Notes from The Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia (Modern Library Exploration)

User Review: - Northern British Columbia Cultural History
This book is the account of noted nature essayist, Edward Hoagland, and his 2+ months spent visiting and interviewing old-timers in Northern British Columbia in 1966. It is reprinted occasionally by the Sierra Club and now has forewords by the well known naturalist David Quammen, and journalist Jon Krakauer.

This is not really a nature book. It contains no descriptions of flora and fauna other than to note there are trees and various animals. So if you're looking for a Natural History of British Columbia, look elsewhere.

Instead, this book is a cultural history of this are from the Klondike gold rush era of 1890 to 1966. It is not a complete history but is hit and miss depending on what village Hoagland visited and which old-timers he interviewed. This gives it a hit-and-miss form that is charming and frustrating at the same time. Charming in the sense of In Patagonia (Penguin Classics), but frustrating if you want a complete picture. Like Chatwin, Hoagland basically wanders around and does what he feels like, when he feels like doing it.

Hoagland and an ex-wife lived in 1960 in Hazelton in this area and then returns in 1966 and spend most of his time north of there up to the Yukon border. He spends time in Telegraph Creek, Smithers, Atlin, Eddontenajon, and Wrangell Alaska, as well as various rivers, lakes and camps in between. If you are interested, there is an old Disney movie with a politically correct plot and the much better book, The Bears and I: Raising Three Cubs in the North Woods, which is the account of a footloose adventurer who adopts three bears on Babine Lake, which is in this same area.

My knowledge of this area began in 1967 and ended when I left in 1983. This is not a comprehensive review of the people and happenings of the area. But it does give you an excellent feel for the history and people of the area.

Hoagland has a clear writing style and allows the reader to get the gestalt of a situation easily. Criticisms are a lack of Natural History (a little bit more would make the book better) and the 5 or 6 mentions of the authors sexual vigor and exploits. I never did figure out what the sexual exploits of the author had to do with anything other than wonder how many STD's he acquired in his life.

As other reviewers noted, this area was unique because it was the last North American wilderness where you could settle down and make a living off the land. There are other wilderness areas further North but the growing season is too short to support agriculture. Much of the British Columbia of Hoagland's essay is gone forever, locked up by environmental policy, lawsuits by the Indians (you'd better call them 'First Nations' in Canada or face a fine), and settled. But what a land and time it was and Hoagland fell in love with it as so many who visit do.

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User Review: - Go see this Area!!!!!!!!
The ONLY way to really appreciate this book is to SEE THIS AREA...99% of the people will never venture into the Dease Lake region or up the Stewart-Cassier Highway or fly a hele into the Grand Canyon of the Stikine...which is so really really unbelievably sad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
People waste so much of their time at the Jersey Shore spending thousands for a week in filth when they could do this area for less than a trip to the beach and come home with a lifetime of memories. To anyone who has not experienced this region this book will be a very strange read indeed....BUT for those can get up off their butts, dust off their adventure side and......... get there ...this book is not only a must read but actually a return trip!!!!!!!!

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User Review: - Portraits from northwest BC.
Two things brought my attention to this book. 1) Edward Hoagland's introductions in well known works of Thoreau and Muir, and 2) my interest in the beautiful expanse of wildness that is British Columbia. The book might be described as "quirky," and I have to wonder whether it was an influence in the creation of the early nineties television series "Northern Exposure" (one of the few TV programs I have ever cared for). Published in 1969, it is the account of a New York* novelist become journalist in the great, wild watersheds of the Stikine and Skeena River systems, waters coursing from the Cassiar Mountains, "from sources known only from aerial photographs, some of them where nobody alive had ever been."
*By the time the footloose essayist Hoagland recorder these images in the summer of 1966, he was already quite widely traveled, and had lived briefly in Hazelton, BC in 1960.
Hoagland renders "portraits" of trappers, merchants, guides, clerics, bush pilots, prospectors, "discoverers", and of the waters and forests that are their homes. He himself often fades from the text, reemerging as a curious anomaly in a world unfamiliar and unusual. In northwest BC, a wilderness "the size of several Ohios" in which the majority of residents are caribou, moose, grizzlies, marmots, wolves, beaver, otter, and lynx, each of the perhaps 1000 human residents, whether Indian or white, might be considered an anomaly. The author gravitates to the old-timers, asking "a dabbler's questions that to me are fun."
This volume is not for every reader. It is very unlike the wilderness travel accounts of Thoreau or Muir (who investigated closely a landscape's flora and geology). Hoagland's attentions here are mostly directed to the local "characters" and to the nuances of the human history of a great wilderness: "... airplanes have made mapping easier than naming nowadays. ... The surveyors of forty years ago did a much better job because they were actually on the spot. Being men of good intentions, they were glad to incorporate Indian names on their maps when they knew them." However, "it's an exceedingly accidental process ... if no Indian accompanied the mapper, or if he wasn't unusually expressive, all the native names slipped through the sieve and were lost right then and there."
The author admits, "I'm no outdoorsman, really," but he is taken with the beauty of northern BC: "Swaying and bucking as on a life raft, we scraped over a further series of ridges and peaks. This was the highest flying we had done; we were way up with the snow so that the cabin was cold. But the sunlight washed the whole sky a milky blue. Everywhere, into the haze a hundred miles off, a crescendo of up-pointing mountains shivered and shook. A cliff fell away beneath us as we crossed the lip. ... There was no chance to watch for game; the plunging land was life enough. It was a whole earth of mountains, beyond counting or guessing at, colored stark white and rock-brown. To live is to see, and although I was sweating against my stomach, I was irradiated. These were some of the finest minutes of my life."
Unlike most books of wilderness travel, this is not a record of the author as a man in the wilderness. It is a series of portraits of the true men and women (mostly men) of the wilderness. At Atlin Lake, for example, we meet three vigorous men in their nineties, one who came to the country during the Rush of 1899. We meet others who had first come to these mountains and rivers in the 1890's. In Hoagland's Journal from British Columbia, the century -- now centuries -- before, seem not so distant.

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User Review: - Real Gem of a B.C. travelogue
I just read this account of the author's three month exploration of northwestern B.C. in 1966 after it was recommended as one of the best 25 books of the last 25 years by the magazine Outdoor Canada. Edward Hoagland is a real find for me. I had never heard of him before, but his description by John Updike as "America's best living essayist" is close to the mark. His descriptions of the country and the people go far to preserve the early days of this wild and untamed corner of Canada. I love to read travelogues, and this one rates right up there with the best of them.