"I think it was at night time that the land shook...
They simply had no time to get hold of canoes, no time to get awake. They sank all at
once, were all drowned; not one survived...
I think it was a big wave smashed into the beach. The Pachena Bay people were
lost..."
Excerpted from a story told by Nuu Chah Nuulth Chief Louis Clamhouse and recorded in 1964 at Bamfield (Arima et al., Between Ports Alberni and Renfrew: Notes on West Coast Peoples, Canadian Ethnology Service, Mercury Series Paper 121, Canadian Museum of Civilization)
Drawing of a Nuu Chah Nuulth village at Nitinat Narrows - a few tens of kilometres along the coast from Pachena Bay. From the London Illustrated News, 1866)