The Chilcotin War: A Tale of Death and Reprisal

In 1967, Christine and Mark leave New York State and drive out to British Columbia, looking for a remote place to disappear from civilization. Christine teaches in a one-room school in the Chilcotin, where ranchers and Indians still live the old-time way.

Then they venture up the coast of B.C. in March in an unseaworthy boat, only to get shipwrecked and go ten days without food or warmth. When their son is born, they return to the Chlcotin and stake land. They have a misadventure of getting lost in hostile country, and spend two nights sitting by a fire.

Mark finds the lakeshore too confining, so they travel by horseback and develop two homesteads in remote places. They hunt, fish, cut hay with scythe, store food up in a cache, build cabins, and spend three winters living in a tent pitched on logs.

Christine falls in love with Sage, and walks forty miles to the trapline where he is wintering. Over the next eight years, they homebirth two boys, trap, and build their homestead, including goats and gardens.

Once again she breaks up her relationship, and over the next ten years, gives birth to another son, raises her boys on her own, motivates them to be creative outdoor kids, and asks Jesus to be Lord of her life.

She meets and marries George, and the family moves to 100 Mile. George hits the bottle and goes berserk, so Christine moves back to her cabin in the Chilcotin.

Simon re-enters her life and she moves to Quesnel with him. That relationship falls apart, and she moves back to her cabin at Tatia Lake in 2004. The four boys are grown up, Christine is 59 years old and a grandmother of five, and finally has time to write this unusual autobiography.

It was the summer of ’43 on a Cariboo ranch. He was 12 and had to become a man. If you were a man, you could become a cowboy. Join the author on this nostalgic look back on the joys, frustrations and observations of growing up and discovering where he belongs.

Excerpt from Eldon Lee's foreword: “This book by Alan Fry is probably the best book ever written on ranch life in the Cariboo. His account of everyday events is so perceptive and so true to the mark that all we country types yearn to re-experience its joys, and its miseries."

The Ranch on the Cariboo is a good book and while it may not make a pretty sight to the tractor jockeys, by damn it is authentic; I should know because I was raised on a similar ranch just 18 miles north.”

The latest addition to TouchWood Editions’ Classics West Collection, Klondike Cattle Drive is the colourful tale of a formidable trek undertaken by legendary Cariboo rancher Norman Lee.

In 1898, Lee set out to drive 200 head of cattle from his home in the Chilcotin area of B.C. to the Klondike goldfields—a distance of 1,500 miles. He was gambling both his cattle and his life. This is his story, derived from the journal he kept, his letters and the loyal men who accompanied him. Throughout the daunting weeks of coping with mud, cold and sheer bad luck, Lee kept his sense of humour. When he returned from his Yukon trek, he rewrote the notes from his journal, illustrating his story with his own cartoons and sketches. He completed his manuscript around the turn of the century, but it sat untouched until 1960, when it was published by Howard Mitchell of Mitchell Press, Vancouver.

Getting three trucks and two horses stuck in the mud on "a good road" into BC's wild, remote interior was just the start of Bruce Watt's Chilcotin adventures—and it was his honeymoon, too. The wildlife, landscape and quirky, down-to-earth people captivated Bruce, and despite the hard work and challenging conditions, the Watts put down roots, raising a family, alongside herds of cattle and horses.

A consummate storyteller, Bruce tells it like it was—and perhaps still is for many people calling this place home. These yarns capture the adventure and humour of running a ranch—from roping cougars to close calls on cliff edges and other "typical" accidents. His stories of chasing horses, navigating the backcountry and getting five kids off to school have a charm all their own.

Fifteen years before the 1858 Fraser River gold rush, a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk named Alexander Caulfield Anderson threaded his way through mountain passes and down rapids-filled rivers in search of a safe all-British route through the mountains that separated the HBC fort at Kamloops from Fort Langley on the Pacific coast. Eventually, Anderson discovered four routes, succeeding where Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser before him had failed. Without his explorations, historian Derek Pethick once wrote, British Columbia may never have come into being or become a part of the Dominion of Canada.

For Anderson, the cross-country expeditions he undertook were welcome antidotes to a fur-trade life that wasn’t quite what he’d expected it to be. By the time he joined, in 1831, the fur trade was in fact a tightly controlled business that was very different from the adventurous trade that had inspired him. But though he may not have had his dream life, his spirit of adventure kept him going. As explorer, map-maker, artist and writer, he created a wealth of information to guide those of his time and far beyond, and his work—first in the fur trade, then in the communities in which he lived, and finally as Fisheries Inspector and Indian Reserve Commissioner for British Columbia—was always aimed at improving the future of the people he lived among.