He Saw with Other Eyes: Stories from the Cariboo

Michael Payne is head of the research and publications program, Historic
Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, and co-author
of A Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

Todd Lee grew up in the Cariboo area of British Columbia. After
graduating from Union College at the University of British Columbia, he
returned to Williams Lake to serve as minister at St. Andrew’s United
Church. This book is a collection of his reminiscences about his three
years of service at St. Andrew’s from 1956 to 1959, interspersed with
some personal and family history.

Lee’s grandfather left California during the Depression to start a
wilderness ranch near Williams Lake, and several of the most interesting
stories in this collection relate to the trials and tribulations of this
undertaking. Having lived as both a child and a young man in the area,
Lee is also able to capture a sense of the extraordinary changes that
occurred in the Cariboo area in the 1950s. Communities like Williams
Lake suddenly grew from a few hundred people to several thousand, and
lumber mills employing hundreds of people replaced small-scale farming
and large-scale ranching as the main local industries. Several stories
in this collection are thus of interest as much as anecdotal sociology
as recollection.

Lee obviously has a great respect and affection for the people who live
in the Caribou. The general tenor of these stories is benign and upbeat:
a somewhat unscrupulous encyclopedia salesman winds up teaching Lee a
lesson in humility, and an itinerant con man reminds Lee that it is
better to give than to get. In his introduction to the book, Clive
Stangoe of the Williams Lake Tribune calls the stories “parables,”
which seems a fair description. Most are didactic without being preachy
and sympathetic to their subjects without being condescending, but they
are not gritty social history of the lumber mills and ranches of the
Cariboo.