Carving the Western Path: Routes to Remember

The sparsely populated southern Interior of British Columbia was rich in resources and ripe for settlement in the late 1800s. The agricultural lands of the Okanagan and Nicola valleys, and the precious metals and coal of the Kootenays, lay largely unused or undiscovered: the challenges was getting to these places.

Transportation was the key that opened the way to these riches, providing hope for the future for stout-hearted settlerspeople for whom hope was the greatest of treasures. In this final book of his bestselling Carving the Western Path series, former Deputy Minister of Highways and Public Works R.G. Harvey tells the stories of the road through the Okanagan Valley, the highway alongside Kootenay Lake and the Crows Nest Railway. He also looks at how the challenge of moving people and cars over water was met, from river ferries running on human power or the force of currents to the 1,000-hp ferries on interior lakes.

Harvey's stories about BC's fascinating transportation history speaks of technical matters, but also of human resolution and determination in meeting nature's challenges.

R.G. (Bob) Harvey was born in Scotland in 1922, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a B.Sc. in civil engineering in 1943. Bob immediately joined the British army and served in the UK, India and Burma before being placed on reserve as a captain (EME) in 1947. He immigrated to Canada in 1948 and joined the BC Department of Public Works that same year, right in the middle of the worst spring flooding in 54 years. In 1950 Bob married Eva Huscroft. He worked in Nelson and Prince George before becoming Deputy Minister of Highways and Public Works in 1976, retiring in 1983. Bob has written five books on the transportation history of British Columbia.