In the late nineteenth century, many parts of British Columbia were still sparsely populated by Euro-Canadian settlers. Contemporary colonial literature often described these areas as vast “primeval forests” that were largely untouched by European development. Such descriptions reflected the dominant imperial viewpoint that viewed the region as an expansive and underdeveloped frontier, despite the long-standing presence and land use of Indigenous peoples throughout the province.

By the mid 1880s, the shores of Malaspina Strait and the nearby mainland had largely remained untouched by sustained Euro-Canadian settlement. While mariners were familiar with the coastal navigation routes through the northern Strait of Georgia, the inland watersheds and mainland inlets had experienced little permanent colonial occupation.

This sparse settlement pattern reflected the broader demographic situation in British Columbia during that era. According to the 1881 census, the province’s population, including Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands (now known as Haida Gwaii), was only 49,459. Spread across approximately 465,978 square miles, this small settler population reinforced the prevailing colonial view of the coastal mainland as a remote and largely undeveloped frontier, even as the Indigenous people have for thousands of years used all the lands, rivers, lakes and seas as their livelihood and food sources. 

The Crown Grants, survey plans, and land-purchase notices issued between 1873 and 1886 constitute one of the earliest documentary records of colonial land alienation in the inland watershed north of Malaspina Strait, within the New Westminster District of British Columbia.

Taken together, these documents reveal the systematic transformation of Indigenous cultural landscapes into surveyed and commodified parcels under the authority of the colonial state. Through a combination of hydrographic knowledge, cadastral surveying, and legal land transfers, lakes, waterways, and travel corridors were progressively incorporated into a colonial property regime that would shape the region’s later economic and geographic development.

Imperial hydrographic knowledge provided the earliest systematic description of the surrounding coastal geography. The North Pacific Ocean and Japan Directory, compiled under the authority of the British Admiralty, catalogued the complex waterways of the northern Strait of Georgia and adjacent archipelagos, including Texada Island, Lasqueti Island, Savary Island, and Desolation Sound. These descriptions emphasized navigational landmarks, anchorages, currents, and hazards, reflecting the practical needs of maritime navigation while also shaping imperial geographic knowledge of the region. The hydrographic tradition on which the directory relied dated back to George Vancouver’s surveys in 1792 and formed part of the broader imperial effort to render the Pacific Northwest legible to navigation and commerce.

Hydrographic surveys opened the coast to surveyors, who began mapping inland land tenure established through Crown Grants issued during the 1870s and early 1880s. The newly surveyed district lots attracted land speculators, and among the earliest grantees were Moses C. Ireland and John Richer Clarke, who received parcels in 1886 and 1887, respectively. These later became associated with Ireland Lake and the surrounding watershed.

These grants, published in the British Columbia Gazette, July 15, 1886, accompanied survey plans that imposed measured boundaries, lot numbers, and settler place-names onto a landscape previously organized through Indigenous systems of land use and mobility. The grants themselves followed a standardized legal formula, transferring surface rights to private individuals while reserving to the Crown rights to gold and silver, coal royalties, and access for public works.

Letters sent from the coast in 1886 were received by Alfred Church, inviting him to explore Texada, to find his land and his fortune. The Church Brothers arrived and wrote letters home; the letters paint an increasingly vivid picture of the young emigrants’ first months on the British Columbia coast, where every day brings a mix of hardship, discovery, and awe. Their arrival on Texada and the surrounding islands is marked by rough living, sleeping in a doorless log hut, cooking on a balky stove, and producing bread so dense they jokingly blame the woodcutters, the fire‑lighters, and even the stove itself.

Yet the landscape around them quickly becomes the real focus of their days. They cross to Comox, where the land is rich but already claimed, and look longingly toward Harwood Island, which appears far more promising. Their own island, still mostly unexplored, seems at first all rock and swamp meadow, but they hold out hope that good land lies hidden inland. As they push farther afield, they row long distances under a blazing sun, stopping at a Siwash village with a Roman Catholic mission and passing deserted logging camps where grouse flush from the underbrush.

