10 Finally to the Sea

MUSQUEAM - The sea was a crescent of pearl. It flooded across shining mudflats, picked up the delicate filigree of weed left by the tide's earlier retreat and carried it once again toward a ragged foreshore of salt marshes, sloughs and brackish side channels.

I paused at the shoreline, water seeping into my shoes, and ignored the massive transformations caused by industrial dredges, urban development, sewer outfalls and agricultural drainage. I concentrated instead on what remained of the view that greeted Simon Fraser almost 200 years earlier. Except for the vast panorama of sea, sky, islands and mountains, almost everything was transformed.

My search for Simon Fraser had begun almost four years earlier with another sliver of light, one defining a dark horizon on the far side of the continent. It had led me, like the young explorer, up immense rivers and down pounding rapids, past brooding 18th century battlements and into aboriginal encampments so ancient even their descendants have forgotten who lived there. I had passed through the gloom of sub-arctic forests and the desert hiss of wind-burnished sagebrush, through winter blizzards, spring freshets, summer storms and the crisp, vivid palette of fall.

For every day I'd spent in the bush, I'd spent another immersed in old journals and the still air of archives where the only life seemed to be the golden dust motes dancing in sunbeams.

I had traveled more than 20,000 kilometres by air, river and road, on foot, in four-by-fours, in jet boats and by canoe, a trek equal to nearly half the distance around the equator.

My journey had begun at sunrise in the same place and on the same day that Fraser was born in 1776. Now it was ending in the glow of a sun descending toward the edge of the Pacific Ocean. I'd begun in a farm field; I was ending in the pulsing heart of one of Canada's three great urban areas.

I'd made my way to the same place where his quest had ended; arriving on the same day of the same month, working out from what Fraser reported of tides and distances traveled a best guess as to the time of day he'd actually sighted the sea.

Behind me was the Musqueam Indian Reserve. In 1808, it was several rows of cedar plank houses separated by footpaths. It extended about 500 metres along the shore of a small tidal lake and Fraser described it as a fort. Today, the lake is long gone, filled in by progress. Much of the creek that drained into the Fraser River has disappeared into ditches and culverts. Residential houses are tucked in behind the busy clubhouse and pro shop that serve a mini-golf and driving range. The streets and crescents are indistinguishable from any other Canadian residential subdivision.

To my right, now only a lovely, lonely expanse of sea grass and driftwood, had stood another village - Mahli or Ma-li or Mâ'lê, depending upon era and orthography - then a long single row of houses facing the North Arm of the Fraser. Beyond it, along the shoreline of Point Grey, archaeologists unearthed evidence of perhaps a dozen more village sites inhabited in the time before Europeans arrived. Scattered across the river's lower estuary  are the relics of perhaps 100 such villages, camps and extended family sites.

Exactly when and by whom these sites were occupied during the West Coast's 10,000 years of sometimes turbulent human history is often a matter of conjecture, the work of archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and ethnohistorians notwithstanding.

Just upstream from where I stood, Fraser had paddled his commandeered canoe almost a kilometre up winding Musqueam Creek only to find the village deserted but for a few old men and women. Raiders from the sea were menacing the river and the villagers had apparently taken to the woods at the sight of strangers. I knew that the village was located where it was for just such tactical defensive reasons. Sto:lo tribes made a practice of locating villages in sloughs and side channels where they were out of sight of raiders, inhabitants had retreat routes and they could be better defended in a fight.

At Musqueam, the shallow, winding creek was accessible to a big canoe only on a high tide. So once I had obtained from the Canadian Hydrographic Service the time of that event for the same date 200 years ago, I could estimate what time of day he'd gone up the creek.

High tide on July 2, 1808, occurred at 2:12 p.m. I knew from his journal that he'd spent an hour looking about the village and I knew that the tide was falling because it left his canoe high and dry and he was forced to drag it "some distance" back to the river before his brigade could paddle it again. So he'd glimpsed the sea about 2 p.m. and traveled farther downstream for a more complete view, probably approximately 3:30 p.m.

On my way to the water's edge, I'd stopped to look at the creek. Even today it's just a trickle at low tide, a narrow ditch between grassy banks that submerge only at high water.

While there, I chatted briefly with Graham Allen Guerin, whose ancestors were here when Fraser arrived and whose father, former Chief Delbert Guerin, just turned 70, left his name on a famous court case which held the federal government accountable for failing to protect the best interests of the Musqueam band and establishing its constitutional obligation to do so for all bands in Canada henceforth.

Graham (he's named for the lawyer who fought the case) was taking a break from netting spring salmon - "I got 20 of them yesterday, about 25 pounds average, nice big fish" - to take the kids, Taylor Guerin and Brett Sparrow, both 12, for a promised round of mini-golf. There's a prospect that would have boggled Simon Fraser's mind.

As I approached the sea, spongy ground oozed water underfoot and the marsh grass and sedges rustled and rippled, the sea breeze over what remains of the old marsh leaving frost-coloured cat's paws on the waving field of green.

