The annual publication of the Department of Indian Affairs for 1906, published in early 1907, gave notice that the Sliammon (Tla’amin) band had 4,712 acres and a population of 106. The village was sanitary and excellent, and the vaccinations had been attended to by those who administered them. Fishing, hunting, and logging were what they were mostly engaged in, although they had done a small amount of farming and gardening.

The buildings, equipment, and farm implements were well-constructed and had undergone improvements. At the time of publication in 1907, the Sliammon (Tla’amin) community had not yet sent any of their children to school; however, they expressed a strong desire to educate their children. They are an industrious, honest, easy-going people who respect authority. Most are temperate and moral, although a few individuals have a fondness for liquor.

Mr. McDonald, the Indian Agent for the area including Sliammon village, wrote a letter to the Department on February 28, 1906, detailing recent events. Included with the letter was a cheque for $200, intended as rent for the lease on the Sliammon (Tla’amin) Indian Reserve covering the period from January 8, 1905, to January 8, 1907.

The British Columbia Mills, Timber and Trading Company paid the $200 for the camp that it had on Sliammon (Tla’amin) lands. In the summer of 1904, a fire partially destroyed the Company’s camp, prompting the Company to relocate its operations away from Sliammon (Tla’amin) lands. As a result, they did not anticipate using the privileges granted to them on the reserve again.

May 26, 1906, brought another letter from Mr. Bryan regarding the Japanese who insist on fishing near the Sliammon (Tla’amin) Band reserve and continue to carry on fishing operations adjacent to the Indian Reserve. Mr. Bryan sent correspondence to the Chief of Sliammon stating that the Japanese have licenses to fish the waters referred to and that the teacher at the school on Sliammon (Tla’amin) is to inform the Indians that they have no right to interfere with the fishermen operating in the strait, nor do they have any control over the waters except the riparian rights to the foreshore on their reserve.

On February 28, 1906, the Fraser River Sawmill Company aimed to cut and transport timber near Mr. L. Anderson’s claim on the coast of the Malaspina Peninsula at Okeover Arm. This development would introduce competition for other local loggers and shakers in the area. Additionally, the Company held a second claim in a small bay located half a mile north of Lund, adjacent to Mr. L. Anderson’s claim.

The Hastings Shingle Manufacturing Co. Ltd wanted a cut-and-carry special timber license near Kelley’s pre-emption on the Malaspina Strait. This pre-emption sat between Thunder Bay and the McRae lands. Applying on March 13, 1906, they were about to enter an area with so many logging camps and thousands of loggers already employed.

Mr. Alfred E. Lye was applying for numerous special cut-and-carry timber licenses, and his applications nearly filled entire pages of the BC Gazette. March 29, 1906, his applications totalled 8, from small lots near Indian Lake to many locations on the east side of Powell Lake. Before Mr. Lye applied for the licenses on March 29, he had applied for the same license on Powell Lake. The application, near Limit No. 5296, was filed on March 14, 1906, and was seven miles north of the mouth of Powell Lake’s outlet, near what is now Henderson Bay. His licenses combined covered an area from the Washout on Powell Lake to Henderson Bay, all the way to the north point of Indian Lake ( Inland Lake, formerly known as Loon Lake as well)

The British Columbia government was gradually establishing electoral boundaries for the upcoming elections. On April 19, 1904, Lund was registered, with all the land within a circle defined by a radius of three miles from the center of the Post Office in Lund, located in the Comox Electoral District.

Land past Lund, BC, was rough, and the waters to travel to it were harsh, with many islands and coves, inlets, and streams lining the coast. On May 6, 1906, Mr. John M. MacKinnon received District Lot 1487 for $267.17. This lot was on Hardy Island, and it was almost a third of the entire island, opposite Thunder Bay and what is now Saltery Bay; this parcel of land held two isolated coves and well-protected shores.

This cut-and-carry application contained errors; the true location was District Lot 1480, as the timber licenses were within District Lots 1479 and 1480, as well as Wulffsohn Bay (now Wolfson Bay), Mahood Beach, and Eagle (Lang) Creek.

Timber cut-and-carry licenses were plentiful in 1906, and Powell Lake was a center of many of them. Mr. Henry Lye submitted 8 additional individual Timber License applications on August 2, 1906, in and around Powell Lake, all of which surround Timber Licenses 7580 and 7581. These timber licenses held timberland between Inland Lake (Indian Lake, 1904) and Powell Lake.

Following the announcement of the location for a new pulp and paper mill, companies from various regions began applying for special licenses to cut and transport timber near the mill site. The Vancouver Timber and Trading Company submitted its application on August 9, 1906, for areas near Lots 1527 and 1591, located by Powell Lake. These lots were in proximity to what would later be known as Olson Lake and the Theodosia River.

