Pictures worth a thousand words

Step Into Wilderness: A Pictorial History of Outdoor Exploration in and around the Comox Valley
by Deborah Griffiths, Christine Dickinson, Judy Hagen, Catherine Siba [photo editor Ernst Vegt]

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2020
$39.95  /  978550178937

Reviewed by Trevor Marc Hughes

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Photography had been newly exposed to the general populace in the early 20^th century. Prior to that access, photography was largely studio portraiture and was the purview of professionals. “It is often said,” as is written in the pages of Step Into Wilderness, “that Eastman Kodak making the Brownie available to consumers ‘democratized’ picture taking.” This early 1900s innovation may be forgotten in today’s ‘Insta’ digital photography era, but it allowed for significant visual documentation.

Authors Deborah Griffiths, Christine Dickinson, Judy Hagen, and Catherine Siba, along with photography editor Ernest Vegt, have compiled a remarkable collection of archived photographs, denoting and describing the settler culture of an earlier immigration boom, centering around a growing population of Vancouver Island: the Comox Valley.

This combination of growing settler population, accessible photography, and an appreciation for recreation through the ample great outdoor options available, has allowed for a boon for the historian. If a picture is indeed worth a thousand words this collection of photography allows for an embarrassment of riches, and the authors tell wonderful human stories of days gone by based on those photographs. “In this new world, cameras began to help illustrate journals and letters, and they travelled with their people and pets to the woods, beaches, mountaintops,” creating a mode of expression that was the 1920s and 1930s equivalent of an Instagram boom. Activities ranging from horseback riding to mountaineering to sport fishing are captured in the book.

The book project is also an opportunity for the authors, who previously collaborated on Watershed Moments: A Pictorial History of Courtenay and District (Harbour Publishing, 2015), to highlight those professional photographers out and about at the time, including Charles W. Sillence and Preston Lambert Tait. Tait was also a mountain guide, incorporating himself into the natural environment he was capturing on film.

This is not an average coffee table book. Early on, the historians, headed by lead writer Deborah Griffiths, place this emergence of photography by settlers in context of the wake of the gold rush and rush for resources, and also amidst a place of long-time natural and human history on the Salish Sea. Among other facts, the people of K’ómoks First Nation are established as the original inhabitants of the valley, with fisheries having begun more than a thousand years prior to European colonization. Landscape photography from the early 20^th century helps to visually express a continuum of human habitation.

Extracting resources such as coal was a preoccupation of early settlers creating an economy, and prior to photography, illustrators such as Frederick Whymper and his wood engraved sketches and drawing captured the region’s natural wonders, such as the Puntledge River in full spate. The photography of Sillence captured bountiful agricultural life. But it wouldn’t be long before the winds of tourism began to blow, and with a distinctly Victorian era British spin, influenced by what had worked in the Mother Country. “Tourism in the Comox Valley was aligned with broader plans for provincial tourism,” and how better to promote the area as a tourist destination than by showcasing its abundant available outdoor activities? The authors collaborate well her with photo editor Vegt to show this development, with the inclusion of a two-page group photo of the 1929 Courtenay-Comox Board of Trade and an image of the SS Charmer, charged with transporting passengers and freight to northern ports including Comox, to support the text. An early account of a hike, written likely by George Abbott Bates and printed in the pages of the Comox Argus in 1923, helps to illustrate this growing industry’s uniqueness and appeal: “a trip of this kind is not like the ordinary sight-seeing trip one makes – it differs in that there is something lasting about it; little bits here and there you will never forget, and there is also that feeling that you must go back – you did not see enough – just another day or two and you would be satisfied, but that ‘day or two’ never ends.”

Soon the reader learns about the enterprising folks that built the outdoor facilities for those travellers looking for an outdoor experience, such as Clinton Wood and his son Stuart Wood, who were behind Forbidden Plateau Lodge, or Eugene Croteau, pal of Comox-based writer and naturalist Hamilton Mack Laing, the ‘old country seigneur’ behind Croteau Camp on Forbidden Plateau. What emerges is a striking visual record indicating how today’s outdoor industries in the area got started. Unfortunately figures such as Stuart Wood, capable guide, would be lost in the Second World War. Outside geopolitical conflict would deplete this seeming idyll of some good people.

What this book succeeds at wonderfully is putting faces, via quality archive images, to the accomplishments, allowing the reader to further become acquainted with the character of these hardy, adventurous figures who established an outdoor activity culture still active today. The authors and photo editor structure the book so that a story of adventure or courageous infrastructure building is accompanied by quality landscape or portrait photography, showing those faces, or extraordinary environment as it was back then, albeit in black and white.

Notable throughout is how the recent emigres from Scotland and England would not frame these locations in an Indigenous context, but in that of promotion to settler visitors of similar provenance, comparing this part of the world to fashionable continental Europe. In describing its mountaineering appeal, Clinton Wood described Forbidden Plateau as “a new Switzerland, full of beautiful lakes and meadows, where the people who lived on the coast could get to higher altitudes.”

The book reference list may be one of its most valuable aspects, featuring a wide range of sources including Above the Bush and Beyond Nootka by Vancouver Island mountaineering historian Lindsay Elms.

During the Great Depression outdoor pursuits, and eventual sport fishing and mariculture, would present low-cost, accessible, and healthy ways to spend recreational time.

Over the course of reading the text, and looking at the quality photography, of this hardcover volume, the reader is given a window into another time, the authors conjuring up a sense of hardworking settlers, trying to form community, bringing know-how and values from recently-departed Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England, and developing a culture in which outdoor recreation was, and still is, woven in to the fabric of life.

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Trevor Marc Hughes is the author of Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925. His newest book is The Final Spire: ‘Mystery Mountain’ Mania in the 1930s. A former arts reporter at CBC Radio, he is currently the non-fiction editor for The British Columbia Review and recently reviewed books by Richard Butler, Wade Davis, David Bird (ed.), Ian Kennedy, John Vaillant, and Peter Rowlands. He recently wrote an editorial on the subject of historic British Columbia publisher New Star Books winding down and about the recent BC & Yukon Prize finalists evening at Book Warehouse on Broadway in Vancouver.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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