Catalog of British Columbiana and Pacific Northwest Americana

"There is an old adage that says, 'Truth is stranger than fiction.' This is the way it was told in the fascinating stories about the famous Sammamish Slough Race. Your Author covers a boat racing era from the 1920s to the 1970s. His personal knowledge, being born into a racing family, has given him insight that few people still living have. In the Pacific Northwest, the area where the Slough Race took place, significant changes occurred that had a long-term effect on outboard racing of that period. He leads you through the years that made boat racing a competition as exciting as major-league sports are today. The contest started from various locations on Lake Washington, ran across the lake and proceeded into a narrow-crooked river that wound through several small towns. It took a brief stop at one of the resorts on the upper connecting lake--Lake Sammamish. The competitors restarted their race boats after stopping and headed back downstream to the starting point, finishing their long grueling marathon. You will learn about some of the local history along the path of the racecourse, which is fascinating in itself. Many alterations were made to the terrain-history was rewritten as a result. The River took some vicious twists and turns, which was the exciting attraction for thousands of spectators. It nearly killed some of the drivers. You are treated to hundreds of wonderful photographs while reading about some of the wild events that happened along the way of this 'Crookedest Race in the World'"--Page 4 of cover

544 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 24 cm

vii, 100 pages : portraits ; 27 cm.

v, 178 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Contributors to this anthology of Oregon letters and diaries include a missionary and a gambler, a prisoner and a judge, a clown and a civil servant, a housewife and a homesteader, a cowboy, a schoolgirl, a nun, and many others. Few would consider themselves writers. Yet all took the time to commit words to paper, providing us today with a unique sense of their lives and times. Letters and diaries are among the most intimate of literary expressions. Seldom written for an intended audience of more than one (if that), they provide a private forum for feelings, concerns, and interests. Yet letters and diaries also benefit a wider audience. They afford us a special knowledge of the past, for they are commonly filled with the concrete details of everyday life, details which biography and history tend to disregard. A summer holiday, fur trapping, a sea voyage, courtship and war, travel and homesteading, the Depression, the Japanese internment, hope despair, and joy--the writings collected in Talking on Paper bring an impressive immediacy to these experiences. In gathering material for this book, the editors traveled thousands of miles and researched thousands of documents. Selections span a period of a century and a half and reflect the wide cultural and ethnic diversity of Oregon. From the lyric-laced diaries of Greek emigrant and itinerant railroad worker Haralambos Kambouris to the poignant letter by 10-year-old Julia Wilson of Mitchell describing the loss of her family in a flash flood, these private expressions of literacy and imagination reveal an intimate aspect of Oregon literature.

xviii, 324 pages : illustrations ; 28 cm.

Collection of forty-six stories chronicling the events surrounding the building of the great Carey act irrigation project that has transmuted a once barren desert into what is now called the "Magic" Valley. The book tells the personal stories of pioneers who got that job done, and who founded the city of Twin Falls, and first made it prosper -- people like Ira Perrine, John Hansen, Paul Bickel, John and Anna Hayes, and many others

ix, 176 pages : illustrations, maps ; 29 cm

"From his perspective as a geographer and expert in public land law, Vaughan provides the reader with historical context to the GLO, a summary of key public land laws, an understanding of the mission, roles, and administrative responsibilities of the GLO, and a review of the controversies involving migration, settlement, and American Indian title."--Page 4 of cover

x, 101 pages : illustrations some color, maps some color ; 26 cm

232 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 26 cm

The Kettle Valley Railway may be gone, but it springs back to life in this collection of stories and photos from Barrie Sanford. From years of recording stories told to him by railroaders and their descendants, coupled with his own research, Barrie has compiled stories of the men -- and women -- who gave the KVR life and purpose. Here are the surveyors who charted the railway through the wilderness, the labourers who built the railway with pick and shovel, and the locomotive firemen and engineers who ran the trains through winter storms and summer heart. Told as a series of long and short pieces, this is social history preserved by one of BC's foremost railway history experts.--Adapted from back cover

viii, 165 pages : illustrations, map ; 23 cm

From back This book, Tales of Richland, White Bluffs and Hanford, tells the story of these three towns before there was an atomic project. They were farming communities, rich in a wide variety of early bearing fruit, and with a long growing season for vegetables, feed grains and alfalfa hay. The author lived in Richland from 1932 to 1941. Her mother's family, the Charles Sawyers, came to the Fruitvale District in 1909. The Sawyers had a 19-acre farm just upriver from where the Graduate Center is at present (1986), north of Richland's Hanford School. Mrs Parker has a deep interest in Northwest history and has written two other books, Kin-i-wak, Kenewick, Tehe, Kennewick, and Washington, Oregon; a Map History of the Oregon Country. She is also an amateur archaeologist and is actively interested in Geology and Genealogy.

