Qualla: Englishman River

Englishman River: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D G Brown, CC BY 2.0. Spanish cartographers put this river on their charts as the Rio de Grullas, the River of Cranes. They had almost certainly been looking at great blue herons, standing motionless in the shallows where the current runs out into the Strait of Georgia, and they made the reasonable error of men a long way from home. The people who had lived on this coast for thousands of years named it for something more useful. In the island dialect of Halkomelem it is Kw'a'luxw - dog salmon - after the chum that shoulder up out of the salt every fall to spawn and die in the gravel. Then the English arrived and named it after themselves, on evidence that has never been very good. Four names, three languages, one river running forty kilometres from a small mountain lake to the sea at Parksville.

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Image: D G Brown | CC BY 2.0

Englishman River: Out of the Beaufort Range

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D G Brown, CC BY 2.0. The Englishman begins in an unremarkable place: tiny Jewel Lake, on the eastern slopes of the Beaufort Range, high enough that snow lingers on the shoulders above it into early summer. From there it runs east for forty kilometres and empties into the Strait of Georgia at Parksvil...

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Image: D G Brown | CC BY 2.0

Englishman River: The Drowned Man and the Neighbour

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Moldyholstein, CC BY-SA 4.0. How the river got its English name depends on who is telling it. One account holds that Indigenous people found the skeleton of a white man near the waterfalls, and that the name commemorates an Englishman who drowned trying to cross. Another is quieter and more likely: a settler...

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Image: Moldyholstein | CC BY-SA 4.0

Englishman River: Two Waterfalls and a Grove

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit th0rstenhell, CC BY-SA 2.0. About ten kilometres upstream of the mouth the river drops twice in quick succession, and those two falls are the reason Englishman River Falls Provincial Park exists. It was created on 20 December 1940, in the middle of a war, specifically to protect the old-growth forest and th...

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Image: th0rstenhell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Englishman River: Drinking the River, Feeding the Fish

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D G Brown, CC BY 2.0. Parksville and its neighbours drink this water. Arrowsmith Dam, finished in 1999 and built jointly by the City of Parksville, the Town of Qualicum Beach, and the Regional District of Nanaimo, holds back a reservoir that keeps the summer taps running from an intake on the lower ri...

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Image: D G Brown | CC BY 2.0