Nathan Dougan Was the First ‘Cowichan Chronicler’
Yes, I’ve been writing the Chronicles for a long time now, first in the Cowichan Valley Citizen for 23 years and, since then, here online.
Nathan Dougan is the man on middle left. —Family photo
But Nathan Dougan was way, way ahead of me.
For years, from the 1950’s on, he wrote regularly of Cowichan’s colourful history in the Cowichan Leader. After his death, his son Bob published many of these articles in a book, Cowichan My Valley, which has become a highly desirable—and expensive—collector’s item.
Nathan Dougan was the son of James and Annie Dougan, of the pioneering Cobble Hill clan for whom that little lake beside the highway, just before the Trans Canada and Cowichan Bay Road junction, is named.
Which would be a worthy legacy in itself. But Nathan Dougan did so much more than rest on his family laurels—he literally ‘saved’ much of the history of what was then Shawnigan region. This included the Malahat, Shawnigan Lake, Cobble Hill, Cowichan Bay and Cowichan Station history.
And he did it mostly from memory, having grown up with the pioneers who made it all happen—something that a latecomer such as I can never hope to do.
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For years, the late Doris Benjamin, a Dougan on her mother’s side, was both my friend and helpmate.
Passionate about her family history as well as that of the Cowichan Valley at large, she dedicated the years of her retirement from teaching to volunteering at the Cowichan Valley Museum and in researching in the Nanaimo Library and B.C. Provincial Archives in Victoria.
The 1880 Dougan farmhouse just southwest of Cobble Hill’s Dougan Lake, still stands but is unoccupied. —Family photo
One of her chosen projects was searching out those columns of Nathan Dougan’s articles that had been published in the Cowichan Leader through the 1950’s and 1960’s. Doris returned to the Valley in the 1990’s, before the world had gone truly digital, and to do this research at the Duncan Archives meant many hours of straining her eyes on the essential but non-operator friendly microfilm machine.
The result of all that work was almost an inch of photocopied columns. Doris made two sets—one for her, one for me. Even better, she created an index. As I said, Doris was a good friend.
One inch of 20-pound paper is, need I say it, a lot of words and a lot of information. Which is what makes Nathan Dougan such a priceless asset to our Valley history. He appears to have written about almost everyone and everything he’d ever heard or seen in his lifetime. That lifetime was spent, after a short time away as a young man, raising a family as a small farmer on the family homestead on Telegraph Road, Cobble Hill.
Nathan Dougan in later years. Although he appears to be frowning he’s probably squinting into the sun. —Family photo
He knew most of the people he wrote about, or their immediate descendants and friends, so most of his information is firsthand or, at worst, second-hand rather than academic and generations removed, as is the case with most historians.
He also had an instinctive knack for storytelling and a writing style that, although sometimes employing words that will send you to a dictionary, is generally easy on the reading eye.
At this point, I should re-introduce son Bob (Robert Isaac) Dougan who, as noted, published many of Nathan’s Leader articles in Cowichan My Valley in 1973. Bob also published a book of his own, A Story To Be Told, which includes the sad tale of his father’s involvement in a fatal train crash at Ladysmith in 1901. (Patricia: Please create link to earlier posts, Terror On the Tracks.)
(Bob was a neighbour when I moved to Cherry Point in 1974 and our common interest in local history led to friendship and his giving me many of his files and photos with permission to use them at will. Happily for me, the family member who now possesses the publishing rights to Cowichan My Valley has since given me permission to use any of the book’s photos and information as I see fit.
But back to Nathan and the coming to Cobble Hill of his parents, Irish immigrants James and Annie Dougan whose farmhouse, one of the oldest in the Valley, still stands although unoccupied on the original farmstead.
To quote Bob Dougan in A Story To Be Told, “James Dougan left the land of his birth near the town of Coleraine in County Derry in the year 1856 to seek his fortune in the Australian goldfields. The heat and, sometimes, a shortage of good water were problems, and there was the constant threat of venomous snakes, the bites of which could be fatal—some of the things he did not like about Australia.
“However, he told Father that he found a partner and sank a shaft in search of gold. They had no luck...and after a lot of hard work they became discouraged, selling their claim to other miners. When these men struck pay dirt in the shaft, Grandfather and his partner realized that they had sold out too soon!”
