Tidewater Ranchers

How far west can you ranch in Canada? ... all the way to the tidewater’s edge!

By DARYL DREW, PHD | HISTORIC PHOTOS COURTESY DARYL DREW

B.C.’s west coast is an unlikely place to build a cattle ranch. The beautiful green and greytoned pristine scenery belies that it is home to intense storms, very heavy rainfall and rip tide overflows. The mercurial weather creating dense fog banks that roll in from the Pacific Ocean has resulted in nearly 500 shipwrecks along its craggy rock-strewn shoreline over the years. Mariners call this coast the Graveyard of the Pacific, and the West Coast Trail, now a favourite of hikers, was built for shipwrecked survivors to find safety by escaping the ocean waters. The unique climate produced the storms that also produced the massive first growth trees, and beginning in the mid-1800s, loggers dreamed about turning them into lumber. That dream helped foster the era of the tidewater ranchers.

While the trees were abundant, the logistics of supplying very isolated logging camps with fresh beef and produce in the days before refrigeration was a nightmare. Before chainsaws, it took two men with axes and crosscut saws several days to fall just one giant first growth tree. Hand logging operations needed many men requiring many calories per day. Once felled, the giant trees had to be cut to length and skidded over corduroy trails to the water’s edge, formed up into log booms and floated to a mill. In the days before steam donkeys and heavy haul back rigging, log skidding was done by teams of draft horses and oxen.

Added to the need for a steady supply of meat and produce, the logging operations required oxen, horses, hay and a wintering ground for draft animals when logging was shut down for the storm season. Complicating the supply problem was the fact that raising livestock and the hay to feed them is not viable in a temperate rainforest. However, some unique climatic variations made the development of small ranches close to logging camp markets a practical solution to the loggers’ supply problems. These ranches ranged from a few dozen hectares of cleared land to 405 hectares (1,000 acres) or more.