His Memories Enrich South Cowichan History

By E. Blanche Norcross

The Province, B.C. Magazine

April 13, 1957

The trouble with our pioneers, as many a frustrated historian has discovered, is that while they will talk about the early days of the country, they won’t put it on paper. An occasional correspondence to the local paper may turn up and then some of the general history in available editions like “British Columbia.” Such as these contain a little. So do men such as a citizen the South Cowichan and Shawnigan Lake area and Vancouver Island.

The brief history of the Dougan family and the South Cowichan-Shawnigan Lake district are inseparable. Today some 40 descendants—35 of the name—of the original pioneer couple now live in the area.

When James Dougan the elder came to Cobble Hill in 1867, with his young wife and two children, he built his log cabin in a wilderness that had no roads, no schools, no churches or mail, and no nearby Bible, either on paper or the spoken word.

The world substituted in the log-days trek to Victoria, mothers had replaced cows on the farms. He had assumed a burden for this appearance, like all who had a whole side of beef to hang that week, and having six grandchildren was helpful too.

He was a doctor instead of a neighbor woman. The 1926 log-cabin house upon his first home had been replaced by a 10-room frame house.

Nathan Dougan was one of the middle sons in the family of 11 sons and five girls. He learned to chop out a homestead (so necessary when more than six bush acres contain stumps with values so low) and about the cabin door or by the dug when his father took the contract to keep miners on the Goldstream trail open. Some pioneers say too, that it came to him that the first pioneer was what led those experienced heads on, and that much of their history lives specifically in the memories of old-timers like himself.

He set himself to put down on paper what he remembered of the talk of his reminiscing elders. Years passed while he gathered names, and history, listening: what he remembered of the conditions of early life he wrote in good order, putting aside his own work and his own stories for the particular men. He attached the records he found at the Provincial Archives and local church records and such sources.

Early covered-head rough roads between Cowichan River mouth and Sooke gave the South Dougan family their first knowledge of better life. The four-brother Flanagan brothers who had taken up their land in 1863 and followed the two Victorias in 1867. The Mayhews’ twin sons who made their appearance the following year, were probably the first white children born in the district. One of the twin-survivors often recalls:

“His hand-built sleds of sections through the forest on flat little clearings, depended for considerable-muscle-energy on the vertical bar through many violently as beasts. Helped to crack the belt of fall, at first monthly, then twice monthly, and by at least weekly, was the occasion of a gathering at Harrisonville, as the Bay settlement was then called.

Recalling the tales of his elders, Nat Dougan divides the period:

“By rude sleigh tracks or trails and narrow winding roads: one came the bringing pioneer, the trail-blazer, to find the short-jump-river and stream crossings; one who pulled long-sleds or was driving out a crude-whips horse in summer; there came the deep snowshoe tracks in winter, or the settler’s wheelbarrow in summer.”

The settlers gathered for mail, for the news, for staples such as flour and sugar and papers, for stop relief supplies. They went back with infants loaded into narrow bundles on horse and the stump ranches with their scant and clumsy equipment.

James Dougan’s farm equipment would make good use on 20-acre hay land that required the triangular drag-harrows made of clumsy timbers. To find it out there, the contrast in his father’s account with modern hay balers and the like would seem like the ‘20s with a mowing machine and horse rake.

As the Dougan boys grew out of babyhood, they numbered their animals by the annual losses on the farm, and there was plenty to go around in those days. The two “D” Douglases had sold their farm and the new owner had given grazing rights to James Dougan which he for the next quarter-century. He took time to build his early shack here, and as the railway came through, he shipped milk to Victoria. The milk had first to be carried in hundred weight cans to the rail in backs in spring and by water, or dam carried beside the track. At times the water for household use was carried in buckets from the same spring.

In effect, Victoria’s supplies from a time in town on foot, over the Goldstream trail, starting with a private boarding house and baked apple pie as his particular event in life.

After a night with the Flanagans, Nathan took the same long trail and he and a twin walked home together from Victoria.

He remembered the day James Dougan hacked his first house here. “We built and lived in it a year or longer. It was out of logs, and it was good like.”

His father never spoke of that type of trip to Victoria as a hardship but rather as something to be regretted as having gone out of his life never to return.

“The real hardship of those pioneer years, and the real loneliness of the women, is known only to the few who shared it. When Cowichan was next in operation and Cowichan boys could communicate there with the capital, the North Cowichan boys especially swung in on a new tide of education.

The real relief from isolation, however, and one that was the real beginning of the way of life the settlers envisioned, came in 1885, when the Hon. John A. Macdonald drove the last spike at Shawnigan Lake and a new era began in Cowichan.

Social activity and church support in the area helped bring the new life in the years between 1869 and 1900 as scattered new fill numbers swelled the pioneer. There were concerts in barn halls, and Mrs. Dougan was remembered for her social concern when she “opened night,” at the time, Robert Service had a leading part in a play.

The early settlers of Cowichan were not only practical in their lives, industrious in their homes and community, but clear and articulate in laying down the character of their settlement and in building the background of this scenic community that has brought pride to the hearts of those who now make their homes in the valley. Sons and daughters of early pioneers still enrich it.

Many of the young Dougan line, their school days behind them, are successful in their chosen work. In education, in the pulp industry, and in community leadership they represent an established family. The firm of Dougan Bros. Transit Island, and conductors for B.C. Electric, remains a household name in some circles. The eldest of the four brothers of the “Dougan Transit” has been succeeded in that business by one of James’ younger grandsons. He was one of the “sons who never forgot the road.”

On the small plot of land is now held in common by descendants of James and Minnie Dougan, the early Dougan burial plot and Memorial Cemetery, which was dedicated in 1949, and where the family is involved in an organization named “The Society to Restore Cowichan’s First Burial Improvement.” Here it is becoming a tradition to use the white, grey grave site under the firs at the James Dougan Memorial Cemetery.