Born Ada Annie Jordan in Sacramento, California in 1888, she had already lived in England, South Africa, and the Canadian Prairies before arriving at Boat Basin in Clayoquot Sound in 1915. She came with her first husband, Willie Rae-Arthur, and three small children. The ostensible reason for choosing one of the most isolated spots on the Pacific coast was to cure Willie's opium addiction and, pragmatically, to ensure that the remittance cheques from his family in Scotland kept arriving. It was a plan born of desperation and resourcefulness -- qualities that would define Annie's next seven decades. She gave birth to eight more children in this wilderness, with no hospital and no road to one.

Annie earned her nickname the hard way. Cougars and bears preyed on the goats and chickens she raised to feed her family, and she shot them with a skill that became legendary along the coast. By 1955, she claimed to have killed 62 cougars and about 80 bears, collecting bounties that ranged from $10 to $40 per cougar -- meaningful income for a woman running a subsistence homestead. But Annie was no mere survivalist. She cleared five acres of rainforest largely by herself and planted a sprawling garden that became a mail-order nursery, selling bulbs and plants to customers up and down the coast. She also operated a general store and post office from her property. Her livelihood depended on the Canadian Pacific Steamships Line Princess Maquinna, which called at Hesquiat Harbour every ten days from 1913 to 1952, connecting Annie to Victoria and the outside world.

Willie Rae-Arthur died in 1936, prompting the first newspaper ad. The husband Annie selected from several candidates died at their home in 1944 of an accidental gunshot wound -- the story goes that he was cleaning his gun and did not realize a cartridge was still in the chamber. Her third husband, recruited by the same advertisement, died of pneumonia in 1955. A fourth husband followed. Between marriages, Annie witnessed one of the war's strangest episodes on Canadian soil: in 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled the lighthouse at Estevan Point, visible from the coast near her property. Annie claimed to have seen the submarine surface in the harbour before the attack and to have found a shell on the beach in front of her land.

Annie rarely left her property. She lived there into her nineties, ailing and mostly blind, before she was finally removed to Port Alberni, where she died on April 28, 1985, at the age of 97. Her friend Peter Buckland, a retired Vancouver stockbroker, bought the property from her estate and spent nearly fifteen years restoring the garden. He established the Boat Basin Foundation and, in partnership with Ecotrust Canada and the Hesquiaht First Nation, opened the Temperate Rainforest Field Study Centre on a ridge overlooking the garden in 2007. The property was listed for sale in 2010 but the sale was halted -- there is an unmarked cemetery on the grounds, including Annie's ashes and those of her first husband Willie. Family members had been shown by Annie where the graves lay. She never put up markers. She just planted something nice on top.