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 Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 3:09 pm Post subject: |
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Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack
Hardcover
By deceased Frostback literary noise,
Robertson Davies
| Quote: | To Amyas Pilgarlic, ESQ.
Dear Pil:
... Upon arrival in Vancouver, the first thing to meet my eye was a notice, signed by the Chief of Police, warning me against confidence tricksters. It told me in detail how I might expect them to work. I would be approached, first of all, by someone who would try to make friends: this would be "The Steerer" who would eventually steer me to "The Spieler," who would sell me Stanley Park or the harbour at a bargain price. Not long after I had read this I was approached by a crafty-looking woman carrying a handful of pasteboards. "Juwanna buy four chances on the Legion car?" she cried, blocking my way. "Madam, you are wasting your time," said I; "I know you for what you are - a Steerer." She shrank away, muttering unpleasantly. Never let it be said that Marchbanks failed to heed a warning.
.... Yours gaggingly,
Sam. (-- pgs. 109-110) |
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| Posted: Tue Jan 01, 2008 12:32 pm Post subject: |
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Kootenai Brown
Canada's *Unknown Frontiersman
Paperback
By William Rodney
| Quote: | Just how Brown lost his money he never said. The cost of mining operations and commodities were certainly factors. During the summer of 1862, for example, The British Colonist, July 22, 1862, reported that shovels and axes sold for $10; coffee fetched $1.50 per pound; flour retailed at $70 per hundredweight; and whisky, the standard antidote for sickness, injury and despair, brought $12 to $18 per gallon, quality and strength unknown. With the advent of winter transportation costs rose, commodities grew scarcer and prices in the winter settlement around Williams Lake rose proportionately. Apart from the high prices for commodities or necessities, there were other ways of losing money. The temptations of gambling and strong drink were ever present, but at least one saloon in Williams Lake provided an additional innocuous attraction in the form of billiards at a dollar game. The British Colonist, September 10, 1862, offers another possibility, and simultaneously reveals the wide social variations characteristic of a wide open frontier community:
| Quote: | | The prostitutes on the creek - nine in number - put on great airs. They dress in male attire and swagger through the saloons and mining camps with cigars or huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing and looking like anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended they should be. Each has a revolver or bowie knife attached to her waist, and it is quite a common occurrence to see one or more women dressed in male attire playing poker in the saloons, or drinking whisky at the bars. They are degrading set, and all good men in the vicinity wish them hundreds of miles away. (-- p. 47) |
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Oh, yes:
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| Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 2:24 pm Post subject: |
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Good Time Girls
of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush
Hardcover
By Lael Morgan
| Quote: | "I happened into one of the leading saloons and gambling joints in Juneau in 1897 at the beginning of the Klondike rush. Dan McGrew, one of the most prominent gamblers of the camp, was dealing far, while Lou watched the game as his 'capper," [someone who helps players mark their bets with coin-like copper cap,"] Dr. Sugden recalled. "The door opened and a tall stranger with matted beard and bare at the throat came in the door. He was a striking figure of a man."
Dr. Sugden's version much resembles Robert Service's. The stranger ordered a couple of rounds of drinks and noted the "Rag Time Kid" was at the bar, so he sat down on the Kid's piano stool and gave a wonderful concert. "The rattle of chips ceased and he held the crowd spellbound," Dr. Sugden recounted. "He ran the gamut from the classics to rag and ended with a wild and crashing Russian overture."
Then, true to Robert Service, the stranger sprang from his still and faced the crowd. "There's a dirty hound from hell in this crowd and I came here tonight to kill him," he declared, looking squarely in the eyes of Dan McGrew, who quietly drew his revolver. The bartender, accustomed to gunplay, turned out the lights to ruin the aim of the combatants. Both McGrew and the stranger died in the shoot-out that followed, and Dr. Sugden recalled seeing "the lady that was known as Lou" take a poke of gold dust from the pocket of the stranger, just as the lights flashed on. (-- p. 269) |
| Quote: | The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses
Paperback
By Robert W. Service
Songs of a Sourdough
Paperback
By Robert Service
The Shooting of Dan McGrew
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a rag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.
There’s men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;
And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;
With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,
As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.
Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do,
And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that’s known as Lou.
