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A story about efforts to rethink a Victoria heritage site’s story has won the Anne and Philip Yandle Best Article Award from the BC Historical Federation.
Explaning Settlers to Ourselves: Rethinking interpretive narratives at heritage sites by Kelly Black was published in the Spring 2021 edition of British Columbia History magazine.
Image; Kelly Black
Black is the executive director of Point Ellice House Museum and Gardens in Victoria and an adjunct professor in the department of history at Vancouver Island University.
His article looks at how previous interpretation of the historic site failed to mention owner Peter O’Reilly’s 18 years as Indian Reserve commissioner and focused instead on the romantic aspects of Victorian-era life. In recent years, the non-profit society that cares for Point Ellis House has reassessed and reimagined the site.
Thirty-five articles published in British Columbia History in 2021 were eligible for the prize, which includes $250 and a certificate. A panel of judges chose the winning article.
One judge called the story “a very readable, well-written, well-argued, eye-opening investigation into how historical sites in BC (and other regions) have omitted open narratives about colonization, and how one site is working to change that.
“It advances big-picture knowledge of BC history by encouraging all of us to think critically about how history is presented to us (or not presented to us), both as historical consumers and historical stewards.”
“I am grateful to the BCHF and adjudication committee for this recognition,” Black says. “It’s more important than ever to revisit our historical narratives in BC and it was a pleasure to write about this for BC History magazine, a leading source for engagement with the past.”
The award was announced Saturday at the BCHF’s annual conference, co-hosted by the Victoria Historical Society and held virtually. Black was also a speaker at the conference.
An honorable mention was also presented to Robert Ratcliffe Taylor for his article, Emily Carr, Cartoonist, which appeared in the winter 2021 issue and looked a little-known aspect of the artist’s work and reproduced a number of her editorial cartoons that appeared in a Victoria journal in 1905.
Philip Yandle was the editor, publisher, and distributor of the former BC Historical News from 1968 to 1977 and his wife Anne was also very active in the magazine and was the longtime book review editor.
This year’s recipient of the W. Kaye Lamb $1,000 scholarship from the BCHF is Lydia Kinasewich of UNBC (pictured) for her paper called “From Health Resort to Pleasure Resort: Re-Constructing Harrison Hot Springs as a Tourist Destination, 1920-30.” This was in the third and fourth year category.
Kinasewich says she wanted to examine how health beliefs shaped tourism, “and the attempts to create a pleasure resort at Harrison Hot Spring provided an excellent opportunity to consider how health and tourism converged in early 20th century British Columbia.”
Kinasweich is working on an honors history thesis under the supervision of Dr. Ben Bradley on how food production and distribution was regulated in early-20th century BC, specifically looking at federal and provincial legislation of the province’s dairy industry.
The scholarship announcement was made at the BCHF conference gala on June 4. The W. Kaye Lamb scholarships are presented for student works relating to the history of British Columbia. The work can be on any topic related to the history of BC and must be created by a student for a course taken at a university or college.
The judges decided not to award a prize this year in the first and second year category.
Laila Axén is the inaugural winner of the BCHF Cultural Resource Accessibility Award, presented at the federation’s annual gala on June 4. This award honours excellence in cultural resource management work which aims to help connect British Columbians with their history and comes with a $500 prize.
Axén founded the Swedish Heritage in British Columbia Museum and Archives with “nothing but two empty hands” in 2017. Noticing a lack of archival and museological organizations dedicated specifically to Swedish heritage, she took it upon herself to prevent photographs, objects and cultural materials from being tossed into the landfill.
She started from scratch, recruiting volunteers and board members while locating space for the new organization while purchasing digital cataloguing software, scanners and more to make the holdings publicly available. Today, Axén, now in her 80s, is returning to school to learn about archival practices to ensure ongoing preservation and improved access to British Columbia’s Swedish-related materials into the future.
The BCHF also presented two honourable mentions in this category.
As more and more initiatives were taken online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Vancouver Island Local History Society who operate Point Ellice House Museum, did not shy away from the opportunity to try something new to keep their visitors connected with cultural resources. The society undertook many new projects, including a series of YouTube videos and the transcription of documents related to the O’Reilly family to allow for improved legibility and remote access.
