The echoes of British Columbia resonate through the Central Interior. It is fluttering the pages of a new book and collection of CDs tucked into the pages. Prince George and area is at the centre of this historical document.
Author, archivist and broadcaster Robert "Lucky" Budd has gathered them into a book released this week called Echoes of British Columbia-Voices From The Frontier pressed by Harbour Publishing and supported by CBC Radio and the BC Archives.
All corners of B.C. are represented in the book, but the general Prince George region is a large part of the setting because of all the reasons it is still the pulse of the province. It's where the resources were that started it all, including the precious resource of passage through the land. The rivers and valleys linking the Rockies to the Pacific and Arctic oceans naturally flow through here, so it is where Budd found the flow of stories, too.
The miners didn't hide the gold in the rocks for others to find, the miners sourced it. Likewise, Budd is mining too. This book, and one that came before it entitled Voices Of British Columbia, are panned from the massive trove of interviews done between 1959 and '66 by foresightful CBC broadcaster Imbert Orchard and sound technician Ian Stephen.
Before "oral histories" was an academic movement, Orchard and Stephen invested countless miles and hours to collect interviews with B.C. elders. The pair conducted 998 recorded conversations on 2,700 hours of audio tape. This raw ore was held first by the CBC and when the corporation was about to send it all to the garbage dump, the BC Archives offered a storage room for it all. And there it sat until University of Victoria history major Budd was hired to digitize the pile of mylar.
Budd said it was a tale from the B.C. Central Interior that leaped out of that treasure room and staked a claim on his brain, and it was, like almost all good history stories, a personal one. He had a good UVic friend named Pharis Patenaude. Many know her alongside husband Jason Romero as one of northern B.C.'s most acclaimed acoustic folk duos. She is a fifth-generation resident of the hamlet of Horsefly, deep in the Cariboo. And Budd realized it was her great-great-grandfather's voice speaking into his ear as he sifted through all that broadcasting ore. He knew in a flash that he was hearing a voice she had never heard, and no doubt didn't know existed. The power of his profession rang in his ears and he knew books must be written.
"One of my favourite stories of all was Forin Campbell. Hearing his recording was one of the ones that first nailed for me just how vital this project was," Budd said. Campbell was one of the four residents at a place called Fort George. He was a surveyor stationed at the Hudson's Bay fort in 1908 alongside James Cowie, A.G. Hamilton and a man called Capee. They were among the first Euro residents of Lheidli T'enneh territory, and even fewer among the non-Lheidli people to choose it as their home and live on there after their duties allowed them to leave if they wished. Orchard and Stephen caught up to Campbell on July 19, 1964.
To hear Campbell's own voice, as Budd heard it during his milling of the interviews, listen to the CDs accompanying each copy of the book. The pages contain the transcripts and context, but the CDs are the actual recordings made by Orchard and Stephen.
"I consider myself so lucky that I've been the one who somehow got the job to digitize all this. I'm absolutely privileged to have access to all these stories no one has ever heard before, the actual voices of the people who played their part to shape our generation and the ones to come, so I had to honour that by doing whatever I could to get these voices out to the public, as they were always meant," said Budd.
He has become a regular contributor on the CBC Radio show North By Northwest where host Sheryl MacKay gets him to play some of these voices on the air. She also wrote the forward in Echoes Of British Columbia.
"It's the social history of the province," Budd said. "You've got the men, the women, the artists, the greenhorns, the home builders, the road builders, the totem builders, the real people. And they aren't all success stories. Some people are miserable, some people just wanted to go home, some people didn't even make it out alive."
Some of the stories are adventurous and exciting, some are pastoral and touching, some are breathtakingly tragic. One heroic man from north of Fort Babine, known only as A'zak. Firstly, according to elder Constance Cox who told the story to Orchard and Stephen, A'zak had his home and possessions (stables and livestock) burned by a Euro settler who was claiming the property in the name of his own Crown-approved homestead.
A'zak's wife received burns as she rescued the children still inside the flaming home. A'zak was out hunting at the time.
Despite this injustice, when a gravely ill surveyor came to him pleading to take him the five-day trip to the fort, A'zak calculated that this white man needed the help even more so than his own desperately sick daughter whom he was about to transport to the medicine at the settlement. He took the surveyor by dogsled at a frantic pace, making the round trip in six days, but it was too late. His daughter had died. A'zak received the Humane Society of Canada's medal for bravery and another from the Catholic Church for his sacrifice, medals that later saved him from another injustice as it was transpiring against him. All of this is described in detail inside the book and on the CDs.
The book also contains local stories of the Cariboo Road, the Gang Ranch, Barkerville, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad connecting first Prince George then on to Prince Rupert, and many more. There are rare accounts of legendary but respected fugitive Simon Gunanoot from the Hazelton region and the notorious McLean Gang from the Kamloops area. A large amount of aboriginal content forms the book, depicting the close relationship between early Euro settlers and the indigenous societies all over the province.
Budd is forming plans to come to Prince George for a personal reading from the book. In the interim, Echoes Of British Columbia is available now for reading and listening.