His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,
So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway,
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play.
Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A helf-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow, and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you've a hunch what the music meant . . . hunger and might and the stars.
And hunger not of the belly kind, that’s banished with bacon and beans,
But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;
For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;
But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowded with a woman’s love —
A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true —
(God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, — the lady that’s known as Lou.)
Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil’s lie;
That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die.
'Twas the crowning cry of a heart’s despair, and it thrilled you through and through —
"I guess I'll make it a spread misere," said Dangerous Dan McGrew.
The music almost dies away . . . then it burst like a pent-up flood;
And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood.
The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash,
And the lust awoke to kill, to kill . . . then the music stopped with a crash,
And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm,
And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn;
But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true,
That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and that one is Dan McGrew."
Then I ducked my head and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark;
And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark.
Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that’s known as Lou.
These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know.
They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch," and I'm not denying it’s so.
I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two —
The woman that kissed him — and pinched his poke — was the lady known as Lou.
(From The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses. [Also published in Britain under the title, Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service. Publishers: Barse & Co. New York, N.Y., Newark, N.J.. Copyright, 1916 by Barse &&038; Co. [expired in the USA]) |
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| Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2008 1:20 pm Post subject: |
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When Nature Calls
Life at a Gulf Island Cottage
Hardcover
By Frostback Funnyman Eric Nicol
| Quote: | The summer cottage. Luxury or necessity? Do you really need a summer place in the utback, or can a person survive year-round in urban condomation without getting into mind-altering drugs or politics?
To the working poor, the concept of owning a summer cottage is pure fancy. They associate the alternate, seasonal residence with the French Riviera villa owned by an Arab prince, or a Hollywood movie star, or a Canadian orthodontist. Their first priority is to get out of the rental and into a mortgage issued by a bank that has temporarily taken leave of its senses.
But I like to think that even the most impoverished denizen of public housing dreams, from time to time, or when delirious with hunger, that one day he or she will win the $6-million lottery that will make owning a summer cottage almost affordable. To believe otherwise would be somehow elitist and could limit the sales of this book.
... The typical cottager is grey-haired. Rarely is he or she bald. Bald people lean to RVs and trailers, according to some studies I intend to make. They wear baseball caps, enjoy gambling and are highly social, travelling thousands of miles in a motor home in order to park cheek by jowl with dozens of other motor homes in an RV park. They are apt to use a cologne, something a cottager would die before doing.
... I promptly bought a lot on Boot Cove for $500. I later bought three more adjacent lots overlooking Boundary Pass - each 90 feet by 180 feet - for $1,000 apiece. Other Province writers also put their money where their hearts were, little dreaming, of course, that we were investing in realty that would, in time, go bananas. Dumb luck is better than no luck. (From Driver, Follow that Dream! and Isles of the Blest, pgs. 9-18) |
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| Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 12:47 pm Post subject: |
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The Merry Heart
Hardcover
By Robertson Davies
| Quote: | There are many people - happy people, it usually appears - whose thoughts at Christmas always turn to books. The notion of a Christmas tree with no books under it is repugnant and unnatural to them. I had the good luck to be born in such a family and, although my brothers and I were happy with such insubstantial gifts as skates, toboggans, and the like, we would have been greatly disappointed if there had been no books. My father expected the latest Wodehouse, and some vast wad of political recollections - the Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page when I was very young and the awesome six volumes of Lloyd George's war memoirs, much later, were the sort of thing that he, and he alone in our family, could read - and my mother wanted and received novels of idyllic rural life by Mary Webb or Sheila Kaye-Smith.
For me, a standby for years was the annual collected volume of the English boys' magazine Chums, through which I chewed greedily, consuming the historial serial (the boy who did wonders in the army of Wellington or the navy of Nelson); the contemporary serial (the boy whose mother sacrificed to send him to a good school - these were all boarding schools - and who emerged victorious from some scandal in which he had been accused of theft or secret drinking, and carried the school to victory in the great cricket match); the comic serial, about disruptive groups of boy conjurors, boy ventriloquists, and boy controtionists who reduced their schools to chaos and their masters to nervous prostration by their side-splitting japes and wheezes. None of these wondrous boys were int he least like the boys I knew in Canada, but that merely gave them the appeal of the exotic. In between the pages of these I read the articles about careers (civil servant, church organist, veterinary) and about how to make a serviceable violin out of a cigar box and some picture wire.
