Books
Treasure Lost & Found In British Columbia
From the author's extensive archives and a lifetime of researching old records, conducting interviews and making field trips, 29 exciting stories about lost—and found—treasures in British Columbia. A gold mine for armchair and active treasure hunters alike! Chapter highlights include:
- Treasures found in the oddest places
- Treasure in the Boston Bean jar
- 'Lukey's lost ledge' of silver
- Green gold, white gold
- Forbidden Plateau's lost lard pail of gold nuggets
Price: $25.00
Mystery, Murder & Mayhem
Mystery, Murder & Mayhem really is “a walk on the wild side of British Columbia’s colourful past”.
Hollywood characters pale alongside some of the characters who have trod the B.C. stage over the past 180 years. Even fiction writers would be challenged to surpass some of the outrageous events that have really happened.
12 amazing stories of British Columbia history they had never taught in schools.
Even readers who “don’t like history” will be intrigued by Mystery, Murder Mayhem. Guaranteed!
Price: $20.00
Capital Crime
Bigger than all of California, half of Nevada and a slice of Oregon combined, Canada’s westernmost province British Columbia was largely uninhabited and unexplored, a century and more ago.
But thanks to an effective justice system and a good working relationship with bordering Washington, most murder cases were solved and resolved with a trial, conviction and punishment. There were exceptions, of course, and Capital Crime covers both solved and unsolved crimes—all of them fascinating.
152 pages.Price: $23.00
OUTLAWS of the CANADIAN WEST
Canadian outlaws?
The American interviewer was dumbfounded.
The very idea that Canada had its own Wild West and its own outlaws and lawmen astounded him.
But the record speaks for itself.
We were every bit as rootin', tootin' as anything you've ever read about in American magazines and
books or seen in the movies. The proof is here in Outlaws of the Canadian West.
Price: $23.95
Capital Characters
This treasury of Victorian eccentrics celebrates the pioneers who marched to their own drummers–straight into oblivion, for they’ve been all but ignored by ‘straight’ historians. You’ll meet
- The ‘worst’ character ever to walk earlyday Victoria streets
- The man who claimed to own all of Esquimalt
- The woman who sang with a broken heart
- The man who was literally haunted by his past
- Madame Bendixen, ‘Pilly Parlow,’ ‘Whisky John,’ ‘Billy the Bug’ and a host of other colourful and outrageous pioneers
Price: $18.00
Tales the Tombstones Tell
Tag along with well-known historian T.W. Paterson as he guides you to some of the outstanding graves and monuments in the Cowichan Valley’s 13 public cemeteries.
Chapter highlights include:
- Vice-Admiral Edmund Rollo Mainguy was ‘father of the modern Royal Canadian Navy’
- The Chemainus sawmill shut down and stores closed to mark Fred Veitch’s funeral
- Gentle-born Gertrude Halhed dutifully followed her husband to the middle of nowhere
- ‘Lord’ William Probyn Thompson stepped into path of an oncoming locomotive
- Mildred Maude Lilley–was she a murder victim or suicide?
- Artist Edward John Hughes is now as famous as Emily Carr
- Nigel Kingscote’s headstone is one of the most outstanding in all of British Columbia
- War casualties Allan and Geoffrey Hook are buried overseas but their headstones are in St. John’s, Cobble Hill cemetery
Price: $25.00
Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 6
For 23 years, the Cowichan Chronicles appeared weekly and bi-weekly in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. Almost 2000 columns, 1.6 million words. And now online as www.britishcolumbia.chronicles.ca.
Historically speaking, the Chronicles have hardly scratched the surface. Hence Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 6 which is more ambitious than its predecessors with longer, more in-depth stories about Cowichan Valley events and the people who made them happen.
Price: $22.00
A Place Called Cowichan
A name is a name is a name, Shakespeare tells us. But what if there’s a story behind that name? Often there’s much more than meets the eye behind the christening of the Cowichan Valley’s mountains, streams and other geographical features.
Chapter highlights include:
- History’s injustice to the Hul’qumi’num (Cowichan), the first mapmakers
- Shawnigan’s Camp Pringle honours the father and son, George C. and George Robert Pringle
- Few know that the ‘last spike’ of Canada’s trans-continental railway was driven at Shawnigan’s Cliffside
- Fairbridge Drive recalls the once world-famous Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm
- Named for a WW1 battlefield, Hill 60 was the site of Canada’s only manganese mine
- And hundreds more historically significant place names of the Cowichan Valley
Price: $20.00
Cowichan Goes to War 1914-1918
It's hard for us to visualize, a century later, a state of world war. But that's the way it was, as of August 4, 1914. Over the next four years the Cowichan Valley would do its part: the highest enlistment per capita for all of Canada. This is the story of all those names on the Duncan cenotaph.
220 pages.
Price: $25.00
Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 6
For 23 years, the Cowichan Chronicles appeared weekly and bi-weekly in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. Almost 2000 columns, 1.6 million words. And now online as www.britishcolumbia.chronicles.ca.
