Overland to the Nass

To my regret, I never met the late Guy Ildstad. We corresponded for several years, beginning back when I was working for The Daily Colonist in Victoria at the start of my journalistic career.

Our friendship began by my playing a long shot after his name came up during my researching the intriguing story of Quatsino’s John Sharp. The watchman for a dormant coal company, Sharp’s mysterious death had long intrigued historians because of rumours he’d really been William Clarke Quantrill,  

History accepts that the notorious Confederate guerilla leader was killed in the last days of the American Civil War. But, decades after Appomattox, people were convinced that the reclusive John Sharp was an escaped Quantrill. 

It’s a great story, one I’ve told previously in the Chronicles.

Back to Mr. Ildstad who was identified in a newspaper account as George Ildstad, who, as a boy, had found the dying Sharp in his cabin and sought medical help. 

So I wrote to ‘George’ Ildstad of Quatsino and trusted the post office to find him; which they did. Thus began several years of correspondence and a growing friendship. It was obvious to me that he was a very interesting guy and well read with a lifelong experience of working in the woods. He also had a passion for history that matched my own. 

In 1969, he wrote a story about his adventures in 1910, when the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway precipitated a land boom. He and two others were hired to stake out 10,000 acres in northern B.C. for an American company. 

I’ll pass on Mr. Ildstad’s firsthand account of his long ago trek “Overland to the Nass,” in this week’s BC Chronicles.

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PHOTO:  The Nass River and Nass Valley were little known to the outside world at the time of Mr. Ildstad’s survey work in 1910. —Wikipedia