Island Timber: A Social History of the Comox Logging Company, Vancouver Island - Softcover

Richard Somerset Mackie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550391011 ISBN 13: 9781550391015

Publisher: Sono Nis Press, 1998

Synopsis

Richard Mackie charts the history of the largest logging concern on coastal British Columbia the Comox Logging Company from the turn of the century to the devastating Sayward fire of 1938. With 450 employees, six huge steam-powered logging machines known as skidders, a dozen locomotives, hundreds of miles of track, and sole access to the great Douglas fir forests between Courtenay and Campbell River, Comox Logging boomed and towed billions of board feet of logs from Vancouver Island to Fraser Mills at New Westminster the largest sawmill in the British Empire. But Island Timber is more than the story of the heroic age of coastal logging. This innovative and entertaining book is rich with stories, humour, and pithy sidebars on coastal legends like Big Jack McKenzie,Greasy McQuinn, Promise Bob; Filberg, Highpockets; Hughie Cliffe, Boomstick Thompson, and Sailor Lehtonen. Island Timber is also the first social and community history of a logging company in British Columbia. Mackie interviewed over 100 people directly involved in the early logging industry, and the book is packed with dozens of stories and stunning photographs that have never before appeared in print. Mountain Timber, the long-awaited sequel to Island Timber is now available.

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 medieval and modern European history at St. Andrews University, and studied Canadian history and historical geography at the universities of Victoria and British Columbia. Richard has written two Vancouver Island logging histories (Island Timber and Mountain Timber), both published by Sono Nis Press, and is working on a third in the series (Pacific Timber). Sono Nis Press also published his The Wilderness Profound (1995; reprinted 2002), the biography of George Drabble, an early settler and surveyor on Vancouver Island. Richard is also writing the biography of the environmental activist Melda Buchanan (1924-2004) of Comox. He lectures frequently and teaches creative non-fiction workshops in the Writing and Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University and at writers' festivals throughout the province. He lives in Vancouver, BC.

About this edition

• Publisher: Sono Nis Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1550391011
• ISBN 13: 9781550391015
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248