In the summer of 1878, long before the arrival of pulp mills, rail lines, or municipal charters that transformed the northern Strait of Georgia, a lone surveyor moved slowly along the eastern shore of what is now known as Malaspina Strait. His task was both technical and demanding, as the Province of British Columbia had commissioned him to lay out Lot 450, Group 1, in the New Westminster District.

Richard C. Cridge did not embody the spirit of an explorer; rather, he carried the tools of a cadastral surveyor. His pack included a compass, transit, and field book, all devices intended to transform forest and shoreline into measured property.

Mr. Cridge began his work on June 28, 1878, by conducting a shoreline traverse that followed the high-water mark. He used a transit instrument as a compass to take long sightings across the uneven terrain. He took bearings and recorded them for distant landmarks, including Harwood Island and Texada Island, which helped to situate the survey within the larger geography of the coast.

The entries in the field book are spare but vivid with mentions of rocky slopes and gravel banks, traversing high benches rising above the tide, and stepping through fallen and burnt timber, reminders of earlier fire sweeping through the coastal forest. He leaves notations for two camps, camp 1 and camp 2, and he does not mention any signs of Indian villages within the survey area.

At one point, Mr. Cridge re-established a corner post destroyed by fire, carefully branding bearing trees to restore the legal geometry of the lot. He referenced the southeast corner of R. P. Rithet’s timber lease, tying their lines into the emerging web of commercial tenure. This survey was not a romantic expedition into an unknown country. It was the measured advance of colonial administration lines, angles, and chainage marking where future claims might stand.

On July 1, amid the steady rhythm of bearings and measurements, the surveyors recorded something more human:  “Steeahmin Indian Village” and an “Indian Church.” The spelling was phonetic, the notation brief. Yet it stands as one of the earliest survey acknowledgments of the settlement at what is now the homeland of the Tla’amin Nation. The village was visible, lived in, real. But in the field book’s logic, it was observed rather than incorporated or present on the land, yet outside the legal framework the survey imposed.

By early July, the party turned inland, following the watercourse first called Nelson Creek and later noted as Teeshquot Creek and now known as the Powell River. Progress was punishing. Mr. Cridge wrote of “very thick underbrush almost impenetrable,” of windfalls tangled across the route, of a heavy timber jam near the mouth of a great interior lake. Beneath the debris ran an “open channel,” hidden but moving. At regular intervals, Mr. Cridge paused to record the diameter of cedar, fir, and hemlock timber tallied not as scenery but as an economic resource and a bearing marker.

Then the forest opened, and before Mr. Cridge lay a vast body of water, which he described simply as a lake “about 25 miles long.” In the formal boundary description that followed, the language was precise and restrained. He wrote the line ran “to M.P. set on bank of a lake, thence following the shore of lake to head of a creek running from the Lake.”