I particularly relished a column of comic backchat between two wags named Roland Butter and Hammond Deggs. Here is a sample of their wares: RB "Why did the djinn sham pain and whine?" HD "I dunno." RB "Because the stout porter bit 'er." HD "Oh, crumbs!" It was not until much later in life when I came under the spell of Demon Rum that I savouredf the full richness of that one.
Before Christmas there was always a period of expectancy during which my parents urged me to read Dickens's Christmas Carol. Every year I tried and every year Christmas Day and new books arrived to find that I had got no further than the appearance of Marley's ghost. I was a slow reader, moving my lips and hearing every word, but I knew the story. It was inescapable. At school no Christmas passed without several children being dragooned into a re-enactment of the Crachits' Christmas Dinner, for the entertainment of parents. Early in life I developed a distaste for the Cratchits which time has not sweetened. I do not think I was an embittered child, but the Cratchits' aggressive worthiness, their bravely borne poverty, their exhultation over that wretched goose, disgusted me. I particularly disliked Tiny Tim (a part always played by a girl because girls had superior powers of looking moribund and worthy at the same time) and when he chirped, "God bless us, every one," my mental response was akin to Sam Goldwyn's famous phrase, "Include me out." (From Christmas Books, pgs. 258-259) |
| Quote: | Chums Annual - 1934-35
Hardcover
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The Christmas Carol gold standard:
| Quote: | Scrooge
DVD
Featuring another comic genius Scot, Alastair Sim
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| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 9:55 am Post subject: |
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New York Times Magazine
Newspaper Subscription
The 7th Annual Year in Ideas
Death of Checkers, The
By Clive Thompson
Dec. 9/07
| Quote: | Checkers has been around for more than 400 years, has been enjoyed by billions of players and has taught generations of young children the joy of strategy.
And now it's all over. This July, Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada, announced that after running a computer program almost nonstop for 18 years, he had calculated the result of every possible endgame that could be played, all 39 trillion of them. He also realed a sober fact about the game: checkers is a draw. As with tic-tac-toe, if both players never make a mistake, every match will end in a deadlock.
One upshot is that Schaeffer now possesses software that can play unbeatable checkers. Indeed, to thos Web site and you can play online yourself, providing your're prepared to lose again and again and again - or maybe, just maybe, fight to a draw, assunming you, too, play with crystalline perfection of a silicon brain. (-- p. 66) |
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| Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2008 11:31 am Post subject: |
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Songs for Reliquishing the Earth
Paperback
By Jan Zwicky
| Quote: | Bill Evans: Alone
Sound that makes night fall around it
like the glow from a reading lamp.
Rain on the roof, straight down.
The name of your name
spoken without another's.
Rubato is a hand
you thought indifferent
laid, briefest of moments,
on your sleeve.
It walks away, then,
that sound, without looking back.
Lights up a Lucky. Says
we hadn't the ghost of a chance, says never
let me go. |
A good one for music lovers!
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| Posted: Thu Apr 10, 2008 9:02 am Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
British Columbia Magazine
Magazine Subscription
Wilderness warrior Betty Krawczyk
Why British Columbia's feistiest great-
grandmother is willing to go to jail
for nature.
By Brian Payton
Spring, 2007
| Quote: | Betty Krawczyk believes that citizens are obliged to speak up when faced with injustice. The 78-year-old grandmother has scolded government, inudstry, and even fellow conservationists in defence of British Columbia's wilderness. Her outspoken manner inspires some, goads others - and has cost her almost two years in cumulative prison terms. (emphasis added)
Krawczyk's remarkable journey has taken her from an impoverished childhood in southern Louisiana to the front lines of B.C.'s environmental movement. While raising her eight children, she found time to pen more than 200 fiction stories in the true-confessions genre ("I was his his love slave") for popular women's magazines - before taking up the cause of the Women's Movement in the late 1960s. During the Vietnam War, she emigrated to Canada after her first son joined the airforce and her second was about to be drafted.
