convinced that there was enough good land in the valley to support an agricultural colony—and hoping to act as an agent for prospective settlers—he wrote letters describing Bella Coola’s potential to Norwegian-American newspapers in Seattle, Tacoma and Iowa. Norwegian immigrants, he promised, would find this northern coastal valley very similar to their own beloved homeland.

At the time Jacobsen was writing, more than 300,000 of his compatriots had immigrated to North America. Most settled in the north-central United States, especially Wisconsin and Minnesota. They left Norway because of poverty and lack of opportunity; a rapidly expanding population at home was putting intolerable pressure on arable land, which had always been in short supply. The New World, supposedly blessed with endless quantities of rich soil, had a near-hypnotic appeal, for the dream of poor Norwegians was to free themselves from wage slavery by cultivating a modest piece of private property.

By the late 1930s, when the great trans-Atlantic migrations had essentially ended, Norway had lost a higher percentage of its population than any other European country except Ireland. In 1830, Norway had just over one million inhabitants; during the course of the next century, more than 750,000 emigrated. Those who left were mainly landless peasants: farm and forestry workers, servants, fishermen, labourers. In America, they typically worked for wages for several years, saving money to buy land and set themselves up as farmers. And they succeeded. Determined, uncomplaining, energetic and tough—most Norwegians made superb pioneers.

Jacobsen received several enquiries about Bella Coola from the Midwest, and Reverend Saugstad, who lived in the Red River valley, near Crookston, Minnesota, probably saw or heard about his letters. The Red River farmers were hardy folk, practised at scratching out a living on the margins of civilization. Many of them were from the far north of Norway—places such as Tromsø, the Lofoten Islands and the Bardu valley—all located well above the Arctic Circle. But some had become disenchanted with life in America. The treeless landscape depressed them, as did the locusts, floods, prairie fires and alternately scorching and freezing climate. The land was fertile, but the Norwegians were used to a combination of farming, fishing and logging, not the tyrannical monoculture of wheat. An economic collapse in 1893, which sent grain prices plummeting, was the final insult.

Rumours were circulating—that new lands had opened for settlement in Washington and British Columbia, that a life more to the liking of Norwegian farmers might be possible, in more familiar surroundings. A few were tempted to raise money to leave by selling their land. They were scorned by their fellows, who saw them as dupes of settlement agents and railway companies. But change was in the wind. One group from the Red River area made plans to decamp, and in May of 1894 they headed off, not for the coast but for central Alberta, where they founded Bardo (which still exists), named fondly after their home valley.

Saugstad had an additional reason for making a fresh start. The Lutheran church in America was in disarray, embroiled in doctrinal disputes and split into at least half a dozen factions. Saugstad, for example, was a Haugean: a follower of Hans Nielsen Hauge, whose “born again” puritanism and excoriating attacks on the state church earned him great fame and a lengthy prison sentence in Norway. Saugstad had already come into conflict with other Lutheran groups in Crookston and elsewhere. The pious immigrants, for whom religion was inextricably woven into everyday life, were caught up in the discord. Saugstad longed to lead his supporters to a place where they could practise their own particular beliefs undisturbed.

Idealistic communities of disaffected Lutherans were not unknown in North America. The most famous were the Amana villages in Iowa, founded in 1855 by German Pietists. Amana had a communal economy, producing high-quality woollen goods, cloth, lumber and agricultural products. The villagers were mystics, inspired through divine revelation to migrate from Germany. The villages exist today. Although the Amana economy is now structured in the form of a corporation, rather than as a commune, the villagers still refuse to give oaths of allegiance or perform military service.

Another well-known colony was Bishop Hill in Illinois, founded by Eric Janson in 1846 in an attempt to recapture the simplicity and sincerity of early Lutheranism. This was a Swedish community, where all farmland was held communally and everyone worked for the common good. Although Bishop Hill flourished for many years, it eventually disintegrated in a welter of debt, lawsuits and internal strife. A short-lived Norwegian communistic settlement was established at Green Bay, Wisconsin, in the 1850s. Saugstad may well have been aware of some of these efforts.

