Qualla: Kildonan, British Columbia

Kildonan, British Columbia: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Qwexcxewq, CC BY 4.0. Three times a week a boat works its way down Alberni Inlet, turns into a narrow side-arm, and hands the mail to a post office that floats. That is Kildonan now: a lodge, a scattering of float homes, and water so deep the cliffs seem to keep going straight down beneath the hull. For nearly six decades this was one of the busiest industrial sites on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a village of sheds and boardwalks standing on pilings above the tide. Then, one June morning, the ground beneath it behaved like liquid.

Image: Qwexcxewq | CC BY 4.0

Kildonan, British Columbia: Built Over the Tide

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Qwexcxewq, CC BY 4.0. In 1903, two captains named Macdonald and Terman founded the Alberni Packing Co. and drove pilings into the shore of Uchucklesit Inlet, the arm of water that branches northwest from the lower reaches of Alberni Inlet. What rose on those pilings was the first cannery on the west c...

Image: Qwexcxewq | CC BY 4.0

Kildonan, British Columbia: Salt, Tin, and Halibut Bait

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Qwexcxewq, CC BY 4.0. What Kildonan produced was never one thing. Chum salmon and herring were dry-salted here for markets in Japan and China, a trade that ran alongside the canning lines and the freezers. When BC Packers and Gosse Packing merged in 1928 and Gosse's San-Mateo Cannery shut its doors, t...

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Kildonan, British Columbia: Ten Fifteen in the Morning

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Qwexcxewq, CC BY 4.0. At 10:15 on 23 June 1946, an earthquake centred beneath the Forbidden Plateau tore through Vancouver Island. Chimneys came down by the hundred in Courtenay and Cumberland. Port Alberni was badly shaken. At Kildonan the saturated ground under the waterfront lost its strength entir...

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Kildonan, British Columbia: Fifty in Winter, Three Hundred in Season

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Qwexcxewq, CC BY 4.0. D.M. Arbuthnot took up the postmaster's job in 1912, and a general store kept the shelves stocked. Roughly a hundred people were counted here in the late 1910s, though the figure may have been generous; through the 1920s and 1930s the permanent population settled closer to fifty....

Image: Qwexcxewq | CC BY 4.0

Kildonan, British Columbia: The Boat Still Calls

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Qwexcxewq, CC BY 4.0. Kildonan was never really a road town, and the story of getting there is the story of the place. By the late 1910s it was a port of call on the Canadian Pacific coastal steamboat run between Victoria and Port Alice, three sailings a month, every five days in summer from the 1930s...

Image: Qwexcxewq | CC BY 4.0