Forty years, four marriages and divorces, eight grandchildren later, the Vanocuver resident is probably best known for her role in the Clayoquot Sound protests of 1993.
On a sunny afternoon, Krawczyk sat down beside an arbutus tree to reflect on her life in B.C.'s environmental movement. Her perch afforded a view of West Vancouver's Eagleridge Bluffs high above Horseshoe Bay, where she and other protesters spent six weeks on a blockade last summer to protest a highway expansion that has since proceeded through the area. ...
Q. What defines a successful campaign?
A. Clayoquot was successful in that is now a biosphere reserve. But it is still threatened, and I may have to go back there. For the moment, it seems all right. The Elaho was a success. It is now protected. The Walbran was not a success. The courts protected the logging companies. ...
Q. Were you ever frightened in your work as an activist?
A. That's a hard one. I guess I'm not frightened. I just take one day at a time.
My biggest worry is for the safety of the people out on isolated blockades. We were in the Walbran for over three weeks. It was very isolated and there had been some bad violence. Young protesters were attacked and it has not been brought to court. I keep in touch with the press and the RCMP; it's the press that keeps violence down. ...
Q. Why can't you work within the system?
A. Primarily, because there is too much money involved.
Corporations buy off the democratic process. They have influence and raw power. So it is very difficult, even in a system like ours, a system that is supposed to be democratic. It's not just our environment that's lost if we don't act decisively - democracy is lost.
So many people think that if they go vote every four years, their duty as a citizen is done. Your duty as a citizen is not done. Your duty as a citizen is to take part in the decisions being made, not to just pick someone else to do it for you...Only we as citizens can make changes. We mustn't depend on government to do it for us. Because they won't. (-- pgs. 52-56) |
Two kinds of Canuck justice - depending on the protester:
Ontario injunction barring native protesters:
| Quote: | Yahoo News
Yet another corporate medium but a no-cost one
Blockade of eastern Ont. rail line ends;
protesters warn of further actions
By Allison Jones
April 21/07
| Quote: | DESERONTO, Ont. (CP) - A key organizer of an aboriginal blockade, which paralyzed passenger and freight rail traffic on the busy Toronto-Montreal corridor, is warning that the protest that ended early Saturday is just the beginning in a series of "escalating" actions.
"We've identified targets as part of this campaign, one being the railway, one being provincial highways and one being the town (of Deseronto) itself," said Shawn Brant. "The disruption on the CN line was a first in a series of economic disruptions, the first in a campaign." he said. "The campaign calls for an ever escalating degree." The next target has already been chosen and plans to finalize the next action are in the works, said Brant, who commented Saturday morning at the site of contention in the dispute - a gravel quarry that the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte say is their land.
Though the protesters originally said they would stay at the railway blockade for 48 hours, it ended peacefully after about 30 hours at 6 a.m. Saturday, after a sleepless night of negotiations with provincial police and other officials. Protesters said they chose to end it early over fears of a violent conclusion. A court injunction ordered the protesters and the dilapidated school bus off the tracks with arrests warned as a consequence, but the order was never enforced by police. No arrests have been made at this point, said Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Kristine Rae. "We're pleased that it was a peaceful resolution." ...
Condominiums are planned using gravel from the quarry for an area known as the Culbertson Land Tract, which is on a section of land given to the Six Nations in 1793. The Mohawks contend they never relinquished any part of it. (emphasis added) |
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B.C. injunction barring Eagleridge Bluffs protesters:
| Quote: | News 1130
Noisy Commercial Radio
Betty Krawczyk sentencing leads
to courthouse occupation
By Jim Goddard
March 5/07
Betty's lawyer, Cameron Ward told the CBC Early Edition in an interview early in March that the judiciary is wrong to enforce an injunction - a civil remedy intended to keep parties to a dispute in the same position until the dispute is tried - as if the case was in substance a criminal matter.
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| Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 8:03 am Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Free Radicals
Short Story by Frostback legend, Alice Munro, who
carefully creates a bad day, then skillfully, enviably
makes it much, much worse.
