Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57
In the early nineteenth century, when the Hudson’s Bay Company sent men to its furthest posts along the coast of North America’s Pacific Northwest, the letters of those who cared for those men followed them in the Company’s supply ships. Sometimes, these letters missed their objects – the men had returned to Britain, or deserted their ships …
Making Native Space
This elegantly written and insightful book provides a geographical history of the Indian reserve in British Columbia. Cole Harris analyzes the impact of reserves on Native lives and livelihoods and considers how, in light of this, the Native land question might begin to be resolved. The account begins in the early nineteenth-century British Empire …
Women and the White Man's God
Between 1860 and 1940, Anglican missionaries were very active in northern British Columbia, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. To date, histories of this mission work have largely focused on men, while the activities of women – either as missionary wives or as missionaries in their own right – have been seen as peripheral at best, if not com …
Game in the Garden
The shared use of wild animals has helped to determine social relations between Native peoples and newcomers. In later settlement periods, controversy about subsistence hunting and campaigns of local conservation associations drew lines between groups in communities, particularly Native peoples, immigrants, farmers, and urban dwellers. In addition …
Voyages of Hope
A line of nervous young women got off a ship in Victoria Harbour in 1862 and had to walk the gauntlet between two rows of jostling, eager men. One girl, proposed to on the spot, accepted equally quickly and left town with her new husband. Why did these women leave everything behind in England and come to the west coast? The answers lie in the lusty …
Black Diamond City
Black Diamond City: The Victorian Era is the first book in Jan Peterson's trilogy on the history of Nanaimo. Peterson traces the evolution of the city from its First Nations history to its coal industry to its becoming a diversified Victorian-era community.
Using original diaries, journals, letters, ships' logs, government records, maps, archival …
Hobnobbing with a Countess and Other Okanagan Adventures
In 1891, Alice Barrett moved from Port Dover, Ontario, to the Okanagan Valley to keep house for her brother and uncle. She soon married Harold Parke, a former NWMP officer, and spent the next decade recording her experiences in a series of notebooks sent to her Ontario family. Few women’s diaries have survived from that time, and Barrett Parke re …
Coal Dust in My Blood
The men who worked British Columbia's mines have passed into history. Coal Dust In My Blood is a moving account of one coal miner's life, in plain, evocative language. But this book is much more than a personal memoir. Bill Johnstone's mining career spanned several decades and he worked in a wide variety of positions. His broad insights reveal impo …
Captain McNeil and His Wife the Nishga Chief
The historical recount of the life and times of Captain McNeill, a long-standing captain in the pioneering days of the fur trade. McNeill was the captain of the Honourable Hudson's Bay steam ship SS Beaver.The historical recount of the life and times of Captain McNeill, a long-standing captain in the pioneering days of the fur trade. McNeill was th …
Telling Tales
Women played a vital role in the shaping of the West in Canada between the 1880s and 1940s. Yet surprisingly little is known about their contributions or the differences sex and gender made to the opportunities and obstacles women encountered. Telling Tales contributes to the rewriting of western Canada’s past by integrating women into the shifti …
The Canadian Department of Justice and the Completion of Confederation 1867-78
The federal Department of Justice was established by John A. Macdonald as part of the Conservative party's program for reform of the parliamentary system following Confederation. Among other things, it was charged with establishing national institutions such as the Supreme Court and the North West Mounted Police and with centralizing the penitentia …
The Chinese in Vancouver, 1945-80
In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity. He juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. It is an engrossing story about c …
Islands of Truth
In Islands of Truth, Daniel Clayton examines a series of encounters with the Native peoples and territory of Vancouver Island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although he focuses on a particular region and period, Clayton also meditates on how representations of land and people, and studies of the past, serve and shape specifi …
The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney
The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney is a biography of a man who played a key role in the events which marked the political, social, and economic transformation of western Canada in the latter half of the nineteenth century. An immigrant adventurer seeking his fortune in the colonies, Dewdney was embroiled in the gold rushes of the 1860s, the B.C. d …
No Place to Run
Historians of the First World War have often dismissed the important role of poison gas in the battles of the Western Front. Tim Cook shows that the serious threat of gas did not disappear with the introduction of gas masks. By 1918, gas shells were used by all armies to deluge the battlefield, and those not instructed with a sound anti-gas doctrin …
Once Upon an Oldman
Once Upon an Oldman is an account of the controversy that surrounded the Alberta government's construction of a dam on the Oldman River to provide water for irrigation in the southern part of the province. Jack Glenn argues that, despite claims to the contrary, the governments of Canada and Alberta are not dedicated to protecting the environment an …
The Burden of History
This book is an ethnography of the cultural politics of Native/non-Native relations in a small interior BC city -- Williams Lake -- at the height of land claims conflicts and tensions. Furniss analyses contemporary colonial relations in settler societies, arguing that 'ordinary' rural Euro- Canadians exercise power in maintaining the subordination …
Another Kind of Justice
Another Kind of Justice is the first historical survey of Canadian military law, providing insights into military justice in Canada, the purpose of military law, and the level of legal professionalism within the Canadian military.
