Trails to Gold

Patricia Myers is a historian with the Historic Sites and Archives
Service, Alberta Community Development and the author of Sky Riders: An
Illustrated History of Aviation in Alberta, 1906–1945.

Branwen C. Patenaude has taken a nugget of B.C. mining history and
turned it into a lode of good reading in this account of the roadhouses
that sprang up along the routes to the gold fields starting in the
1850s. A tremendous amount of research has gone into producing a
narrative that is rich in anecdotal material and period feel. What it
was like to travel a road as a freighter, to cook or sleep in a
roadhouse, is carefully documented. Patenaude’s catalogue of roadhouse
sites is exhaustive, and includes those that survived for a few months
right up to those that survive, in some form or another, to this day.
Lucid maps and black-and-white illustrations add to the appeal of the
book.

Trails to Gold does more than capture the flavor of an era: it shows
what transformed that era in depicting the roadhouse not just as a
stopping place, but as an important part of the economic and social
history of a developing area.