Upcoast Summers

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Along the channels and on the islands of the lower British Columbia coast, there once were many more settlements than there are now. Small canneries flourished 60 years ago, and independent loggers eked out a living there, before huge monopolistic companies squeezed them out. Some of these villages are evident today only in vandalized ruins. Others have simply been swallowed by the raincoast forest so quickly “that it seems sometimes as if these upcoast people never lived.” It is the purpose of this book to see that these people of the thirties, and even earlier, are not forgotten — people known as Chinaman Harry and Portuguese Joe, people who were so poor during the Depression that “We couldn’t mail a letter for two years,” people like Billy Newcombe, who shared his house only with “rare books, papers and ...almost a hundred Emily Carr paintings,” or the recluse who “greeted people with a shotgun and…had to be removed.”

These and other upcoast people live in the diaries of a middle-aged couple, the Barrows, who spent their summers leisurely cruising up and down the coast between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Their journals of the ‘30s and bits of diaries going back to the first years of the century were literally snatched from a fire and were made available to Beth Hill, whose previous books include studies of Indian petroglyphs of the area; the Barrows discovered and recorded many of these. Hill retraced the Barrows’ travels and has arranged the diary excerpts not in chronological order but in sections for specific geographic areas. Thus, entries from years apart may appear side by side. In addition, she has researched the history of the region and provides extensive background about the people and places the Barrows visited. Photographs and maps illustrate the book, there is an index, and a five-page bibliography is provided.