Cariboo Wagon Road: Mule Skinners

Brown Jug Dept: First up is a little-known CBC Radio journalist -- now long dead -- whose tireless work half a century ago created a remarkable archive of British Columbia's creation stories, told by those who either witnessed the events themselves or heard them first-hand from those who did, according to Vancouver Sun. They amassed 2,700 hours of audio tapes describing events which range from the capture of train robber Bill Miner to the life of a remittance man in the arid Interior grasslands. There are mule skinners on the Cariboo Wagon Road, warrior chiefs, riverboat passengers on the Skeena, sealers in the brutal North Pacific fur seal fleet that provided Jack London with the basis of his grim novel The Sea Wolf, the survivor of an avalanche that buried a train a hundred years ago and an account of the etiquette of drinking in saloons with names like The Brown Jug, The Grotto and Garrick's Head in gold rush Victoria and b.C. Day is when we celebrate who we are, and since that's not possible without knowing where we came from, here's tribute to a few of the people who have recently helped us remember the drama and sweep of our provincial history. Imbert Orchard, a postwar immigrant from England, and recording engineer Ian Stephen travelled the remote back roads and river routes of the province between 1959 and 1966 to track down and interview almost a thousand of the province's oldest old-timers about the events they remembered from their childhood and youth. As reported in the news.
@t warrior chiefs, train robber