Previously, James’s older brother Robert had left Australia with a group of other miners who’d decided to try their luck in the Cariboo gold fields of British Columbia.
“Grandfather decided to join him,” Bob continues, and reached Victoria about a month later. As it happened, he arrived before Robert had left Victoria, Robert’s ship, the Orestes, having been delayed because of trouble with its captain, the notorious ‘Bully’ Hayes. Living up to his reputation, Hayes had made the voyage so unpleasant with his brutality to his crew that, upon reaching Esquimalt, both crew and passengers raised a blue shirt, an internationally recognized distress signal.
Capt. Hayes was greeted with an armed boarding party from a British warship.
(So Bob wrote. One of the difficulties, alas, of researching history is that of conflicting information. According to the sources I checked, Bully Hayes (who was always on the run from the law and his creditors) had been “removed” in Honolulu for his fraudulent activities while en route to B.C. But, no matter, let’s move on with Bob’s tale...)
“They lost no time taking off up the Fraser River, making their way through the Coast Mountains towards the goldfields and the Cariboo.
“There seems to be some confusion as to whether the Dougan brothers made it to the goldfields. Some members of the family think not. The late start on the long trek through the mountains ran them into trouble, and they turned back to the coast, making their way to Victoria. Grandfather later told his family of the hard and dangerous return journey, and of being short of food with winter weather already upon them.
“Robert and James James Dougan returned to Australia where Robert lived out his life until his death on April 16th, 1915. James, our grandfather, married Annie Magrath there in 1862. There were three sons from this union: James Jr, 1864; William Arthur, 1865; and John, 1867, all being born in New South Wales.
“With these three young boys James and Annie Dougan, 33 and 22 years of age respectively, set out on an ocean Voyage of more than 12,000 miles on the sailing ship, Silas Fish. During the voyage which lasted three months, the second son Arthur became ill, did not recover, and was buried at sea.
“Grandfather told us of the poor food, bad water and severe storms. The atmosphere in the interior of the ship was constantly damp, a very unhealthy condition, and it was a wonder that more did not die."
(In quoting Bob at length I’m trying to show you that he, like his father Nathan, had a naturally pleasing writing style—and great stories to tell. What a shame that Bob was pulled from school when only in Grade 3 to help work on the family farm during the Great Depression. Who knows what he might have accomplished with more education.)
The Nathan Dougan family. The little ‘girl’ in the front is Bob! That’s the way they dressed little boys in those days. —Family photo
Bob again: “James and his young wife must have felt a great relief when their strenuous and difficult voyage came to an end on the shores of the west coast of Canada in 1868. They were soon making a new home on a preempted piece of land in Hillbank Valley, just south of the Koksilah River. A log house was built close to the creek that runs into Dougan Lake, and it was to be their home for some years.
“They travelled to California where they stayed about two years, but it is quite evident that they rated Vancouver Island the best place to live for they returned to spend the rest of their days in Cowichan. With the help of their children a farm was carved out of the virgin forest of tall, silent trees.”
Which brings us again to Nathan Dougan: “Father came into this world on Aug. 27 1878, number seven in the family for the young parents. He inherited much of the Irish temperament, easygoing going most of the time, argumentative when in the mood, and very serious about life in general; he was inclined to trust others too quickly, I sometimes felt.
“He was never cut out to be a mechanic, but he was a good student, he loved a good book and never seemed to tire of the delightful pastime of reading good literature...”
Like so many born storytellers, Nathan didn’t tell us all that much about himself, usually limiting personal references to establishing credibility by noting his personal connection with the pioneers he was writing about. Which makes it very fortunate that he allowed himself to be interviewed at length by Victoria Colonist reporter G.E. Mortimore in 1957.
Years later, as we’ve seen, son Bob would relate some of what his father had told him, but Mortimore’s one-on-one interview capture’s details of Nathan’s Tom Sawyeresque boyhood (or so what was harsh reality on the Cobble Hill frontier sounds to us today) in Nathan’s own words.
