“I feel that Ontario is very rich… the development that took [place at] that time in Ontario—from 1790 to 1970, if you like—that period is ‘squeezed up’ in B.C. In about a hundred years less of time, it’s come from the bush to the big cities. This is a fantastic development. This country interests me because of that.
“It also interests me because of the stories, as I got to see them, were rather large scale; they were kind of ‘epic’… the Indian presence was much stronger here. It was a much more challenging life, therefore it produced a different kind of person. And also, I realized that there was a tremendous variety in this country. There is more variety in climate and terrain between Long Beach and the Rockies than there is in all the rest of Canada… I began to see that this was a story all by itself and almost a country all by itself.”
To uncover this “story,” and inspired by his experience on the Skeena River, Orchard travelled over 24,000 miles by boat, horse, car, train and foot and interviewed nearly a thousand people between 1959 and 1966. He used a fraction of the material in three series, Living Memory, From the Mountains to the Sea and People in Landscape, which he produced and broadcast on CBC Radio in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1974, when the Provincial Archives of British Columbia established an aural history program, Orchard donated approximately twelve hundred tape recordings (all of the original master tapes of the interviews, as well as the original master tapes from the completed episodes from each of the three radio series) to the Archives, where they are still housed today. In all, the Orchard Oral History Collection (not including the finished radio programs) amounts to 998 interviews (in excess of 2,700 hours) with miners, ranchers, fur traders, ship captains, missionaries, farmers, totem carvers, road builders and some of the First Nations people of British Columbia.
Orchard was already fifty years old when he began to collect his interviews, and as he was not doing the job to make a name for himself, the interviews remained largely unknown. He, himself, was struck by how little British Columbians knew about their own heritage:
ORCHARD: Yes I’m surprised how few people know about our great characters and the people that are semi-historical, semi-legendary that there are in B.C. We’ve got just as rich a background as any part of this continent, in that way. But we don’t know it yet.
You see, I realized early on that it was no good waiting for a special occasion or a special budget, that I was going to have to go out and get a lot of these people before they died. Luckily again, the CBC cooperated with this idea, and Ian [sound technician] and I travelled all over the country just to get the people, before they died or before they faded out. And this was what I did. And then it’s there to be used, but I haven’t had the opportunity to use a great deal of it.
Of course this gave me a sense, too, that what I was collecting was not just for the CBC. I was collecting it for the province, for the story of the province, for an understanding of the life of those days. And to me that was ample justification for getting all this stuff that wouldn’t get on the air for some time.
And of course the important thing now is to gather this up and have a means of preserving it, because we don’t know how long tape will last. I know some tape disintegrates after twelve or fifteen years, very rapidly. Now we’ve got to have a means of preserving this tape so that fifty or a hundred years from now these voices can still be heard. They’re part of our story, the story of our country. And it’s very, very important to do that. I discovered this early, early on, I knew that the tapes I was doing were going to, if I could preserve them, would play a part, a certain historical part, a certain part in preserving the history.
We need facilities for research. Not just simply research for the historian, the academic person who’s only concerned really with writing—but for people who want to go back to the original and listen, and hear how it sounded and how this person’s meanings come through in sound, which they don’t come through on the written page. You’ve got to go back to the original thing if you’re going to get the meaning of it.
And telling a story, and this is very, very ancient and it’s way beyond before print was ever invented. And it’s coming back into its own now. And this is to me very important.
···
ONE of the intentions of this book, then, is to expose British Columbians to the valuable resource Orchard has left us and, by including the original audio recordings, to realize his vision.
Although the B.C. Archives have been instrumental in preserving Orchard’s work, his contribution to oral history and the Orchard Collection itself remain largely unknown by scholars and the general public. In the 1970s to early 1980s, the B.C. Archives published a series of books entitled Sound Heritage that used excerpts from the Orchard Collection along with material from other collections. In the 1980s, the Sound and Moving Images Division (SMID) at the Archives created a catalogue system for the Orchard Collection. However, it was not until the summer of 2000, when the CBC embarked on a project to digitize all of the audio material scattered across the country in the various provincial archives, that his material came to light again. Under the supervision of Allen Specht, the long-time director of SMID, Charlene Gregg and I were hired to begin cataloguing and copying to compact disc all of the reel-to-reel tape and other recordings that belonged to the CBC and were housed at the B.C. Archives in Victoria. In 2001, we began to work on the Orchard Collection.
In the course of digitizing and cataloguing this enormous and extensive collection, I sat with headphones on for hours, listening to the interviewees tell their tales. Often I was taken back to another time through the tremendous sense of atmosphere conveyed in the voices and stories of the collection. Less than a week into listening, I came across a couple of tapes titled Patenaude—Horsefly, which were recordings made of my very good friend Pharis’s great-grandfather and great-grand-uncle. The Patenaudes were one of the first non-Native families to settle in the Cariboo region (Pharis is the fifth generation to come from Horsefly), and it struck me then that the tapes I was accessing contained stories about people’s great-great-grandparents discussing familiar places and speaking in English. (My own relatives would have been speaking Central European languages!) It became clear to me that each of these accounts was a window into the history of this province that no one else had ever heard in its entirety.
The more I listened, the more I felt that I had to help get this material out so the general public could have access to this rich resource. As a result, the Orchard Collection became the focus of my master’s degree in history at the University of Victoria. Contained in this book, several years later, are the “greatest hits” from the collection, a broad survey featuring fun, poignant stories from a variety of regions and covering an array of vocations and experiences that paint a picture of life in pre-war B.C.
Since the contents of this book are a sample of the entire collection, there are many omissions. For example, I have not selected any of the stories from northern Vancouver Island or from the Arrow Lakes district. And the collection itself contains many interviews from the Skeena River but very few from the Stikine River. These omissions are not meant to take away from the rich histories in each of these areas, but I could not represent everything in this one volume.
It is also worth noting an obvious oversight in Orchard’s collection: Asians—particularly Japanese and Chinese people—are discussed in many interviews, yet among all the recordings in the collection there is only one interview with a Chinese person. Perhaps Orchard did not deem the level of their English or the quality of Asian immigrants’ voices to be “broadcast worthy.” Perhaps they refused his requests to be interviewed or perhaps he didn’t think to ask them. Regardless, much information can be gathered from Orchard’s collection about how the Chinese and Japanese people of British Columbia were perceived by non-Asians in the pre-war period. Workers of Chinese origin were segregated in British Columbia’s labour markets: mostly they competed with Euro-Canadians