Henry March arrived in 1887 and is generally counted as the first resident. He cleared the March farm out of rainforest using horses and oxen, which in this country meant fighting Douglas fir stumps the size of small rooms on ground that wants to be forest and will become forest again the moment you stop arguing with it. This was not obviously farm country. It was, however, superb timber country, and that fact would dictate everything that followed for the next century. The lake itself was the reason the valley worked at all, a natural highway for moving logs before there were roads worth the name.

In 1947, Western Forest Industries completed the homes of the original Honeymoon Bay townsite. That sentence describes something more specific than it sounds. This was a company town in the full sense, where the employer built the street grid, the dwellings, and the reason to be there in the first place. A single mill's shift whistle set the rhythm of the day for everyone. Cowichan Lake supported three such operations in its era, at Honeymoon Bay, Mesachie Lake and Youbou, each anchoring its own settlement. The arrangement was generous and precarious at the same time. It worked beautifully as long as there was timber and a market, and it had no plan for the day either one ran out.

For more than 130 years, Sikh Canadians have been part of the Cowichan Valley, and the mill towns around Cowichan Lake were among the strongest concentrations of that community in British Columbia. Punjabi workers took jobs in the sawmills from the early twentieth century onward, at a time when Canadian law and local sentiment worked hard to keep South Asian immigrants out of the country and out of anything but the most punishing work available. They stayed anyway. By the 1970s and 1980s, Honeymoon Bay, Mesachie Lake and Youbou were community strongholds, with a Sikh temple serving the lake towns alongside the churches and the fire hall. Then the mill gates closed. Honeymoon Bay's mill shut in 1981, Youbou's in 2001, and with the work gone, virtually all the Sikh families left Lake Cowichan. A gurdwara still stands in the valley, its long-term future an open question.

What remained after the mill was the place itself, which turned out to be worth something on its own terms. Gordon Bay Provincial Park was established here on September 18, 1969, 104 hectares of lakeshore that fills with campers every summer. A short walk away is the Honeymoon Bay Ecological Reserve, known for years as the Wildflower Reserve, protected specifically for its showy stands of pink fawn lily, an uncommon plant that carpets the forest floor here in spring. From April into late June the loop trail runs past fawn lilies, bleeding hearts, violets and white trilliums. It is a modest circuit through unremarkable-looking second growth, and it is also one of the better displays of its kind on Vancouver Island.

Honeymoon Bay today is a village that outlived its purpose and had to invent another one. The economy runs on recreation, retirement, and the steady trickle of people who decide that a small settlement on a long green lake with mountains at both ends is worth the drive. Cowichan Lake is warm enough to swim in by mid-summer, which on this coast is not a small claim. The clearcuts of the company era have grown back into dense, uniform stands that look like forest from the air and read very differently on the ground. The bachelor never returned. Almost everything else about the place has changed at least twice since.