Barely 10 per cent of the biologically rich wetlands that surrounded Fraser and sustained scores of villages as the explorer made his way to the river's mouth have survived the subsequent dykes, dredging, runways, storm drains, bridge footings, log booms, farm drainage, pilings and rip-rap, wash from tugboats and pleasure craft, the three sewage treatment plants that discharge more than a billion litres  of wastewater a day, residential subdivision, strip malls and the whole vast metropolis that now sprawls across the flood plain and up the mountainsides. On the North Arm, almost 2,800 hectares of the original 2,900 hectares of wetland have vanished, says a 1996 habitat study by the federal government. Attempts to rehabilitate these biologically important sedge marshes had achieved a less-than-stellar result, restoring only 3.4 hectares.

Most of the villages didn't survive either, first ravaged by smallpox in the late 18th century, then again in the early 1800s, again in the 1830s and once more in 1862. Then, when Sto:lo populations had declined from as many as 60,000 people or more to as few as 1,200, they were finally displaced and dispossessed in the great immigrant land grabs, reserve reductions, cutoffs and transfers that frequently cleared indigenous occupants off the most valuable farmland.

Some things haven't changed, of course. Sunrise and sunset, the rhythmic rise and fall of the tides, the changeable marine weather, the annual spring freshet and the subsequent return of the salmon and migratory bird flocks are all the same. The great plume of silt that's visible from space continues to spill across the Strait of Georgia all the way to the Gulf Islands. And even today Fraser would recognize the view from the estuary to the western horizon - except at night when the electric lights come on.

I stood, mulling the changes that have taken place over the 10  generations that separate us from the explorer. It was a Canada Day holiday. Yet, when the fur trader reached this spot in 1808, Canada as we know it wouldn't come into existence for another 59 years.

Here and there, bird-watchers scanned the inter-tidal zone and its teeming shorebirds. They peered intently through binoculars, telescopes and massive camera lenses. Joggers in flimsy synthetic quick-dries, young moms pushing baby strollers, teenagers sharing earbuds and holding hands, couples walking the family dog, kids on mountain bikes all enjoyed a tranquil Saturday afternoon outing at what's now Iona Beach Regional Park.

For Fraser, reaching the Pacific had proved anything but tranquil. At the moment of his expedition's success its very survival was in question. As he scrambled back into his canoe and pushed off into deep water, the river bank was suddenly lined with fierce Musqueam warriors who had emerged from the forest wearing armor, wielding war clubs and "howling like wolves."  Canoes bristling with spears, archers notching their bows with arrows, paddlers banging the gunwales with the short, sharp-pointed war paddles that the  warriors stabbed at the faces of their foes, were closing rapidly from up-river. One had come so close alongside that Fraser's voyageurs fended it off with the long muzzles of their flintlock muskets until the belligerents gave up and paddled to the Musqueam village.

Although a concentrated volley from his guns would have blown the threatening canoe to splinters and massacred much of its crew, it is to Fraser's credit that he fired no shots in anger but instead calmly, if speedily, withdrew up the river where he hoped to refresh provisions and return the next day to reconnoiter further, maybe even travel on to what he called "the main ocean."

"The tide was now in our favor [it had turned at 6:50 p.m.], the evening was fine and we continued our course with great speed until 11, when we encamped within six miles of the Chief's village [where he had obtained the canoe]," he wrote. "The men being extremely tired, went to rest; but they were not long in bed before the tide rushed upon the beds and roused them up."

Some suggest that Fraser had misinterpreted welcoming ceremonies for hostility or had unwittingly breached the protocols required of visiting strangers in a time when slave raiders could arrive unexpectedly at any moment. However, former Musqueam chief Delbert Guerin once told me that his grandparents had told him that the natives' intent was certainly to drive Fraser away.

Whatever the cause, it must have been enormously frustrating for Fraser to have his moment of triumph evaporate in a miasma of fear and menace. The next day he complained of his "great disappointment." Yet it speaks to his cool head and leadership skills that his men did not panic in the face of imminent disaster. A successful retreat without losses, any military officer will tell you, is far more difficult to achieve than a successful attack.

I thought about that as I looked west and northwest into the vista that had greeted Fraser. I'd first walked down the north bank of the North Arm, parking near Musqueam Creek then squelching through the "greasy grass" of the estuary while tugboats churned against the current, working to position log booms in the channel.

Somewhere near, Fraser's canoe had come abreast of what he called the "second village" beyond Musqueam - probably the abandoned site at Mahli -  and he'd seen the bluffs of Point Grey and the Strait of Georgia. Or, as long-time North Arm fisherman Terry Slack suggests, maybe these assumptions are wrong, maybe he'd turned into a major channel, since filled, which once separated the west end of Iona Island from the islet from which a man-made jetty now juts far into the strait.

Former Vancouver Sun writer Alan Morley, who published a history of Vancouver in 1961, was even more skeptical.

