Juan de Fuca Search and Rescue Historical Archive1948–2026

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Rangers Find Missing Hunter After Search of Five Hours

Daily Colonist14 November 1948p. 3Before 1979

“Rangers Find Missing Hunter After Search of Five Hours”, Daily Colonist, p. 3, 14 November 1948 ref-only

Summary

A party of 27 South Vancouver Island Rangers found William Reader, a 60-year-old father of eight from Colwood Camp, in the dense woods of the Sooke Lake watershed, less than five hours after the party left Victoria to join a search that was already two days old. Reader had left home at 11 a.m. on Thursday to go deer hunting with his 24-year-old son William, became separated from him about 4 p.m., and was not seen again until the Rangers located him shortly after 11 a.m. on the Saturday, "in amazingly fair condition." It took two hours to carry him three miles out of the bush on a stretcher; he was weakened by hunger and exposure and was driven home by Corporal F. L. Jeeves of the Duncan detachment of the Provincial Police. Reader said he had staved off hunger by eating salal berries and had fired 27 of his 30 shells in answer to searchers' shots, and told the paper "It was wonderful the way they closed in on me."

Written from the article text only. Where the scan is hard to read, the summary was taken from the page image rather than the OCR.

Details

Headline“Rangers Find Missing Hunter After Search of Five Hours”
PublicationDaily Colonist
Date14 November 1948
Page3
EraBefore 1979
Document typenews report
Sourcebritishcolonist.ca (University of Victoria)
no external link recorded
Accessed2026-07-17
Licensingref-only
Record confidenceconfirmed

Archivist's note

This is the earliest documented organized search in the archive and it predates every predecessor of JDF SAR: the searchers are the South Vancouver Island Rangers, not a Sooke organization. 07_context/2026-07-17_south_vancouver_island_rangers.md records the SVIR as incorporated in 1947 and describes it as the first incorporated search and rescue society in British Columbia; that claim is unverified. The Rangers appear again in the 1955-12-06 Daily Colonist search on this archive's shelf, which suggests they were the standing regional capability before any Sooke team existed.

The clipping

Scan of Daily Colonist, page 3, 14 November 1948 — the full page, shown because the article region could not be verified
The full page. The article region could not be verified automatically, so the whole page is shown rather than risk a clipping that cuts off the article. the article region could not be verified - this page reads as a clipping only because its OCR is too poor (0.54 of 1) for the word count to mean anything, so the whole page is shown.

Read the original online

No external link. This paper is not online. It was read from microfilm digitised by the University of Victoria. The full page scan is below.

Files

Full page scan (PDF)

Archive notes

Shared page. This is one item on p3 of a broadsheet whose other content is unrelated (a Santa Claus photo feature, 'The Local Scene' briefs, a Mallek's fur-sale advertisement, a Canterbury debating-society brief headed TEACHER BEATS PLUMBER). The summary describes only the Rangers item. Because page OCR scores 0.54, the summary was written from the page image, not from clean.txt. A halftone portrait captioned WILLIAM READER JR sits inside the article. Two readings in the article are uncertain and are marked [reading uncertain] in the people list: the name of the constable at Cobble Hill and the surname of the Ranger directing the search (OCR gives 'L. Wilby'); both need a clean read before print.

Record id 1948-11-14-daily-colonist-p3-rangers-find-missing-hunter. Original file in the project archive: 06_pre_formation/1948-11-14_daily_colonist_p3_rangers_find_missing_hunter.pdf.

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  • 14 November 1948A party of 27 South Vancouver Island Rangers found William Reader, a 60-year-old father of eight from Colwood

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