Drawing on a wide range of materials, Chris Madsen traces the development of military law from 1867 to 1997. After delv …
The Limits of Labour
In a few short decades before the First World War, Calgary was transformed from a frontier outpost into a complex industrial metropolis. With industrialization there emerged a diverse and equally complex working class. David Bright explores the various levels of class formation and class identity in the city to argue that Calgary’s reputation as …
Fort Langley Journals, 1827-30
These journals comprise one of the principal sources of information on early European settlement in BC and provide a remarkable and unique record of the establishment of Fort Langley. Although the journals record such day-to-day details as weather, trade, and visitors, they also contain a wealth of information about social and administrative life a …
Butter Down the Well
In this immensely popular Canadian classic, Robert Collins describes his boyhood growing up in Saskatchewan during the bleak years of the Depression. Featuring the fine realist paintings of well-known painter Len Gibbs, this special illustrated edition evokes the mood of that era both through Collins's humorous and touching stories and through Gibb …
The Terror of the Coast
On April 20, 1863, the British naval gunboat Forward attacked a Native village on Kuper Island. The naval officers believed that the village harboured individuals involved in two recent assaults against European transients in the Gulf Islands. The gunboat fired on the village and was repulsed with casualties after a fierce battle with a handful of …
The Lifeline of the Oregon Country
In The Lifeline of the Oregon Country, James Gibson compellingly immerses the reader in one of the most intractable problems faced by the Hudson's Bay Company: how to realize wealth from such a remote and formidable land. The personalities, places, obstacles, and operations involved in the brigade system are all described in fascinating detail, str …
Creating Historical Memory
Canadian women have worked, individually and collectively, at home and abroad, as creators of historical memory. This engaging collection of essays seeks to create an awareness of the contributions made by women to history and the historical profession from 1870 to 1970 in English Canada. Creating Historical Memory explores the wide range of career …
Gamblers and Dreamers
The popular image of the Klondike is of a rush of white, male adventurers who overcame great physical and geographical obstacles in their quest for gold. Young, white, single American men carried forward the ideals and structures of the western frontier. It was a man's world made respectable only after the turn of the century with the arrival of wh …
Muddling Through
"
When two thousand British bank clerks, butchers, housewives, saleswomen, remittance men and ex-Boer War soldiers followed the charismatic but inept Anglican minister, Isaac Barr, to the Canadian prairies in 1903 their rallying cry was ""Canada for the British.""
Despite the Canadian governmentÌs expectations and BarrÌs assurances, however, very f …
This Ragged Place
In this groundbreaking portrait of the uneasy state of the province, Terry Glavin's lyrical narratives reveal the fibre of a British Columbia rarely glimpsed. With journalistic acumen, he surveys a landscape of inexorable suburban sprawl, dismantled railway lines, scapegoating of Native fisheries, and strange goings?on at Gustafsen Lake. A new bree …
Walking in Indian Moccasins
Walking in Indian Moccasins is the first work to offer a different view of the Tommy Douglas provincial government in Sakatchewan: their policies, their applications, and their shortcomings. Much more than that, however, it is a careful account of the development of Indian and Metis people in Saskatchewan in the post-war period. The goal of the CCF …
Trading Beyond the Mountains
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the North West and Hudson’s Bay companies extended their operations beyond the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. There they encountered a mild and forgiving climate and abundant natural resources and, with the aid of Native traders, branched out into farming, fishing, logging, and min …
Paul Kane's Great Nor-West
In this beautifully designed and richly illustrated book, Diane Eaton and Sheila Urbanek re-create Paul Kane’s heroic journey across Canada and bring to life the people, places, and events he experienced.
Determined to document the lives and customs of the Indians of the Northwest, Paul Kane set out in 1845 to cross the continent “with no compa …
The Resettlement of British Columbia
In this beautifully crafted collection of essays, Cole Harris reflects on the strategies of colonialism in British Columbia during the first 150 years after the arrival of European settlers. The pervasive displacement of indigenous people by the newcomers, the mechanisms by which it was accomplished, and the resulting effects on the landscape, soci …
The Emergence of Social Security in Canada
The Emergence of Social Security in Canada has become a standard text in social work and related courses in post-secondary institutions across Canada. It is the first and most detailed history of Canadian social security from colonial times to the present.
This book analyzes the major influences shaping the Canadian welfare state. A central trend i …
Making Vancouver
Making Vancouver explores social relationships in Vancouver from 1863 to 1913. It considers how urbanization structured social boundaries among Burrard Inlet's increasingly large population and is premised on the belief that, in studying social boundaries, historians must abandon single category forms of analysis and build into their research strat …
