Raincoast Chronicles First Five: Collector's Edition / Edition 2

by Howard White

Overview

A book that has become a west coast institution - articles, stories, poems, drawings covering every imaginable aspect of northwest history and folklore. The first five issues of Raincoast Chronicles, dating back to 1972.

Winner of the first Eaton's British Columbia Book Award, this is the innovative institution at the heart of BC regional publishing. Northwest history and folklore, unromanticized, in a unique magazine format, blending reminiscences, articles, drawings, photos. . .

"The best source book available on Canada's west coast."
-Books in Canada

"Utterly absorbing. . . until Raincoast Chronicles came along the fabulous west coast rum-runners and ghost logging camps went unrecalled save in the dimming memories of oldtimers."
-Maclean's

"The magazine is a thoroughly professional production in terms of design, layout and graphics, and the quality of the writing is just as impressive."
-Quill and Quire

"Raincoast Chronicles reveals western identity. . . as dense as the undergrowth in the rainforest, and as richly alive."
-CBC Radio

"Still my favourite magazine"
-Lorne Parton

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780920080047
Publisher:	Harbour Publishing Company, Limited
Publication date:	01/01/1977
Series:	Raincoast Chronicles Series
Edition description:	Tenth printing. First paperback edition 1977
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	7.78(w) x 11.26(h) x 0.82(d)

About the Author

Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat (bio), The Men There Were Then (poems), Spilsbury's Coast (bio), The Accidental Airline (bio), Patrick and the Backhoe (childrens'), Writing in the Rain (anthology) and The Sunshine Coast (travel). He was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History in 1989. In 2000, he completed a ten-year project, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has twice been runner-up in the Whisky Slough Putty Man Triathlon.

Read an Excerpt

BUDDHIST COLUMBIA

Had you been standing near the Air Terminal across from the Art Gallery on Georgia Street, Vancouver, on May 2nd, 1972, you may have witnessed a curious sight. Had you asked any of the young, long-haired, baby-toting, smiling, headgarlanded men and women who those Japanese were in the long orange and purple robes, they would have said "They're not Japanese, they're Tibetan, monks, lamas, and a nun, and they're on their way back to Northern India via Samye-Ling monastery in Scotland."

It is a long way in time and space for those Tibetans from preinvasion Tibet where cars, electricity and running water were unknown, to the world of jet travel. Tibetans, Indians, and Japanese have been travelling to modern North America in increasing numbers in the past few years, spreading the word of the Buddha and other spiritual teachers to the open-eared young of the West.

When several groups of businessmen, teachers, artists and writers working for the Tibetan Relief Fund attempted to obtain permission for the displaced Tibetans to establish in the B.C. Rockies, Welfare Minister Gagliardi gave one of his familiar gruff replies. "We've already got too many deadbeats in this province." He would be surprised to know that the spiritual forefathers of these same "deadbeats" had preceded his countryman Chris Columbus to North America by at least ten centuries.

That, at any rate, is the speculation surrounding one of the greatest adventure stories of this coast. Little is known of this story, however, and its validity has yet to be established, but with a few concrete facts and a bit of imagination, we can probably fill it in.

In the early nineteenth century the discovery of some early Chinese texts stimulated a raging controversy among European scholars. The writings, in a work by Ma-Twan-lin, record the travel story of Huei Shan, a Buddhist priest who returned to China from a land far to the east in 499 A.D.

He told of a land named Fusang, and. of two lands before it, named Wan Shan (the country of marked bodies) and Ta Han (Great China). In Fusang, which derived its name from a tree which produced food and clothing for the inhabitants, houses were made of planks, people wrote on treebark, bartered for goods, and had a very clear system of rank, being led by a king treated with much pomp and ceremony. Of Wan Shan, it was said that the inhabitants marked their bodies to indicate tribal rank and lived in houses surrounded by moats filled with "yin shui", a term difficult to translate but suggesting silver-water, now considered to have been oelachen in process of having their oil extracted.