Feb. 11 & 18 /08
| Quote: | "I baked two tarts. One had the poison in it and one didn't. I drove down to the university and got two cups of coffee and went to her office. There was nobody there but her. I told her I'd had to come to into town, and as I was passing the campus I'd seen this nice little bakery that my husband was always talking about, so I dropped in and bought a couple of tarts and two cups of coffee. I'd been thinking of her all alone when the rest of them got to go on their holidays, and of me all alone with my husband in Minneapolis. She was sweet and grateful. She said that it was very boring for her at the office, and the cafeterial was closed, so she had to go over to the science building for coffee and they put hydrochloric acid in it. Ha-ha. So we had our little party."
"I hate rhubarb," he said. "It wouldn't have worked with me."
"It did with her. I had to take a chance that it would work fast, before she realized what was wrong and had her stomach pumped. But not so fast that she would associate it with me. I had to be out of the way and so I was. The building was deserted, and as far as I know to this day nobody saw me arrive or leave. Of course, I knew some back ways."
"You think you're smart. You got away scot-free."
"But so have you."
"What I done wasn't so underhanded as what you done."
"It was necessary to you."
"You bet it was."
"Mine was necessary to me. I kept my marriage. He came to see that she wouldn't have been good for him, anyway. She'd have got sick on him, almost certainly. She was just the type. She'd have been nothing but a burden to him. He saw that."
"You better not have put nothing in them eggs," he said. "You did, you'll be sorry."
"Of course I didn't. It's not something you'd go around doing regularly. I don't actually know anything about poison. It was just by chance that I had that one little piece of information."
He stood up so suddenly that he knocked over his chair. She noticed that there was not much wine left in the bottle.
"I need the keys to the car."
(-- p. 142) |
The New Yorker on Audio CD:
Wonderful Town
Stories from the New Yorker narrated
by some of America's best actors[ - the
ones who can read AND talk
Life Stories
A few of the New Yorker's favorite character studies of
the famous narrated by more of America's best actors -
the ones who can read AND talk
Both collections are among our favorites!
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| Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 2:34 pm Post subject: |
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Nuvo
Glossy Overpriced Frostback Infomercial
Gambling on Sheer Talent
Reich and Petch are design's sure thing
By Betty Ann Jordon
Spring, 2005
| Quote: | It's a busy Friday afternoon at the world's most visited museum, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. In the Africa gallery of the Behring Family Hall of Mammals, the rumble of thunder and a flash of lightning precede the rattling sound of falling rain. Visitors stand transfixed before a mounted giraffe, legs akimbo as it stoops to drink from a simulated Savanna waterhole. On a glass screen behind the creature, who is flanked by a pair of zebras and a rhino, there's a video projection of a herd of elephants lumbering through tall grass.
Up in Canada, in Gananoque, Ontario, at eleven in the mroning the nautical-themed Thousand Islands Charity Casino is awash with the pinging of the slot machines punctuated by periodic alarm bells signaling another win. Half-awake slots players are islands inundated by waves of ambient noise, anchored by an aural undercurrent of what sounds like middle C ebing played over and over on a toy piano. In Oscar's dining room, named after the chef who invented Thousand Islands dressing, a wall is spangled with glowing talismanic names: "Heart Island," "Cherry Island" and the shivery "Dark Island."
The link between these disparate experiences is that they have been superbly stage-managed by Reich+Petch Design International of Toronto. Since the firm's formation in 1987, a polyglot team of architects, interior, museum, industrial and exhibit designers, plus facility planners and graphic artists (currently a core group of 25 people) has produced scores of effective, highly popular environments that run a very large gamut. On the museum design A-list, their educational attractions are the Hong Kong Heritage Museum and the Singapore Philatelic Museum, the Art Gallery of Windsor and the Royal Ontario Museum's galleries for Egypt/Nubia, Birds and South Asian Art. The company has also become synonymous with gaming, with some 30 projects to its credit, including the major Casino Niagara, Sault St. Marie Charity Casino and Woodbine Racetrack Slots. (-- p. 66) |
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| Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 12:23 pm Post subject: |
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The Beaver
Magazine Subscription
Getaway
Mining Tourist Gold
Katherine McIntyre travels to Dawson City, where the streets echo with memories of fast times. and the rush for riches.
October/November, 2007
| Quote: | It was once a First Nations fishing village located on a piece of swampy permafrost at the edge of the Yukon River. But then came the gold rush, and Dawson City became, for a while, the "Paris of the North."