Partnering with graduate students from the Public History program at the University of Victoria, museum staff undertook the digitization and online exhibition of Point Ellice’s calling card collection, providing new resources and biographies for researchers to delve into the social life of the O’Reilly family. The society provided the acceptance video below.
The British Columbia Regional Digitized History project of the University of BC Okanagan and many partner organizations supports digital public access to unique and under-utilized holdings found in collections throughout British Columbian communities.
Originally started five years ago as the Digitized Okanagan History, the project helps “tackle the challenges of digitization on a regional basis across many different repositories” and includes over 43,000 photographs, 22,000 newspaper issues and hundreds of oral histories. Today, 44 partnering organizations across the Okanagan and Kootenay-Columbia areas have joined with plans to expand into the Thompson Nicola region.
The BCHF has presented its inaugural Advocacy Award to Dr. Albert “Sonny” McHalsie (Naxaxalhts’i) and Dr. Keith Thor Carlson, who are synonymous with Truth and Reconciliation in the Fraser Valley.
The announcement was made at the federation’s annual gala on June 4.
Authors of multiple publications over 30 years, Sonny and Keith work in tandem with Stó:lō communities, Elders and Knowledge Keepers to uncover and share the past about the Peoples and lands of S’óhl Téméxw. Their many publications and teaching resources are valued by scholars, teachers and the public and their work has resulted in the strengthening of resettler/Indigenous relations regionally.
The BCHF also presented an honorable mention in this category to Tara-Lynn Kozma-Perrin (pictured), a fierce advocate for fulfillment of the recommendations of the TRC and UNDRIP through her continuous work to bring educational opportunities and opportunities for inclusion and connectedness into the City of Abbotsford.
Along with her mother Tery Kozma, Tara-Lynn co-founded the annual Aboriginal Arts and Culture Day, an event which brings Abbotsfordians together to celebrate First Nations, Metis and Inuit culture. A cross-cultural learning and engagement event, the event allows visitors to learn about the past of our Indigenous Peoples, the present and how we can work towards the future together.
The BC Historical Federation recognized the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby with its first annual Storytelling Award at the federation’s annual gala on June 5.
The award is for the online exhibit Writing Wrongs: Japanese Canadian Protest Letters of the 1940s, which brings together and interprets a significant collection of Japanese Canadian letters written in protest of the dispossession and dispersal of the Japanese Canadian community from the West Coast during the Second World War.
Interspersed with videos and other digital media, the exhibition takes a unique perspective by presenting descendants of original protest letter writers reading letters written by their ancestors, many of whom were unaware of the existence of the letters. The exhibition contains a searchable database of primary source documents in addition to containing diverse voices to share personal perspectives throughout the four-part narrative.
The BCHF also presented an honorable mention in this category.
The Maple Ridge Family History Group of the Maple Ridge Historical Society has worked ceaselessly over the past two years to prepare its new online and travelling community history, On the River: The Fishing Industry in Maple Ridge.
Produced entirely by volunteer senior researchers who mentored new researchers throughout the development of the project, the history merges teamwork and community spirit with a love of genealogical records, census data, and more, to weave together the evolution of the fishing sector in Maple Ridge between the 1890s and the 1920s.
“Family history is essential storytelling, and the Maple Ridge Family History Group exemplifies the blending of local and family history practice,” the nominator wrote.
A book that links early maritime history, Indigenous land rights, and modern environmental advocacy in the Clayoquot Sound region has won the 2021 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing, as presented by the British Columbia Historical Federation at its annual conference on Saturday. The award comes with a cash prize of $2,500.
Possessing Meares Island: A Historian’s Journey into the Past of Clayoquot Sound is by Barry Gough and published by Harbour Publishing. Centred on Meares Island, near Tofino on Vancouver Island’s west coast, Possessing Meares Island connects 18th century Indigenous-colonial trade relations to more recent historical upheavals and bridges the cap between centuries to describe how the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council drew on a complicated history of ownership to invoke their legal claim to the land and defend it from clear cutting.
Gough is a past president of the BC Historical Federation and won the same award in 1984 for Gunboat Frontier: British Maritime Authority and Northwest Coast Indians, 1846-1890. He becomes the second person, with Richard Sommerset Mackie, to win the award twice.
