Harry Swarth (center), circa 1915 |
My husband Chris Swarth is putting together a book about his grandfather Harry S. Swarth, a prominent ornithologist in the early 1900s. Harry was a young man, engaged to be married, when he made a several month trip to Vancouver Island, British Columbia in 1910. Below are some of the adventures that he wrote in a set of letters to Winnie Wood, his fiance in Pasadena, California.
Chris's first book on his grandfather's trip to Arizona from LA as a teenager can be found on Amazon:
Imagine eating Great Blue Heron stew with beans!
Golden Eagle Mine, Jul
18, 1910
Harry Swarth wrote to his fiancé Winnie Wood:
“One of the main things we were after were ground hogs, and
tho there were some in the basins the best place for them was on Douglas
Mountain-quite a long ways off. I’ll tell you some of our doings. July 5th
was a very strenuous day, tho with small results. Despard [Harry's Canadian field assistant] and I left early in
the morning, he with the rifle and myself with the shotgun and the camera.
First four miles down the road to the King Solomon trail, and then four miles
up that trail to the basin. We reached there about 10:30 and made a fire and
had lunch. Then we started on the hard part of the trip, as planned to go
straight across the divide between the two canyons, not very far in miles, but
a terror to climb. You have been over the trail between Strawberry Valley and
Tahquitz [In the San Jacinto Mountains in California], and you can imagine what the steep part would be like if there was no
trail, and it was grown up thickly with underbrush—salmon berry bushes and
devil’s club. However we had only gone a short distance, had not begun to
climb, when on rounding a clump of bushes we saw a bear crossing the meadow
ahead of us. I grabbed the dog, and we both crouched down, and when Despard had
a chance he fired twice. Mr. Bear got into the timber tho, and altho we
followed him a mile or so we had to give it up. Then we turned straight up the
mountain and put in about as hard a two hours as you can imagine…We started
down our side of the hill at 4 P.M. and it was worse than the climb up, a
continuous scramble, slide, roll and tumble. About two thirds of the way down
we struck a steep snow slide, nearly half a mile long, and that was easy as we
could go about ten feet to a stride. And so we got back to camp again with sore
muscles but no broken bones.”
Douglas Mountain area, Alberni, British Columbia |
On a second trip a few days later:
“The two nights we spent on the mountain were not very
comfortable. We made a shelter of branches and kept a good fire going all
night, and so managed to get a little sleep. There are deep snow banks all
along the ridge, and the second night the little ponds froze clear across. On
the morning of the third day we got an early start, and with heavier packs then
we had coming up, managed to flounder down the mountain side, reaching the
bottom at 8:30. Despard’s dog does not like the steep places at all, and it was
funny to see the worried, anxious look on his face all the way down. I fell at
one place and slid thirty or forty feet before I could stop myself and the dog
refused to try it, but went around the other way. When we reached King
Solomon’s Basin we went long quietly and carefully, on the chance of another
bear, and sure enough as we were crossing the edge of a snow slide we saw the
grass and weeds to one side agitated by something moving along. The vegetation
was rank, and over waist high so nothing could be seen, but we stood still
behind a bit of brush and in a moment a big black head was poked up out of the
grass, sniffing about, trying to get our wind. It was only about thirty yards
away, and we were afraid he might bolt any minute, so Despard fired and the
head disappeared. Everything was still in the grass, so after a moment we sent
the dog in to investigate, and then cautiously followed. The bullet had broken
his neck however, and he fell dead in his tracks. This was a fine specimen, on
old male in beautiful pelage, and right there ended our plan of getting back to
camp early. “
Nootka Sound was, and still is remote! |
On the next leg of the trip:
Fairweather Cove,
Nootka Sound, July 24, 1910
“Dear Winnie,
Well here
we are at the end of the world; the consolation is that this is our farthest
point; and when we leave here we begin to work southward. It took us two days
to get here from Alberni, on the steamer, “Tees”, an awfully long trip for the
distance. We landed here last night about 7. There is only one white man here,
the storekeeper, and he took us in, fed us, and put us up for the night. There
is no wharf here, and we had to climb down the “Jacobs Ladder": over the side of
the ship, to the storekeeper’s canoe.”
“I’m going to tell you something now, that you must keep to
yourself for a time, anyway for I would never hear the end of it, tho it is too
good to keep. I missed the boat for Nootka! Got down to the wharf at Port
Alberni in time to see the steamer out in the channel some forty or fifty yards
away, with Despard and the outfit on board! The captain was on the bridge and I
yelled to him; he shouted back for me to get a boat and he would wait for me,
but there was no boat to be had. Finally he came back to the wharf and I
scrambled aboard. How’s that for luck!”
Harry worked in British Columbia for 25 years |
When he returned south to Alberni, B.C. on August 14, 1910,
he wrote to Winnie:
“This proved a pretty poor collecting ground. At every other
camp we have been at least able to get deer to eat, but here there was no game
at all. All of my spare time was put in in keeping the bean pot boiling, and we
made stew of Great Blue Herons and Mergansers, as you can see to what we were
reduced. It's a fright of a country to travel in, the underbrush making the
woods nearly impassible…After about ten days of strenuous effort with small
results we decided to pull out…We had to get ourselves and outfit in two small
boats, and they were pretty well loaded. The next morning we started about 2
a.m. leaving early to avoid the wind that blew up the canal every day. It’s
lots of fun to get up in the dark and start on a twenty five mile trip in a
cranky little boat, with gnats in swarms about your head. There were two of us in
each boat, with about half the stuff. We rowed for about two hours, when a
light breeze came up, and we put up the sail and went along with less labor…The
breeze dried out, and then suddenly it started to blow against us, getting
rougher all the time. We could not make any headway against the wind and the
sea became unpleasantly rough, and as there was four miles of open water ahead
that we had to cross we decided to run to shelter…We had to stay where we were
until 5 P.M., when the wind died down sufficiently to enable us to proceed. We
had a pot of beans with us and some pilot bread [hard tack, a type of simple
biscuit], so we warmed up the beans and ate them with clam shells, as we had no
spoons. We reached our destination at 6:30, and I was pretty well tired out as
I am not used to rowing, and paddling is worse.”
As he headed further south, he wrote:
“We had an enjoyable time loading our stuff from the canoe
on to the “Tees”, and one box of grub went overboard. That “Tees” is the most happy go lucky,
irresponsible sort of a boat that I ever saw. I had a hard time getting our
baggage ashore at Alberni at all, and had to dig it out of the hold myself,
and then my dunnage bag was left on board and carried on to Victoria; so here I
am with no clothes except what I am wearing, waiting for the boat to return. I
was never on a trip on which so many different kinds of things happened to me,
and I’m getting nervous, wondering what next!”
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