Mike King’s close call with mother bear makes a great read

Chinook Days by Tom MacInnes, Sun Publishing Co., Vancouver, B.C., 1926

It’s not a very big book: half an inch thick, yes, but only 4 1/2 inches wide x less than six inches deep, and the type covers only 3 1/2 x 4 3/4 inches. It really is a pocket book.

But, proving that good things can sometimes come in small packages, there’s a lot of great content in Chinook Days’ 200 pages, 1000 copies of which were published in 1926 by the Vancouver Sun as a souvenir for the opening of the Grouse Mountain Highway.

An online bookseller sums up its contents thusly: “Historical sketches, legends and poetry including sketch of Jack Crawford the poet scout with some Klondike interest.”

Another dealer goes further: “This book includes a variety of [MacInnes’] writings, such as historical recollections, legends, and poems, that relate to the cultures of British Columbia and Canada at the time of the Klondike Gold Rush.”

They value their original copies at $43.00 U.S. and $45.00 U.S. (shipping included) respectively. Let’s say, $60.00 Canadian, delivered to your door.

Fortunately for me,
I found my copy at a garage sale or flea market, and have made columns of several chapters in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. It’s signed, from Anyox, B.C., now a ghost town, and I see that I paid $4.50 Canadian for my copy which is in good if not perfect condition.

I’ve wanted to write something about this author and give a sampling of his singular approach to B.C. history for quite some time. So, today, this mini-biography of author Thomas Robert Edward McInnes. Note the ‘Mc’ not ‘Mac,’ the latter being an affectation he chose later in life.

Born near Dresden, Ontario, in 1867, the B.C. Author Bank tells us, he came from good stock; his father, Thomas McInnes, served as B.C. lieutenant-governor, 1897-1900, the family having moved to New Westminster in 1881.

After studying law at a leading Canadian university
he was called to the bar in 1893 and, three years later, served as secretary to the Bering Sea Commission. He participated in the Yukon gold rush, as an importer rather than as a gold miner, then returned to practising law in Vancouver. After his report commissioned by the Dominion Government on ‘Indian Title’ to certain lands…with special reference to British Columbia” was shelved (McInnes had concluded that some B.C. Indians had been treated “unfairly and illegally” (Wikipedia), he did a philosphical flip-flop by helping to draft anti-Asian immigration legislation in 1910.

He then spent several years in China in the 1920s, working with the Sun-Yat-Sen government to build a tramway network for the city of Canton (this from the Canadian Opinion of Immigrants website) until forced by the opposing Communists to leave the country.

By then a rabid anti-Bolshevist he became a public speaker for the Canadian Union of Fascists.

He was viewed by those on the opposite side of the policital and philosophical coin as being unscrupulous—”a shyster”—his forays into journalism and radio commentary more mercenary than principled. They would also be termed distinctly racist by today’s standards, MacInnes being motivated not just by personal bias but by, it seems, his bitter experience with the Chinese Communists.

He didn’t just want further Chinese immigration curtailed,
he wanted those already established here to be controlled along the lines of South Africa’s infamous apartheid program. As for Japanese immigrants, he was in favour of their coming only on a purely temporary work permit to serve as farm and contract labourers, and as domestic servants. What he viewed as the greatest threat was the displacement (these immigrants worked for much less pay) of white citizens in the commercial, industrial and agricultural life of British Columbia.

In short, his 1927 book, Oriental Occupation of British Columbia is not a happy read and is not to be compared with Chinook Days. According to the Author Bank he’s best remembered, literarily, for his poems, Roundabout Rhymes, which I’ve not read. Nor have I read any of his other dozen published works other than Chinook Days.

So, let’s accept that MacInnes, who died in Vancouver in 1951, was not a particularly nice fellow. That doesn’t change the fact that there’s some great content in Chinook Days. He has earned the respect of some historians for his autobiographical sketches, such as those of the legendary ‘Sea Wolf’ McLean and famed woodsman Mike King.

Mike King, you ask?
According to the Western Canadian Lumberman, “In the early days of the development of logging in British Columbia there was no more striking figure than Mike King…” Without going into detail, King played an instrumental role in the founding of the pulp industry in this province.

It was in his old age, by then suffering from various injuries, that King told MacInnes the story of his near-fatal encounter with a mother bear that became a chapter in Chinook Days…
* * *
Many of the old-timers along the Coast knew Mike King; especially those who were interested in timber. He was a mighty axe-man; and, as a timber cruiser, he has never been surpassed in British Columbia; which is as good as saying anywhere.

