written by Cole Harris, Norbert Duerichen, Mick Wilson & Abra Brynne Although not obviously farming country, the Slocan has attracted farmers for well over a century. When farming began in the valley, local markets were declining, and distant ones almost impossible to reach. Nor could the valley’s small farms compete with far [...]
Written by Nathan Goodale, Alissa Nauman, Cole Harris & Lori Barkley Although unknown until recently by the settler society that displaced them in the 19th century, the Sinixt have lived in the Slocan Valley for the last 3,000 years, perhaps much longer. Drawing on recent archaeological investigations and up-to-date historical knowledge, the Slocan History [...]
by Henning von Krogh & Cole Harris This is an account of a West Kootenay village, New Denver, during its first decade. The almost instant creation of a mining rush, it began in a speculative frenzy, then grew much more slowly than its promoters has hoped. Yet, unlike most of the townsites created [...]
Joseph Colebrook Harris with an Introduction by Cole Harris Sometime in 1927, my grandfather, J.C. (Joseph Colebrook) Harris, began to think of writing a history of the Slocan mining camp, and contacted some of the prospectors and miners who had been in the Slocan in 1891, the year the Slocan rush began. Of [...]
by Cole Harris Foreword by Sean Arthur Joyce Speculative energy drove a mining rush and also founded newspapers. Including Kaslo in the east and Nakusp in the west, seventeen newspapers were published in and around the Slocan just during the decade after the first silver finds in September, 1891. Just over a year [...]
Japanese Canadians on Harris Ranch by Cole Harris I began the following account for my family, intending that it, among other short writings, would give them a fuller sense of what my grandfather rather grandly called the Bosun (or Harris) Ranch, a mountainside farm above the highway between New Denver and Silverton, B.C. [...]
Cole Harris Introduction This article was published in the Canadian Historical Review in 1985, and republished in 1997. However, as it has not been generally available in the Slocan, I include it in this series of local booklets with the hope that readers will not find its academic style too heavy going. It [...]
Reminiscences of Joseph Colebrook Harris with an Introduction by Cole Harris Beginnings at the Bosun Ranch booklet cover Early in 1944 my mother, who had a morning show on CBC Radio, asked my grandfather, Joseph Colebrook Harris, to write about his early years in British Columbia. She hoped that his accounts [...]
Joseph Colebrook Harris preface by Cole Harris This account was written in 1944 by Joseph Colebrook Harris, a farmer of English background who pioneered in the Cowichan Valley on Vancouver Island in the early 1890s, visited the Slocan in 1896, and settled there in 1897. Raised in an upper-middle-class industrial family in Calne, [...]
