Is a story history?

Bloomsbury to Barkerville: The Life of Florence Wilson
by Marion McKinnon Crook

Victoria: Heritage House Publishing, 2026
$26.95 / 9781772035643

Reviewed by Robin Fisher

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Well now, Trevor, this is an interesting book that you have sent me to review. You, the non-fiction review editor of The British Columbia Review, and I, the aging historian who clings to the notion that history should be grounded in the evidence of the past. This book does not fit neatly into any of those categories. It is described on the back cover as a “meticulously researched work of creative non-fiction.” I know that nothing is easier, or more bogus, than to review a book critically because I would like it to be a quite different book from the one that the author has written. I will try not to go there.

Marion McKinnon Crook is an accomplished author in a variety of genres: including accounts of her life as a nurse and rancher in the Cariboo, mysteries, advice for and about teenagers, as well as books on writing and publishing. It is an impressive list.

This book is a story about the past. History, of course, contains the word “story.” History was for so long his story whereas this one is her story. It is the story of Florence Wilson, a woman who lived much of her life in a man’s world. But here is the thing, if history is a story does that mean that a story is history? Let’s see.

So, here’s the story. Florence Wilson grew up in London in comfortable circumstances and, a writer herself, in the literary circles of Bloomsbury. She was, for instance, acquainted with Charles Dickens. For much of her life she resisted convention and traditional roles expected of her as a woman who had, at least to start with, social status. She fell on hard times when she was cheated out of her inheritance and did become a governess but to a family living in Russia. She survived a shipwreck when returning to London but that did not deter her from taking passage on the Tynemouth with sixty other single women bound for Victoria in 1862. Unlike many of the other passengers she did not come to British Columbia to find a husband. In Victoria she sets up a successful retail business. After a short time there she packed up and, in search of a greater adventure, took the several forms of transport that in 1864 made up the Cariboo Road to Barkerville.

Gold rush Barkerville was a man’s town. In Frederick Dally’s photos it was the men who struck poses for the camera. Women were less visible but present. Through Florence we get a picture of Barkerville at the height of the gold rush: the makeshift buildings, the raised boardwalks, the seasons, the mud or the dust in the street and the people scrambling to make a fortune. Florence started in business by selling supplies to miners and eventually established two saloons. They were saloons of refinement: places for drinking, reading, and conversation. They are emphatically not brothels like Fanny Bendixon’s saloons. Florence Wilson also bought into several mining operations. She was involved in literary and drama societies and in the development of the Theatre Royal which was the major cultural institution in town. She married a suitable man named Sam and they had a daughter. Then all that Florence built went up in flames, along with most of Barkerville, in the fire of 1868. The rebuilding, with more attention to fire mitigation, began the next morning. Florence moved for a time to the near-by town of Stanley that was then a thriving community but where now little is left but the cemetery. She later moved again, this time to the Napa Valley and she lived out the rest of her life in California.

Actual and well-known figures from British Columbia history pass through the pages of this book. Florence admired James Douglas and was friendly with Matthew Baillie Begbie. Joseph Trutch was the villain of the piece. Florence holds him responsible for First Nations people losing their land but she does not reflect on her own contribution to dispossession as a settler and business woman. First Nations resources were there for the picking and Florence sought atonement by joining an Indigenous woman from Lillooet to harvest berries. “Luane Joe” is one of a cast of imaginary characters. I would have thought that there were more than enough interesting characters in historic Barkerville to enliven any story. To add to a sense of immediacy, personalities both real and imagined, are given dialogue. So there are certainly elements of fiction in a book that is billed as non-fiction and that is the creative part.

For me it is a stretch to call this history and that may well be because, as one of my historian colleagues helpfully pointed out at the last BC Studies conference, I lack sufficient imagination. I have often thought, ever since I taught university summer courses about Barkerville on site in the Historic Town, that there is room for a historian’s history of Barkerville, deeply grounded in archival sources. This book, to be clear once again, is not that book and is not intended to be.

Bloomsbury to Barkerville is captivating story well told. I recommend it as a good read that opens one’s mind to the past. It certainly brings the past into the present. As I was writing this review I kept flipping back and forth between past and present tense and had to correct to the past tense. With the present decline of interest in actual history, bringing a version of the past alive is a significant contribution.

I leave it to the reader to decide for themselves whether this good story is also good history.

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Robin Fisher taught and wrote history as a faculty member at Simon Fraser University before he moved into university administration and contributed to the establishment of two new universities: the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George and Mount Royal University in Calgary. His books include Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (UBC Press, 1977; second edition, 1992) and Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 1991). He was the recipient of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing for Wilson Duff: Coming Back, A Life. [Editor’s note: Robin Fisher was recently featured in The British Columbia Review‘s Interview Series, in a video segment that was screened in Charlottetown on June 3, 2026 as part of the Canadian Historical Association’s Annual Meeting, to honour the career British Columbia historian Patricia E Roy. He has reviewed books by Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs (edited and with an introduction by Wilson Duff), Alvin Finkel, Carol E. Mayer, Ted Binnema, Jim Reynolds, and Daniel Marshall for The British Columbia Review, and contributed two popular essays, The Way We Were: Two Friends, Two Historians and “The Noise of Time” and the Removal of History?]

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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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