The island's English name comes from Captain Napoleon Fitz Stubbs, who circumnavigated Vancouver Island in 1861. But the name Clayoquot reaches further back. It is the anglicized form of Tla-o-qui-aht, the Nuu-chah-nulth name for a confederation of peoples whose territory encompassed this coastline. The first syllable means 'another' or 'different,' the second 'people' or 'village,' and together they describe a people transformed -- formerly peaceable, who became warlike. Before Clayoquot, the place went by Port Cox, after John Henry Cox and Company, Canton merchants who dispatched two ships to these waters in 1787. Historically, the name Clayoquot covered not just Stubbs Island but all the settlements on Stubbs and Meares islands and the main peninsula to their southeast. That peninsula's principal town eventually took a different name: Tofino.

By 1855, Banfield and Frances Ltd. operated a trading post on Stubbs Island. Twenty years later, Captain Pinney opened a store whose separate small window handled First Nations trading. Frederick Christian Thornberg ran the operation, but a limited selection of goods for passing ships doomed the business. In 1890, Thomas Earle bought the venture, though Thomas Stockham and Walter T. Dawley -- who had been running a competing post a mile away -- soon took over management. The two-storey hotel that opened in 1898 was the first on Vancouver Island's west coast. Affiliated with the Hudson's Bay Company, the store provisioned ships heading for the Bering Sea, and as many as 16 schooners would moor alongside the island at once. The community curved in a crescent around the eastern bay, while a Japanese hamlet occupied another part of the island, together bringing the population to around 300. Fire destroyed the hotel in 1908; it was rebuilt, only to burn again in 1918. The replacement was smaller, and from the 1920s it served liquor under the stewardship of Major George Nicholson.

In 1990, Susan Bloom purchased the forested island. Rather than develop it, she did something unexpected: she removed the remaining traces of settlement and let the coastal temperate rainforest reclaim the land. Over the next quarter century, Bloom watched the forest knit itself back together over foundations and footpaths. In 2016, she donated two-thirds of Stubbs Island to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Today the island operates entirely off the grid. Solar panels run the generators, and sand filtration produces drinking water. The caretakers are the only permanent residents, and the public is invited to visit just once a year, during the Victoria Day long weekend. The rest of the time, the island belongs to the cedars and the rain.

Clayoquot sits just 1.5 kilometres by boat northwest of Tofino, close enough that its tree-covered silhouette is part of the everyday scenery for the thousands of tourists who flock to Tofino each summer. From the water, nothing about Stubbs Island hints at its layered past -- no pier, no building, no clearing. That is precisely the point. Where most ghost towns preserve ruins as monuments, Clayoquot has erased them. The island's story is one of deliberate forgetting by the landscape, a reversal of the usual colonial narrative in which settlements expand and forests retreat. Here, the forest won. Approached from the air, the island appears as an unbroken patch of green amid the scattered islands at the entrance to Clayoquot Sound, indistinguishable from the surrounding wilderness it has chosen to rejoin.