This is Klahoose territory, and has been for far longer than the written record reaches. The Klahoose used and managed Cortes Island and the waters around it well before Europeans arrived, moving through a seasonal round that answered to what was ripe and what was running. Squirrel Cove, on the island's east side, was a summer place — spring shellfish, berries, gardens planted and harvested before the return to Toba Inlet on the mainland in the fall. In the late 1890s the Klahoose relocated from Toba Inlet to Squirrel Cove permanently. The spit and lagoon at the island's southern tip were part of the same productive geography: a sheltered tidal lagoon that traps warmth and fish, a beach that yields clams, and a freshwater lake a short walk inland. That combination is why the midden is there, and why it is deep.

Michael Manson was born at Pickigarth in the Shetland Islands in April 1857 and came to British Columbia in 1874, still a teenager. By the late 1880s he and his younger brother John, who followed him out from Shetland in 1887, were running a trading post at the south end of Cortes — buying and selling with the Klahoose and supplying the logging and fishing outfits then working their way up the coast. The store held together until 1895. The paperwork followed the commerce: the Cortez Island Post Office opened on April 1, 1893 with Michael Manson as postmaster, shut on December 1, 1898, reopened on May 1, 1904, and was finally renamed Mansons Landing Post Office on July 9, 1941. The provincial gazette got around to recognizing Mansons Landing as a steamboat landing and settlement on April 6, 1950 — fifty-seven years after the mail first started arriving. Michael himself went into politics, sitting in the Legislative Assembly for Comox from 1909 to 1916 and returning for Mackenzie in 1924, a seat he still held when he died at Bella Coola in July 1932.

For a stretch of the twentieth century the lagoon was a neighbourhood that floated. In the 1950s roughly fifty people lived here on float houses moored in the sheltered water, most of them logging families, with a few dwellings hauled up onto the shore. It was a practical arrangement on a coast where the work moved and the roads did not. When a show finished, a house could be towed to the next inlet behind a boat. Children rowed to school. The store at the lagoon served the whole arrangement, and the tide came and went beneath the kitchen floor twice a day. Nothing about it was quaint at the time — it was simply how you lived on a coast with more water than road — but it produced a kind of community that no longer exists anywhere on this shore.

Mansons Landing Provincial Park was established in 1974 to broaden the range of marine parks in the northern Gulf Islands, and it took in about a hundred hectares fronting water on two sides: Manson Bay and the saltwater lagoon on one flank, Hague Lake on the other. Hague Lake is the draw for most visitors — freshwater swimming warm enough to be genuinely pleasant, off a beach of pale sand, a rarity on a coast where the ocean rarely gets above bracing. The store at the lagoon carried on for about a year after the park arrived, then closed. Its building stood empty until roughly 1995, when BC Parks sold it to the Cortes Island Museum and Archives for one dollar. That is a fitting last transaction for a place that began as a trading post: the store itself, sold cheap, to the people whose job is remembering.