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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
Queen
Charlotte
Sound
Port Hardy
Gwa’yasdams
Fort Rupert
Coal Harbour
Quatsino
Alert Bay
Port McNeill
‘Mi’mkwamlis
T’sadzis’nukwaame’
Johnsto
ne Strait
Telegraph
Cove
19
19
Campbell River
Cape
Mudge
28
Gold River
Courtenay
Pacific Ocean
Comox
Yuquot
19
Sproat Lake
Provincial Park
4
4
Port
Alberni
Tofino
Long Beach
Strait of Georgia
Parksville
Vancouver
Nanaimo
1
4
Ladysmith
Ucluelet
Lake
Cowichan
Vancouver Island
Locations of Emily Carr’s
Vancouver Island sketching
trips from 1895–1942 and
places visited by the author.
18
Duncan
1
Port Renfrew
The Gorge
Mt Douglas
Goldstream
Provincial Park
14
Sidney
Metchosin
Sooke
Albert
Head
Victoria
Esquimalt Lagoon
Strait of Juan de Fuca
Contents
Foreword
Emily Discovered
Victoria
Victoria Map
Wharf Street
Emily Carr House
The House of All Sorts
Beacon Hill Park
Walking Tour
Inner Harbour
Sundry Sites
Art Gallery and Museum
Ross Bay Cemetery
Southern Vancouver Island
1
10
12
20
29
40
47
56
64
70
78
Southern Vancouver Island Map
82
Mount Douglas
84
Goldstream90
The Gorge
96
Fisgard Lighthouse and Esquimalt Lagoon
102
Gravel Pit, Albert Head, Sooke Hills
109
Port Renfrew
114
Lake Cowichan
121
Duncan128
Western Vancouver Island
Western Vancouver Island Map
136
Ucluelet138
Hitacu145
Pacific Rim
158
Sproat Lake and Port Alberni
168
M.V. Frances Barkley
174
M.V. Uchuck III
184
Yuquot194
Northern Vancouver Island
Northern Vancouver Island Map
Campbell River
Cape Mudge
Alert Bay
Telegraph Cove
Kwakwaka’wakw Villages
Port Hardy and Fort Rupert
Coal Harbour and Quatsino
212
214
222
231
244
248
265
274
Emily Carr Chronology290
Further Reading294
Foreword
Emily Discovered
T
hick 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 shallows. 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 traditional great houses, it was still unmistakably Haida. There she introduced
her husband, Walter, a grey-haired man with a neatly trimmed white
Emily Carr’s B.C. Vancouver Island
Emily Discovered
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 continued 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 passion 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-clinging-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 embarrassed 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 Columbia 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 acquire 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
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 nowhere 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
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Emily Carr’s B.C. Vancouver Island
Emily Discovered
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, journals, 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,
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 monumental 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 country, 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 peoples 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
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Emily Carr’s B.C. Vancouver Island
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 produced some intriguing mysteries and some of the best encounters of my
travels with Emily Carr.