Historically speaking, the Chronicles have hardly scratched the surface. Hence Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 6 which is more ambitious than its predecessors with longer, more in-depth stories about Cowichan Valley events and the people who made them happen.
Price: $22.00
Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 5
In September 2017 the Cowichan Chronicles entered their 20th year of publication in the Cowichan Valley Citizen. That's almost 2000 columns, almost 2 million words. But, for all those stories there's no end in sight of rich material. They just keep on coming! 160 pages.
Price: $20.00
Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 4
‘Cowichan Country gave them the sanctuary and the assurance that they could live as they saw fit, undisturbed by required protocol and convention...’
Chapter highlights include:
- Treachery among the timber cruisers
- Ho! for the Koksilah silver mines
- ‘California off, we’re settling on Vancouver Island’
- Janet Goodall left ‘lungs’ for future generations
- Cowichan Lake’s legendary Jesse James
- Natasha had the strength of a man and the courage of a legion
- When commandos struck at dawn
‘No Mercy for Camp Six Sweetheart.’ Ironically, Mabel Jones’s death by suicide benefited hundreds of schoolteachers, mostly young women, throughout the province.
160 pages.
Price: $20.00
Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 3
From the Old World they came to Cowichan, the rich and poor, the scions of aristocracy and labourers, the erudite and the dropout, the regimental and the individualist, the poet, the ploughman and the artist...
Chapter highlights include:
- ‘Go to Cowichan. Stop.’
- A Hallowe’en kind of Christmas
- Marriner diaries are portals to the past
- ‘Fighting’ Joe Martin was no match for Cowichan’s Charles Dickie
- Mad dogs and Englishmen in the noonday sun
- Dying miner’s friends were too late to save him
‘The Murder of Joe Dougan’. The full, previously unpublished story of the shooting of this Cobble Hill pioneer by his ‘loving’ cousin and lover Mary Ann Routledge.
160 pages.
Price: $20.00
Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 2
"My husband hates history but he reads you every week."–the wife of a faithful reader of the Cowichan Chronicles in the Cowichan Valley Citizen.
Chapter highlights include:
- Toma Antoine, history’s ‘invisible man’
- Cowichan Lake children fought cougar to standstill
- Ashdown Green was no idle braggart
- Margaret Sutton forsook fame and fortune for family
- Cowichan cleric split Victoria congregation
- ‘When I get out, I’ll eat you up’
- Gold, gold, gold....
‘We’re looking for the hangman, my dear’. The amazing story of the ‘massacre’ of Jim Miller and Bill Dring at Crofton.
160 pages.
Price: $20.00
Cowichan Chronicles, Vol. 1
Twice weekly, for 18 years, Cowichan Chronicles has entertained readers of the Cowichan Valley Citizen with the dramatic, the humourous, the tragic, the heroic–and sometimes the not-so-heroic–events of Cowichan’s past and the men and women who made them happen.
Chapter highlights include:
- Gordon River’s ‘big-footed devil’
- The story behind Mill Bay’s Tozier Rock
- Swallowfield was a perfect Eden
- Lost silver mine of the Koksilah
- Capt. Barkley died trying to save grandmother’s diary
Price: $20.00
Rails to Trails Historical Map and Guide to
All aboard! with the hikers’, cyclists’ and equestrians’ companion to Historic Hikes ‘n’ Sites with map and directions for exploring historic spots along the Cowichan Valley and Trans Canada Trails and the Kinsol Trestle.
With map and colour photos.
Price: $10.00
Historic Hikes, Sites & Sights of the Cowichan Valley
The hikers’ and cyclists’ guide to the Cowichan Valley’s historic logging railways, the Kinsol Trestle and the Trans Canada Trail: ‘An indispensable guide for those who wish to discover Vancouver Island’s scenic and colourful past.’–Cowichan Valley Citizen.
Three books in one with easy-to-follow directions and over 60 colour and historic photos.
The guide to 122 km (75 miles) of logging and mining history; the story of the building, abandonment and reconstruction of the world-famous Kinsol Trestle, highest and longest wooden structure of its kind in North America, perhaps the world; and the saga of the building of the E&N Railway and the Canadian Northern Pacific–meant to be Canada’s ‘other’ trans-continental railway.
138 pages. Full colour.
Price: $25.00
Riches to Ruin
The boom to bust saga of Vancouver Island’s greatest copper mine, 1895-1908.
Chapter highlights include:
- Building the Lenora, Mount Sicker Railway and the Tyee tramway
- Crofton, the ‘new smelter centre of the Pacific’
- Mount Brenton’s mine manager was a sentimental softie
- On the mountain and in the bowels of the earth
- The missing teamster who was suspected to be Victoria’s Jack the Ripper
- A freak of explosives
- ‘Oh, come quick, Mr. Beech is trying to kill my mother!’
Price: $25.00