Mortimore began by introducing N.P. Dougan as the oldest of the surviving Dougan children who was then living on a 70-acre portion of the family estate on Telegraph Road, South Cowichan:
“He has handed over the operation of the dairy farm to son Robert, and lives in semi retirement, cooking meals for his son and writing his historical articles for the newspapers.” The “barefoot boy of pioneer times has grown up to be a lean, gently spoken man of 79 with white hair and a white moustache.”
Mortimore was referring to Nathan’s reminiscences about daily life as a boy. Nathan: “Most of the clothes were homemade in early days, of cloth purchased from R. P. Edwards. My mother made clothing for my elder brothers until they were grown men. By the time I was grown up, they were beginning to get bought things.
“In summer, all we boys went barefoot. You couldn't make us wear boots but the girls were always shod. My big toe was always bloodied up. If there was a rock or root anywhere near, I was sure to strike it with my big toe, and just as it was healing up, I would strike it again.
“There was a Fielding family—for some reason they went under the alias of ‘Jones’. The woman of the family was midwife to most of our generation... I remember I struck my toe on a root and it bled. And that sweet woman took out a clean cambric handkerchief—probably the only one she had—and bound it up. But your feet got as tough as a bear’s. When we got older they tried to put boots on us, but we'd get halfway to school, sit down and take ‘em off.
Soon after we changed schools, though, and went to a bigger school where most of the boys wore boots. We wore them too, so as to be like the others."
Nathan seems to have been relaxed and willing to speak not only of the good old days, but also of some of the more sensitive moments in his early years. These included his having left home without so much as a goodbye to his parents. Even at age 79, more than half a century later, his conscience still bothered him for the hurt he’d inflicted on his mother and, in particular, his father.
Three of his brothers had already left the farm in search of adventure and in 1895, just 17, Nathan hit the road for Seattle to join his brothers who were working in a sawmill. But they, and everyone else, had been laid off and Nathan decided to return home; he arrived in Victoria with just 25 cents—enough, he said, to buy breakfast.
Continued Nathan: “I hit the road for Hillbank; walked all all the day, just kept plugging along over the railway ties, morning to night.
“How badly hurt my father was by the way I left—a kid never thinks of that. I have often thought since, how cruel it was.” He found work cutting cord and other odd jobs, “here and there,” but still didn’t return home. Having previously learned something of telegraphy at the Cobble Hill railway station (a story in itself), he got a job as telegraph operator and weighman at the Alexandra Mine, South wellington.
After teaching telegraphy to a druggist in Cumberland, he went to Ladysmith (then called Oyster Harbour). As the town was just being built, he lived in a railway car.
Mortimore: “It was at this time that something happened to change Nat Dougan's life. Two coal trains collided between Ladysmith and Fiddick’s Junction and [four men were killed]... The memory of it remains vivid in his mind, and he still argues over the case to himself.
“He never went back to the railway, but worked in logging and construction until he came back to the Dougan land, in 1904, and began to feel a little more at ease.” He married Robina Cavin two years later.
Mortimore concluded with: “Nathan Dougan had 10 brothers, two sisters. Surviving are himself, Daniel and Cyrus; and Steven, who farms 400 acres of the old place. Nathan himself has four sons, three daughters. Robert, the youngest son, runs his father's 70 acres and 20 acres of his own, and tends the dairy herd of 24 cows.”
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Writing about Nathan Dougan’s role in the Ladysmith train wreck has always troubled me; I let the story lie for years. But it’s a matter of record and, God help me, a ‘great’ story.
My problem with it is that I believe Nathan to have been a thoroughly decent man who did make a terrible mistake but who, the evidence strongly suggests, took the rap for a poorly run railway owned by the richest man in the province. James Dunsmuir had no interest in accepting any responsibility, moral or otherwise, for the actions or malfeasance of those he employed, so what chance did a lowly telegrapher have for real justice?
The bottom line is this: N.P. Dougan was (and I say this in all due respect to the late Jack Fleetwood and Adelaide Barry Ellis) the foremost southern Cowichan Valley historian. Next week, I’ll share with you one of Nathan’s better “narratives” as the Cowichan Leader liked to call them. Not all of his original newspaper stories can be found in Cowichan My Valley and some of those that are included were condensed for the book.