In an exhaustive study, the nineteenth century scholar Edward P. Vining draws strong arguments to place Ta Han in the Aleutian chain, Wan Shan on the North Pacific coast, and Fusang in Mexico. His deductions are simple and mechanical. The distances stated in the Chinese texts, though a point of contention, place the countries in the areas he suggests. The argument for a water crossing through the Bering Strait is highly possible. The greatest water distance on that crossing is under two hundred miles. Even simple seal-skin craft could have weathered it. Well into the last century, Japanese junks were blown off course to appear adrift off the coast of Washington and British Columbia.
Next, Vining compared the texts with known anthropological data, finding, for example, the use of caste tatooing by the Point Barrow esquimaux and body painting by the Haida and Kwakiutl. In Mexico, he found many parallels with Fusang. People did have written script, ate a fruit resembling the pear (from cactus), made cream from deer's milk, did not have iron, though copper in abundance, all of which are stated in the Chinese.

Also he cites many cultural and religious parallels between Asia and Mexico. In Pre-Columbian Central America, many priests lived in monasteries said to have been established by "the Revered Visitor" Quetzalcoatl. Tiamacazque, or more simply Tlama, the name of those priests is suspiciously like the Tibetan Lama. At Uxmal, above the entrance to the House of Priests is a seated cross-legged figure bearing striking resemblances to a meditating Buddha. Representations of various gods correspond to those of China and Japan and there are parallels of dress, bridge construction, calendars, armour and anchors.

Of Fusang, the Chinese texts said "In olden times, they knew nothing of Buddhist religion, but in the reign of Tming, of the Emperor Haio Wu Tu of the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 458), from Ki-Ping five beggar priests went there. They travelled over that kingdom, everywhere making known the laws, canons and images of that faith. Priests of regular ordination were set apart from the natives, and the customs of the country became reformed."

One of the most interesting, if not vitally important studies of history is of such movements of cultural traditions and ideas. British Columbia's position in relation to Asia made it a possible main highway for Hwei Shan and his fellow monks. Buddhists in particular had a tradition of widespread travels, spreading the Dharma (or Way), meeting with other practitioners, and seeking instruction. Buddhism was originally carried by such wandering mendicants from its home in India, to China, Japan, South-east Asia, Tibet and Mongolia. There are records of Buddhist monks reaching as far west as the Black Sea area sometime before the first century A.D.

It is interesting to imagine these early Buddhists making their way past the islands of British Columbia in small boats, stopping here and there to propagate the word of Buddha, having become conversant with the Indians' tongue. Lending credence to these conjectures are a number of finds at various sites in B.C. In 1882, the October 25th issue of the Weekly Colonist in Victoria ran a story on the discovery of a string of bronze coins which were up to 3,000 years old. They had just been found by some miners working a creek bank

near Telegraph Creek. When they were hauled up from their resting place several feet below the surface the wire holding them together disintegrated. The newspaper suggested "whether the Chinese miners who went to the Cassiar seven or eight years ago deposited the collection where it was found for the purpose of establishing a prior claim to the land - may never be known." Some years later, while prospecting in the same area, the Chinese court interpreter from Victoria met Indians who showed him several ancient Buddhist silver ceremonial dishes and a number of brass charms. Though they were reluctant to part with any of it, the Indians did give him one of the charms, which was estimated to be at least 1,500 years old. It had been found, along with the other objects, buried in the roots of a large tree.

Also discovered in the roots of a tree, when the townsite of Powell River was being cleared, was a small statuary Buddha. At the Planetarium Museum in Vancouver, there is a stone ceremonial figure closely resembling a seated Buddha. It was taken from a Fraser midden. In Nanaimo, layout workers found an ancient Japanese sword in a copper-bound wooden scabbard. It was lying eleven feet beneath the earth's surface.

Though there is a possibility that such items made their way to the coast via Russian or Spanish trade routes, the evidence for a Chinese origin are equally strong. Marius Barbeau, long time curator of the National Museum of Canada and noted ethnomusicologist, entertained theories that the Northwest Coast tribal music was strongly flavoured by Buddhist temple chanting, which would certainly not have been introduced as a trade good.