"Despite enthusiastic modern Vancouver pageantry, Simon Fraser never saw the Strait of Georgia, he never rounded Point Grey and he never paddled across English Bay to land on Kitsilano Beach among the plaudits of friendly Indians," Morley wrote. "He did see and land on the southern slope of South Vancouver or Marpole somewhere along the river bank."

Fraser, on the other hand, claims unequivocally in his journal that he saw the sea.

Meanwhile, fingers blunt and calloused from half a century of net-minding and mending, Slack had thumped them down on old maps to show me where the channel ran and to point out another long-abandoned Musqueam village just where it opened to the sea.

"See the bulrushes in that indentation over there," Slack had said, pointing to a section of river bank where the Iona sewage treatment plant now stands. "That's where the channel was. It became a slough later. I used to go in there as a kid. Now it's all filled in."

Nothing whets a reporter's appetite like the prospect of an unsolved mystery, so I crossed the river, threaded my way through the maze of roads around the airport and went down to the jetty to examine the view from the edge of the mudflat where the old channel appeared to have opened.  

Fraser, too, had looked from the low vantage point of his canoe to the west, where clouds from the open Pacific tumbled over the spine of Vancouver Island. As they had on that afternoon, snow fields gleamed on the Comox glacier and Mount Arrowsmith. To the north, the stark, snow-clad massifs still marched away behind West Vancouver and the Sunshine Coast. Curving to the south, a jumbled arc of dark green Gulf Islands which today bear Spanish names: Gabriola, Valdes, Galiano, and Saturna.

But why does Fraser's journal say the Strait of Georgia runs from southwest to northeast when it so obviously runs from southeast to northwest? Was this a copying error? One more mystery for some historian to solve, I thought.  

As I looked, I savored the mingled scents of wet earth, salt air, the brackish smell of sedge marsh, the sharp iodine tang of seaweed. All those odors, the explorer would have known when he looked into the Strait of Georgia with the flooded lowlands of the great Fraser River estuary stretched out behind him.

The acrid whiff of ground level ozone from the immense, throbbing conurbation behind me, the explorer would not have known. Nor the almost subliminal rumble of traffic over the bridges into Richmond, a city with a population today that is more than double that of all Upper Canada in 1808, its subdivisions snug behind the dykes where Fraser saw only sodden marshes and low-lying vegetation.

It's difficult to imagine now, but so much of the river's delta was subject to flooding on a combination of high tides and summer freshet that Captain George Vancouver had sailed the whole shoreline from Point Roberts to Point Grey in 1792 without spotting any of the river's great channels.

The Spanish, who preceded him in 1791, had missed it, too, although they knew from its muddy plume there was a major river somewhere nearby. There's a theory that Jose Maria Narvaez walked from Boundary Bay to the river during his explorations, but as historic maps expert Derek Hayes points out in his Historical Atlas of Vancouver, there's no discovered documentary record and Narvaez's own map presents no evidence he did.

Thus, so as far as the historical record is concerned, credit for being the first non-natives to actually lay eyes on the lower river where it meets the sea at what's now Vancouver must remain with Fraser and his brigade, although as Slack points out, exactly where he saw the Pacific can only be a surmise.

Fraser described both the historic event and the stunning vista in perfunctory terms.

"At last we came in sight of a gulph or bay of sea; this the Indians call Pas-hil-roe. It runs in a S.W. & N.E. direction. In this bay are several high and rocky Islands whose summits are covered with snow. On the right shore we noticed a village called by the Natives Misquiame; we directed our course toward it," he wrote.

In fairness, the scenery wasn't high on Fraser's agenda at the moment he jotted his entry. He'd reached the Pacific all right, but the river he'd been exploring wasn't the Columbia.

Furthermore, it didn't offer a navigable - and thus less costly - route for the shipment by water of furs and trade goods to and from New Caledonia, 36  days of arduous travel to the north.

"If I had been convinced of this fact where I left my canoes [at Leon Creek], I would certainly have returned from thence," he wrote.

More important, I suspect, his practical commander's mind had already engaged the more pressing tactical problem of how to extricate himself from the confrontation with the Musqueam that threatened his survival.

Fraser had begun his final progress to the sea on Thursday, June 30, breaking camp at a Sto:lo village somewhere downstream from present-day Hope.

Determining exactly where Fraser made his stops on the river is difficult and perhaps even impossible given the vagueness of his account and the enormous social disruptions caused by a series of virulent smallpox epidemics. They resulted in sequential depopulations and movements of people. Villages later documented may have been deserted in Fraser's day, places he recorded may have subsequently been abandoned and then reoccupied by newcomers, the political and economic influence of tribes certainly waxed and waned and their affiliations changed.

Judge F.W. Howay, who in 1914 co-authored with provincial archivist E.O.S. Scholefield the first major history of British Columbia, placed his first stop in the Lower Mainland near present-day Ruby Creek.

Nic Doe, writing in the B.C. Historical News in 2000 makes a well-argued case - based on his analysis of John Stuart's solar observation - for the present day Ohamil Indian Reserve.

Either way, the expedition was delayed there in its departure because Fraser's guides had returned to their up-river village and he had to negotiate the use of canoes.

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