National Network for Equitable Library Service

From the 1960s through the 1980s, RCMP Sergeant Charlie Scheideman spent much of his time patrolling the "dark corners of the Interior of British Columbia" where "the citizens would meet the modern criteria for redneck: if their veranda collapsed it would kill more than four dogs; they think 'harrass' is two words, and so on." Such places weren't much fun to police—but they were full of characters, many of whom make their way into Charlie's entertaining book, Policing the Fringe.

Of the settlers, prospectors, trappers, mountaineers and loggers who came to British Columbia's remote Bute Inlet between the 1890s and the 1940s, few remained long. August Schnarr, however, trapped far up the Homathko and Southgate Rivers and logged the inlet shores from 1910 until the 1960s. An adventurous photographer, August strapped his Kodak camera to his suspenders and captured his mountain climbing, upriver treks and family homestead. His photo collection is a diary of fifty years of an upcoast life.

In 1888, a prosperous industrial family in Calne, Wiltshire, sent one of its younger sons, a lad judged to have no head for business, to Guelph Agricultural College in Ontario to learn to be a farmer. Joseph Colebrook Harris, the author's grandfather, didn't take to Ontario and after visiting a friend on Salt Spring Island, fell in love with BC. Eventually fetching up on the shores of the Slocan Lake, Joe bought 270 acres of hilly land in the Slocan Valley—less than thirty acres of which was really fit for farming—and began clearing the forest to build a ranch.

In 1970, twenty-two-year-old Thom Henley left Michigan and drifted around the northwest coast, getting by on odd jobs and advice from even odder characters. He rode the rails, built a squatter shack on a beach, came to be known as "Huckleberry" and embarked on adventures along the West Coast and abroad that, just like his Mark Twain namesake, situated him in all the right and wrong places at all the right and wrong times.

This 25th edition of Raincoast Chronicles intertwines Alan Haig-Brown's experiences of his formative years as a deckhand on a We Wai Kai seiner with the historical and cultural context of BC's commercial fishing industry. In Raincoast Chronicles 25, Haig-Brown recounts his formative years as a deckhand in the 1960s and early '70s on a fishing boat run by the We Wai Kai family he married into as a teenager.

Delores Churchill, Haida weaver, shares the stories of her life, her culture, and the importance of passing cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. Told with humility, humour, and deep respect, From a Square to a Circle is a testament to the values of her people, a technical guide to her masterful weaving skills, and a gift to the reader at every point along her journey. This book shines light on Delores's weaving teachers, including her strong-minded mother Selina (Ilst'aayaa), whose teachings Delores once resisted as a child.

A captivating account of the lives of Laura, Christine, and Caroline Lindhard—three sisters who left their home in Stege, Denmark, in 1870 due to war, political turmoil, and limited opportunities—and sought out new lives in the Cariboo region of British Columbia. There are few stories of entrepreneurial, business class women in nineteenth century BC. They didn't keep diaries or save letters like the ruling class women often did, and they were usually overlooked in newspaper reports.

A writer and educator reflects on the idealistic, tumultuous, and eye-opening time she spent as a back-to-the-land hippie homesteader in Kootenays in the 1970s. What compelled a nice Jewish girl from the suburbs of New York to spend a decade of her life as a hippie homesteader in the BC wilderness? Galena Bay Odyssey traces Ellen Schwartz's journey from a born-and-raised urbanite who was terrified of the woods to a self-determined logger, cabin-builder, gardener, chicken farmer, apiarist, and woodstove cook—living on a communal farm in the Kootenays.

At age nineteen, Pat Ardley packed up her belongings and left Winnipeg for Vancouver, looking for adventure. Little did she know that she'd spend the next forty years in the wilderness, thirty of which would be spent with a man known as George "Hurricane" Ardley. Pat met George soon after arriving in Vancouver, and not long after that the two of them set out for Addenbroke Island to work as junior lighthouse keepers. The journey up to the little island in the Fitz Hugh Sound, 483 km north of Vancouver, took four rolling days by Coast Guard ship—and a huge leap in lifestyle.

This autobiography by Emily has been called "probably the finest... in a literary sense, ever written in Canada." Completed just before Emily Carr died in 1945, Growing Pains tells the story of Carr’s life, beginning with her girlhood in pioneer Victoria and going on to her training as an artist in San Francisco, England and France. Also here is the frustration she felt at the rejection of her art by Canadians, of the years of despair when she stopped painting.