The influence of the Royal Navy on the development of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest was both effective and extensive. Yet all too frequently, its impact has been ignored by historians, who instead focus on the influence of explorers, fur traders, settlers, and railway builders. In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition of his cla …

A wholesome and hearty collection of authentic recipes and local history from ranch country.

Come ‘n’ Get It is an authentic collection of down-home recipes and early Western Canadian ranch lore. Featuring material and recipes gathered from letters, history books, family cookbooks, and interviews with ranching families, this book represents a cr …

Daggers Unsheathed: The Political Assassination of Glen Clark is the story of the Glen Clark era in British Columbia politics. From the 1995 announcement of his NDP leadership aspirations to the day in 2002 when he was acquitted of criminal charges in a BC court, Glen Clark was the dominant personality in West Coast politics. Clark's style and poli …

Everybody has a train story. Whether it comes from a distant relative who worked on the railways or from a family train trip that formed a lasting impression of the Canadian landscape, trains inspire a sense of wonder and nostalgia. They are embedded in the history of Canada as a whole and western Canada in particular, and for generations they were …

This is the story of a rebellious girl from British Columbia who travelled the world in pursuit of her calling only to find her true inspiration in the Canadian landscape she’d left behind. Both a prolific painter and an accomplished writer, Carr was more comfortable in the raw wilderness than in the tea rooms of London, and more at home with her …

The expansive ancestral territory of the Blackfoot Nation ranged from the North Saskatchewan River in Alberta to the Missouri River in Montana and from the Rocky Mountains east to the Cypress Hills. This buffalo-rich land sustained the Blackfoot for generations until the arrival of whiskey traders, unscrupulous wolfers, smallpox epidemics, and the …

In their last adventure, Cody, Eric, and Rachel were clever enough to fool townspeople with a homemade "ancient Egyptian" tablet. Their exploits brought some much-needed tourism to Sultana, Manitoba, but their deception ensured they would spend the summer doing community service. While mowing the grass in the local cemetery, they stumble across som …

When the members of Canada’s First Arctic Expedition set out from Victoria aboard HMCS Karluk in the summer of 1913, it was a moment of great optimism. The three-year mission would chart unexplored landmasses of the Western Arctic and secure Canada’s place in the international geographic community. Little did the team of distinguished scholars …

At the end of the nineteenth century, Canada’s prairies were still sparsely populated. Crimes such as horse theft, random murders, and prison escapes were the order of the day, and the North West Mounted Police continued to rely on their horses, their contacts, and their wits to apprehend the culprits. By the mid-1930s, a sea change in technology …

In August 1914, Canada found itself jolted from its splendid isolation by the onrush of a European catastrophe. In Victoria, British Columbia, five hundred youth who had been educated at Victoria High School went to war and were forever changed by the experience.

From Classroom to Battlefield follows the experiences of this cohort through the Second …

In the traditional Algonquian world, the windigo is the spirit of selfishness, which can transform a person into a murderous cannibal. Native peoples over a vast stretch of North America—from Virginia in the south to Labrador in the north, from Nova Scotia in the east to Minnesota in the west—believed in the windigo, not only as a myth told in …

In 2009, Victoria's CHEK-TV became the first employee-owned television station in North America after corporate owner CanWest Global threatened to shut it down. The David-and-Goliath story made national headlines and reawakened a belief in local, independent broadcasting. In the five years since the employee purchase of the station, CHEK has weathe …

From the era of wooden sailing ships and Europe’s golden age of exploration, the story of famed British navigator Henry Hudson tells a classic tale of courage, ambition, and treachery on the high seas. As the leader of four Arctic voyages in 1607, 1608, 1609, and 1610, Hudson searched in vain for a navigable route through the polar ice that would …

Life is getting more dismal by the minute in the town of Sultana, Manitoba. Thanks to a dry season that nearly dried up the river, no one wants to camp there anymore. There aren’t enough tourists to keep the local restaurant busy and, if Cody’s best friend’s mom loses her job there, the family will have to move away.

Cody, his best friend, Er …

Building transportation routes through the Rockies is dangerous. It always has been. It is also expensive, labour-intensive, and highly political. But railway and highway construction through the western cordillera succeeded thanks to scientific innovation and sheer human grit. In the nineteenth century, steam locomotives, railways, tunnels, trestl …

Through his incredibly varied fifty-year career, John J. Healy left an indelible mark on the Canadian and American west. At different points in his storied life, Healy was a soldier, a trapper, a prospector, a free trader, an explorer, a horse dealer, a scout, a lawman, a newspaper editor, a speculator, a merchant, a capitalist, a historian, and a …

Haida Gwaii, ancestral home of the Haida First Nation, was once as inaccessible and mysterious as it was beautiful. The tight cluster of islands off British Columbia’s northwest coast remained virtually untouchable for millennia, allowing its people to develop a distinct and exceptional cultural identity that was known and revered across the regi …