The transformation began in August 1896, when local prospectors George Carmack, Dawson Charlie and Skookum Jim Mason found gold in nearby Rabbit Creek (now named Bonanza Creek). When news of the discovery spread across the world, thousands of stampeders answered the siren call, heading north to make their fortune scrabbling for gold.
At the same time, slick enterpreneurs discovered an easier way to strike it rich. They opened sawmills and built casinos, dance halls, hotels, saloons, restaurants and houses for the successful. By 1898, Dawson City had swollen into a ramshackle conglomeration of more than 40,000 miners and hangers-on, become the largest Canadian city west of Winnipeg.
But as miners found fewer and flecks of gold in their pans, Dawson experienced a mass exodus. In 1899 alone, eight thousand people left Dawson City to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Within a few years, Dawson City reverted into a Subarctic community of about two thousand residents, many haunted by memories of long-gone dancing girls and fast living. By 1960, Dawson claimed a mere three hundred and fifty residents.
With its wild and turbulent history behind it, Dawson City today mines for touris gold. The city of about two thousand people draws close to 60,000 tourists each year ... (-- p. 54) |
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 2:24 pm Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
British Columbia
Magazine Subscription
Our history in pictures
From the gold-rush frenzy of 1858 to our growing Olympic fever in 2008, photographers have been there to capture a visual record of the making of British Columbia. Join us for a phtographic journey through the past 150 years.
By Jane Nahirnny
Summer, 2008
| Quote: | Cariboo Wagon Road
This iconic photograph of travellers on the Cariboo Wagon Road is synonymous with our province's pioneering history. Gold strikes along the Fraser River brought thousands of enterprising California prospectors northward in the spring of 1858 - so many that the British government hastily founded the colony of British Columbia that fall to establish its claim on the region.
From the Fraser, nugget hunters moved north to even greater riches in the Cariboo. Roadhouses, saloons, and whole towns popped up overnight, and the freshly minted colony invested more than $1-million to construct a good road between Yale, on the south Fraser, and the Cariboo gold fields.
(The original route, judge Matthew Baillie Begbie decreed, was "... utterly impassable for any animal except a man, a goat or dog.") Here, freight wagons on the Cariboo Wagon Road make the perilous descent down "Eight Mile Bluff" near Spences Bridge, circa 1867. (Photo caption, p. 35) |
| Quote: | James Douglas
right: History books call him "the father of British Columbia." As governor of the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, James Douglas defused the threat of American annexation, maintained law and order in the gold fields, built towns in the Interior and ordered the construction of the Cariboo Wagon Road. But few know the humble beginnings of the former fur trader and Hudson's Bay Company Chief Factor. Born to a Scottish plantation owner and a "free colored" woman in British Guiana (now Guyana), Douglas was shipped off to Canada at 16 to work in the Hudson's Bay Company. His wife, Amelia, was also of mixed blood, with an Irish-Canadian father and Cree mother. To end up as a knight and lady of the British Empire was an usual reward, observed historian and author John Adams in Old Square Toes and His Lady. (Photo caption, p. 36)
Old Square Toes and His Lady
Hardcover
By John D. Adams
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| Quote: | Saloons aplenty
left: Hotels and saloons, such as Nelson's Royal Hotel shown here in 1898, gave prospectors and pioneers a warm place to congregate over a glass of beer or whiskey. At the height of the gold rush in 1862, Victoria listed 60 saloons among its many business establishments. During its heyday in the mid 1890s, the mining town of Sandon, about 100 kilometres north of Nelson, offered its 4,000 to 5,000 residents 29 hotels, 28 saloons, an opera house, and one of Canada's largest red-light districts. By 1897, nearby Rossland had 7,000 people and 42 saloons. (Photo caption, p. 43) |
| Quote: | Far, far from home, we miners roam,
We feel its joys no more,
These we have sold for yellow gold,
On Fraser River's shore.
(Far From Home, a folk song from 1858, p. 58) |
| Quote: | Fraser River War
How British Columbia became a colony
The Fraser Gold Rush of 1858 attracted some 30,000 miners from America into the British-controlled region of New Caledonia. Propelled by liquor and gold fever, they overwhelmed the Fraser Canyon's Nlaka'pamux people, who had been collecting gold on the river's banks for years. Friction turned to anger, and anger to bloodshed. Accounts from the time allude to hundreds of deaths.