Second prize, worth $1,500, went to Joseph William McKay: A Metis Business Leader in Colonial British Columbia, by Greg Fraser (Heritage House). The book looks at the accomplishments and contradictions of the man best known as Nanaimo’s founder and one of the most successful Metis men to rise through the ranks of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the late 19th century.
Third prize, worth $500, went to A Journey Back to Nature: A History of Strathcona Provincial Park by Catherine Marie Gilbert (Heritage House). This book looks at the century-long effort to define, access, preserve, develop, and exploit the uniquely beautiful area of rugged wilderness now known as Strathcona Provincial Park on Central Vancouver Island.
The Community History Book Award, worth $500, went to Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin by Marion McKinnon Crook (Heritage House). In this memoir, the author recounts arriving in Williams Lake in 1963 at age 22 to work as a public health nurse, relying on her academic knowledge, common sense, and government-issued Chevy to provide health care to rural communities of the region.
Honorable mentions were presented to Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann (TouchWood Editions); Becoming Vancouver: A History, by Daniel Francis (Harbour Publishing); and Pinkerton’s and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot, by Geoff Mynett (Caitlin Press).
The award recipients were chosen by a three-member panel of judges from 24 books published in 2021 and submitted for the competition.
British Columbia History magazine’s Aimee Greenaway interviewed Dr. Barry Gough, award-winning author of Possessing Meares Island: A Historian’s Journey Through the Past of Clayoquot Sound in June 2022. The recording is available on BCHF’s YouTube Channel.
How did the book come to be and who are some of the significant people in Clayoquot Sound’s history? Possessing Meares Island was the winner of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing. The book was published by Harbour Publishing and can be purchased from the publisher, or where books are sold.
By Mark Forsythe
Seeing the tree beneath Its baptism of snow, the twigs Seem dark, and the bark feels Cold to your hands, but inside she Pulses with the urgency of green.
From the 36th Annual Report of the Okanagan Historical Society (1972) written by Donna Lezard of SnPink’tn (Penticton Indian Band) which represents one of the seven communities of the Okanagan Nation
A legacy of storytelling. This year marks the centennial of the British Columbia Historical Federation and we’re excited to salute the work of member organizations like the Okanagan Historical Society (OHS). The OHS has generated thousands of stories about the region’s people, events, and landscapes in 85 Annual Reports—each a book unto itself.
This remarkable tradition began with the Society’s formation in 1925. In the following year, president Leonard Norris noted, “A start at least has been made at the work of drawing aside the veil which hangs over the past history of our valley.”
The Report encompasses three watersheds: Okanagan, Shuswap, and Similkameen. Branches are rooted in Salmon Arm, Armstrong-Enderby, Vernon, Kelowna, Summerland, Penticton, Oliver-Osoyoos, and Similkameen, with each contributing to the Annual Report. In the early years, road travel in the region was an ordeal, so the publication connected and communicated with members across this vast area. As the province began to open up for travel, the OHS was also keen to share its story with the rest of BC.
Jessie Ann Gamble of Armstrong is a past president of the Society. She says the first priority continues to be publishing Okanagan history. “Our readers like to support the recording of local history and feel the written word has a longer shelf life than Facebook.”
Historian and former O’Keefe Ranch curator Ken Mather is the current editor. “My mission is to assemble the entire gamut of articles, from family histories to scholarly studies. I’ve also tried to include natural history articles; after all, the society started out as the Okanagan Historical and Natural History Society. I am committed to including cultural diversity, from Indigenous People to newcomers.”
Ken is in distinguished company. In 1935 Margaret Ormsby was one year away from her PhD in history when she became editor of the Sixth Annual Report, the first of nine that she guided. Ormsby later authored the definitive British Columbia: A History, was president of the British Columbia Historical Federation for a dozen years, and broke new ground for women at McMaster University and the University of British Columbia. BC’s most famous professional historian felt most at home back in the Okanagan; in retirement, she returned to the family house beside Kalamalka Lake to write more local history.