Any community that has ever been labelled a “mill town” carries both the promise of prosperity and the constant threat of collapse, its fortune hinging on a single industry whose performance is as much related to the whims of a global economy as it is to the abundance of a key natural resource. The people of Port Alberni, located deep in Vancou …

They endured the torments of scurvy and the vagaries of deep fogs, adverse winds, and contrary currents. They suffered through appalling quarters and rotting food. They spent years away from their homes and families, never knowing whether they would return. Their orders from Spain might well arrive long after they were needed, six months or longer …

Often called one of the Seven Wonders of Canada, the canoe has played a particularly important role in British Columbia. This seemingly simple watercraft allowed coastal First Nations to hunt on the open ocean and early explorers to travel the province’s many waterways. Always at the crossroads of canoe culture, BC today is home to innovative art …

In this bestselling timeless classic, Peter Gzowski recounts the 1980-81 season he spent travelling around the NHL circuit with the Edmonton Oilers. These were the days when the young Oilers, led by a teenaged Wayne Gretzky, were poised on the edge of greatness, and about to blaze their way into the record books and the consciousness of a nation. W …

Vancouver Island in the late nineteenth century was a major port of entry for people from all walks of life. But for many, the sense of hope that had sustained them through rough sea voyages came to an abrupt halt as soon as they reached land. Quarantined is the heart-wrenching true story of the thousands of forgotten people who arrived on our shor …

The Legend of the Buffalo Stone is based on the history of the Blackfoot people—specifically their dependence on the buffalo and how they hunted the great animals on foot before horses were brought to North America—and is retold with the permission and under the advisement of a First Nations scholar and member of the Blackfoot nation.

The story …

Ted Grant, the undisputed father of Canadian photojournalism, has made a career out of being in the right place at the right time. Over his sixty years in the business, he has immortalized some of the greatest events in history and caught some of the world’s most famous and elusive subjects in rare moments of unaffected humanity. From Pierre Trud …

On June 20, 1942, the lighthouse at Estevan Point on Vancouver Island was shelled by the Japanese submarine I-26. It was the first enemy attack on Canadian soil since the War of 1812. But this was only one incident in the incredible and little-known Japanese campaign to terrorize North America’s west coast and mount an invasion through the Aleuti …

High finance, wilderness adventures, violence, and questionable legal tactics all played important roles in the history of the North West Company. William McGillivray, head of the company from 1804 until 1821, was arguably the most powerful businessman in Canada in the early nineteenth century.

William McGillivray emigrated from the Scottish Highlan …

“I want to gold pan; I want to strike rich. I’ve been searching for a stream of gold. It’s these fortunes I never win that keep me searching for a stream of gold. And I’m getting old. I keep searching for my stream of gold; and I’m getting close.”

If those words sound like a common refrain, don’t despair. With this newly compiled and e …

In 1858, some 30,000 gold seekers stampeded to the Fraser River. Scores perished during the gruelling journey, but some made their fortune and many pressed on northwards to the creeks of the Cariboo. Originally compiled by Art Downs, founder of Heritage House, this is a vivid and detailed account of the first gold strikes, the miners who made them …

The stories of the men and women who dug for gold on Williams Creek are told in this revised and updated edition of a Canadian bestseller.

The legendary town of Barkerville is flourishing today, just as it did more than 150 years ago, but this time under the care of professional and amateur historians. Richard Thomas Wright peels back the pages of h …

On October 1, 1917, prohibition came into effect in the province of British Columbia. Washington and Oregon had gone dry the previous year. The ban on liquor sales led to deadly conflict and legal chaos in the Pacific Northwest, and the legacy of those “booze battles” continues into the 21st century.

Rich Mole introduced readers to West Coast pr …

In the spring of 1885, it appeared that war was about to set the Canadian West aflame. Louis Riel had established a Metis provisional government at Batoche, and the Cree, led by war chief Wandering Spirit, had killed settlers, taken hostages and forced the capitulation of Fort Pitt. Among the forces marshalled to quell the unrest was an elite scout …

There is a special place on the southeastern shores of Barkley Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It is a magnificent landscape of rocky cliffs fronting onto the wild Pacific Ocean, sheltered beaches, lakes, mountains and forests. Since the beginning of time, it has been the ancestral home of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation.

Drawing directly …

Despite being neighbouring provinces with long ranching histories, British Columbia and Alberta saw their ranching techniques develop quite differently. As most ranching styles were based on one of the two dominant styles in use south of the border, BC ranchers tended to adopt the California style whereas Alberta took its lead from Texas. But the d …

The people of the Nechako region are not unfamiliar with hardship, environmental devastation and protecting what they hold dear. June Wood chronicles the history of the Nechako River and its region, covering the construction of the Kenney Dam, which changed forever the flow of the river and its tributaries; the controversial Kemano Completion Proje …

In contrast to the widely known experiences of Asian immigrants who came to Canada, this book looks at movement in the opposite direction. Using text and images, it is a collection of stories about how Canadians “found Japan,” the first place they reached when travelling westward across the Pacific.