It is doubtful if Huei Shan would care too much about being the "discoverer" of a land which he felt to be "illusory". One place is much the same as any other to a person who rinds his reality centered in the workings of the mind rather than in his history. Doubtless, the North America through which Huei Shan and his monks wandered was less foreign, economically and culturally, than today's North America is to the refugee Buddhists of Tibet. Similarily, Shigetsu Sasaki, later known as Zen Master Sokei-An, would have found himself in a more familiar environment hiking the backwoods country of Puget Sound in the early 1910's while he was living around Lummi Island with Indians for neighbours. Patterns repeat themselves and echo. The mind of man plays infinite variations on countless themes, but here on the Northwest coast, Buddhist wandering monks inject an element of continuity, one more thread in the tapestry of our history.
-Scott Lawrance

LIKE A WAR by Peter Trower

No bombs explode, no khaki regiments tramp to battle in a coastal logging-camp.
Yet blood can spill upon the forest floor and logging can be very like a war.

We sat aboard a crummy, tension -creased.
The fog rose surely from the vanished east.
The hooker said - 'I've felt this way before in Italy. It's something like a war.'

The hill was dark and filmed with icy slush.
We stumbled through the morning-clammy brush.
The sky was grey and vague. The air was raw with winter and the game was like a war.

The savage cables rattled through the mist.
The boxing chokers cursed the men they missed.
We wrestled with their steel ropes and swore and grumbled. It was very like a war.

Then far above us, shifting timber groaned.
The loader's lonely warning-whistle moaned.
Six logs came crashing down the foggy draw.
The guns had sounded. We were in a war.

Our names might well be written on the butts of that blind downfall. Terror gripped our guts.
We shrank behind our stumps beneath the roar.
Like hapless soldiers, we were in a war.

And ever down the wooden missiles rushed,
an avalanche that battered, slammed and crushed and passed us. And you couldn't ask for more if you'd been spared by bullets in a war.

Foolhardy veterans, we resumed our work and snared the timber in the swirling murk.
We'd tasted action now. We knew the score.
They paid us for engaging in a war.

The logging-slash rears weary in the sun.
No truce is called. No victory ever won.
We bear no weapons, yet the fact is sure that what we wage is very like a war.

They Don't Make 'Em Anymore: Captain Herb Clifton
Captain Herbert Clifton, a Tsimshian Indian, was born in the village of Metlakatla, a few miles to the west of the city of Prince Rupert, in the late 1870's or early 1880's. It is very difficult for me to determine, with any accuracy, his exact age as I saw no change in his appearance in the fifteen years we were closely associated.

My first meeting with him was in 1906 when I was going to school at the Inverness Cannery on the Skeena River. He was then Master of the steam tog Florence owned by the J.H. Todd interests of Victoria and used as a tender for Inverness. I have been unable to trace her builder but think it safe to assume that it was Orvig at Port Essington. She very much resembled the design that he was known for.

A couple of years after this the North Coast Towing Company associated with Georgetown Sawmills at Georgetown, which is 17 miles north of Prince Rupert and 9 miles south of Port Simpson, bought the steam twin screw steel tug Topaz in Vancouver and brought her north to take care of the expanding delivery of lumber to the new city of Prince Rupert as well as the canneries along the coast. Captain Clifton was hired to take command.

Captain Clifton's certificate was an unusual one in that it was a certificate of Service rather than a certificate of Competency which was usually granted. Certificates such as this were granted in those days by the Department of Marine and Fisheries and it would seem that they had bent their rules to some extent to accommodate Captain Clifton on the advice of the Anglican Church.

Much of my time served at sea before getting my Master's Certificate was served under Herb and I can say, without doubt, I learned more of handling a tug from him than from any other source. He was also a sterling example of a man.

As a young man growing up in Metlakatla Herb married an Indian girl and, being restless to get away from the village where there was no employment except in the fishing season, he and his bride went to Hazelton and signed on with the Hudson's Bay Company to pack on the Babine Trail.

They were a husky pair. Herb stood well over six feet, while his wife was a well built woman taller and huskier than the average of her people. He told me that he carried on his back as a regular load, three fifty-pound sacks of flour while his wife carried a regular load of seventyfive pounds. This, for a distance of nearly eighty miles.