The Reports have been consistently eclectic over the decades. The Second Report (1927) featured an account of the first marriage at Okanagan Mission, the “Rise and Fall of Rock Creek,” and “Indian Picture Writing.” Leap ahead to the 67th Report (2003) to read about mysterious “airship” sightings reported in 1896, a student essay on mixed marriages, and a lament for rodeo legend Kenny McLean who died sitting on his horse. The page count on this issue clocks in at 244.
Wendy Wickwire, professor emerita in the Department of History at University of Victoria, scoured the Annual Reports for information about Similkameen elder and storyteller Harry Robinson. She eventually published three award-winning volumes of his oral stories. “I consider those Annual Reports to be among BC’s richest archival treasures. There is nothing I have enjoyed more over the years than leafing through the reports, year by year, because each time I’ve done this I’ve found golden nuggets. They offer such rich first-hand accounts of life in the Okanagan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
Jessie Ann Gamble is proud of their publishing record and scope. “We have always tried to include marginalized groups of any kind, but in recent years the editors have worked hard to include Indigenous stories and writers.”
Editor Ken Mather says this collaboration has a long history. “Most of the early ranchers in the Okanagan/Similkameen married Indigenous wives and, through the 1870s, mixed families were the norm. When the OHS was formed, offspring of these families were involved in the organization and contributed Indigenous content.”
In addition to producing the Annual Report, the OHS branches are fully engaged with other projects: overseeing the Pandosy Mission lease (Kelowna’s first European settlement); the annual student essay contest; supporting historic trails; a presence in the abandoned gold-rush town of Fairview; and working with the UBC Okanagan campus on digitizing the Annual Reports. The Okanagan is fortunate to have these collaborative and enduring storytellers.
Mark Forsythe travels through BC and back in time, exploring the unique work of British Columbia Historical Federation Members.
Explore this surprising array of Okanagan stories, written by the people who live there at this link: www.okanaganhistoricalsociety.org. Digital copies of back issues are available through UBCO’s British Columbia Regional Digitized History: https://tinyurl.com/yckteuvv
Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra at the opening of We Are Hockey, an exhibit at the Sikh Heritage Museum National Historic Site, Gur Sikh Temple, 2019. Photo: South Asian Studies Institute Collection
Iam a 37-year-old PhD candidate in the department of history at UBC, and a sessional faculty member in the department of history at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV), which means I’m in a contract-based, impermanent, and precarious teaching position. I am co-chair of the Race and Antiracism Network at UFV and coordinator of the South Asian Studies Institute at UFV.
I am also mother to a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old. I share these identities with you because they shape the kind of person, historian, and educator I am. I call myself an activist historian because I am shaping the future for my sons so they don’t have to experience the same hurdles I have been through and continue to see around me, including not seeing themselves reflected in the study of history. I refuse to let my boys be educated in a world where they don’t see themselves in the content of history.
I am honoured to be writing this piece for BC History magazine as the BC Historical Federation celebrates its centenary. BC History doesn’t work through performative gestures but through meaningful engagement with BC’s varied histories in all their complexities, diversities, equities, and creativities. In this important year for the publication, they are actively engaging with the theme of activism and the changing face of the discipline of history.
I therefore begin by acknowledging that I am writing from the unceded, ancestral, and ongoing territories of the Sto:lo peoples, the people of the river. Lately we have seen that settler-colonial infrastructures—that is, the farms—are struggling to revert to their original form—a lake—through the sheer force of Mother Earth.
I speak, of course, about the flooding of the Sumas area in the Fraser Valley, where I have lived for more than 30 years. I see this event as a reminder that we need to listen to Indigenous methodologies and practices as well as to calls to action from land defenders in this climate emergency.
I am here to share my journey over the past few years and provide you with some insight and motivation to become an activist historian yourself. I want to tell you about the challenges those of us who identify as racialized historians face and to recentre activism as a worthwhile practice. I’ve seen the word “activism” used to mean something to be feared or co-opted by privileged white people.
When I use the word “white,” as a woman of colour, I mean it as a purposeful reminder that we need to break down systems of white supremacy within the discipline of history. I am aware that simply by virtue of who I am, my use of the word “white” is hyper-politicized.
But this isn’t meant to make you feel guilt or shame; it’s a call to action for you to be a part of the dismantling of white supremacy. Your response to the word can tell you how ready you may be to heed the call. My use of the word “white” is informed by the understanding that Black and Indigenous scholars and activists have been fighting systems of colonial white supremacy for centuries.