From Mexico to Alaska was the range of this wiry and ever-cheery Canadian;
but for choice he would always be in the heavy forests of Vancouver Island and the mainland along the Gulf [sic] of Georgia. I knew him as far back as 1879, and at odd times after that. I lost all track of him in 1900. Then a few years before the outbreak of the First World War I met him one day unexpectedly in Montreal.

Mike at that time must have been nearing seventy, but he still held himself erect, and at first glance looked as fit and trim as ever. Meeting one whom I had admired since boyhood so far from home after a handful of years, and in a city that always wears a foreign air for everyone, even those who live in it, I wanted to keep him for hours to myself and listen to him talk.

It was towards the end of a warm June day. Across the street from where we met was the Dominion Square, and there we went and sat on a bench under the trees till sunset. Only then did I notice that Mike was not what he had been ten years before. A twinge of pain would flicker across his face occasionally, and then he would droop his shoulders after it had passed.

For a time he talked of Mexico; talked of his troubles with the Yaqui Indians; talked of a certain concession of mahogany limits and mineral claims down there which he had tried to secure, and of which he had not yet given up hope. He mentioned incidentally that he had been on hand for the little earthquake which had started the Big Fire in San Francisco; the biggest fire that he expected to see in this world.

Waking at the first shock,
and realizing on the instant what was up and down in such an affair, he clapped a pillow over his head. This it was that saved him from having his skull cracked by a falling brick. After that he talked back to the place he loved best, and gave me news of British Columbia, which does not find its way into the press dispatches—intimate, humourous and useful. Then I asked him straight what was the matter with him.

He said he had been making an examination of certain coal deposits up Nootka Sound way, and while walking along a fallen fir which spanned a deep gulch the bark had given way, throwing him to the rocky bottom thirty feet below. After he came to himself, he found one leg dislocated and his back injured. Later it was found that he had broken several ribs. He managed to drag himself on through that wild, lovely but unlucky region, avoided by the Indians because it is the home of the Wild Man, the Massatchee Itka; haunted by slolikum; and rock-inscribed by warnings from the Vanished People.

It is a region which has, in several instances, seemed to lay a hoodoo on British Columbia politicians who meddle with it, pinning their small names to its high spots under the general name of Strathcona Park; and some of them trying to sell it to foreign lumbermen. Mike himself had seen the Massatchee Itka there on an earlier occasion when cruising through it.

This time, half dead, he limped along
until he reached the little port of call on the coast, where he knew he would be picked up by a tug bound for Victoria. He was due in New York to make his report within a fortnight about the coal prospects. Concealing the seriousness of his injuries from the doctor so that he would not be sent to a hospital he crossed from Victoria to Vancouver and took train there for New York.

When I met him he had just returned to Montreal after making his report on time. His back was beginning to be very painful; but he was still “the indefatigable Mike King by the Lovely Dove!”

As twilight came on he agreed to go along with me and see Dr. Westley at the Windsor. But first of all I suggested that we go to the Grill and follow the advice of St. Paul to Timothy, and then have a planked steak. So we did. And it was then that I got him to tell me of his time with the bear in Cowichan.

Mike was in the woods as usual, and cruising timber.
It was far back, almost 1893, and logging methods in the Cowichan District then were primitive. But at that, and because of that perhaps, the district produced some of the champion axemen of the world, as well as one champion wrestler, little Dan McLeod, whose shoulders and arms were such, and whose swing was so quick and hard and exact, that he could fell three trees while one of the best of the other axemen would be hard put to it in felling one. And for that Dan was paid the wages of three men, and in those days there was no union mean enough to make any row about that. His fellows were all too proud of him.

Mike had been hard at work since dawn; and as noon came on he sat down under an overhanging ledge of rock to rest on the moss. He heard no sound except the whispering in the tree-tops; with now and then the croak of a raven, or the distant drumming of a grouse. Naturally he dozed. When he opened his eyes he saw two funny little faces peering up at him from within arms length. They were two bear cubs about 10 days old, and looking like toys come alive. Never thinking of harm, Mike extended his arm and patted them, and they took it in good part all unafraid. Mike lifted one onto his lap when suddenly his keen sense of smell told him what was to windward; and he realized as well that he had left the smell of himself on the cub.

