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Island Timber (Sono Nis $39.95)
Michael Ondaatje cuts the mustard in Toronto, Douglas Coupland is hot in Vancouver, but Richard Somerset Mackie leads sales in Campbell River with his pictorial history, Island Timber (Sono Nis $39.95).
It's a social history of the Comox Logging Company replete with characters such as 'Greasy' McQuinn, 'Boomstick' Thompson, world champion women's log bucker Esther Forsman and poet Eric Duncan who held thrift, oats and potatoes in high esteem.
Duncan, a Shetland Islander, was suspicious of progress in the 1940s and remained true to rural values akin to the 1870s. Every year he donated two sacks of oatmeal to the Community Chest drive. He considered potatoes 'a universal blessing' and considered motorcars the bane of existence. He died at age 85 in 1944, eschewing eggs because they weren't necessary.
Cecil 'Cougar' Smith was even more legendary as a hunter who also adopted orphaned cougar cubs and gave them to zoos in Canada and the United States. Smith, his wife and five children operated a farm at the mouth of the Oyster River.
Mackie interviewed more than 100 old-timers and gathered dozens of
never-before-published pictures. As someone who grew up in Merville with a father who worked for the CLC, novelist Jack Hodgins can be forgiven for saying Mackie's book "rivals the national epics of some small countries!";
The Comox Logging Company had 450 employees, six steam-powered skidders, a dozen locomotives, hundreds of miles of track and sole access to the Douglas Fir forests between Courtenay and Campbell River. The company supplied Fraser Mills in New Westminster when it was the largest sawmill in the British Empire. 1-55039-101-1
[BCBW SPRING 2001]
It's a social history of the Comox Logging Company replete with characters such as 'Greasy' McQuinn, 'Boomstick' Thompson, world champion women's log bucker Esther Forsman and poet Eric Duncan who held thrift, oats and potatoes in high esteem.
Duncan, a Shetland Islander, was suspicious of progress in the 1940s and remained true to rural values akin to the 1870s. Every year he donated two sacks of oatmeal to the Community Chest drive. He considered potatoes 'a universal blessing' and considered motorcars the bane of existence. He died at age 85 in 1944, eschewing eggs because they weren't necessary.
Cecil 'Cougar' Smith was even more legendary as a hunter who also adopted orphaned cougar cubs and gave them to zoos in Canada and the United States. Smith, his wife and five children operated a farm at the mouth of the Oyster River.
Mackie interviewed more than 100 old-timers and gathered dozens of
never-before-published pictures. As someone who grew up in Merville with a father who worked for the CLC, novelist Jack Hodgins can be forgiven for saying Mackie's book "rivals the national epics of some small countries!";
The Comox Logging Company had 450 employees, six steam-powered skidders, a dozen locomotives, hundreds of miles of track and sole access to the Douglas Fir forests between Courtenay and Campbell River. The company supplied Fraser Mills in New Westminster when it was the largest sawmill in the British Empire. 1-55039-101-1
[BCBW SPRING 2001]
Submitted on June 24, 2003 in By David.