When word of the violence reached James Douglas, then governor of the British colony of Vancouver Island, he was gravely concerned. Already he knew a strong lobbgy of Americans citing 'manifest destiny' sought to annex New Caledonia. The killing of U.S. citizens in the Fraser Canyon would only fuel their fervor and could prompt the 1,500 American troops stationed across the border to charge north to protect their compatriots.
To keep any of this news from reaching London, Douglas suppressed official accounts of the Fraser River War, and hurried to the mainland to meet with frightened miners who were demanding protection.
By the time he arrived, the worst was over. Chief Spintlum had successfully advocated peace to his fellow Nlaka'pamux chiefs and, in meetings with militia leader Henry Snyder, had negotiated an end ot the violence. Douglas helped to cement the truce by allocating land along the river to the native people in verbal agreements - generous settlements that were ignored by susequent government officials.
To ward off further threats from the Americans, Douglas worked with British officials to create the Crown colony of British Columbia in November, 1858, and served as its governor for five and a half years. (-- p. 59) |
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 1:51 pm Post subject: |
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The Door
Poems
Hardcover
By * Margaret Atwood
| Quote: | where do we both get off?
Is this small talent we have prized
so much, and rubbed like silver
spoons, until it shone
at least as brightly as neon, really
so much better than the ability
to win the sausage-eating contest,
or juggle six plates at once?
What's the use anyway
of calling the dead back, moving stones,
or making animals cry? I
think of you, loping along at night
to the convenience store, to buy your pint
of milk, your six medium eggs,
your head stuffed full of consonants
like lovely pebbles
you picked up on some lustrous beach
you can't remember - my feather-
headed fool, what have you got
in your almost-empty pockets
that would lure even the lowliest mugger?
Who needs your handful
of glimmering air, your foxfire, you few
underwater cyrstal tricks
that work only in moonlight?
Noon hits them and they fall apart,
old bones and earth, old teeth, a bundleful
of shadow. Sometimes, I know, the almost-holy
whiteness rooted in our skulls spreads out
like thistles in a vacant lot, a hot powdery
flare-up, which is not a halo
and will return at intervals
if we're grateful or else lucky, and
will end by fusing our neurons ...
(From Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later, pgs. 30-31) |
| Quote: | | *Note: ... and despite countless well-deserved awards, who nevertheless made time on a holiday in the Loire Valley to send a quick note to a desperate housewife fan alone and palely loitering in a foggy California bedroom community - a note we include with pride and gratitude among our own collection of 'glimmering air and foxfire.' |
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Last edited by editor on Thu Sep 04, 2008 1:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 11:33 am Post subject: |
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Divisadero
Hardcover
By Frostback Wonder Michael Ondaatje
| Quote: | More than a century before us, in August 1849, a group of men set up camp in a valley more than a hundred miles north of Petaluma. They built cabins at a place they called Badger Hill and began to search for gold. There were twenty of them panning the streams, standing knee-deep in the icy rivers, and they almost surrendered to the winter storms that overtook them. But within six months gold-laced quartz was unearthed in the place that would eventually be called Grass Valley. A hundred ramshackle hotels went up, and bizarre names for mines began to speckle the constantly repreinted maps - Slumgullion, Delerium Tremens, Bogus Thunder, Hell's Delight, Graveyard, Lone Jack, Rich Hell, Ne Plus Ultra, Silver Fork, Rocking Horse, Sultana. Men would be stranded in the mountains with no supplies and become hunters out of necessity, killing grouse, cattle, bears, with shotguns and pistols. Butcher shops sprang up. Steamboats travelled inland to the furthest point of navigation - as far as the Feather River. And a many-headed civilization arrived. Gamblers, water entrepreneurs, professional shootists, prostitutes, diarists, coffee drinkers, whisky merchants, poets, heroic dogs, mail-order brides, women falling in love with boys who walked within the realm of luck, old men swallowing gold to conceal it on their return journeys to the coast, balloonists, mystics, Lola Montez, opera singers - good ones, bad ones, those who fornicated their way across the territory. Dynamiters blasted steep grades and the land under your feet. There were seventeen miles of tunnels beneath the town of Iowa Hill. Sonora burned. Weaverwille burned. Shasta and Columbia burned. Were rebuilt and burned again and rebuilt again. Sacramento flooded.
