The vivid, personal accounts of four women who lived and travelled as
settlers in early British Columbia "...a cloud passing away from the
face of the moon revealed a band of wild horses bearing down upon us at
a full gallop. As they came near and saw us they divided into two
groups, passing by on either side. Had the moon not come out they would
probably have become entangled in our tent ropes, and we should not have
lived to tell the tale."--Violet Sillitoe, between Osoyoos and Penticton
The women in this book were trailblazers. The frontiers they lived on
were not only geographical but personal. As they left the drawing rooms
of England and eastern Canada for new lives in the far West, social
patterns were disrupted, and the status quo dissolved. On the wagon
roads and river boats of nineteenth-century British Columbia, they found
risks, opportunities and freedoms far beyond those familiar to their
more settled contemporaries. By Snowshoe, Buckboard and Steamer tells
four extraordinary stories of life on the unruly edge of empire. Winner
of the 1998 BC Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Historical Writing.