Japanese Settlement Found in Forests of British Columbia(smithsonianmag.com) |
Japanese Settlement Found in Forests of British Columbia(smithsonianmag.com) |
There were orchards, livestock, farms of potatoes, onions and legumes, but most of the activity was in hauling out doug fir to tidewater with oxen or steam donkeys or building miles-long flumes to shoot WRC shinglebolts down to the river or Burrard Inlet.
> But it is the third site, which seems to have transitioned from a logging camp to a thriving village, that fascinates [the archaeology professor] the most.
Must be a real privilege for your grandfather to share that bit of vivid history with you. My grandfather would have been a young adult during WW2, and the small island that both he and I grew up on has a deep history with the Japanese which had a direct impact on its indigenous population; he supposedly spoke fluent Japanese as a consequence, along with Korean (by birth), the indigenous language (married a local), and eventually English (after American occupation). Unfortunately, he was unable to speak coherently by the time I was in my late teens and old enough to be interested, so the only history lessons I've gotten of the time were second hand, passed down from the stories he told my father.
tidewater: an area that is affected by tides, especially eastern Virginia.
flume: a human-made channel for water in the form of an open declined gravity chute whose walls are raised above the surrounding terrain, in contrast to a trench or ditch
WRC shinglebolts: [Hand-sized chunks of wood] relatively small cubes of Western Redcedar which are later processed into redcedar roof shingles.
And presumably there were non-loggers living there tending to these things. So by what definition is this not a settlement?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Canadia...
It's also beautiful and brutal at the same time, a single mistake and you're done for so make sure that you know everything there is to know about first aid and keep your gear in very good order. If you bring a vehicle also bring plenty of fuel and tools (and it helps if you know how to use them).
In the words of an 18th century map maker, the North of Canada (Quebec, Ontario) is 'immense forests', in the West you have the Canadian portion of the Rocky Mountains and then there are the territories. You can spend a lifetime there and never see the same thing twice.
Only thing that has been similar was flying north from Kenya to Egypt and being similarly amazed at how vast the Sahara is.
There's a lot of surface that are covered by glaciers or forest and not visible from the sky.
"30 times the area of Norway" usually gives a good first impression.
The location of a few such settlements were known to the locals, because they had been spotted by hunters or fisherman due to being in relatively close proximity to villages in the inside passage. Others groups disappeared much deeper into the fjords and into the mainland, usually after buying supplies in Ketchikan, and were never seen or heard from again. Anecdotal but interesting.
Absolutely nothing, and we're relatively close to civilization (i.e. we put in off a road and take out off a road.)
Start hiking and you could easily go thousands of kms without evidence of people. (except the hiking would be almost impossible)
It's extremely unlikely that there'd be any unknown settlement of any permanence or size.
See a map here (PDF): https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/cfs/asse...
I spend a lot of time in the mountains of Scotland so I couldn't help thinking "so that's the Highlands looked like 12,000 years ago" to it all.
TIL, thanks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esker
The areas around the cities are dotted with farmland, but it is not difficult to find some kind of a forest nearby. Even Vancouver has a fairly dense forest downtown in Stanley Park. It's possible to wander into it and (sometimes, maybe not during peak tourist season) not encounter anyone