On a return trip from visiting the coast, Mr. McDonald arrived in Sliammon (Tla’amin) to hold a meeting on September 24, 1906. Upon arrival, he found many Japanese fishermen residing on the Sliammon (Tla’amin) Reserve and ordered them to leave. After leaving Sliammon (Tla’amin), Mr. McDonald travelled to Vancouver to meet with Chief Williams.

Upon arriving in Vancouver on September 24, 1906, Mr. McDonald went to see Chief Williams and Mr. Higgins to obtain the money owed to Mrs. George of Sliammon (Tla’amin). Afterward, Mr. MacDonald made a call to Chief Constable Campbell to report that a Sliammon (Tla’amin) Indian had been murdered.

Land disputes occurred frequently, with surveys and boundaries often being crossed, sometimes requiring intervention from the Dominion to resolve the issues. On October 6, 1906, Mr. McDonald sent a letter to Joseph of the Sliammon (Tla’amin) Indian Reserve concerning a dispute with Harry and Mrs. Charley, who were members of the Klahoose Band. The letter instructed Joseph to cease interfering with Harry and Mrs. Charley, as they were residing on the Abpocum Indian Reserve, which belonged to the Klahoose Band.

The Chief of Sliammon (Tla’amin) reached out to Mr. McDonald, the Indian Agent, regarding the Japanese fishermen who were requested to remove their party from the reserve. The Chief informed Mr. McDonald that they were still on the reserve. In his reply of October 12, 1906, Mr. McDonald enclosed a letter to the boss of the Japanese Fishermen, warning him to remove them from the reserve and, if he did not, kindly let Mr. McDonald know.

On October 12, 1906, Mr. McDonald sent a letter to Mr. V. Kagakn regarding trespassing on the Sliammon (Tla’amin) Reserve. In a previous visit, Mr. McDonald had ordered Mr. Kagakn to remove himself and his buildings from the reserve. Since the Chief of Sliammon (Tla’amin) had informed Mr. McDonald that Mr. Kagakn was still on the reserve, Mr. McDonald’s letter stated that if he did not remove all his belongings, the Department would be obligated to seize and sell any property found on the reserve.

Responding to a letter from William regarding George Charley’s mother refusing to hand over to the widow of Mr. Charley and to the children all the tools which belonged to the deceased at the time of his death. Mr. McDonald was asking Chief Tom would be good enough to see to the tools and have them given to the widow and children and to inform the mother she has no rights whatever to them.

Near the end of 1906, there were an estimated 3,000 loggers and 1,500 miners just along the coast of Malaspina Strait and Texada Island. Truly, it was a massive population in an area that the Sliammon (Tla’amin) Indians, a people of around 100, once hunted, fished, and lived in. Adding to the population was another small logging operation of Mr. E.E. Higgins, applying for the only timber licenses left on the coast, a special cut-and-carry timber license. Mr. Higgins’s special license was between Saint Vincent Bay and Gordon Pasha Lake, adjacent to Timber Lease 7248 and Lease Lot 1323.

In the closing months of 1906, parcels of land along Powell Lake were still open for purchase, and interests connected to prospective mill financing quietly moved to secure strategic ground. Among them was A. Smith, who filed a notice of intention to purchase District Lot 1901, a tract lying immediately beside District Lot 1901a, the site where surveyors had already laid out the proposed dam. His application, dated October 30, 1906, sought roughly 120 acres on the lake’s west shore, positioning his claim directly within the emerging industrial corridor.

With the entire coast of Malaspina Strait full of logging camps and thousands of loggers, smaller operations like that of Mr. Knute Larson were staking any timber claims they could access and financially afford to log. Mr. Lewis Anderson, Mr. Larson’s agent, gave notice for a cut and carry license on the corner of District Lots 1306 and 1476 on November 30, 1906. Being well within Malaspina Inlet and near the entrance, it was a sheltered, prime location for logging. Although the shores were steep and rugged, it was what was left.

North of Powell Lake, timber was harder to access and even harder to transport, so the closer to the water and in the safer parts of the coast, the more one wanted to get their special license to cut and carry timber. On the west shore of Malaspina Inlet, in a small bay, west of a small rocky island at the mouth of Trevenon Bay, Mr. M.C. Drew applied for his on December 8, 1906. Malaspina Inlet, being a sheltered inlet, required cut-and-carry timber licenses, meaning all timber cut would need to be transported by water, as there were no roads, trails, or railways.

Mr. Fredk J. Fulton, who was the clerk of the Executive Council, published the certificate for the Canadian Industrial Company Limited on December 13, 1906. This certification permit also allowed the Company to acquire District Lots 450 and 1901a and to erect buildings, infrastructure, a wharf, and water pipes in the course of manufacturing pulp and paper. The dam construction was to be at a convenient point between the head of the Falls and Powell Lake and not to exceed 50 feet above the present river level, and to raise the height of the water of Powell River and Powell Lake to the dam height.