A group of Red River Norwegians appointed Saugstad and Anders Stortröen to head west and look for new land. They left in June 1894, investigated the Yakima and Willamette valleys in Washington and Oregon, and then made the long steamer trip north to Bella Coola. Walking fifteen kilometres upriver, they examined soil and vegetation and were pleased to find another Norwegian family there, that of Captain Thor Thorsen, a friend of Fillip Jacobsen. Jacobsen had recently married Thorsen’s eldest daughter and was managing a store at Clayoquot on the west coast of Vancouver Island (where he also tried to start a Norwegian colony). He would later return and live at Bella Coola.

When he arrived home from the coast, Saugstad held several meetings in the Crookston area. The minister was a stocky, powerful figure with a long beard and a fiery, eloquent manner of speaking. He soon had a number of dissatisfied farmers eager to follow him into the unknown. Encouraged, he started a correspondence with Colonel James Baker, BC’s provincial secretary and minister of mines, education and immigration.

The BC government was eager to develop the province’s resources, including agriculture. Wealthy industrialists, whose interests were well-represented by Premier Theodore Davie and his ministers, benefited greatly from increased immigration. New settlements needed railway and steamship connections, and healthy profits could be made from freight and passenger operations. In addition, new transportation schemes often attracted huge land grants and subsidies, and opened up additional territory for mines, lumber mills and canneries.

In the Okanagan and elsewhere in the interior, well-heeled gentlemen farmers, mostly of British origin, were snapping up the better ranch and orchard lands. At the Chicago world exposition of 1893, a BC exhibit lured potential US immigrants with maps, brochures and giddy descriptions of the future. The Victoria Daily Colonist described the fair as “little more than a giant advertising scheme.” In 1894, Colonel Baker championed a special type of land grant as a means of persuading groups of settlers to clear and farm more remote areas, especially on the coast: the immigrant lease.

The terms by which such a lease might be obtained were still vague when Saugstad first approached the BC government in August 1894. His group from Minnesota turned out to be the first suitable applicants. Their exchange of letters was a form of negotiation—exploratory on Baker’s part, deferential on Saugstad’s. The initial missive seems to have been lost, but most of the correspondence survives at BC Archives. Saugstad apparently asked for land in the Bella Coola valley to be put aside for three years to allow his followers time to get fair prices when selling their US properties.

Colonel Baker, who considered the Norwegians a “most desirable class of immigrants,” wrote back that the land could be reserved for only three months. At least twenty families would be required for a free grant, he added, and declared that “it would have to be shewn that they possessed sufficient means of their own to make them useful settlers.” His ended his letter by saying that “if the settlement was of an advantageous character to the Provincial Government, the Government would no doubt assist the settlers by the constuction of a waggon road.”

Had the equivocating tone of Baker’s final statement rung warning bells for Saugstad, he might have saved himself a lot of letter writing later on: most archival correspondence from BC’s early colonies consists of complaints about the government’s promises to build roads. But the pastor was more concerned with Baker’s “sufficient means” remark. “We have never intended to bring paupers into your Province to make a burden,” he wrote back. His group intended to support itself until “we, with honest work, can raise the means from the land we occupy.” He also tried politely to discover whether the eventual Crown grant would give his settlers clear title to their land or if hidden strings might be attached.

By September, Baker had worked out the details of the proposed lease: the land would be reserved for six months; a minimum of thirty families or mature adults were required; each would receive a quarter-section and must have $300 in cash; settlers had to occupy their lands for five years, with only minor absences tolerated, and increase them in value by five dollars per acre. At the end of that period, Crown grants would give clear title to each property. If the conditions weren’t met, the land might be reclaimed or the settlers might purchase it at five dollars per acre. Immigration leases did not actually become law until late October, at which time the Norwegians were already in Victoria preparing to head north. The leases were discontinued in 1899, when a new administration came to power.