When the packing season closed the couple returned to Metlakatla where they built one of the nicest homes in the village overlooking the sea. Later Herb joined Bishop Ridley's mission boat and finally got command. In addition to his duties in connection with navigation he was also called upon, to play the organ. Herb was the cleverest musician I have ever had the good fortune to meet. His favorite instrument was the violin but he could get music out of any instrument placed in his hands. I remember his first experience with a saxophone. A "wise guy", thinking that at last he had come up with an instrument that would stump Herb, handed him the sax and sat back with a smug grin, waiting for Herb to fall flat on his face. But after doodling around a bit he came out with some of the hits of the day.

Herb was always a welcome guest at our home in Georgetown and often when he was held over waiting for a tide he would stroll into our living room and sit down at the piano and play enchanting music for hours on end. These visits were greatly enjoyed by my mother because although she played she also enjoyed hearing someone else. There was not much opportunity for Mother to enjoy someone else's playing as we lived in a very isolated area.

When the first pipe organ in northern British Columbia was installed in the Anglican Church in Metlakatla, Herb took over as organist. On one memorable occasion when I had called him to Vancouver to take one of the tugs north after refit I learned that one of the world's renowned violinists was conducting a show at the old arena building. I bought two tickets for the recital and took Herb to his first such entertainment. When I glanced over to see his reaction to the violin solo I was not surprised to see the tears rolling down his cheeks. He was that kind of person.

One of Herb's more astonishing accomplishments was the ability to write "calling cards" freehand in old English script. His ability got to be well known with the result that he did the cards for a good many of the fashionable ladies of the time.

Although his hands were large and he was as strong as a bull he could, after making a few samples, go on and write fifty or a hundred cards which could not be distinguished from the original. His log books were also written in this beautiful manner and were a sight to behold. How I regret not keeping one!

Herb was not without wit. One time he was assisting a surveyor who was mapping several islands in Venn Passage not far from the boundaries of Metlakatla. He and the surveyor had taken time out to eat their lunch and before they resumed work the surveyor heard a call from nature and went into the bush. Shortly after, he asked Herb for the Indian name of the island as he was anxious to preserve the native names as much as possible. Herb answered "Clianchi", which sounded alright and was carefully noted on the map. It turned out that the word meant "The island that was s--- on." The name still appears on charts of the area.

As I moved away from the north in 1919 and did not return until the Second World War days, after Herb had gone to the happy hunting ground, I was robbed of the opportunity to continue my association with this fine friend and superb gentleman.
-Donale Peck

BOOK REVIEW: MIST ON THE RIVER

To start with, this is a biased review, so much so that I suppose you could call it an adver. tisement. Being a latterday academic drop-out, I don't have to get into the vagaries and niceties of whether or not Hubert Evans is a major or minor novelist, a proponent of regionalism in Canadian literature or any other time/space/or culture slot I could fit him into.

Let's flash first to a scene along the beach at Roberts Creek, where the salmon are crowding forward in their autumnal trip home. The stream in front of Hubert's had been dammed by some high seas the winter before and Mister and Missus Salmon were having a hard time making it past the jam. Hubert, though pressing on in years, when he found the creek was blocked, hauled out his pick and shovel and cleared the way, a matter of course.

Hubert's also written a number of novels, as well as trucked, sailed, hiked, rowed, and swam over most of the coast and a good chunk of the interior. One of his books sprang from some years teaching with his wife up in the Hazelton area. The Gitkasan people there became their close friends - the warmth and understanding that flowed between them becomes evident in the book Mist on the River.

Just reissued as a number in McClelland and Stewart's New Canadian Library, the novel brings a neglected but central problem of B.C.'s history to light. Life in a country will change with technology and communication but some of the old ways and patterns are inevitably im. printed onto the new. When two races meet, or collide, the waves of impact will travel wide and echo far.

The young native protagonist is caught in a unique web, spun by the racial intrigue, but whose patterns have been felt in all our lives. The family and tribe with the old, timehonoured ways, the dreams of the ancestors on the starless nights, pull in one direction. In the other pull the voices of the New, the Unknown, the promise of better things ahead, Progress, which for the native of this coast from roughly 1800 on has worn a white mask.