To understand what it means to be an activist historian is to first question the very foundations of the discipline. The project of colonialism around the world—including in Canada, in BC—was justified through what is called “scientific racism.” The term has been defined as “a history of pseudoscientific methods ‘proving’ white biological superiority and flawed social studies used to show ‘inherent’ racial characteristics [that] still influence society today.” [1]
Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra was a co-author of Challenging Racist “British Columbia” — 150 Years and Counting
The discipline of history, in other words, is not innocent in terms of how it chooses to cite certain scholars but completely relegate others to the margins. The discipline is implicated in the drawing of the “color line,” as pointed out by the brilliant Black thinker W.E.B. Du Bois. [2]
The term “was originally used as a reference to the racial segregation that existed in the United States after the abolition of slavery. An article by Frederick Douglass that was titled “The Color Line” was published in the North American Review in 1881. The phrase gained fame after Du Bois’s repeated use of it in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk.
To be an activist historian is, in part, to teach the histories of enslaved and colonized people as central to the discipline. I have come to understand this is why, during one of my PhD committee meetings, I reflected on scholars such as Aime Cesaire (and many others) and wondered, “Why do they speak to me in ways that I have not been spoken to throughout my previous historical training?” The response from one of my committee members was, “Sharn, it’s because they don’t speak in the language of the colonizer.”
To be an activist historian is to understand the systems that Black, Indigenous, and racialized scholars are trying to alter and to resist the discipline that puts Hegel on a pedestal. To teach against the grain of colonialism, empire, and violence is an act of resistance.
When I began my PhD in the Department of History at UBC in 2014, I was the first Sikh woman to pursue a PhD in that department. Today, as I reach the end of my studies, I reflect on how my entire outlook has transformed. I came out of my first year traumatized because I felt like I did not belong in that department.
But over the years, after reading racialized historians and theories based on critical race theory, I began to understand why I resisted so much that first year. To holistically teach the racist foundations of the history is to (hopefully) prevent other students from experiencing the trauma I faced. Having activist historians lead the way will create and move the discipline forward.
Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra presenting an exhibition for the South Asian Studies Institute. Photo: South Asian Studies Institute Collection
Activism is on a spectrum that includes street protests as well as pushing back against racist faculty, racist policies, and the coded daily language of racism. It includes writing, teaching, and choosing to centre racialized histories, historians, and scholars. Activism includes moving aside to cede space to racialized colleagues and coworkers rather than constantly co-opting the space to centre your own white power.
To become an activist in history means to study the history of those who are not included within the system and the institution. It means seeing what is taking place around you and attaching those threads of history to your class lectures and how you teach the students. All of this is possible. I do it. And I love it.
To be an activist historian also means to find a place within the margins. The concept of the margins as a powerful space for acts of resistance was coined by the brilliant scholar bell hooks (she spelled her name in lowercase letters), and I wish to end this article by quoting from her, as she passed away in December 2021 but continues to inspire so many of us. She wrote the following:
I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance—as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination.
We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which is difficult, challenging, hard and we know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, and fulfills desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world. [9]
Sharanjit Kaur Sandhra is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UBC, a sessional instructor in history at the University of the Fraser Valley, a co-curator at the Sikh Heritage Museum, National Historic Site, Gur Sikh Temple, and the coordinator of the South Asian Studies Institute at UFV. She is also mother to two sons.
1. “Scientific Racism,” Confronting Anti-Black Racism, Harvard Library, https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism 2. W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk Essays and Sketches (Chicago, Ill: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903). 3. bell hooks, “Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989), 23.
If you wish to read more writing by activist historians, here is a list of authors and titles to explore:
Tom Lymbery, a former BCHF council member from Gray Creek on Kootenay Lake, reminisces on the 2003 BC Historical Federation conference in Prince George. This story originally appeared in the East Shore Mainstreet.
In 2003 Terry Turner and Susan Hulland’s East Shore history, Impressions of the Past, placed second for the BC Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing in the BC Historical Federation competition. I went with them to the BCHF conference in Prince George where the award would be presented.
