The Heart of the Cariboo-Chilcotin anthology celebrates this beautiful and remote region of British Columbia. From the days of the gold rush through to modern times, the stories in this collection capture the spirit of a place whose beauty and wildness have inspired its people throughout its history. Legendary tales include:

• a husband's promis …

How will she ever find him in this wild place?

Jane Priddle, a proper young Englishwoman, has lived a sheltered, genteel life. In 1897, she is offered a life-changing opportunity: she will travel to Canada's northwest frontier to search for young Billie Thomm.

Surviving in the gutters of London, England, Billie had acquired the cunning of someone t …

Reliving the adventures of past explorers.

Trail to the Interior is R. M. Patterson's rich account of exploration and personal adventure in the Cassiar district of British Columbia. The trail is the historic track from Wrangell, Alaska, along the Stikine and Dease rivers and across the height of the land into the valleys of the Liard and the Macken …

In thirteenth century France, a catastrophic fire has destroyed the greatest shrine in Christendom. Out of the ashes of the tragedy, history leaves a shadowy tale of a miracle, of the resurrection of faith, and of reconstruction—the erection of the masterwork of Gothic architecture, the Cathedral at Chartres. At the time of the fire, a powerful v …

Timeless tales about wilderness living.

Eric Collier's riveting recollections about the 26 years that he, his wife Lillian and son Veasy spent homesteading in the isolated Chilcotin wilderness made for an international bestseller and one of the most famous books ever written about British Columbia.

In the early 1930s, Collier and his family moved t …

At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story of European immigration to Canada's dark places of the earth, and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism, The Wolves At Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de force from one of Canada's master prose stylists.

Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germ …

Artist, photographer, writer and explorer Mary Schaffer Warren overcame the limited expectations of women a century ago in order to follow her dreams. Born into a wealthy Pennsylvania Quaker family, Mary Sharpless was a precocious child who longed to experience the world beyond her sheltered home. An 1889 cross-Canada trip with her new husband, doc …

In 1897, a 21-year-old unemployed Californian named Jack London borrowed funds so he could make his fortune in the Klondike. His life prior to the gold rush had been a story of toil and lean days. He knew how to pitch a tent, start a fire with minimal effort and how to go without either a fire or a blanket if circumstances required. He had lived in …

This historical biography – based on the life of British Columbia pioneer John Muir – tells the amazing story of a family from Scotland who came out to Canada in the late 1840s to work as "consignee" labourers for the Hudson's Bay Company. Daryl Ashby recreates the story of the Muirs' struggle to develop a place for themselves in the hierarchic c …

CBC Vancouver's radio show BC Almanac, not to be outdone by the parent corporation's nationwide search for the 100 Greatest Canadians of all time, called upon its listeners in 2004 to nominate the 100 Greatest British Columbians of all time. This cornucopia of West Coast characters collected and bound by BC Almanac's host Mark Forsythe and director …

To many, the North is a familiar but inaccessible place. Yet images of the region are within easy reach, in magazine racks, on our coffee tables, and on television, computer, and movie screens. In Northern Exposures, Peter Geller uncovers the history behind these popular conceptions of the Canadian North.

Rome, 1221. On the death of Dominic Guzman, founder of the Order of Dominican Friars, a list of three names is locked away with the depositions attesting to Dominic's beatification, and a copy is sealed in an icon of the Virgin Mary that is eventually carried to New France.

This list is the thread that binds the fates of ordinary people caught up in …

Journey into Shuswap country in the time of early colonization. A neighbouring Indian tribe from over the Rocky Mountains abducts a group of Shuswap women and a great tale of trouble and triumph unfolds. Based on a traditional Shuswap legend, the story is told by a captured girla Shuswap chief's daughter. Harold Eustache takes us back to a time in …

Often, the way a story is told is as important as the story itself. This is true of the most recent novel by Gerry William, The Woman in the Trees.

Set during the time of first contact, The Woman in the Trees takes place around what is now Vernon, BC. The novel moves effortlessly from myth to dream time to narrative real time. Spanning the historic …

In the triumphs of their victories and the horrors of their losses, Canadian combatants first tested their military skills on the battlefields of Europe. In Hell's Corner, one of Canada's master historians tells the story of how Canada became involved in World War I, how it fought the war and how it emerged from that conflict a stronger and more un …

The award-winning Western epic by "one of Canada's greatest living writers" (David Adams Richards) Lightning takes up where Fred Stenson's Giller-nominated and much-honoured novel, The Trade, left off.

It is 1881, and the fur trade has been forced to make room for another economy. Seven thousand cattle are crossing the border from Montana into new …

“The Black Barber of Barkerville,” as Wellington Delaney Moses was known, came to British Columbia from San Francisco, looking for a new home and a place of peace. He was among the first black people to arrive in B.C., hoping that the colony, with its Creole governor, James Douglas, would offer a more tolerant and welcoming frontier than had Ca …

Ten gripping tales of murder and missing persons show how skulls and skeletons reveal their secrets to forensic investigators. A skull is found on a scree slope high above the mirror-calm waters of Spray Lakes. Bones rumoured for years to be buried in a Medicine Hat backyard are finally dug up. The trussed and tortured skeletal remains of an unknow …

They came west looking for new opportunities and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Entrepreneurs such as James Lougheed, Max Bell, Eric Harvie and A.E. Cross all had a few characteristics in common: they were exceptionally ambitious and took enormous risks. And they went from rags to riches.

