Colonial Despatches

Comiaken Hill is located in the Comiaken Land District, and is the feature from which the district derives its name.1 Pemberton, in this 1857 map of the surrounding area, calls the feature Mount Bruce.

In 1856, a landing party of Royal Navy marines named the eminence Mount Bruce—after Rear-Admiral H. W. Bruce—while the group camped there in pursuit of a fugitive from the Cowichan First Nation. Bruce led the expedition in search of Chief Tathlasut, who allegedly shot and wounded Thomas Williams, an English settler who Tathlasut claimed had seduced his bride.2

• 1. G. P. V. Akrigg and H. B. Akrigg, British Columbia Place Names (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 51.
• 2. Barry M. Gough, Gunboat Frontier: British Maritime Authority and Northwest Coast Indians, 1846-1890, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984), 61-63.