The Coast of British Columbia

An excerpt from Chapter 1, The Coast of British Columbia

....In the early part of this century, millions of acres of Crown land were available to settlers. All that was necessary to establish a pre-emption, providing the land was unoccupied, was to blaze a "witness tree" on the corner of the lot and make a rough description of the 160 acres to be homesteaded. The land cost one dollar, providing the homesteader cleared ten acres in ten years and lived on the land for at least six months out of every year. When the homesteader had blazed his tree he rowed back to Vancouver or Victoria and presented his claim to the government for validation, then headed back up the coast with his wife and children and all their belongings. Few of these people have been written about. They are the subject of this book.

From the middle of the nineteenth century to the late 1940s, the coast of British Columbia was settled by newcomers from all parts of the world. Some of them homesteaded, while others settled in established villages. Their livelihood came from fishing, logging, mining and trapping. Homes were built of logs or from planks and shakes cut by hand or purchased from small coastal mills. Wood stoves, oil lamps and nearby streams provided all the amenities these pioneers needed.......