Dedicated to a community’s history
Tales, Trials and Triumphs: Echoes of Atlin
by Kate Fisher and Christine Dickinson
Atlin: Atlin Historical Society, 2025
$50 / 9781069075604
Reviewed by Howard MacDonald Stewart
*
Kate Fisher and Christine Dickinson have done a remarkable job of summarizing the short modern history of the small town of Atlin. They’ve assembled many high-quality images in their book Tales, Trials and Triumphs: Echoes of Atlin, and also explained these images and their context. The result is a concise but richly illustrated social history of a place that is more important to the history of modern BC than its tiny size and obscure location might suggest. A century ago, Atlin was almost like a far northern version of Ocean Falls, albeit a sweeter smelling and prettier one. It was a place a great many people passed through. They included many of my relatives.
To be honest, growing up, I often found the family’s ‘Atlin talk’ a bit tedious. At every gathering at my grandmother little house in Kitsilano, the old folks’ discussion was sure to include endless Atlin stories. The annual ‘Atlin Picnic’ was attended by many of the former Atlin residents who lived in the Lower Mainland; it was usually held somewhere in Stanley Park and was a highlight of their year. I never went because I knew the picnic was just another excuse to tell Atlin stories. At one time or another between the 1920s and the early 1950s, my mother’s mother and step-father, my mother and her brothers and sister, my father’s father, and my father all lived and worked in Atlin. For a few years, one of my grandfathers was the local cop, the other was the post master and one of my uncles, the bootlegger. My parents worked their way through university there in the dirty thirties: my mother in one of Atlin’s lakeshore hotels and my father in a gold mine. Tales, Trials and Triumphs has managed to capture snippets of all their stories (except the bootlegger). And those of the thousands of other people who passed through Atlin over the years as well. I expect their families will find this book a treasured resource.
Fisher and Dickinson worked together for decades to preserve the history of Atlin. Tales, Trials and Triumphs makes a valuable contribution to this preservation. Though the book is largely a collection of photographs, its text is substantial and substantive, complementing and explaining the hundreds of black & white and colour photos and maps.
Tucked away in the far northwest corner of the province, near where BC, the Yukon, and Alaska converge, Atlin is not among BC’s best-known communities and it’s certainly not one of the province’s more accessible places. We invited a talented young Atlin based writer to our Readers and Writers Festival on Denman Island a few years ago and her travel cost us as much as writers from Ontario. The town is hard to find on a map and hard to get to. And it has a population of maybe 500. So, what’s special about Atlin? Fisher and Dickinson’s book answers this question.
Home to Taku River Tlingit people for centuries, Aà Tlien (the Big Water) became known as Atlin when Eurasian settlers began to pour into the lakeshore settlement and its surrounding creeks at the end of the 19th century. The place was a southern offshoot of the Klondike Gold Rush. Nearby Whitehorse remains the regional metropolis today and you can drive from Atlin to Whitehorse in a couple of hours. But for the first half century after the initial influx of gold seekers, Atlin was a uniquely difficult place to get to, even by the challenging standards of British Columbia.
Within a few years of the first gold rush, one could reach Atlin from the south by a convoluted route that involved a sea voyage up the Inside Passage, a short train ride north from the Alaskan port of Skagway, then a lake steamer, another short train ride, and another steamer. Whew! Before long, some people flew in and out too. My family’s stories suggested these were seldom relaxing flights. Tales, Trials and Triumphs makes it clear what drew people from across North America and beyond to this difficult to reach, intensely isolated corner of the world: much gold and equally abundant natural beauty. Great fishing, hunting, and trapping helped too.
Atlin’s heyday was its first few decades and most of the images in this book come from that era. They comprise a truly remarkable collection of high-quality images capturing everyday life and challenges in a mining boomtown lost in the northern wilderness that would soon develop a secondary vocation as an exotic tourist destination. Again, even by the high standards of BC, Atlin’s setting – surrounded by snow covered peaks on the shore of BC’s largest natural lake – is magnificent. Fine enough to attract well-healed southern tourists over that complicated route a hundred years ago. But gold mining would remain the mainstay. Today it’s also a retreat for artists. More tourists may be tempted to visit after reading this book.
*
Howard Macdonald Stewart, as well as having genealogical ties to Atlin, is an historical geographer and semi-retired international consultant whose work has taken him to more than seventy countries since the 1970s. His memoir of a youthful bicycle trip down the Danube with war hero and debonair cyclist Cornelius Burke, Bumbling down the Danube,was published in The British Columbia Review in 2016, and his memoir, The Year of the Bicycle: 1973, followed in 2020. He is also the author of the award-winning Views of the Salish Sea: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Change around the Strait of Georgia (Harbour, 2017), as well as a popular Remembrance Day reflection, Why the red poppies matter. He has lived on Denman Island, off and on, for more than thirty years. He is now writing an insider’s view of his four decades on the road that followed his perambulations of 1973, notionally titled Around the World on Someone Else’s Dime: Confessions of an International Worker. [Editor’s note: Howard Stewart has recently reviewed books by Nancy Marguerite Anderson, Gina Leola Woolsey, Dave Steen, Amanda Swinimer, Jim Kerr, and John Boyko for The British Columbia Review.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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