The voice of the old is Paul, hereditary chief, who is the craftsman, canoe-maker for his people and keeper of those ways, and for the whites at the cannery, the boss in the boat shed. He tests the allegiances of young Matt who must struggle with the self-contempt arising from being a member of such a "backward" race. The people from upriver go to the coast seasonly each summer, to work in the canneries around Prince Rupert and Rivers In let. The novel contains some fine descriptions of that migrant existence at both ends, coastal and headwater, from the tar paper shacks on pilings where the fresh and salt water mingle, to the fine stands of maple in the sun-lit valleys.

Where once the economic life of the people was tied to barter with the coastal tribes and the great run of oolachan, now it is hinged not to a natural pulse but to the economics of the market. No longer is the take-home pay measured in fish oil for food and fuel but rather in dollars to be spent in company stores and white supermarkets.

But there are the good whites too. The school teachers and the truly humanitarian doctors whose modern ways, though distrusted, save lives. Moral questions are held in abeyance, in half-light, riddled with the contradictions that reality entails. The company, the doctors, the teachers, the old natives and the young all striving as best they can to make sense out of the whirling currents of the mingling of the racial streams, all make the mistakes compounded by the nature of their desires.

A review of this book fits into this magazine in a very crucial way, pinpointing as it does one of the underlying dynamics of any story of the coast. This coast, in which we face these ghosts.
-Scott Lawrance

Table of Contents

FOREWORD by Bob Hunter

Truck drivers, fishermen, loggers, miners, whalers, Indians, Norwegians, Scots, mechanics, gamblers, boozers ... the flesh and blood people of a strange wet land that was at the end of the world, the mists of which parted to reveal mountains and woods and totem poles. Fogs that could swallow whole civilizations.

Raincoast Chronicles is essentially a no-bullshit book that opens up the past of those of us living along the West Coast of Canada in a way that no other magazine has ever succeeded. No glossy tourist nonsense. No political monkeying with the facts of life. Sweat and grease and silver and salmon. Lovely yellowing old -photographs. Steam engines. Diesels. Oars. Easthopes. Rigging. Donkeys.

Without doubt the Chronicles is the most engaging and funky published matter to appear in this corner of the planet. Almost from the first edition, it became a cultural event in its own right, the sort of thing you realized, the moment you saw it, that you had been waiting for it all along. History that wasn't as dry as the tobacco in an old man's pipe. Good solid writing without pretense and without being obviously designed to score brownie points in somebody's thesis.

What Raincoast Chronicles has done is fill a very special need. The age of monocultures has passed away and a new time of acute sensitivity to one's immediate terrain is taking shape. Simply, the Chronicles tell about the real British Columbia of Haida potatoes, petroglyphs, rum running, leper colonies, towboating, you name it. Whatever the past was, here it is again, gathered like a rich mellowing harvest.

At one level, the "book," as everybody involved in its production calls it, is essentially a historical journal. One of its articles - still my favourite - goes back to 499 A.D., telling how a Buddhist priest from China probably travelled along this whole coast. The book includes such staid-sounding down to earth titles as Pioneer Steamers of Vancouver Harbour, Lighthouses of the B.C. Coast, and articles of Tsimsyan myths, cargo hulks and page after page of old photos the likes of which you haven't seen since the last time you crawled through Grandpa's attick, grubbing through mildewed boxes, showing great old boats and trains and trucks, all the rockbottom stuff of which our history is truly fashioned. A mechanic would get off on it as much as a mystic.

That's one level. At another, the Chronicles are a vehicle for the expression of some distinctly West Coast sensibilities, featuring poems by Peter Trower of Gibsons, for instance, who is a people's poet if there ever was one.

Dragging our past for an image that will let us like ourselves a little better - Editor Howie White says that's what the Chronicles is about. What emerges clearly from the pages of the book is an identity which is deeper and truer to these tremendous landscapes than anything else yet published. If "sense of place" is important, then the Chronicles is important. That's all there is to it.

For me the Chronicles has been a joy to discover. It is already part of the landscape. Earth coloured. You can almost smell it. It appears, almost predictably at this stage, on the counters of funky little shops and book racks almost anywhere you go in B.C. The only trouble has been, once you get a copy of one edition you immediately want the rest, and back copies are rare as nuggets - and often as costly. Reissuing the whole works under one strong cover was a break for all of us. Glad it happened.

