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Robson Valley history gets exhaustive reworking |
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Written by MARK NIELSEN
Citizen staff
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Friday, 28 November 2008 |
Nearly 30 years after publishing the first extensive history of the Robson Valley, Marilyn Wheeler, with the help of a long list of friends, has come out with a new, improved and decidedly heavier version.
If books were sold by the kilogram, The Robson Valley Story: A Century of Dreams would come at a hefty price. Fortunately, that's not the case and at 710 pages of stories about the people who've settled in the region, interspersed with more than 800 photos and illustrations and a detailed map on its inside covers, you get your money's worth.
"It is quite wieldy, yes," Wheeler agreed.
It's organized into a dozen fairly lengthy chapters for those determined to read it from start to finish but the glossy paper on which it's printed gives it the feel of a coffee table book you can pick up and read at your leisure. Just turn to a page and take in a short burst about The Beanery, a popular eatery in McBride, or a newspaper editorial from 1914 complaining about a bad day's work on construction the community's main street.
Much of the account revolves around the camps and towns the sprung up along the Grand Trunk Pacific and Canadian Northern railway lines. The next watershed moment, said Wheeler, came when a full-fledged road was completed in 1968.
"Most of the population was just desperate all those years to have a road as well as a railway. They wanted to get out, they wanted to to Prince George or Kamloops or Jasper and be able to drive there," Wheeler said.
"What they hadn't realized is that having one would bring people into the valley and that seemed to be a bit of a surprise. When the road first opened, there was nowhere for them to stay -- the hotel would fill up and that would be that, so they had billeting and all sorts of things.
"And many people from the outside wanted to live here, which was unusual. Before that, people would come here because there was work, not many had come because 'oh, what a wonderful place to live.'"
Wheeler and her now-departed husband, John, settled in McBride 50 years ago after they drove to Mount Robson from Melfort, Sask., the year before.
"We had gone out through to Prince Rupert on very difficult roads just to see what B.C. was like," she said. "We stopped for a couple of weeks at Mount Robson because it was kind of nice and there was nobody else there and we kind of liked the area."
A teacher, Wheeler wanted to learn about the history of the valley.
"I couldn't find anything and it annoyed me so much," she said.
Wheeler and her husband "foolishly volunteered" to compile the first edition which consisted mostly of accounts from the pioneers. "It just seemed great to learn all this stuff and put it down for other people," she said.
Two printings of that first edition quickly sold out. Some 20 years later, Wheeler decided to pursue a second edition after learning the provincial government's legislative library was microfiching all the editions of B.C.'s newspapers and giving them back to the communities.
"And if the communities didn't want them, they destroyed them," Wheeler said. "So we high-tailed it down to Victoria and came back with the back end of the car weighed down."
Not only were the newspaper accounts used to fill in the gaps in the valley's chronology but added some atmosphere, Wheeler said.
"There's something about newspapers that are so 'at the time,'" she said. "The way things are put, the sort of humour, the sort of things that are important. They really reflect the times that they're written in."
The process of sifting through the material was "particularly intensive" for the past five years or so before the finished product was completed this summer.
The book includes a completely new second chapter on how and why people moved to the area while a chapter on family histories has been discarded because of concerns about accuracy.
Through it all, Wheeler said the "tremendous diversity" of the people who've lived in the Robson Valley is what has shone through most.
"We've had so many different waves of people come and each brings something with them," she said. "It makes a very rich environment all around."
Wheeler will be at Books and Company to sign copies today from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 28 November 2008 )
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