We were accommodated at the student residences at the new University of Northern BC. It was some distance from the city, so we were fortunate to be driving to be able to access other events and meals. We met a woman from Nanaimo, the site of the next year’s conference, and took her to breakfast at Tim Hortons – which was a first for Susan.
Terry and Susan’s award was presented by BC Lt.-Gov. Iona Campagnolo, to which they gave a very good response at the impressive banquet.
As the conference always runs for three days, we settled in on the first day. The next day we were taken by chartered Greyhound bus to see the historic St. Pius X Catholic Church in the Lheidli T’enneh community of Shelley, northeast of Prince George. The church was built in 1913, likely by the Oblates, a missionary order originally from France.
Image: “St. Nicholas” is one of several exquisite stained glass windows from the historic St. Pius Catholic Church on the Shelley reserve of the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation northeast of Prince George. (Photo: Kent Sedgwick, Northern BC Archives, UNBC Accn. 2012.13)
A First Nations man met us there and explained the problems they were having to maintain the church and protect it from vandals. The church was built with beautiful stained glass windows from the French region of Alsace Lorraine. A few years after our visit the windows were removed to Exploration Place in Prince George for safekeeping until the church could be restored.
The afternoon Greyhound trip went up the north side of the Fraser River where many sawmills once operated but were now closed and consolidated in Prince George. Our young charter driver had ingeniously put “New York City” on the bus destination sign, and stopped at a restaurant named Paradise. Terry took a photo of the amusing scene. This community might soon be gone – we saw sawmill buildings in the background, but they were no longer in use.
We drove further on, intending to cross the last remaining combination rail-and-highway bridge in BC to take us to Penny, another sawmill place now barely hanging on. But as there was a work crew on the bridge, our driver turned the bus around on the highway (quite a feat) and returned us to Prince George.
On the next day, Sunday, we had an option of driving to Fort St James, and this we were eager to do. One of the advantages of BCHF conferences is the opportunity to visit places you might never get to otherwise. We were taken by a different company’s charter bus, and stopped for a break at Vanderhoof, which claims the distinction of being the geographical centre of BC.
Fort St. James National Historic Site on the shore of Stuart Lake is the earliest HBC trading post this far west. It was built back in 1806 by Simon Fraser of the North West Company to trade with the local Carrier (Lheidli T’enneh) First Nation. For much of the post’s 150 year lifespan it was the Hudson’s Bay Company’s headquarters for what is now mainland BC.
The fort was opened especially for our group, and served us the traditional beans and bannock fare for lunch. The great-granddaughter of Chief HBC Factor Sir James Douglas spoke to our group, and explained how she traced her Black ancestry back to Sir James Douglas’ mother who was Creole, and her Metis ancestry to his wife Amelia.
As Governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island, Sir James enabled hundreds of Black Americans to settle in the colony, and publicly denounced the practice of slavery. He signed treaties and established reserves for some of the First Nations on Vancouver Island, but his successors such as Joseph Trutch didn’t carry through on these.
After visiting another church with stained glass windows from France, I suggested to our bus driver that some of us would like to see the Russ Baker Memorial at Fort St. James, named for Frank Russell Baker, one of the first bush pilots in the region. After World War II, Baker’s small local airline helped to give Pacific Western Airlines its start. Other fabled bush pilots included Sheldon Luck, who Millie and Geoff Noden in Riondel rated as their favourite pilot. (Geoff, a long time Cominco employee, had been flown in to many isolated mines.)
I had inadvertently mentioned to our driver that our Greyhound driver had turned his bus around on the highway. So he drove us toward where he thought the memorial was, but not being as skilled a driver, he somehow got the coach stuck on some rocks when he attempted to turn the bus around. However he managed to get the bus free and returned us safely to Prince George.
Driving home we took Highway 16 through McBride, past the spectacular Mount Robson, then down the Icefields Parkway to end a super trip.
Image: A chartered Greyhound bus with “New York City” on its destination sign arrives at the Paradise restaurant, next to a sawmill that was soon to close, northeast of Prince George in 2003. (Photo courtesy Terry Turner)
British Columbia Historical FederationPO Box 448, Fort Langley, BC, Canada, V1M 2R7Information: info@bchistory.ca
The Secretariat of the BCHF is located on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish speaking Peoples.
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