A hundered years later, at the time of Coop's obsession, there would still be five thousand full-time gold miners along the banks of the Yuba and Russian rivers. They scouted out the old towns in the Sierras named after lovers and dogs and characters in novels - names that were a time capsule of hunger and desire for a new life. Ne Plus Ultra! At each filament-like dot on the country maps, something had happened. On this riverbank two brothers killed each other arguing about which direction to travel. At this clearing a woman was traded for a site. It was as if there were a novella by Balzac round every bend.
Prospectors now drove up in Airstreams, pulling gas-fuelled dredges to suck up whatever remained on the river bottoms. A century of flooding and storms had knocked loose the gold from the prehistoric beds, sluicing it down into the rivers. Miners in wetsuits were 'sniping' the streams, and swam in the underwater darkness holding giant cauldrons of light. (From Part One, Anna, Claire and Coop, pgs. 12-13) |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 1:54 pm Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Canadian Geographic
Magazine Subscription
The lost Eden of Okanagan
Vineyards are replacing orchards, recreation is replacing ranching and retirees are replacing rattlesnakes in the arid ponderosa hills of the Okanagan Valley
July/August, 2008
| Quote: | ... The houses and condos will be bought up eagerly by a wealthy generation of human migrants from Alberta or Australia. They come to play in Canada's most perfect valley, towing wakboard boats, snowmobiles, quads. "Man must recreate," says Sarell resignedly.
Their televisions and air conditioners will require a bigger power line through this piece of snake habitat. Their blossoming yards, ensuite bathrooms and golf courses will demand more water from this semi-arid country. More fine restaurants, more landfille, more marina slips and muffler shops. (Biologist Mike) Sarell returns his catch to its rocky lair. He does not think the night snake's presence here is a 'showstopper,' consultancy parlance for a particular flora or fauna that can halt development. If an exceedingly rare desert night snake cannot do it, I ask Sarell, what would? He thinks about it for a moment before responding.
"Recession," he says. (emphasis added)...
"Water is going to be a problem," says (historical geographer Wayne) Wilson, as does anyone you meet in the valley. Nestled in a rain shadow of the Coast Mountains, the Okanagan dodges British Columbia's famous onslaught of maritime precipitation. The valley is replenished by rain or snow from higher in the watershed, the Okanagan Highlands of the Interior Plateau. However, much of the runoff is lost to evaporation in Canada's driest locale, where the Great Basin Desert biome extends it warm reach. What little surface water does arrive is 100 per cent managed. About 70 per cent is used for agriculture, which contributes almost one-quarter of the province's total agricultural output. Homeowners compete with wild plants and animals for the rest.
Newcomers mostly fail to understand how a valley blessed with so many lakes - including Okanagan Lake, more than 100 kilometres long and deep enough, at 230 metres, to hide a mythical monster called Ogopogo - could ever be short of water. However, the lake has an extremely low flushing rate of more than 52 years; only the top one metre or so is replenished annually. The whole valley is dry - much of it is semi-arid, and significant portions are true desert - which is not obvious in what seems like a watery place. Virtually all its smaller upland waters are dammed or diverted, which has contributed ot the decimation of Okanagan Lake's once plentiful Kokanee salmon. A 1994 study suggested that existing water in the valley could support a maximum population of 425,000 people, provided agriculture was scaled back significantly. (emphasis added)
... Once the section linking 'the Coke' to Kelowna was completed in 1991, the $1 billion toll highway across the Cascades effectively brought the Okanagan into Vancouver's backyard, reducing the trip to less than four hours. Transport upgrades continute today. The low-volume floating bridge across Okanagan Lake has been replaced with a soaring new one named for the Kelowna-born Bennett. Meanwhile, a runway upgrade at Kelowna's airport will soon accommodate the largest Airbus jumbos direct from Europe and Asia. (-- pgs. 44, 52-53) |
Yee-haw. ...
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