Mountain Timber; The Comox Logging Company in the Vancouver Island Mountains - Softcover

Richard Somerset Mackie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550391712 ISBN 13: 9781550391718

Publisher: Sono Nis Press, 2009

Synopsis

Mountain Timber: The Comox Logging Company in the Vancouver Island Mountains.

Mountain Timber is the long-awaited sequel to Mackie s best-selling Island Timber: A Social History of the Comox Logging Company, Vancouver Island, which has gone through four printings and sold nearly 7,000 copies.

Whereas Island Timber was set on the low-lying coastal flats along to the Strait of Georgia, Mountain Timber is concerned with Comox Logging s later and higher fortunes in the vancouver Island Mountains. As the company depleted its supply of coastal Douglas fir in the 1920s, it moved inland to log the Bevan sidehill, the shores of Comox Lake, and the valleys and tributaries of the Puntledge and Cruickshank rivers. But wherever it moved, the company had the same purpose: to find and cut mature Douglas fir forests. The action in Mountain Timber takes place between 1925 and 1945 the two critical decades when most of the available lowland timber was cut. This absorbing book also revisits Comox Logging s railway logging shows out of Headquarters and Camps 1, 2 and 3, around Oyster River and Black Creek.

On one level the story of loggers and their machines cold deckers, skidders, geared locies and many more Mountain Timber is also a dense and engrossing social history of central Island in the mid-20th century. The book s nine chapters alternate revealingly between logging and social history: between working landscapes and the communities they supported. A stunning visual feast, this richly illustrated history contains 340 photographs of the men, women, families and communities supported by logging. Mackie has gathered most of the photos, many of them hitherto unpublished, from 60 private collections. Mountain Timber also contains 18 maps and diagrams of logging camps, methods and aspects of railway and highlead logging technology.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Edmonton in 1957, Richard Mackie moved to Vancouver Island when he was 11 and soon started digging up Victorian-era bottle dumps on the margins of mud flats on Tsehum Harbour, North Saanich, starting beneath his parents home and moving out from there. He probed the muddy shorelines with a metal rod and learned to distinguish between buried glass and rock. Soon he had a bedroom full of old bottles and pottery pieces. This was worthwhile salvage work because the tidal estuaries tended to get filled in for parking lots or dredged for marinas.

Richard has been uncovering, salvaging, and interpreting the past ever since. He worked as an archaeologist for a number of universities and museums, studied mediaeval and modern European history at St. Andrews University, and studied Canadian history and historical geography at the universities of Victoria and British Columbia.

Richard is now writing a series of three Vancouver Island logging histories, published by Sono Nis Press, and the biography of the environmental activist Melda Buchanan (1924-2004) of Comox. He lectures frequently, teaches creative non-fiction workshops in the Writing and Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University, and is an adjunct associate professor in the Geography Department at the University of Victoria. He lives at Cowichan Bay with his wife and three children.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sono Nis Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1550391712
• ISBN 13: 9781550391718
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320