Author Archives: Bruce
The eulachon
The eulachon was first recorded from British Columbia waters in 1866 by A. Günther on the basis of 4 specimens 8 to 9 inches in length, collected near Vancouver Island by C.B. Wood, surgeon on H.M.S. Plumper, and presented to the British Museum. The eulachon is common along the whole coast of British Columbia, particularly [...]
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The coldest and bleakest
If your readers only kept in their minds the very vague ideas they entertained of what this Province of Manitoba was like as short a distance of time back as ten years ago, I think most of them will remember that Manitoba was then classed with the Hudson Bay itself in being only fit for [...]
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Santa Maria
The newspaper column I write these days is supposed to be about tourism. Sometimes I have a tough time holding myself to this broad theme, though I always try to at least give it a nod as I pass by…
First published in THE NORTHERN VIEW, August 26, 2009.
The CBC documentary “This Beat Goes On†premieres [...]
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Raise a little hell
If you don’t like
What you got
Why don’t you change it
If your world is all screwed up
Rearrange it
Raise a little hell…
Brian Smith & Ra McGuire (Trooper), “Raise a Little Hell,†Thick as Thieves (MCA, 1978).
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The book collector who failed
I started as an accumulator of books. I was a great accumulator. Book club editions of Thomas Costain, and an almost-complete 1940s National Geographic collection? Fabulous. Even as a teenager moving my books required the logistical planning of a military operation. Over time I’ve parted with enough books to easily fill a large public library.
If [...]
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Purity of a purified nature
..I beg the reader to find my method of procedure acceptable, and to excuse me if, in order to give a better understanding of the character of our savages, I have been forced to insert here many uncivilized and extravagant details, since one cannot convey complete knowledge of a foreign country or of how it [...]
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Making a mistake
This morning I posted an old story to the Solid Gold Box, fully realizing that it was not quite right. I still think it was a good story. It was neither the first time, nor the last time, that I got something wrong in a published piece.
The mistake that sticks most often in my mind [...]
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Fort Desjarlais
Fort Desjarlais is the story of an obscure little independent fur fort on the Souris River. The story was published in a Manitoba newspaper called the Souris Valley Echo in 1987.
I was reminded of it when I began searching on-line for stories I might be able to add to the Solid Gold Box. I found [...]
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Anne, with an “eâ€
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through [...]
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Windigo!
win’-di-go n. a spirit believed by the Algonquians, Cree, and Ojibwas to take possession of vulnerable people, causing them to engage in cannibalism and other forms of antisocial behavior.
I’ve always had a soft spot for westerns, and during the late 1980s I went through a phase of writing western stories—primarily for the magazines of the [...]
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He heard the ropes creak
My grandmother saw the Teazer blown up. She saw it from the Tanner’s house on Heckman’s Island, the first house across the bridge on the right. She saw the British gunboat come inside of Grey Island, now called Pearly Island, and the boats leaving her with eight sweeps on a side, sixteen in all. They [...]
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The Observer
One morning a couple of weeks ago—it may have been the 8th of January—I stood on my veranda and watched the Sophia Z make her way out to sea. She ghosted down the harbour through hazy mist, with a tug alongside.
The 57,000-tonne Sophia Z was on her maiden voyage when she arrived in Prince Rupert [...]
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Charlie’s Tugboat Tales
Charlie’s Tugboat Tales is long out of print. The late Captain Charlie Currie was a waterfront icon of the Northwest Coast.
Captain Currie and his wife, “Tugboat Winnie,†ran the 44-foot wooden tug C.R.C., built to Captain Currie’s design at the Prince Rupert Drydock in 1929. They helped people. They helped boats in trouble, hauled supplies [...]
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Sorry, we’re Canadian
Harris once asked, “I don’t know what moved us.†He meant, I think, that he couldn’t put his finger on that last indefinable something. I said, “Something in the air moved us. The artist just up and does something about it without knowing what it was exactly about. It was a genuinely Canadian thing. The [...]
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The end of the ’80s