By Snowshoe, Buckboard and Steamer: Women of the Frontier

R. Douglas Francis is a professor of history at the University of
Calgary and the co-author of Destinies: Canadian History Since
Confederation.

This book recounts the experiences of four women who lived in British
Columbia during the frontier era between the 1860s and the 1890s. B.C.
archivist Kathryn Bridge chose these four women because of the vivid and
extensive accounts they gave of their experiences. All four women were
of the middle class, but their lives and accounts differ remarkably as a
result of when and where they settled, and their unique experiences.

Margaret Agassiz (1854–1940) came with her family from London, Canada
West (Ontario), to live first at Hope and then on a ranch at Fenny
Coombie (near Yale) from 1862 to 1868, after which she attended Angela
College, the Anglican girls’ school in Victoria. In 1876, she married
John Goodfellow, manager of the Victoria branch of the Bank of British
North America. Her memoirs, from which the excerpts in the book are
taken, recount only the years up to her marriage.

Eleanor Caroline Fellows (1831–1926) came from Middlesex, England, in
1861 with her husband, Arthur, a B.C. hardware merchant. The couple
lived in Victoria until 1868, then moved to San Francisco and eventually
to London, England. Her story begins with her move to British Columbia
and her early years in Victoria. Her accounts are as much social
commentary as reminiscences, especially in the way that she reveals her
very liberal views of Native people and the Chinese. At one point she
writes: “Are my aboriginal friends ‘the wretchedly degraded race’
which unobservant people call them? If ever that reputation was
deserved, upon whose shoulders should the blame be laid?”

Helen Kate Woods (1854–1937) came to British Columbia from Ireland in
1861, at the age of 11. She attended Angela College, where she excelled
in art. In 1880, she visited her older sister and her husband in
Kincolith, on the Nass River, a Native community where they were
missionaries. Most of Kate’s journal entries reproduced in the book
concern the Natives of Kincolith. Bridge also includes a number of
Woods’s excellent artistic sketches of that region.

Violet Emily Stillitoe (1855–1934) came from England in 1880 with her
husband, Acton Windeyer Stillitoe, the newly ordained Anglican Bishop of
New Westminster. The position required extensive traveling into the
Fraser River Valley and Cariboo country, and Violet accompanied her
husband on his visits. Her accounts cover her travels between 1880 and
1892.

These four women all experienced the frontier, but that is where their
similarities end, thus making it difficult to draw any general
conclusions. Indeed, that is the value of the book: it is a reminder
that individual experiences in the past were all unique, each a product
of time and place. Nevertheless, these four accounts shed a great deal
of light on the experiences of women in the early history of British
Columbia.