The largest of BC's southern Gulf Islands, beautiful Salt Spring Island has long been a favoured holiday destination and a prized real-estate area for those in search of an idyllic rural residence. Now available in trade paper, Salt Spring: The Story of an Island chronicles the island's rich history from the days when Coast Salish people inhabited Salt Spring's shores, through some 150 years of settlement by many diverse groups. Because of the island's rugged geography, the early story of Salt Spring is largely the story of hard-working people in small isolated communities industriously carving farms out of rough terrain. Many of the settlers who followed came to find a place where they could live their lives free of the constraints of most societies. This was as true for the African-Americans, many of whom were among the first non-aboriginal settlers to arrive in 1859, as it was for those fleeing conventional middleclass life and for Americans seeking to avoid the Vietnam War. And it's true of almost every new islander who arrives today with a unique personal dream.

British Columbia Saltspring Island, History, Saltspring Island (B.C.) History, Saltspring, Île (C.-B.) Histoire

1. In the Beginning: Aboriginal Salt Spring
2. Land for Five Shillings
3. Eking Out a Living: 1859-1872
4. The Black Community
5. Government, Law, Disorder
6. A Troubled Adolescence: 1873-1883
7. The Hawaiian Community
8. Connections and Communities: 1884-1899
9. Into the Twentieth Century: 1900-1918
10. Farming the Hard Way
11. The Squire of Salt Spring
12. Logging, Mining and Red Ink
13. Ferries and Roquefort Cheese: 1919-1945
14. The Japanese Community
15. Time for Each Other: 1946-1960
16. The Island Discovered: 1961-1986
17. Salt Spring in Transition: 1986-1998