-Bob Hunter, Vancouver, 1975

INTRODUCTION by Howard White

Much as I'd like to tell a story of long-suppressed historical forces on the west coast drawing inexorably together in the formation of Raincoast Chronicles, the truth is the thing was conceived on a rainy Pender Harbour afternoon in September of 1972 as I sat at the kitchen table casting about for a likely fantasy to plug into that year's LIP grant form. But in those days when the epochal romanticism of the sixties was still strong upon us, enlivening everyone's outlook from the country's rose-toting prime minister down to the lowliest college dropout, filling out a grant form tended to be a lot like forming a wish for the thing you'd most like to happen, so my fantasy took the form of some quite real personal yearnings.

Essentially what I longed to do at that point was to return to my childhood. I had grown up following my logger father from one hard-luck gyppo show to another, not learning much in the way of reading and riting but forming my imagination permanently in the shape of the lichen-bright bluffs, wicked tiderips and miragical horizon -haunting islands of the upper coast.

Later, so that the kids might have school, we settled in Pender Harbour. Pender Harbour did not begin to get seriously involved with the twentieth century until the mid-fifties, when the road from Vancouver came in with the first automobiles, followed shortly by electricity and telephones. Television has still not fully arrived. Shopping and visiting was done exclusively by "kicker" - open clinker-built skiffs with 3-horse Briggses - and the most prominent families were second and third generation fishermen who could count on one hand the number of times they'd been "out" to Vancouver but couldn't remember all the times they'd shot the Yacultas or bounced around Cape Caution. In the sixties I still had high school friends who'd never been "to town", though many spent their summers in fish camps on the Queen Charlotte Islands.

The point is it was a very close and independent community, with the peculiar home-made culture that implies, and it extended northward, through all the identical steamer stops, fishing villages and Indian reserves up coast. Loggers hopped camps from one end of the coast to the other, fishermen yo-yoed between fishing grounds from the Fraser to the Skeena, and the daily passage of the steamers kept Pender Harbour and the other communities of the coast in touch like families along a common road. Men like Charlie Klein, who could lift a full gas drum, and women like Sidney Sauderman, an iron-fisted exmadam who ran her own camp around Minstrel Island were legends that fired childish imagination the length of the coast.

One speaks of the things when one means the spirit, but how is the spirit to be pictured otherwise. There can be no nostalgia for things, only the use of things and the spirit of that use. Grown up and living in cities, it seemed to me there had been great spirit inhabiting that world known in childhood, as any matured culture comes to possess an elan, a genius, a soul that is like all souls immortal and worthy of awe. It was tied to the place, the B.C. coast, and the uses, fishing, logging, farming, hiding, people had put it to, but it was more than that, the west coast experience. It was the people who'd been there, their reason, and what the place had done to them. The more I tried to talk about it, especially around city academic circles where the B.C. coast was considered to have about as much historical character as a new concrete apartment block, the more I began to feel like some obsessive proponent of the Sasquatch. The idea of a rural west coast culture in the city context seemed a rich fantasy indeed. But I couldn't give the idea up without giving up on what I discovered I unalterably was, as soon as I started trying to be a city boy - an upcoast boy - so I moved back to Pender Harbour and started a community newspaper, thinking to become involved as deeply in that left-behind reality as I could. Of course it was too late. The fishermen were trading their waterfront property to marina builders and moving into bungalows nearer the new shopping centre. The kickers had been entirely replaced by cars, although it is only half a mile across the harbour by kicker and 15 miles around the shore by car. No one wore gumboots to weddings anymore and the social diseases of the suburbs were increasingly evident. This shook my faith in the existence of indigenous west coast folk culture more than anything had, and just as I began to realize any contact with that vanished world of childhood would of necessity be a historical study, the LIP grant form came into my hands.
The magazine I envisioned would not merely detail the stages of local settlement, counting arrivals and births and things: it would drive through that easy chronicle for the flavour, the spirit of the B.C. coast story. Its founding assumption would be that there was a contiguous coastwise community which could be described in general terms.

