Robert Budd
foreword by MARK FORSYTHE
_____
STORIES
from our
FRONTIER
Copyright © 2010 by Robert Budd
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
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Douglas & McIntyre
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Vancouver bc Canada v5t 4s7
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
isbn 978-1-55365-463-6 (paperback)
978-1-55365-644-9 (ebook)
Editing by Derek Fairbridge and Lucy Kenward
Cover design by Jessica Sullivan and Peter Cocking
Cover photographs courtesy of Royal B.C. Museum, B.C. Archives: (clockwise from top left) hp093186/Hannah Hatherly Maynard, hpoo3761, hp093991, hp008228
Map by C. Stuart Daniel/Starshell Maps
All interior photos courtesy of Royal B.C. Museum, B.C. Archives
CD compilation edited and produced by Robert Budd
CDs manufactured in Vancouver, B.C., by cdman
Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd.
Printed on paper that comes from sustainable forests
managed under the Forest Stewardship Council
Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the
Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council,
the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit
and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
To my mother, Vivian,
and in memory of my father, Les Budd (1946–2008)
A Note About the Sound Recordings
LISTEN to the sound recordings that correspond to each chapter by clicking on the hyperlinks at the beginning of each interview. If your reading device does not support hyperlinks, you will find the recordings in the following Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/69amznyg444talq/AABMRZbt2YUUi4IcsBqdni86a?dl=0
Imbert Orchard interviewed hundreds of BritisColumbians. This map shows the locales described in the twenty-four stories reproduced here.
FOREWORD
It’s In the Voice
MARK FORSYTHE
_____
THE HUMAN voice soothes, nurtures, connects people. Recently a new mother was telling me how her baby had been fussing most evenings, so she sang a tune she’d crooned during her pregnancy. As her daughter heard the first notes of Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, she calmed. Instantly. The human voice is a wondrous and powerful thing; we catch its rhythms, its nuance, its rise and fall, even in the womb.
Imbert Orchard knew the power of the voice. He listened to a thousand voices as he and CBC Radio recording engineer Ian Stephen lugged tape recorders around British Columbia to interview the people who founded this province, including Aboriginal people whose stories reach back thousands of years. Today, those audio archives sound as fresh as the day they were recorded: they’re crisp, warm and personal. We hear apprehension, humour, sadness, reflection, and realize the things that make us human are all wrapped up in the sound of our voices. Even a pause during a conversation can be revealing as someone searches for the right words to give their story clarity and meaning (or avoids answering a question we’ve posed). We hear people think during such moments.
The fact that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation encouraged these two to travel across B.C. to gather so many stories is commendable, especially since many of these interviews were never aired. CBC recognized the value of building this first-person archive, which is exactly what a public broadcaster should be doing. These memories and stories are our social history and provide context for our times.
In this world of sound bites, long-form interviews like the ones conducted by Imbert Orchard are very rare indeed. Today we don’t have the patience to listen, to attempt to understand the broader context of what’s behind those sound clips, to sort through the fragments of information charging toward us via radio, TV, cell phones, the Internet. Tuning in to the radio for a one-hour conversation between Imbert Orchard and one of his pioneer subjects would be unheard of today. We’re partial to the fragments, even if we don’t know what they mean.
Imbert Orchard, though, knew he was on to something when he began talking with B.C.’s pioneers. He was also an excellent listener and guided conversation in a masterful way, much like another great CBC radio interviewer, Peter Gzowski. When he was interviewing, Peter thought of himself as sitting at the back of a canoe, steering, with his guest riding up front. Peter understood the overall direction of the interview and guided that journey by listening carefully then dipping his paddle in the water, asking a question or making a well-placed comment to keep the conversation on course. In Peter’s interviews, his guests did almost all of the paddling: the story propelled them toward their destination, often with an enlightening detour or two along the way. In his own way, Imbert Orchard did much the same thing. He sat away from the microphone. Listening carefully, and posing simple, direct questions, he encouraged his guests to tell their story. In their own words.
My CBC colleague Deborah Wilson has spent hours listening to many of Orchard’s oral history interviews as she prepared profiles of B.C. characters and events for broadcast. She comments that listening to him interview people in his gentle, unhurried way was to be, “transported to another place and time…What I learned from Imbert Orchard: slow down and savour the details.”
Orchard tapped memories like some people tap maple trees. The stories flowed, and the range of experience was remarkable. He asked about places like Port Essington on the Skeena River, a canning community that no longer exists yet is no less a part of the story of British Columbia. He met Joseph Coyle, who moved from New Jersey to Alaska then to Aldermere, near Smithers, where he launched the area’s first newspaper and described how his newsprint was carried into the valley by the legendary packer Cataline. (Coyle went on to invent the egg carton.)
In his collection, we hear first- and second-generation memories of a vast province being opened up by riverboats, railroads and cattle drives. Imbert listened to Annie York of Spuzzum tell him about her grandparents’