25 October 1918 is the day that goes down in history as the Inside Passage's worst maritime disaster. Over 350 people lost their lives and the CPR's British Columbia Coast Service was forever tarnished when the Princess Sophia went down off Vanderbilt Reef in Lynn Canal between Skagway and Juneau, Alaska. The authors relive the tragedy of the Princess Sophia and her last voyage. To this day, many questions still linger or was this sinking really just a 'peril of the sea' as the inquiry concluded. Read about the ones who answered the SOS and their efforts to save the passengers and crew on board, but who later were the ones to recover the bodies instead. This book is part of West Coast maritime history and makes for very interesting reading.
2018 Alaskana Award from the Alaska Library Association 2018 Alaska Historical Society James H. Drucker Alaska Historian of the Year Award Walter Harper, Alaska Native Son illuminates the life of the remarkable Irish-Athabascan man who was the first person to summit Mount Denali, North America’s tallest mountain. Born in 1893, Walter Harper was the youngest child of Jenny Albert and the legendary gold prospector Arthur Harper. His parents separated shortly after his birth, and his mother raised Walter in the Athabascan tradition, speaking her Koyukon-Athabascan language. When Walter was seventeen years old, Episcopal archdeacon Hudson Stuck hired the skilled and charismatic youth as his riverboat pilot and winter trail guide. During the following years, as the two traveled among Interior Alaska’s Episcopal missions, they developed a father-son-like bond and summited Denali together in 1913. Walter’s strong Athabascan identity allowed him to remain grounded in his birth culture as his Western education expanded, and he became a leader and a bridge between Alaska Native peoples and Westerners in the Alaska territory. He planned to become a medical missionary in Interior Alaska, but his life was cut short at the age of twenty-five, in the Princess Sophia disaster of 1918 near Skagway, Alaska. Harper exemplified resilience during an era when rapid socioeconomic and cultural change was wreaking havoc in Alaska Native villages. Today he stands equally as an exemplar of Athabascan manhood and healthy acculturation to Western lifeways whose life will resonate with today’s readers.
In 1918, Canadian Pacific steamship Princess Sophia ran aground on Alaska’s Vanderbilt reef. She sat there for two terrifying days before sinking in a raging snowstorm. Seventy-six years later, a cruise ship called the Star Princess was sailing in the same stretch of water — and Alaska’s worst maritime disaster nearly repeated itself.
Scottish nursemaid Janet Smith was the victim of a 1924 tragedy that ignited racial tension in a very young Vancouver. At the core of the issue were the mysterious circumstances surrounding Smith's death, particularly the fact that the only other adult in the house at the time was the Chinese houseboy. When Smith's death was followed by the assassination of Davie Lew, a well-known Chinese man, it only strengthened the European view that Vancouver's Asian community was a hotbed of violence and corruption. Newspaper editors and most of Vancouver's white community raised an outcry, charging the police with incompetence and demanding arrests, while Presbyterian indignation called for law and order as well as an end to Chinese immigration. Before the summer was over, the tongs of Chinatown and the clans of Canada's West Coast were set to defend their own, and one Scottish minister went so far as to declare it a time of "holy war."
Aunt Phil's Trunk Volume Three entertains readers as they travel through Alaska's history from 1912 to 1935. This book of nonfiction short stories highlights the pioneering spirit of early Alaskans as they enter a new era as a territory of the United States. As with the first two books, Volume Three is filled with close to 350 historical photographs. Downing Bill weaves page-turning narratives. Readers follow along as men with axes, hammers and mauls pound a path through the vast Alaska wilderness to lay railroad tracks that connect the deep-water port of Seward in the south to the territory's interior town of Fairbanks in the north. Through the stories in this volume, readers watch a railroad construction town grow out of the tundra to become Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska. Volume Three also shares stories about epidemics and disasters, including the Great Sickness of 1918, the sinking of the steamship Princess Sophia in Southeast Alaska and the incredible diphtheria serum run in 1925 when brave mushers and their tenacious dogs saved the town of Nome from certain death. This book shines a light on early aviators who blazed new trails through Alaska skies, how the Alaska Native people struggled for recognition and how farmers from America's Midwest carved out an agricultural community in the wild Matanuska Valley. It ends with the fatal airplane crash of humorist Will Rogers and aviator Wiley Post near Barrow in 1935.
