Hudson's Hope is B.C.'s third oldest community and easily one of its most important citizens was Earl Kitchener Pollon (1916-1992) who came to the Peace River area in 1931, along with his father Jack, brother Art, and sister Phyllis. Earl made his living by hunting, trapping, dredging gold, and operating a lime kiln and a sawmill. He married ''his river girl'' Bonnie Goodvin in 1939, and they had four children, Harley, Pat, Carolyn and William.

Through his presidency of the local Board of Trade, Earl Pollon spearheaded
building a road from Chetwynd to Hudson's Hope, and escorted then-BC Premier W.A.C. Bennett to Portage Canyon, the potential site for a dam that would carry the premier's name. Writing was Earl's true passion. He founded a local newspaper, Hudson's Hope Power News, and later wrote a historical essay titled ''Dinosaurs to Dynamos'' detailing the dramatic
successional changes the Peace River valley had experienced over the eons. His poetry and prose collection, titled Beneath These Waters, sold several thousand copies.

Earl Pollon lived in Hudson's Hope since 1931 as a prospector, writer and local newspaper publisher. With Calgary's Shirlee Matheson he co-wrote This Was Our Valley: The True Story of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam (Detselig Enterprise, 1989) to resurrect the stories submerged by B.C. Hydro's flooding of 640 square miles of land to create Williston Lake. A third, revised edition was released in 2018.

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
This Was Our Valley

BOOKS:

This Was Our Valley: the True Story of the W.A.C. By Bennett Dam. With Shirlee Smith Matheson (Detselig, 1989)
Beneath These Waters (Glencanyon Press, 1980)
Hudson Hope: Dinosaur to Dynamo. Compiled and edited by Earl and B. Pollon (Hudson Hope Chamber of Commerce, 1969)

[BCBW 2017] "Local History"