While conducting research for a much larger project, I came across a strange story that
I think you’ll find interesting, which I cannot imagine I’ll be able to incorporate
into another piece.
The story is an excerpt from the memoirs of Susan Moir Allison, one of the first pioneers
to settle the Similkameen Valley in south-central British Columbia.
Susan Moir was a Scottish immigrant who came with her family to British Columbia in 1860,
at the age of fifteen.
Like many Britons at the time, Susan’s step-father, Thomas Glennie, was drawn to BC by news of
a gold strike at the head of the Fraser Canyon, near the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson
Rivers.
Rather than search for the yellow metal himself, however, Glennie planned to establish a cattle
ranch on the lower Fraser Valley, just downriver from Fort Hope, British Columbia, at the mouth
of the Fraser Canyon, and make his fortune selling beef to hungry prospectors newly returned
from the goldfields.
When his gambling habit and spendthrift lifestyle put him into more debt than he could handle,
he abandoned the country and his family.
In 1868, 23-year-old Susan married a 42-year-old Englishman named John Fall Allison, a veteran
of both the Fraser Canyon and California gold rushes who owned a cattle ranch near what
is now the city of Princeton, British Columbia, on the shores of the Similkameen River.
Susan left her home in Fort Hope and relocated to Allison’s remote log cabin about 40 miles
to the east.
“Then began my camping days,” wrote Susan Allison in a later reminiscence, “and the
wild, free life I ever loved till age and infirmity put an end to it.”
For five years, the Allisons ranched out of their Princeton property, their only neighbours
being a handful of white and Chinese prospectors, a distant Hudson’s Bay Company employee,
a few fellow pioneers like themselves, and members of a local Okanagan Indian band, most
of whom spoke very little English.
Their hard life was punctuated by several hair-raising adventures, including a run-in
with a gang of notorious Metis outlaws and their spectation of powwow that nearly resulted
in a war between the Okanagan Nation and the U.S. Army.
In the fall of 1873, Susan and John and their three children relocated to the western shores
of Okanagan Lake at the site of what is now West Kelowna, about 50 miles northeast of
Princeton, across the lake from a Roman Catholic mission.
The couple continued to raise cattle, which John regularly drove to New Westminster, the
site of present-day Vancouver, British Columbia.
John typically brought his cattle down a trail he blazed himself, which presumably connected
Okanagan Lake with the Similkameen River.
From there, he likely headed west down the so-called Dewdney Trail, a wagon road connecting
Fort Hope with the Similkameen, which Susan’s brother-in-law had built for the provincial
government, and further down the Fraser Valley to market.
In 1877, while making one of these routine trips, John Allison met with a strange accident
from which he never fully recovered.
Susan Allison described this unnerving incident in a later reminiscence, writing, “That
year my husband met with an accident that affected his whole life.
He had just taken a drove of cattle to New Westminster.
The weather was intensely hot, but he always used a trail he had cut for his own use.
He never met anyone on this road.
He was rather more than a day late but I thought nothing of that as business often detained
him.
When he came it was late in the day and he looked very pale.
The first thing he asked was what day it was.
When I told him, he said he had been three days on the road and must have been insensible
for thirty hours or more.
He remembered leaving the Similkameen and passing the small lakes, entering the timber-
then no more till he felt his horse poking its nose in his face and trying to wake him
up.
He looked at his watch- it had stopped.
He felt stiff and cold but mounted and came home.
We never knew what had happened- thrown by the horse or sunstroke.
His memory was never the same.”
The blame for John Allison’s strange misadventure, tragic though it was, could be laid on the
doorstep of natural phenomena like heat stroke or blunt force head trauma were it not for
the bizarre detail of his pocket watch giving up the ghost.
Susan wrote that the timepiece had “stopped”, which seems to be an indication that its internal
mechanism had malfunctioned without any obvious evidences of its having been smashed, such
as a shattered crystal or a dent in the body.
While there are, of course, natural explanations for pocket watch malfunctions, the concurrence
of this unexplained technological mishap with Allison’s mysterious loss of memory does
have an uncanny air, evoking ancient legends like Anglo-Celtic fairy tales and the Tlingit
tradition of the Kushtaka, as well as modern stories involving mysterious disappearances
in National Parks and alien abduction.
What are your thoughts on John Allison’s strange experience?
Let me know in the comments below.