These connections began as early as 1848, when …

From the days of the fur trade, one constant thread weaves its way through the tumultuous history of frontier British Columbia, Washington and Oregon—the war over liquor. Between 1840 and 1917, the whisky wars of the west coast were fought by historical heavyweights, including Matthew Baillie Begbie (the “Hanging Judge”) and Wyatt Earp, and a …

They were nicknamed Snow Eagle, Flying Knight, Bush Angel, Punch, Doc and Wop. They worked in open cockpits and flew through cold, snow and fog without the benefit of radios, maps or weather reports. They flew over the Barrens, frozen lakes, boreal forests and mountain ranges by dead reckoning and line of sight. They landed on makeshift runways, gl …

After Royal Navy captain Sir John Franklin disappeared in the Arctic in 1846 while seeking the Northwest Passage, the search for his two ships, Erebus and Terror, and survivors of his expedition became one of the most exhaustive quests of the 19th century. Despite tantalizing clues, the ships were never found, and the fate of Franklin’s expeditio …

In late 1942, Britain was desperate to win the ongoing Battle of the Atlantic. German U-boats had sunk hundreds of Allied ships containing millions of tons of cargo that was needed to continue the war effort. Prime Minister Churchill had to find a solution to the carnage or the Nazis would be victorious. With the support of Churchill and Lord Louis …

In 1874, the newly formed North West Mounted Police marched west to shut down unscrupulous liquor traders who had devastated the lives of many First Nations people. The Mounties' famous trek heralded over 50 years of "whisky wars" in the Canadian West. Author Rich Mole traces the turbulent history of alcohol, temperance movements and prohibition be …

Anson Northup, the first steamboat on the Canadian prairies, arrived in Fort Garry in 1859. Belching hot sparks and growling in fury, it was called "fire canoe" by the local Cree. The first steam-powered passenger vessel in Canada had begun service on the St. Lawrence River in 1809, and for the next 150 years, steamboats carried passengers and frei …

Just before midnight on February 13, 1950, three engines of a US Air Force B-36 intercontinental bomber caught fire over Canada's northwest coast. The crew jumped, and the plane ditched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The fact that the huge aircraft had been carrying a Mark IV nuclear bomb was kept carefully hidden. Three years later, the wreck of …

Getting three trucks and two horses stuck in the mud on "a good road" into BC's wild, remote interior was just the start of Bruce Watt's hilarious adventures—and it was his honeymoon, too. When the newly married Watt moved there in 1948 to take up ranching, he was a just a kid in his early 20s. He and his wife fell in love with Big Creek, three h …

When the Hudson's Bay Company decided to establish its new Pacific coast headquarters at Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island in 1843, the Island was a pristine paradise—or an isolated wilderness, depending on one's point of view—that had sustained its First Nations inhabitants for millennia. It was one of the last places to be discovered and sett …

During the second half of the 19th century, thousands of Chinese men arrived on the west coast of North America, seeking to escape poverty and make their fortunes in the goldfields or working on the railroads. Among them was 36-year-old Yip Sang, a native of Guangdong province in southeast China, who arrived in Vancouver in 1881 after failing to st …

From 1858 until 1950, the BC Provincial Police were responsible for maintaining law and order in British Columbia. Numbering only 100 men in 1900, they patrolled this vast area by horseback, boat, snowshoes and dog team until the arrival of the train, automobile and airplane. In these classic cases from the files of the BC Provincial Police, former …

The years from the fall of New France in 1763 to the amalgamation of the Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company in 1821 were marked by fierce competition in the fur trade. Traders from the warring companies pushed west, undertaking incredible voyages in their search for new sources of furs. Irene Gordon explores the eventful lives of those w …

John R. Jewitt's story of being captured and enslaved by Maquinna, the great chief of the Mowachaht people, is both an adventure tale of survival and an unusual perspective on the First Nations of the northwest coast of Vancouver Island.

On March 22, 1803, while anchored in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Boston was attacked …

In June 1942, Japanese troops occupied the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska in Alaska, the first enemy occupation of US territory since the War of 1812. For the next year a bloody conflict raged that was nearly invisible to most North Americans as Canadian and American soldiers, airmen and sailors went north to hold the Japanese in check.

This is …

The sparsely populated southern Interior of British Columbia was rich in resources and ripe for settlement in the late 1800s. The agricultural lands of the Okanagan and Nicola valleys, and the precious metals and coal of the Kootenays, lay largely unused or undiscovered: the challenge was getting to these places.

Transportation was the key that ope …