To Everything there is a purpose…

British Columbia’s floral emblem, the dogwood, is as beautiful as the province it represents.

I’ve already outlined my belated introduction to Canadian history in school and the eureka! moment when an American television program opened my eyes to the fact that British Columbia, Canada–not the American Wild West I’d grown up on, in books and movies–had a frontier history, too.

A history that’s every bit as exciting and fascinating as anything that happened below the 49th parallel.

I’ve never looked back and never tired of reading and writing about our rich and colourful past. I’ve been doing it for half a century now, for untold thousands of readers in magazine articles, newspaper columns and books. Am I running out of material? Hardly!

History isn’t dull and boring

My point is, history isn’t dull and boring as we were conditioned to believe in school. It’s a living, breathing and vibrant theatre of sound, fury, colour, comedy, love, hate, pathos and tenderness–all the ingredients that make for human drama. And what a drama it has been! Most believe that life often imitates art whereas art almost always imitates life. Rarely do even the most vivid imaginations–those, say, of writers of science fiction or thrillers–surpass that which has actually occurred.

That which we so drily define as ‘non-fiction’ is the real deal.

I said that British Columbia’s frontier was every bit as exciting as the wildest of the American Wild West. Shootings, hangings, stagecoach robberies, shipwrecks, train wrecks and war, we’ve had ‘em all and they make for great drama and great reading.

But there’s much more to our history than just the juicy bits. There are the stories of the men and women of many nations, backgrounds and cultures who built this province from scratch in an age when “blood, sweat and tears” was neither a cliche nor a rock band but a harsh fact of life.

When I say men and women of many nations and cultures, I’m including our First Nations people who settled what became British Columbia thousands of years before the arrival of the first Europeans.

Satisfaction guaranteed

I give you my personal guarantee that most of the British Columbia content that you’ll enjoy here will be fresh, insightful and entertaining. Certainly unlike anything you learned in school. And it will be the absolute truth!