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Grizzly Bear Mountain (Caitlin $18.95)
"Why,"; a young woman from Cape Breton wondered the other day in our bookstore, "are there so many local history books in B.C.?"; She was looking at shelves of books like This Was Our Valley, Crooked River Rats, Atlin's Gold, Unfriendly Neighbours, A Western Doctor's Odyssey, Trail to the Interior and so on, books that recount the lives of by and large ordinary folk homesteading, trapping, prospecting in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The obvious part of the answer is that in our day time has lost its moorings. What seemed commonplace and unremarkable a few decades ago-work in sawmills, moose in the garden, salmon in the rivers, a landscape not yet logged over, a scattered community of tough men who knew the bush and women who could equally play the piano and shoot a bear-has mostly vanished. But many of the people from those times are still around, and not even especially old. They are eager to tell their stories, to rescue what is still so real in memory from the amnesia of the present.
A new but classic example of the local history genre is Grizzly Bear Mountain (Caitlin $18.95) by Jack Boudreau. It comes on the heels of Boudreau's bestseller Crazy Man's Creek, his personalized history of the little-known interior town of Penny and its surrounding area along the Fraser River east of Prince George. Grizzly Bear Mountain is a veritable forest of anecdotes about growing up in the bush, about encounters with grizzly bears, about fighting forest fires, about the isolation of winter along a narrow ribbon of river and railway. These are stories told around the wood stove, and they all begin (at least implicitly): "I remember this one time when..."; The reader knows the stories are all true, knows they all happened not far away, and knows that they all have something telling to reveal about the habits of animals, about the processes of nature, or about the strengths and weaknesses of human character. What makes such books problematic is that, despite their sincerity and effort to be accurate, they are still stories, and all stories tend toward the crafted, the fabulous, the unavoidably literary. The impulse to create legends is just as real as the impulse to record the truth. In fact, the two become hard to distinguish as time goes by.
An interesting case in point, when it comes to rescuing truth from amnesia, is the history of the exploration of the Nahanni River in the 1930s. A number of trappers and prospectors travelled the remote river, and news of their exploits found its way into books like R.M. Patterson's Dangerous River, into newspaper reports and into the pages of the RCMP Quarterly of the day. [Local history buffs might want to know that a mountain in the Highwood Range of southwest Alberta has just been named after R.M. Patterson and this fall publisher David Finch of Rocky Mountain Books in Calgary will release a new biography, R.M. Patterson: A Life of Great Adventure. The naming of Patterson Peak will be celebrated with a gathering on August 19, 2000. Raymond M. Patterson's books include a history of Kamloops as well as Trail to the Interior, his account of a journey through the Stikine-Dease watershed in the 1960s, and Finlay's River, an anthology of Finlay River lore and experience, published in 1972.] Hand in hand with these mostly reliable journalistic reports on the Nahanni were legends of a fabulous lost gold mine, of a tropical valley heated by hotsprings and of missing men whose headless bodies turned up years later. 0-920576-81-8
[George Sipos / BCBW 2000]
A new but classic example of the local history genre is Grizzly Bear Mountain (Caitlin $18.95) by Jack Boudreau. It comes on the heels of Boudreau's bestseller Crazy Man's Creek, his personalized history of the little-known interior town of Penny and its surrounding area along the Fraser River east of Prince George. Grizzly Bear Mountain is a veritable forest of anecdotes about growing up in the bush, about encounters with grizzly bears, about fighting forest fires, about the isolation of winter along a narrow ribbon of river and railway. These are stories told around the wood stove, and they all begin (at least implicitly): "I remember this one time when..."; The reader knows the stories are all true, knows they all happened not far away, and knows that they all have something telling to reveal about the habits of animals, about the processes of nature, or about the strengths and weaknesses of human character. What makes such books problematic is that, despite their sincerity and effort to be accurate, they are still stories, and all stories tend toward the crafted, the fabulous, the unavoidably literary. The impulse to create legends is just as real as the impulse to record the truth. In fact, the two become hard to distinguish as time goes by.
An interesting case in point, when it comes to rescuing truth from amnesia, is the history of the exploration of the Nahanni River in the 1930s. A number of trappers and prospectors travelled the remote river, and news of their exploits found its way into books like R.M. Patterson's Dangerous River, into newspaper reports and into the pages of the RCMP Quarterly of the day. [Local history buffs might want to know that a mountain in the Highwood Range of southwest Alberta has just been named after R.M. Patterson and this fall publisher David Finch of Rocky Mountain Books in Calgary will release a new biography, R.M. Patterson: A Life of Great Adventure. The naming of Patterson Peak will be celebrated with a gathering on August 19, 2000. Raymond M. Patterson's books include a history of Kamloops as well as Trail to the Interior, his account of a journey through the Stikine-Dease watershed in the 1960s, and Finlay's River, an anthology of Finlay River lore and experience, published in 1972.] Hand in hand with these mostly reliable journalistic reports on the Nahanni were legends of a fabulous lost gold mine, of a tropical valley heated by hotsprings and of missing men whose headless bodies turned up years later. 0-920576-81-8
[George Sipos / BCBW 2000]
Submitted on July 11, 2003 in By David.
