Emily Carr is British Columbia’s most famous artist. She is known for her paintings of the dark forests and totem poles of the North. She came to the Hazelton district twice. Did she and Horace meet? What would they have made of each other? Could she, perhaps, have hurt her knee clambering over rocks or caught a chill in the rains at Kispiox, and come to the doctor for a remedy? Neither Horace nor the Omineca Herald mention such a meeting. I have searched long and hard, without success, to find any evidence that they actually did meet.
The first time she visited Hazelton was in 1912. She came up on the Skeena and went down to Kitsegukla on the Inlander on one of the last voyages before the railway made stern-wheelers obsolete. While at Hazelton she visited Hagwilget and went up to Kispiox, where she stayed with the missionary there.
She came again in 1928. This time she was more self-sufficient and came accompanied only by her dog Ginger Pop, a six-pound dog that reportedly terrified the local mastiffs. She visited Kitwancool, although having being warned it was still too dangerous for non-indigenous people. There she was fascinated with the totem poles there, especially, we are told, the one the with the hole in it.
Although Carr wrote that she did not like missionaries (she grew up in a religious home, and her sister was very pious) she did have introductions to them and on occasion stayed with them on her travels. Could she have stayed with Horace? No evidence shows this, although it may have been logical. She may well have known Horace’s artist sister, Mary Wrinch, perhaps having met her when she was in Toronto. She probably would have heard of her. Mary was a noted painter in Ontario, a member of Ontario’s art establishment and a female pioneer in a man’s world. She and Carr had mutual friends in members of the Group of Seven. On a few rare occasions, they had work in the same exhibition. They had both studied in London at much the same time, though not at the same school.