Colliers and cowboys

This research project deploys archived text and older and newer interviews to tell the story of the penetration of British Columbia’s Nicola Valley by the CPR and the simultaneous start of coal mining in the valley in the first decade of the previous century. This story is a story of Euroamerican consolidation and Amerindian attenuation through country lost and gained and possession asserted and negotiated, even resisted. Research by a number of historians, too, informs this story, and permits treatment of the industrialization of the Nicola Valley as one more demonstration of the inevitability of an unmaking in the making of history.