As Susan Moir, Susan Allison arrived at Fort Hope on the Fraser River with her mother and her spendthrift stepfather, Thomas Glennie, who was attracted by the thought of becoming a country squire in the rich land of the goldfields. Fortune did not flow as easily as Glennie had expected, and in 1864 he vanished, leaving his wife and children to make do as best they could with the help of genteel acquaintances in Victoria and the Fraser Valley. In 1868 Susan Moir married John Fall Allison, after whom the Allison Pass is named. Allison was one of the pioneer farmers in the Similkameen Valley and in the Okanagan, and one of the founders of Princeton, and Susan shared the life of a rancher-trader that he pursued. She was deeply interested in the Indian peoples of the region, and deeply concerned as she watched their decline during her decades in these valleys whose late nineteenth century remoteness is hard to envisage now that they are traversed by main highways. The fact that she was often involved in life at its most elemental - for fire and flood several times left her homeless in a virtual wilderness - did not diminish Susan Allison's interest in the artistic accomplishments she had learnt in her girlhood, and after Allison died in 1897 she began to turn to writing, publishing a long poem on the Similkameen Indians and also a paper on them which was published by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. But most of her work went into the Recollections which are here printed. They are the only major account by a woman of pioneering life in British Columbia during the mid-nineteenth century... Mrs. Allison's actual text is in fact quite short; together with a couple of her versions of Indian stories as an appendix, it runs to little more than 80 pages. The remainder of the 200 odd pages of A Pioneer Gentlewoman of British Columbia is taken up with Margaret Ormsby's long introduction and her elaborate notes identifying and telling the basic history of every individual and place named in the text. Some such apparatus was needed, since Susan Allison writes as if on the assumption that her readers would know everyone she mentions; Dr. Ormsby's work has been done so well that what we have is not merely the story of one woman, but a kind of shadow history of the extraordinarily beautiful region through which one travels from Hope across the ranges to the Similkameen Valley and on to the western shores of Okanagan Lake. -- George Woodcock