Strange New Country: The Fraser River Salmon Strikes of 1900-1901 and the Birth of Modern British Columbia
Geoff Meggs | Harbour Publishing
$22.95, 224 pages
Fishing for salmon has always been difficult, demanding work, and this book records an important struggle to determine who in B.C. would benefit from that work.
Ever since salmon and human populations colonized the coast of what is now B.C. as the last ice age ended, the big migratory fish has been an important source of human nourishment, nourishment gained by tough and sometimes lethal work.
For the First Nations of this coast, the big fish were not only a source of food. They were woven into religion, art and culture on a terrain that was in part shaped by the volumes of marine proteins they brought upstream each year.
But by the turn of the 20th century, a new relation to salmon was being forged as settlers from Europe and Asia (particularly Japan) confronted the descendants of the First Nations that had lived in balance with the salmon runs for so long, engaging in complicated, multi-cornered conflict (among themselves and against a domineering master class of “canners,” businessmen buccaneers led by the domineering Henry Bell Irving) as the fisheries on B.C.’s big salmon streams were being wrenched into a new, uglier, industrial model.
Geoff Meggs’s deft new history, Strange New Country, tells the story of a crucial moment in that complex struggle, the time of fishermen’s strikes on the Fraser River in 1900 and 1901.
Meggs, whose current day job is as chief of staff to B.C. Premier John Horgan, tells this complicated story in lucid, well-researched prose, and argues persuasively that we need to understand the events of those tumultuous two years if we want to understand our modern province.
This is a colourful story, full of vivid characters such as Bell Irving, a quintessential and rage driven capitalist oligarch, George Kelly, the resourceful Tsimshian leader who later assumed the ancient and powerful name Lig’ex, Yasushi Yamazaki, the violent, mercurial descendent of a traditional samurai family who moved from the union side to the anti-union side as class conflict roiled the Fraser’s waters, and Frank Rogers, militant longshoreman who led fishermen in fierce conflicts with the canners and was later shot dead on the Vancouver docks.
This is a book of labour history, a book about racism and its toxic effects and an exciting story of adventure. Anyone who wants to understand B.C. should read This Strange New Country.
• Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. The closest he ever got to the fishing industry was a short stint working in a warehouse during the herring roe fishery years ago. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at: email@example.com
CLICK HERE to report a typo.
Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email firstname.lastname@example.org