407 pages : illustrations ; 29 cm

Published by the Mason County Historical Society and co-authored by Ethel M. Dalby and Valerie Abrams Johnson, Tales of Hood Canal compiles rich local lore, vintage photographs, and personal recollections documenting the historic communities along Washington's dramatic fjord. The book chronicles the lives of early loggers, oyster growers, homesteaders, and maritime traders who navigated the deep, glacier-carved waters of the canal before the arrival of modern highways. Through collected anecdotes and archival records, the text preserves the distinct character of isolated waterfront settlements shaped by the rhythms of the tides and dense surrounding forests. A keen insight drawn from the work is how a winding marine waterway served simultaneously as a barrier and a highway; while the steep topography of the Hood Canal kept communities geographically sequestered from inland urban centers, the water itself provided the vital commercial and social umbilical cord that tied them to the broader Puget Sound economy.

ix, 137 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

220 pages : illustrations ; 28 cm

vii, 99 pages : illustrations ; 27 cm

With a career spanning five decades, writer Daniel Wood's adventures have inspired, informed, and entertained generations of readers about British Columbia's charms. Whether he's exploring human nature, scientific discoveries, oddities, or environmental wonders, at the centre of those explorations are people, their ideas, and their dreams. Written by B.C.'s most acclaimed writer and journalist, this anthology features 28 award-winning magazine articles, including a near-death hotair balloon ride, B.C.'s pot-growing pioneers, Elvis impersonators in the Okanagan, the province's first dino-dig, and its last free-range cowboys. You won't find a better collection of B.C. tales anywhere

255 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Authored by Helen Huson Olsen and Effie DeForest Boyer Knowlton, Tales from a Tahuya Log: Second Growth preserves the rustic folklore, pioneer genealogy, and personal recollections of early settlement along the Tahuya Peninsula on Washington's Hood Canal. The book captures the unglamorous day-to-day realities of homesteading, logging, and raising families in a densely forested, isolated region where neighbors were separated by miles of wilderness rather than paved roads. Through charming anecdotes and local family histories, the text chronicles how a distinct, resilient community was hewed out of the second-growth timberland. A keen insight drawn from the work is how the concept of "second growth" serves as an apt metaphor for the psychological landscape of frontier children; just as new trees vigorously sprouted from the logged stumps of the original forest, the second generation of settlers had to grow sturdy and resourceful in the literal shadow of their parents' exhausting labor.

159 pages : illustrations, map ; 28 cm

"A natural and environmental history of Mount Rainier National Park and its watersheds and surrounding human communities, with emphasis on Native American people and their millennia-long association with the mountain"-- Provided by publisher

266 pages : illustrations (some color), maps ; 23 cm

Published in 1916 by journalist Herbert Hunt, Tacoma, Its History and Its Builders: A Half Century of Activity offers an exhaustive chronicle of the city’s aggressive rise from a rugged Puget Sound mill town to a major industrial railroad terminus. The multi-volume text details the ruthless corporate maneuvering of the Northern Pacific Railway, the fierce regional rivalry with Seattle, and the foundational lumber and maritime industries that fueled Tacoma's ambitions as the self-proclaimed "City of Destiny." A keen insight drawn from the work is how early civic boosterism actively sanitized the city's history of racial violence to protect its commercial reputation; by framing the brutal 1885 expulsion of Tacoma's entire Chinese community as a tragic but necessary measure for labor stability, Hunt's narrative demonstrates how pioneer-era historians deliberately rewrote organized xenophobia as an acceptable cost of maintaining civic order and industrial progress.

3 volumes frontispieces, plates, portraits, maps 27 cm

An introduction to the T'Sou-ke people and the people of Sooke, a small community on the western coast of Vancouver Island.

156 pages : illustrations (some color), maps, portraits ; 22 x 29 cm

"In The History That We Share, historian Robert Janning presents a clear and comprehensive depiction of the relationship that existed between the Snuneymuxw First Nation and the Methodist Church of Canada from the time of contact to the day Snuneymuxw children were first sent to the Coqualeetza Residential School, in Sardis, British Columbia. This book gives readers an opportunity to learn what day to day life was like in a First Nation community prior to the implementation of the Indian residential school system in British Columbia. Despite the fact that fear, guilt and shame have for many years conspired to conceal much of the history that we share, an immense body of documentation chronicling our past has been left to collect dust on the shelves of archives and libraries for a century or more. Driven by a consuming desire to better understand how we became who we are today, Janning launched an investigation that took five years to complete. After collecting and chronologically arranging his findings, he was determined that the evidence would get to see the light of day. After all, if it is the truth that will set us free, then is it not high time we took a long look in our rearview mirror?" -- Back cover

xxx, 317 pages : maps, portraits, black and white photographs ; 29 cm

"The first book in the Speaking of Idaho Series, inspired by the popular blog of the same name. It's filled with Idaho history, loosely defined and quirky. Learn about Chicken Dinner Road, Grace Slick's tenuous connection to Idaho, why a governor didn't care for a beloved folk singer, the unique trick played by the Idaho giant salamander, where that Hot Rod Lincoln race really took place, and more useless but entertaining trivia about the Gem State"--Publisher