In the meantime, the colonists were getting organized. Saugstad drew up a constitution and a set of bylaws for his group, which he named the Bella Coola Colony of British Columbia, and started signing up members. At a meeting in September, the members adopted Saugstad’s rules, elected him president and also elected a five-person managing committee. Saugstad and colony secretary Hagen Christensen were authorized to negotiate with the BC government. Anyone wanting to join the colony had to be screened by the managing committee, “which must be furnished [with] satisfactory evidence of a good moral character, working ability, and possession of necessary means to cover travelling expenses and provisions for one year.”

On October 17, 1894, about eighty Norwegians, mostly men, left Crookston for Winnipeg, where they changed trains and continued their westward journey. Saugstad brought along his young daughter, Gea; his wife and other children would join him the following year. At Sicamous, in central BC, the immigrants were visited by Lord Aberdeen, the Governor General of Canada, and his wife. Aberdeen owned the Coldstream Ranch fifty kilometres to the south. His palatial coach was joined to the train, and he welcomed the newcomers, urging them “to hold fast to the fine religious principles which have brought you together.”

Five colonists from Seattle joined the group in Vancouver, and a steamship carried them all to Victoria, where they spent a week buying supplies. Iver Fougner, the colony’s articulate schoolteacher—whose diary and magazine articles are a useful early source of information—noted that 147 sacks of flour were purchased, plus coal oil, soap, sugar, tobacco, tools, stoves and “Japan tea.” A number of custom-made tents were run up. A major expense, at $62.64, was coffee; 332 pounds of the wilderness-enhancing stimulant were required. The Norwegians’ patron, Colonel Baker, met them, gave a speech and passed out “indenture forms” to be signed, setting out the terms of the lease.

The immigrants received Victoria’s stamp of civic approval. “Scandinavians make good settlers,” the Daily Colonist informed its readers on October 25. “They are intelligent, sober, pious, industrious and self-reliant. They do not expect too much. They come from a country where nature is not very generous—where men have to work hard and continuously to gain a comfortable livelihood, and they therefore will not be discouraged when they are required to face the difficulties and endure the hardships and privations incident to pioneer life.”

The newspaper report was not entirely accurate. One colonist, for instance, flagrantly abused the rule against alcohol consumption by going on a substantial bender in Victoria. A hastily convened meeting condemned the unfortunate fellow and he was left behind. The rest of the Norwegians, along with government surveyor Peter Leech (“an old man of seventy,” according to Fougner), boarded the Princess Louise and made their way slowly up the coast. En route, they formed into parties of four individuals or four families, with each party drawing a section, or square mile (260 hectares), of land by lot. This was done in order to avoid conflicts and also to share the work of home building, as four men could erect one shelter fairly quickly, then live in it while other houses were being built. Each party would subdivide its land as it saw fit.

Andrew Svisdahl, left, and Mathis Hammer, photographed squaring timber for cabin construction, were two of the original Norwegian settlers. Image G-00977 courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives

The colonists’ first impression of Bella Coola was “not encouraging,” wrote Fougner. “Out of the sea rose the almost perpendicular mountains dark with evergreens, their tops hidden by fog; to eastward we could see the valley, which seemed like a mere fissure in the immense mountain masses.” Colonel Baker had recommended that the settlers not arrive in winter. “It seems to me that you have chosen a bad time of the year,” he wrote to Saugstad. “Would it not be better to wait until the Spring? … Think well over it before starting.” But Saugstad was adamant. “Hope we will stand the hardships as well in your province as we have done it here,” he replied.

The initial hardship was to get ashore. The steamer’s lifeboats leaked so badly that the colonists had to wait for canoes from the nearby Nuxalk village to ferry them and their possessions to dry land—a service for which they were later charged more than $100. The only highlight of day one at Bella Coola was the presence of Thor Thorsen and his family. His young blond daughter, Bertha, seemed “an apparition from another and better world,” Fougner recalled, “sent to bid the strangers welcome.” Even so, to the eighty-five strangers putting up their tents 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.