In an era when streetcars wound their way down Vancouver's streets, a ferry linked the cash-strapped municipality of West Vancouver to the city, and the Vancouver School Board was pushing for racially segregated schools, Hok Yat Louie was teaching his eight-year-old son Tong how to write invoices at his grocery stand. Because of the political clima …

Nickel Company's grassroots exploration of the Canadian Arctic in the 1960 field season. Exploration of the Canadian Arctic documents the International Nickel Company's grassroots exploration of the Canadian Arctic in the 1960 field season. This well-detailed story of the search for economic mineralization in Canada's most isolated regions is at on …

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 …

A history of men who worked the rivers in the Rocky Mountain Trench. Drift back in history to time when the rivermen still plied their trade through the northern rivers of BC. Crooked River Rats tells the tales of men and women who traveled the river highways living and working in the wilderness. Generations of trappers, hunters, big game guides an …

Six miles below the headwaters of Dean Channel on the BC coast, the Dean River flows graciously into salt water. Known for centuries as Kimsquit, this is a place of outstanding river, sea and mountain beauty. This is where James Sirois spent his childhood and teenage years alternately between Doc Gildersleeve's logging camp and school in Ocean Fall …

Over a whole bunch of decades, Ted “Chilco” Choate has spun a full quota of trail guide yarns. Along the way he also learned to fabricate a line or two that would help get him out of a jam. With that in mind it seems fitting that Chilco offers his autobiography as “being more than 90 percent true.”

A seasoned big-game guide and outfitter, C …

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Vancouver was a mill town rapidly becoming a bustling cosmopolitan seaport. New technology proliferated, Klondike miners brawled their way through town, political turbulence and dramatic boom-and-bust cycles were the norm, Then as now, Vancouver was young, thriving, magnificently beautiful, and troubled by seri …

John Wilson came to Canada from Scotland in 1912, leaving his wife and family with the promise to return in a year. In 1914 he joined the Mounties, and while stationed in Saskatchewan village, he caught TB and fell hopelessly in love with the young woman who took care of him. He would do anything for her, anything at all.

Winner of the 1995 Arthur …

Take a walk down the main drag of Likely, Alberta. Everywhere else it's the time of love-ins and antiwar protests, but not here: here the main events are 4-H contests, meetings of the Hereford Breeders' Club and suppers served in the church basement by the Ladies of Lamentations. Likely is what you call a half-horse town: no newspaper, a cafe calle …

In 1876, Jack the Ripper, otherwise known as Canadian Doctor Thomas Neill Cream, graduated with merit from McGill’s faculty of medicine. Cream was a backstreet abortionist and managed an exclusive brothel called The Elite Club. His notorious reputation eventually forced him to flee Canada for London. He was hanged in 1892 for the murder of four …

Seafaring stories in the Horatio Hornblower tradition, Midshipman Kirk, is filled with the rollicking adventures of Midshipman Eric Kirk and the iron screw corvette HMS Calcutta. The Calcutta patrols the Pacific coast in the 1880s and confronts Fenian plots, pirate raids, as well as the hazards of genteel social life in Victoria.

"Smith, man of moderate ambition, unknown first name, and dubious companions, has a quarter horse he is convinced has become one of the Chilcotin country's great cutting horses. In the hands of master stroyteller Paul St. Pierre, this simple Western tale -- the path from quarter horse of good stock to cutting horse of skill and finesse -- is strewn …

As a young man living in England at the time of the Allied Landing at Dieppe, Canadian novelist and screenwriter Ernest Langford acquired a special affection for the Canadian soldiers who fought so valiantly and suffered so harshly in the ill-fated raid.

On August 19,1942, Major-General J. M. Roberts led 5000 troops of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Divi …

Escaping from Communist Czechoslovakia on skis with his family in 1948, Jan Drabek's experience of World War II was anything but ordinary. Thirteen follows a young Drabek growing up in tumultuous Prague where Nazi propaganda, clandestine BBC radio broadcasts, conspiratorial talk at home and escapist comedies in the theatres provided an unconvention …

In a land such as the Yukon, with its colorful past matched by its colorful characters, tales abound of the perils and adventures experienced by those hardy sourdoughs who first pioneered the country. Many are the tales that have been told in the still of the un-equalled splendor of a Yukon evenings while gathered around the campfire with close com …

Robert Brown, a twenty-one-year-old Scotsman, arrived on Vancouver Island in 1863 for the purpose of collecting seeds, roots, and plants for the Botanical Association of Edinburgh. Relations with his employer quickly deteriorated, however, and when the opportunity arose in 1864 to head the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, Brown eagerly accept …

In 1857, the French Roman Catholic religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, began permanent missionary work among the Native peoples of British Columbia. The memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola, a Corsican-born Oblate who arrived in the province in 1880, reveal the complexity of the work carried out by the ordinary missionary pries …