The following excerpts first appeared in the 1955 Golden Jubilee edition of the Cowichan Leader (now the Cowichan News Leader Pictorial, which has been a newspaper of record since 1905):
Louisa, called Louie by her family, never forgot the spell of that first trip over the rough trail from Duncan through the long avenue of giant trees to Cowichan Lake. She loved to tell of the last drive of logs down the river in 1909, how the logs piled up on a bar on the (Cowichan) river opposite her home.
She often recalled watching the men working in the icy water (trying to free the logs) and wondering if they would appreciate a cup of hot coffee. When she offered them one, a worker loudly proclaimed, (after tasting the brew) “This coffee is better than any whiskey I have ever tasted!” She was pleased.
Before arriving in Canada she had spent two years in Moscow working as governess to the children of a wealthy Russian family. Her life with the family “whose lifestyle was a most gracious one set in a fine townhouse with many servants” (as her son recalled many years later) was now a dim memory for this young Welsh woman.
The pioneer life she was to live, upon arriving at Cowichan Lake, took up every moment of every day with little time left for pondering one’s past exploits.
Years later and, by then an aging widow, she still occupied the creeper-covered cottage on the riverbank that husband Frank Green had built so many years before. Set under the shade of three ancient cedars trees at Greendale, Louie had lived there since arriving as a new bride in 1909.
At age 93, after a long and interesting life, Louisa Spencer Green died at the Cherry Point Lodge Rest Home in 1965. But, for the last two years, Louie spent much of her life living in the original log cabin that was built by husband, Frank Green (this area’s first permanent pioneer) so many years before.
Perhaps the nastiest (or more politely put, the most unpopular) of the early settlers was Charles Henry E. Lengnick, who left his native Germany bound for East Africa, then Australia, before finding his way to Cowichan Lake.
Mentioned more than once in this column over the years, Lengnick was profiled in great detail in the Golden Jubilee edition of the Cowichan Leader (1955).
“He stood five feet eight inches tall, had powerful, heavy shoulders, narrow hips, small hands and feet, wore a brown beard and moustache and had piercing blue eyes. Clothing, when he wore any, was a pair of shorts with a kind of bib and wide straps over the shoulders, leaving his torso and legs bare. Other times he wore a kilt and mostly went barefoot. His headwear was always a beret. He was known by locals as the Count or the Captain, he could lay claim to either title.
“That his family was wealthy there was no doubt. He received generous financial assistance from them each month up until the outbreak of the Great War (WWI) in 1914 when all financial help was abruptly cut off.”
From then on he depended on the generosity of the townsfolk, who actually (for the most part), he despised.
He settled on the lakeshore across from Marble Bay after making a small clearing in the forest. Since there was no road in, everything he needed had to be delivered by boat. On the clearing he constructed a house, that to some, resembled a Bavarian lodge. He planted a garden and many ornamental and rare trees throughout the property. Some years later after the house burnt down, he built another, this time using tin.
All the while he depended — or as some said, demanded — on local people to transport all supplies and food that he and his poor woe-be-gone wife required. Since he had no money, others in the area footed the bill, as they felt sorry for his wife Elsa.
In addition to having no money, he also possessed no skills, at least not skills that were required of early pioneers. Elsa, who had been sent to him as a servant by his family in Germany, was nothing more, as the story goes, than a slave.
It was reported that when his wife was deathly ill and confined to her bed, he brought the goats to her bedside so she could milk them. Alas, one day in 1925 poor Elsa died some five years before her husband (master). Both were buried in Victoria’s Royal Oak Cemetery.
