Farming in the Slocan: Past & Present
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 larger, more mechanized farms elsewhere. But times have changed. The local market has expanded. The ecological and social effects of industrial monocultures are widely criticized, the reliability of globalized marketing doubted. This booklet [...]
Sinixt in the Slocan: The Last 3,000 Years
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 Series has released its eighth booklet, Sinixt in the Slocan: The Last 3,000 Years. The booklet is divided into three sections written by four authors. In Part 1, archaeologists Nathan Goodale and Alissa [...]
Early New Denver
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 in the Slocan in the early 1890s, it survived the mining rush, and remains to this day a small, fascinating place. Over the years, it has been situated, from a vantage point of [...]
Martin Fry, Frontiersman
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 the eleven men who overwintered at the mouth of Carpenter Creek (now New Denver) that winter, six were still alive in 1927, and four lived in the Slocan. My grandfather interviewed them. “How [...]
Newspapers and the Slocan
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 later, there was a newspaper, The Kaslo-Slocan Examiner, in Kaslo, and before the end of 1893 other newspapers in Nakusp and Three Forks. To establish a townsite and erect a few buildings was, [...]
Mist and Green Leaves
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. In the now almost 120 years since he acquired land and established this unlikely farm, the few years when Japanese Canadians were interned there have been one of its most distinctive moments. I [...]
Industry and the Good Life Around Idaho Peak
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 contains a good deal of information and a framework for thinking about the early Slocan that are not readily available elsewhere. The Sinixt in the Slocan, 1750–1900 Here, I sketch what seems to [...]
Beginnings of the Bosun Ranch
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 would serve as the basis for school broadcasts and take his mind off his wife’s recent death. He responded over the next several months with more than a hundred typed, single-spaced, foolscap pages. [...]
Boom Days in the Slocan
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, Wiltshire, he bought land between Silverton and New Denver and, intending to supply the miners with fresh fruit and vegetables, set about creating a farm. With his team of Clydesdales, he also hauled [...]