"It was so severe that it made all the people sick, threw down their houses and brought great masses of rock down from the mountains. One village was completely buried beneath a landslide. It was a very terrible experience; the people could neither stand nor sit for the extreme motion of the earth.
The old people took their stone hammers, one in each hand, and pounded the ground with them, chanting a song to the spirit of the earth as they did so. They bade everybody to do the same, and a little time after the earthquake ceased."
Excerpted from a story told by a Cowichan elder to James Hill-Tout in the early 1900's and included in his Report on the South eastern tribes of Vancouver Island ( Maud, R. (1978) The Salish People, Volume IV, (Talon Books)
The Cowichan village of Kwa-mutsen (Quamichan) as photographed by Frederick Dally ca. 1865. (Image HP-015941 from the B.C. Archives, Information, Science and Technology Agency)