As he started up he heard a quick crashing through the undergrowth.
He had nothing in the way of a weapon with him but a hatchet. So he quit the premises on a run. He had not gone far forward before he knew that the bear was after him. Now no black bear goes hunting for trouble except when caring for cubs. But then, specially if it be the mother, trouble is a bear’s middle name. She follows right after it.

On Vancouver Island are still the primeval forests; forests where the Douglas firs and the cedars grow together till their great columns reach up a hundred feet or more before they even begin to whisper to the blue with their branches. And below, even at noon, there is a green twilight, showing a ground thick-carpeted with moss and ferns; with shafts of light coming through here and there over entanglements of undergrowth and fallen logs.

For a hardy man well up in wood craft, and going at his ease in the summertime, such a forest is a delightful and spirit-freeing place; Gothic and solemn it is, and yet in no way depressing. Every old-timer who loved the trees will be remembering that, even although now he must live his life out in the midst of brick-blistered and machine-driven cities.

But you be in those same woods with a crazy mad, black mother bear after you,
and nothing in your hand but a small hatchet for blazing trails and marking trees; then you will want to go home, and go quick; then the ugliest of habitations of man will be desirable beyond all sight of trees with trunks too thick to be rounded for a climb, and with no branches within reach.

Mike King ran and jumped and ran. He lost his sense of direction, so intent was he on mere speed. His only thought then was to put so wide a space between himself and that bear that she would soon give over and return to her cubs. But as he leapt over one huge log he went plumb into a pool of black mud and water, thick-grown over with skunk cabbage. Odd how in moments of extreme peril one takes sharp notice of trifles!

Ever after that Mike King hated the scent of swamp lilies. By the time he had recovered himself and made to firm ground the bear was over the log and splashing toward him through the pool. Mike turned and grabbed from the ground with his left hand a small broken branch at his feet; one that was slivered and old from a tree long fallen. He knew there was slim chance of hitting an attacking bear with a hatchet at first blow. With paw quicker than the fist of any pugilist the hatchet at first blow would have been knocked aside, and on the instant the other paw would have ripped him from face down.

At the edge of the pool the bear rose on its haunches.
Mike struck straight across to the face with the stick in his left hand; but the stick never touched the bear, and was knocked from his grasp. In the same instant, however, he came down with the hatchet in his right hand, trying to give the fatal blow across the nose. He missed the nose, and the hatchet only cut with little effect into the forehead, and with that slipped from his grasp. Yet the blow was enough to stagger the bear over the slippery, yielding edge into the pool.

Mike ran and jumped and ran. Maybe it is true, as Kipling says, that the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Anyway, that bear was up and after Mike again, and he “learned about wimmin from ‘er.”

There are some men who at a crisis can call up a reserve of strnength, although it may leave them limp for long after. Mike ran and jumped and ran. But now the bear was shortening the distance between them. Mike could hear its snarling grunts of rage; the hot smell of it was coming towards him. Then it was that his ears caught the sound of axes; the regular clip-clop, clip-clop of expert loggers. Mike headed for the sound. It is not every city dweller who can tell the direction whence a sound comes through the woods. But Mike could take his directions by ear as a dog can by his nose.

The rest of that run to him was in a dark green blaze of horror.
A nightmare had materialized, and was after him. Then new sounds were in his ears, sounds of breakage as if a great wind had struck up aloft. The bear now was just at his heels, and there was a great roaring and falling over them both. He felt a ripping blow behind as he plunged, bent double and head foremost—crash—darkness!

Next thing Mike knew there were two men standing by, and a third was holding up his head and telling him to drink from a flask which he held to his lips. He had been flung forward beyond the trunk of the falling tree just as it came to the ground. The bear had been fairly caught across the back.

Mike was a kindly soul, and could always be depended upon to make others keep the King’s peace when necessary. But in the stock of his good fellowship there was no asset in favour of any bear for a long time after that. And he said to me:

“I tell you, Tommy, old Job talked about escaping by the skin of his teeth; but it was the skin behind my pants that I escaped by; and for weeks after that if I forgot myself and sat down careless like then I had cause good and plenty to curse that bear. You bet I had, by the Lovely Dove!”

* * *

Clean, upright Mike!
But that fall at Nootka was his finish. He left Montreal and went to Johns Hopkins or some such place for treatment by specialists, and died soon after.