89 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Around the turn of the twentieth century, and for decades thereafter, Oregon had the second largest Chinese population in the United States. In terms of geographical coverage, Portland’s two Chinatowns (one an urban area of brick commercial structures, one a vegetable-gardening community of shanty dwellings) were the largest in all of North America. Marie Rose Wong chronicles the history of Portland’s Chinatowns from their early beginnings in the 1850s until the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1940s, drawing on exhaustive primary material from the National Archives, including more than six thousand individual immigration files, census manuscripts, letters, and newspaper accounts. She examines both the enforcement of Exclusion Laws in the United States and the means by which Chinese immigrants gained illegal entry into the country. The spatial and ethnic makeup of the combined "Old Chinatown" afforded much more contact and accommodation between Chinese and non-Chinese people than is usually assumed to have occurred in Portland, and than actually may have occurred elsewhere. Sweet Cakes, Long Journey explores the contributions that Oregon’s leaders and laws had on the development of Chinese American community life, and the role that the early Chinese immigrants played in determining their own community destiny and the development of their Chinatown in its urban form and vernacular architectural expression.

xx, 337 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.

"This book is about "surviving" and is divided into three sections: an introduction that looks back to my 1996 book and reproduces some of the images and thoughts from that tranquil time nearly 30 years ago; a second section about "surviving" as an adjective--what has survived of its fine buildings and beautiful neighbourhoods; and a third one of "surviving" as a verb--how people are surviving in Vancouver. I have used "Vancouver" both as a term for the city itself and sometimes for Metro Vancouver--the region which includes Burnaby, New Westminster, the North and West Vancouvers, Surrey, Richmond, Delta, Port Moody, White Rock, the Coquitlams and the Langleys. The final section of the book considers that geography, and the "great escapes" further afield."-- Provided by publisher

126 pages : illustrations ; 28 cm

"Over the last thirty years, conservative evangelicals have been moving to the north-west of the United States in an effort to survive and resist the impact of secular modernity. Their activity coincides with the promotion by prominent survivalist authors of a programme of migration to the "American Redoubt," a region encompassing Idaho, Montana, eastern parts of Washington and Oregon, and Wyoming, as a location within which to endure hostile social change or natural disaster. These migration movements have independent origins, but they overlap in their influences and aspirations, working in tandem and sometimes in mutual dependence to offer a vision of the present in which Christian values must be defended, if necessary, by force, and a vision of the future in which American society will be rebuilt according to biblical law. Drawing on Calvinist theology, the social theory of Christian Reconstruction, and libertarian politics, these believers are projecting significant soft power, with their books being promoted by leading secular publishers and being listed as New York Times bestsellers. The strategy is gaining momentum, making an impact in local political and economic life, while being repackaged for a wider audience in publications by a broader coalition of conservative commentators and in American mass culture. These believers recognise that they have lost the culture war - but another kind of conflict is beginning. This book examines the origins, evolution, and cultural reach of the migration that might tell us most about the future of American evangelicalism." -- Publisher, page four of cover

xii, 210 pages : map ; 25 cm

"Frank Swannell surveyed much of northern British Columbia in the early part of the 20th century. As well as keeping a journal of what he saw and what his survey crews did, he also kept a photographic record of his seven trips through the North." "This book includes both well-known photographs and others previously unpublished. As the 100th year of the Corporation of Land Surveyors of British Columbia approaches, Surveying Northern British Columbia is finally being produced and acknowledges the contributions of a man, a surveyor, a photographer, and a journalist."--BOOK JACKET

vii, 166 p. : ill., maps, ports ; 27 cm.

Photographer and curator Terry Toedtemeier (1947–2008) began his career in the 1970s with extensive photographic experiments to capture his close circle of friends and colleagues. Largely self-taught, he began to attract wider critical attention with his landscape images, initially snapshots from his moving car and later exquisite compositions influenced by his deep understanding of both historical and contemporary photography traditions of the American West. His haunting photographs often focused on the Oregon desert and coastline, and magnificent basalt formations of the Pacific Northwest. Sun, Shadows, Stone is the first scholarly monograph of the photography of Terry Toedtemeier. His photographs were featured in the nationally traveling exhibition Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan and are in the collections of many museums including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

134 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 27 cm

"In 1889, David Eccles chartered the Oregon Lumber Company, an organization that produced many mills and railways and whose influence was felt from Salt Lake City to Northern California and Idaho. Through family connections, Eccles was also involved with many other logging enterprises, and he influenced the growth of the Inter-Mountain region as well as the Pacific Northwest. Sumpter Valley Logging Railroads is a pictorial history of the Oregon operations, focusing on the operations along the Sumpter Valley Railway. It explores the rails, mills, and people, as well as the logging practices of a bygone era

127 pages : chiefly illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.