During the late 1870s, the Crown continued to pursue this expanded framework through additional grants to individuals, including Robert Fulton Dodd, Morris Moss, and James Raulinson Waghorn. Survey plans associated with these 1886 to 1887 grants reveal the gradual emergence of a cadastral grid around the interconnected lake systems that would later be known as Dodd Lake, Nanton Lake, and Gordon Pasha Lake. Although the surveys generally adhered to rectangular parcel geometry measured in chains, they also show irregular lot shapes, with surveyors adapting the grid to lakeshores, waterways, and earlier claims.

One of the most significant early consolidations of land occurred through the grants issued to Augustus Meredith Nanton between 1887 and 1887. Mr. Nanton’s parcels were distributed across several interconnected lakes, with a total of more than 1,000 acres. Mr. Nanton’s strategically positioned land grants gave him control of access to the lakefront and the transportation corridors within the watershed. The accompanying survey plans demonstrate the growing administrative sophistication of the colonial surveying system, recording watercourses, lot boundaries, and chain measurements with increasing precision while simultaneously introducing settler toponymy that inscribed private ownership onto the landscape.

By the mid-1880s, the cadastral framework established through these grants facilitated the further expansion of settler holdings. Robert Fuller Dodd acquired additional parcels adjoining earlier grants, forming clusters of privately held land around the lake system. These surveys show how early grantees influenced later settlement patterns, as subsequent applications were often related to existing lot boundaries and previously named lakes.

The transition from the initial Crown Grant phase to intensified settlement activity is visible in the land-purchase notices filed during the mid-1880s. In 1886, applicants, including Augustus Meredith Nanton and J. R. Waghorn, submitted standardized notices claiming parcels of approximately 320 acres near Nanton Lake and Gordon Pasha Lake.

These notices, published in accordance with provincial regulations, served both legal and practical functions: they recorded the intent to acquire land, signalling their claims to other settlers, and enabled the provincial government to regulate and tax land acquisition. The descriptions typically relied on simple geometric measurements: forty or eighty chains aligned to cardinal directions, often beginning at a lakeshore stake and extending inland.

By January 1886, the Crown Grant issued to James Raulinson Waghorn illustrates the culmination of this early phase of land alienation. His grant followed the same legal framework as earlier grants, reserving mineral rights and public access while transferring surface ownership to a private individual. Chronologically, Mr. Waghorn’s grant coincided with the wave of land applications that characterized the late nineteenth-century expansion of settlement in the region. Sydney Bellingham Styes makes claims on district lots that fall between and within the parcels already applied for, as does Percy Atkinson, and soon the lakes around what is now known as Dodd, Nanton, and Ireland Lakes become embedded in place names.

The year the Gordon Pasha lakes were named is unknown; the earliest documented use of the name is in the 1886 survey. The name “Gordon Pasha” refers to Major-General Charles George Gordon, who was killed at Khartoum in January 1885. His death sparked a significant wave of imperial commemoration across the British Empire. However, it remains a mystery who actually named the lakes. History has attributed this name to them, as well as a more modern reference to Khartoum, which was associated with the 3rd Pasha.

Collectively, these Crown Grants, survey plans, and land-purchase notices reveal the layered formation of colonial land tenure in the Powell–Gordon Pasha watershed between 1873 and 1886. Early grants established the foundational cadastral grid, subsequent surveys expanded that framework around key lakes and waterways, and later purchase notices filled remaining gaps in the surveyed landscape. Through these processes, lakes, rivers, and portage corridors that had long formed part of Indigenous cultural and subsistence networks were transformed into numbered lots within a colonial property system.

The near-total absence of Indigenous land use or occupancy in these documents reflects the legal fiction that underpinned the provincial land regime, even though the region lay within the traditional territory of the Sliammon (Tla’amin) Nation and other Coast Salish peoples. The transformation of this watershed into surveyed and titled property during the late nineteenth century thus represents a profound reconfiguration of land relations that would shape the region’s subsequent historical trajectory.