CLOVERDALE is a cheerful name for a farm, it reminds one of grass scents and buzzing bees. But this place looked melancholy, almost eerie in an autumnal light that filtered through the faded leaves of oak trees, bronzed by drought. Built on a hill the farm house is still surrounded by trees, but through them, we could see rolling country and the invasion of houses and factories—the city of Victoria creeping up to an old estate.
This is the first stone house on Vancouver Island, with an original holding of over twelve hundred acres of cleared land. It was necessarily self-contained, as you may see by its generous ration room and huge bake-ovens, for the three mile trip to Fort Victoria through dense woods was something of an adventure in days when the tender mercies of the West Coast Indians were far from kind. That was in the 60’s of the last century.
A delightful porch still bids you hearty welcome. One of the family had planted here a slip of English ivy. To-day, there is an overhanging wall of lustrous green, supported by giant trunks that twist and turn in weird and sinister shapes. As you enter the house you seem to be enveloped in the shade that the ivy casts. It is mingled with the green of Virginia [page 204] creeper. The interior is dim, but through the shadows a blur of Indian relics becomes disentangled; bows, spear heads, pottery, and beadwork make history in the shaded hall.
The drawingroom is mid-Victorian, but un-English, nevertheless. Its furniture came by sailing ship around the Horn, and though there is the inevitable crinoline chair, with its ample armless seat, and a roulette table with a round top that may be swung up out of the way, and an old rosewood sofa whose wavy back suits soft billows of brocade, there is also a lacquer cabinet that arrived here on the Fujiami, the first ship in recorded history that came into Victoria Harbor from Japan. A fine gilt mirror hangs over the fireplace. It once hung in the diningroom of the famous Bachelors’ Hall of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Vancouver while that Fort was still British territory, and the boundary line was farther south than it is to-day. When Fort Vancouver was abandoned by the Hudson’s Bay Company the mirror was bought by the founder of this house.
It is nearly a century since Dr. William Fraser Tolmie came from Inverness and Glasgow to Fort Vancouver as a physician and clerk in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Later, he became a Chief Factor and was deeply concerned in Pacific Coast affairs. He learned and translated the language of certain of the West Coast Indian tribes, [page 205] the Enncultaws and the Songhees, and the grounds of his farm gave him ample opportunity to collect relics and implements of vanished tribes. He was an ardent botanist, and that is why so many excellent specimens of British Columbia flora found their way into Kew Gardens under the régime of Sir John Hooker who was his close friend.
This early settler lived British Columbia to the full, an existence utterly different from that of any other province. The ocean brought its strange adventurers, and the mountains were like evil magnets for Indian superstition. It was a locality of mysterious murders and haunting superstitions.
“Stlalamsin!” said the first Indians, pointing to a pleasant hillside on the farm in Dr. Tolmie’s day. “Stlalamsin—place of bones!”
“There is an oak tree on Quadra Street just below Cloverdale school,” said Miss Tolmie, “with the mark of a cross on it. Nearly sixty-five years ago one of our gardeners, half-breed, was found hanging here. Other murders took place more to the west. For years no one could be induced to walk after dark through the brick-fields yonder, a part of the farm which was supposed to be haunted. My father loved the mountains, and he tried to overcome the terror of the Indians of evil spirits, who were, of course, the unseen powers that tossed great avalanches about and sent them scuttling down the valley with a roar like that of thunder. It was [page 206] his great desire to climb Mount Ranier. He was the first white man to attempt it, and he would probably have succeeded but for the refusal of his Indian carriers to encounter the giant spirits who lived among the snows.”
“Many years after my father made this attempt,” went on Miss Tolmie, “several of us, his sons and daughters, formed an expedition to visit the mountain and annually, ever since, we have repeated the pilgrimage.”
The Tolmie family are united in their affection for this house in which they were born. And indeed it must be lovelier now than ever. The grounds about it called to us on this autumn morning. We walked down to a bark tea-house, covered with ivy, with a wild-flower garden stretching behind it. It is a place in which to rest and invite long thoughts. Monarchs of long ago live quietly here—a sequoia, sixty feet high, planted over a century ago; an oak estimated according to its girth at eight hundred years; tall Douglas firs; lazy acacias. And there are flowers of all seasons, though the trees cast rather forbidding shadows, disapproving of colour. But something lingers that is deeper and stranger than mere garden magic. Cloverdale is not a sweet old farm house; it belongs tremendously, mysteriously, to the Island. [page 207]
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