In the wake of SARS and H1N1, this story of medical health officer Dr. Fred Underhill and his battle against the 1918 Spanish influenza that killed 25 to 50 million people worldwide is particularly relevant. Underhill is symbolic of the senior public health officers in cities across Canada and the U.S. who mounted the best defence they could against the killer flu. His vision, his tireless efforts, and his dialogue with colleagues in Seattle and elsewhere saved many lives. And his patient advice and findings are still relevant today as we await the new viral epidemics that undoubtedly lie ahead. In their enlightening account of the events of that era, authors O'Keefe and Macdonald have crafted a compelling story of people coming together in a time of crisis.
In 1953, Forests Minister Robert E. Sommers was one of the most powerful men in BC, able to influence the province's major industry, forestry, with a stroke of his pen. Five years later he plummeted from the heights when he was sent to jail for conspiracy and accepting bribes. The Sommers scandal was the first and biggest stain on the record of Premier W.A.C. Bennett's Socreds. Betty O'Keefe and Ian Macdonald have recreated those stormy days of the mid-1950s, when Sommers, Bennett, Attorney General Robert Sommers, Phil Gaglardi and Gordon Gibson rocked the rafters of the Legislature with bellowed accusations and denials. Weaving interviews with major players and the media reports of the day, they show the relentless process by which Sommers was finally brought to trial, and reveal the confusing array of verdicts for Sommers and his co-accused. The Sommers story is also the story of BC's forest industry. The forest-management system was under attack and investigation as the Sommers scandal unfolded, and the decisions made in the 1950s set the course for the death of logging towns, the corporate concentration and the crisis of overcutting some 30 years later.
Everyone who lives in the western provinces of Canada has been affected by Alexander Duncan McRae. That's why Betty O'Keefe and Ian Macdonald believe the man deserves more than fleeting references in Canadian history books. McRae was Vancouver's 'merchant prince', a businessman, a self-made aristocrat who lorded over Hycroft, the finest home on the west coast (now the home of the Women's University Club).
'Sophia is the sort of remarkable, almost unbelievable untold true story that every writer dreams of chancing upon. A wonderful debut, written with real spirit and gusto. Anita Anand has produced a winner' William Dalrymple 'A fascinating and elegantly written life of one of the unknown giants of women's suffrage' Katie Hickman, author of Daughters of Britannia The enthralling story of an extraordinary woman and her part in the defining moments of recent British Indian history Winner of the Eastern Eye Alchemy Festival Award for Literature In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, a realm that stretched from the lush Kashmir Valley to the craggy foothills of the Khyber Pass and included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar. It was a territory irresistible to the British, who plundered everything, including the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond. Exiled to England, the dispossessed Maharajah transformed his estate at Elveden in Suffolk into a Moghul palace, its grounds stocked with leopards, monkeys and exotic birds. Sophia, god-daughter of Queen Victoria, was raised a genteel aristocratic Englishwoman: presented at court, afforded grace-and-favour lodgings at Hampton Court Palace and photographed wearing the latest fashions for the society pages. But when, in secret defiance of the British government, she travelled to India, she returned a revolutionary. Sophia transcended her heritage to devote herself to battling injustice and inequality,a far cry from the life to which she was born. Her causes were the struggle for Indian independence, the fate of the Lascars, the welfare of Indian soldiers in the First World War – and, above all, the fight for female suffrage. She was bold and fearless, attacking politicians, putting herself in the front line and swapping her silks for a nurse's uniform to tend wounded soldiers evacuated from the battlefields. Meticulously researched and passionately written, this enthralling story of the rise of women and the fall of empire introduces an extraordinary individual and her part in the defining moments of recent British and Indian history.
