New sites for Partners and Homesteader

The work I perform to pay the monthly bills has exploded. I’m sure it will help to pay those bills at the end of the month but it does tend to interfere with working on the new novel, writing posts for the blog and doing things around here such as putting the summer tools away and bringing out the winter things.

It is also interfering with the work I need to do on earlier novels and their promotion. Strategic Book Publishing will be and has me supplying information for the changing of the web sites for “Partners” and “Homesteader”. They will become a single site with access to both novels on the one page. As we add more novels they will appear on the same site.

In regard to that I have four ready to go.

There is my first, the prequel to “Homesteader” which is titled, “The Great Liquor War” but is no longer available; four of the same characters as those found in “Homesteader”.

“Jake’s Justice” which I particularly like since it includes a story, or more precisely my changed and expanded version of a story I originally heard from an early pioneer to the Peace River Country. Of course that also means I include some Peace Country history and I do love the land and its history.

“Cattle Business” which includes more information on how ranching began its growth in the North West Territories, a subject that is also touched on in “Jake’s Justice” and “Homesteader”.

Cattle also appear in some of the stories in my collection of short stories. There are seventeen in the collection and they cover a time frame from the 1880s to the 1960s. I’ve titled the collection “The Yearlings” (cattle, of course) which is also the title of one of the stories and it has a connection to one of the others.

No idea when we will get to all of this because right now we are working on the new web page, new press release and a video trailer.

Once we have some of that finished and ready to be viewed I’ll post that info along with the new site addresses.

 

By the way, here are pictures of two men who changed my life with their work and a third who is doing well and making us all smile. Have any idea who they are?

 

Quotations

I was actually looking for a quotation from the Bible which I wanted to use in one of my stories. However, during the process I found a great many sites with quotations, some of which I have heard and some that I haven't. Of course there are thousands out there, but before I moved on to the task that had actually started me on this journey I found several that where interesting, enlightening, and humorous.

Oh, and yes, I did find the Bible quote, the chapter and verse. However, now I've decided not to use it in this particular yarn. Maybe in the next one.

Life

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. (Mark Twain)

 

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future. (John F. Kennedy)

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. (Lao Tzu)

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
(Eleanor Roosevelt)

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone. (Robert Frost)

Don't let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.
(Richard L. Evans)
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. (Carl Jung)
 I think I've discovered the secret of life - you just hang around until you get used to it.
(Charles M. Schulz)

 Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. (George Bernard Shaw)

 When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?' (Sydney J. Harris)

 Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.
(Samuel Butler)

 A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
(William James)

There is just one life for each of us: our own. (Euripides)

 

Humour

Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes. (Jim Carrey)

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity. (Albert Einstein)

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please. (Mark Twain)

 People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
(Isaac Asimov)

I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.
(Lily Tomlin)

By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
(Mark Twain)

 I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
(Fred Allen)

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
(Will Rogers)

I'm sorry, if you were right, I'd agree with you.
(Robin Williams)
 

 

 

The machines in this picture have been working hard for close to three weeks. However, on the last day of Sept., 2013 they are all fueled up and ready for the final day of harvest on this particular family holdings.

There are those out there who still have as much as a week's work ahead of them.
Canola, wheat, barley, and oats into the food baskets of the world.

Chetwynd the logging / mining town 100 km to the east has a chain saw carving contest every summer and this year was no exception.

These artists do some phenomenal work with machines of many sizes while I’m having a great day if I can get mine to cut straight..

I have been intending to stop and take some pictures of a few of the two dozen sculptures situated about the town and finally took time to get two.

Many are cut from a single log. Pegasus, which has been placed in front of the town hall is one of those that has attached parts; the wings, of course.

In the second one Mama Eagle is banking around the tree trunk and bear as two young eagles look out of the nest.

 

New Stories and pictures from Canada's West

I’ve been working on a story that has a “crime baron” operating in New Westminster, BC in 1881. I’ve found the research interesting, due to the great changes that were taking place at the time. For instance, Vancouver did not come into existance until five years later and twenty years later was a thriving city and one of the more important ports on the Pacific coast. However, more about that in a later post.

For now, I was just looking through some of the material I collected for “Jake’s Justice” and “Cattle Business” and thought I would post some of those items.

“Cattle Business” takes place west of Edmonton in the early 1890s and has to do with some of the unlikely people who, despite their lack of a proper background, eventually became the developers of Canadian Agriculture. It also introduces an aboriginal policeman. According to a couple of sources I discovered the BC Provincial Police appointed “Special Constables” (a policeman’s responsibility, little training and no pay) very early on in their history when they were still “Colonial” police. The story also touches on the development of coal mining and the structure of the North West Mounted Police, their barracks and district prison at Ft. Saskatchewan.

Much of “Jake’s Justice” or perhaps the ‘heart of the story’ takes place in 1898 in the same area as “Cattle Business”. However we also learn something of Jake’s early life as an Ontario farm boy, a Great Lakes deck-hand, a fresh water fisherman, a cattle ‘tender’, and a ‘wolfer’ attempting to help clear the Canadian Prairies of predators after the blizzard winter of 1886. Following the rape and murder of his wife he also spends time trapping on the upper reaches of the Peace River system.

