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Toddler rescued from bush
Daily Colonist1 December 1976p. 11Before 1979
“Toddler rescued from bush”, Daily Colonist, p. 11, 1 December 1976 ref-only
Summary
A three-year-old boy missing for seven hours in dense bush at Saseenos in the Sooke district was found unharmed by a volunteer searcher after darkness had fallen. "We faintly heard him crying in the woods and finally got to him," said Gary Jones, of 3660 Woodlands. Jones and Pat Farquhar, both Sooke volunteer firemen, were searching without flashlights at the time. The boy, Jimmy Ferguson, wandered away from his Harbourview Road home with a dog at about 11:30 a.m. and was not found until 6:45 p.m., about a mile from the road. "He was cold and scared but otherwise okay," Jones said. "Overnight it would have been grim" — temperatures had dipped below freezing on recent nights. Sooke RCMP said they were notified that the boy was missing by his mother just after 1 p.m. The number of searchers grew to about 50 during the afternoon — neighbours, police, Emergency Measures Organization members from Saanich, youth groups and "just about everybody", RCMP said. Among them were citizens' band radio owners; Jones was one of these, picked up a message that the boy was missing, and promptly joined the hunt.
Details
| Headline | “Toddler rescued from bush” |
|---|---|
| Publication | Daily Colonist |
| Date | 1 December 1976 |
| Page | 11 |
| Section | 'Just about everybody' helped |
| Era | Before 1979 |
| Document type | news report |
| Source | britishcolonist.ca (University of Victoria) |
| Accessed | 2026-07-17 |
| Licensing | ref-only |
| Record confidence | confirmed |
Archivist's note
VERIFIED AGAINST THE SCAN, and it settles a doubt this archive had raised. The catalogue had questioned whether the project's description of this as a "Sooke-firemen toddler rescue" was supportable, because the poor OCR showed only named volunteers. The article says plainly that Gary Jones and Pat Farquhar were "both Sooke volunteer firemen". That matters for the lineage question: it is direct evidence of Sooke Volunteer Fire Department members running a search in 1976, consistent with the CRD history text saying the fire department handled search and rescue before 1983. Note also the citizens' band radio network — the finder heard about the search over CB and joined it.
The clipping