To my breathless astonishment the grant came through and the onus was suddenly on me to make the fantasy real. I realized with panic I had no idea how to do it. I had some notion of things I would like to deal with, Pender Harbour as a typical steamer stop and the Nootka whaling story, which had originally reversed my notion of Northwest coast Indians as a society of shiftless clam suckers, but I had no notion of how to go about the presentation. Apart from a handful of dry community histories and a few professional books by Alan Morley and Roderick Haig-Brown, very little serious writing had been done on what the west coast was and there was no satisfactory established modes to work from. The only two books I felt I could really look to were Woodsmen of the West by Martin Grainger and Hubert Evans' Mist on the River.

The project was really saved by other people. Mary Lee, who'd been the managing editor of the newspaper, soon assumed the task of administering the grant and doing all the work, a function she has filled with increasing appetite to this day. Lester Peterson, the community historian of Gibsons and probably the greatest source of unwritten social history of the coast to be met anywhere, gave the project his blessing and helped with ideas and sources.

I went to see the most respected of my old university profs, Warren Tallman, and he put me in touch with Scott Lawrance, a Roberts Creek writer who came up with the name Raincoast Chronicles and was the magazine's strongest contributor up to the fifth issue. Our biggest break apart from actually getting the grant was picking up a hitchhiker near Sechelt who turned out to be Cal Fingers Bailey, a mad genius photographer who had just finished three years in the New York design studio of Martin Petersen - learning how to lay out magazines. It was he who bundled our disorderly scribblings into a bag and came back with the handsome, almost professional-looking product that was our first issue. Without Cal, Raincoast Chronicles would have been a one-issue wonder.

As it was, we hit the jackpot. The 3,000 printing sold out in three months and we got 500 letters, many of them from old time coast residents who said things like, "Our family has been here 102 years and this is the first time we've seen anything about what it's really like in a book . . ."

Lorne Parton wrote a review in the Province declaring Raincoast Chronicles was the best local publication he'd ever seen. (We still love Lorne Parton. In his ever ready, off the top of the head way, he has boosted more local books than all the rest of the Vancouver media put together.) Manuscripts poured in as from a ruptured dam. One woman sent nine fulllength article manuscripts stating she had been looking 22 years for a place to publish regional coast materials. (Unfortunately all of them had to be returned.)

Around this time our greatest fan also appeared: Joe Simson. Joe's father was the manager of the Hastings Mill Store and original pre-emptor of Thormanby Island, which Joe still holds. He is the sort of history fan who phones up and says, "You're spending too much time behind that desk. Why don't you take my boat for a few weeks and go see some of this stuff you're writing about." Joe does more than simply help by setting up things like the Easthope interview in our fifth issue: he restores one's faith that there are still some real good people around.

It was also just after the first issue that a mutual friend, Curt Lang, put us in touch with the logger-poet Peter Trower, who had grown up just forty miles away in Gibsons and was in the process of working out his own regional magazine when the Chronicles appeared. With myself and Mary Lee he has since become part of the permanent core group who stick around holding things together between grants.

From the first issue onward we have also been very flattered by the interest and unstinting help of Leonard McCann of the Vancouver Martime Museum, Ron D'Altroy of the Vancouver Public Library and Willard Ireland, late of the Provincial Archives. In these times such personal attention from high level administrators is a pleasant discovery indeed.

We now have enough material in sight to carry us to our 100th issue. The weak point remains financing: circulation has levelled off around 5,000 which leaves us still dependent on government largesse for the money we pay to our writers and artists - at, in spite of what MacLean's magazine says, the best rates in the province. We have taken some criticism over this grant dependence, but the way we figure it, the consumer subsidizes you whether by advertising (which is ultimately billed to him) or by grants (which are ultimately billed to him). The only difference between the two systems is that advertising makes a mess. In any case we have now been accepted as authentic culture by both the Canada Council and the B.C. Cultural Fund - to whom our thanks are sincerely given - and our future seems secure. We have two general subject issues in layout, and a third, dealing with aspects of Vancouver history everyone else has been too polite to mention, half written.

-Howard White