With all the timber licenses and cut-and-carry timber licenses issued between 1900 and 1906, one would think there were no areas left untouched by logging. Larger companies, however, wanted only the prime timber and left behind the smaller, less valuable timber as scrap, useless to them. Small salvaging logging companies, like one owned by Lewis Anderson, would look for areas already logged, with skid roads, old camps, and already accessible water areas; they were their perfect locations.

Earlier logging crews had already worked the ground east of Okeover Arm on Malaspina Strait, cutting into its heavy stands of large, marketable timber and leaving behind the first scars of industrial entry skid traces, rough landings, and the beginnings of a worked landscape.

Those operations left a landscape shaped by skid roads, old landings, and the remnants of the first wave of commercial timber extraction. On December 19, 1906, Mr. Anderson applied for permission to cut and transport timber around Lease Lot 1308, which is near Timber License 9447. The area measures 80 chains by 160 chains, and Mr. Anderson salvaged the smaller timbers for sale to lumber mills along the coast.

Throughout the year, the Province of British Columbia funds people to travel across the countryside and the coast to research areas of interest. Mr. Walter Renton Ingalls was just such a person, having written the Report on the Zinc Resources of British Columbia and their commercial exploitation in 1906. In the Report, he writes about the presence of considerable deposits of this mineral near Theodosia Arm in Malaspina Inlet. This mineral claim was the ‘Broken Hill Group’ owned by Mr. J.M. Mackinnon of Vancouver, BC. Situated 5 miles inland from the head of Theodosia Arm, or 18 miles by water from the Lund Post Office, it was a rough 5 hours of steady walking to it once you reached land.

Mr. MacKinnon had developed a work consisting of two tunnels that cut the veins, with one vein 50 feet long and the other about 800 feet long, the two veins about 800 feet apart. The second tunnel, coming in at 40 degrees by the time of the publication, had yet to reach any veins.

The coast of Malaspina Strait was becoming very well known along the west coast, so much so that in the 1907 publication of the Department of Commerce and Labour, a Bulletin of the Bureau of Fisheries published by George M. Bowers, Commissioner for the Department in the United States, included the area.

He noted within the publication that on August 3, Mr. J.A. Kerr of Seattle informed the office that rainbow trout were abundant in the Powell River at the upper end of Texada Island, where fishing was permitted from June to late fall.

The Geological Survey Department of Canada, in the Sessional Paper No. 26, put in the Summary Report on page 17 that Mr. O.E. LeRoy examined the part of the coast of British Columbia lying between the International Boundary and Powell River. In addition to the geological work, Mr. LeRoy gave special attention to economically important formations and to Texada Island.

He continues by writing that north of Burrard Inlet, and as far as Powell River, there are elevations of three to five thousand feet, dense forest growth, narrow valleys, and wood of Douglas Fir, cedar, hemlock, and spruce. The Powell River is of special importance, with a 120-foot fall and an estimated 30,000 horsepower available.

Texada Island is highlighted by a variety of ore deposits, from limestone and altered ash rocks along the shores of Van Anda to Blubber Bay. Texada Island has isolated mineral claims of special importance.

The year 1906 marked a moment of rapid transition on the upper Sunshine Coast, where a longstanding Indigenous presence met an accelerating wave of industrial expansion. The Sliammon (Tla’amin) community, described in the 1906 Department of Indian Affairs report as “an industrious, honest, easy‑going people who respect authority” and numbering 106 individuals on 4,712 acres, continued to rely on fishing, hunting, and logging while expressing a growing desire for formal education for their children.

Their modest band finances, recorded by the Auditor General, reflected a small economy shaped by logging rents, hospital fees, and provisions for the destitute. At the same time, American and Canadian publications circulated ethnographic and linguistic information about Coast Salish groups, including the Sliammon (Tla’amin), as part of broader discussions of the Comox-speaking peoples.

Against this backdrop, the coast from Texada Island to Powell Lake underwent an unprecedented surge of resource extraction. Dozens of companies and individuals, Fraser River Sawmill Co., Hastings Shingle Manufacturing, Alfred and Henry Lye, Rat Portage Lumber Co., Vancouver Timber & Trading, and many others filed for timber, quarry, and mineral licenses across Malaspina Strait, Okeover Arm, the Gordon Pasha Lakes, and Powell Lake.

The document notes that by late 1906, “there were an estimated 3000 loggers and 1500 miners” in an area once occupied by a Sliammon (Tla’amin) population of roughly 100. These applications coincided with preparations for a major pulp and paper mill at Powell River, including the certification of the Canadian Industrial Company and authorization to build a dam that would raise the river and lake by up to 50 feet. Geological and fisheries surveys drew further attention to the region, highlighting its mineral deposits, timber wealth, and the 30,000-horsepower potential of the Powell River’s 120‑foot fall.