Captain William Moore: BC's Amazing Frontiersman

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.

Captain William Moore was a larger-than-life figure in the early history
of British Columbia and Alaska. He and his four sons were involved in a
series of steamboat ventures and participated in every gold rush from
the little-known Queen Charlotte Islands rush of 1852 to the 1900 rush
in Nome, Alaska. Over the years, Moore made (and lost) a succession of
fortunes. He seems to have been a textbook example of the frontier
entrepreneur: energetic, ambitious, and cantankerous, an inveterate
gambler with a poor sense of timing.

The book chronicles Moore’s career with narrative panache, but little
analysis. There is no real effort to place Moore’s enterprises in any
general context or to consider Moore’s often problematic relations
with Native groups as indicative of anything other than his daring and
indomitable spirit. However, readers can expect a good story that
rattles along at an often breakneck pace, much like the West Coast
rivers Moore once navigated.