 

Both of these stories contain considerable mention of the North West Mounted Police. In fact, the main protagonist in "Cattle Business" starts out as a constable but for 'political reasons' is cashierd. Toward the end of the 1800s the Mounties moved to Regina headquarters but Ft. Macleod was still an important centre. Further north the administration centre was Ft. Saskatchewan where the NWMP had built a jail with 32 cells which, by the time of these two novels had very few which were empty. There was also a hospital.

Around the fort a few civilian services were built which eventually became a town and in the twentieth century a fine small city.

Ft. Saskatchewan hospital, 1899

Queens Hotel, Ft. Saskatchewan, 1906

Ft. Saskatchewan store and office

Ft. Saskatchewan, 1905

North West Mounted Police barracks,

Ft. Saskatchewan, 1890

Government Street,

Ft. Saskatchewan, 1906

Have We Lost Our Way?

            From the title one might think this post is all about the apparent tendency to disregard the truth, moral conduct, or equitable treatment in our society. Such actions are, or at least appear to me to be more prevalent each day and are destroying the world we live in.

            Our legal system doesn’t seem to be a great help in supporting our society and ensuring its continuity. They keep making decisions that fail to reward upright behaviour, make special efforts to protect those who are trying to destroy our society (and our system of law) and fail to hold felons responsible for their actions.

            But no, that’s not what this is about at all, although it’s quite apparent from what I just wrote and how I feel about it that it could be and would be very long.

            No, this is about our sense of direction.

            When some one says “West,” or you see the word in print what do you think of? For most of those in North America, and even a few in other parts of the world, the first picture that comes to mind is Monument Valley, perhaps the plains of Texas, or perhaps a view of Arizona sagebrush. I know that was, and often is, the first picture that comes to my mind.

            We know that isn’t right. If a person is in Maine then New York is west. In Canberra Perth is out west, even if the Perth in question is in Perthshire or Ontario.

            So why is it that for millions “The West” is in the U.S. south-west? Because several people, most notably in Los Angeles, CA spent millions to make it so. Hundreds of so called “low budget” westerns with Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Rex Allen, Roy Rodgers and Gene Autry and a long list of others that we forget having seen. And then there are hundreds, yes hundreds, of big budget flicks such as Shane, High Noon, and all the Eastwood and John Wayne movies that, despite the critics decrying their costs still managed to make a dollar. They became vehicles that advanced the careers of those both in front of and behind the cameras including those who wrote both screen-plays and original stories.

            Why can’t a “Western” be about the west of Argentina? Perhaps an “Eastern” about the trapping, mining and rail road builing in Siberia. (Louis L’Amour’s “Last of the Breed” comes to mind as a good place to start.)

            Of course it has been done successfully for Australia with “Quigley Down Under” and the “Snowy River” stories.

            Personally I’m concerned with the West of Canada. A couple of passable TV shows have been done about the opening of Ontario in the early days, two “modern” western series that I can think of presented on CBC and a third that was absolutely awful and should never have seen the light of day. A couple of ‘made for TV’ movies; one about Bill Miner and another about early gold rush days in BC that where not only well done and entertaining but reasonably accurate.

            There are many reasons why I write, but this is the primary reason why I write stories placed in the early days of Canada’s west. Because I believe that more people need to know that Canada’s history, the stories of our growth and development, our cattlemen, farmers, lawmen, miners, trappers and railroad men are as exciting and entertaining as those from any “west.” They can also teach the value of truth, moral conduct and equitable treatment such as many of the Hollywood movies attempted.

            Besides, it is quite obvious from the money spent around the world on western memorabilia that there is a waiting, hungry market for the traditional western. (Not to be confused with the big budget, special effects, comedy western extravaganza.)

            On top of that, there aren’t many writing Canadian historical fiction. Guy Vanderhaeghe, Bill Gallaher, and …

            Perhaps the title should have been, “Searching for the West.”

 

Round-up crew at the chuck wagon.

More pictures from Barkerville

As mentioned earlier I took a few more pictures of Barkerville on my last trip.

Those I took 3 years ago are on "my pictures" and you're welcome to take a look - a couple of coaches, the BX stables and street pics.

This time I took several of plaques and a couple of buildings I missed last time.

Williams Creek school. This is one of the buildings that was rebuilt from the original plans. One of my characters in the sequel to "Partners" (which, at this point I'm calling "Underbelly") is tutoring a few young people, therefore I need to know where his (fictional) students came from.

 Barkerville fire.

On September 16, 1868 close to 2/3 rds of Barkerville burned down. This plaque, believed to be at the site of ignition commemorates that. I plan to include this disaster in "Underbelly."

 Dillar Claim

 Stout's Gulch. Edward (Ned) Stout lived for many years in the BC goldfields. He was involved in the "Thompson War" in 1858 and was one of 5 survivors of a party of 26. He died in Yale in 1924

 Kelly Saloon, one of many that operated in Barkerville. There was also a local brewery and distillary although spirits were also freighted in. I have one of my characters owning one of the hotels and playing long poker games where a great deal of gold changes hands in places like this. I have tried to avoid using the names of actual hotels. There were gamblers who owned or worked in particular hotels but they tended to move around a great deal.

This plaque commemorating "Scotch Jenny" is on the road between Barkerville and Richfield. The drop into the canyon - and others like it in the area - undoubtadly took several lives. The picture on the plaque was taken in front of the Pioneer Saloon in Centreville, another of the small communities in the area that no longer exits.