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Imbert Orchard

and the Story of the Province

_____

“I’m surprised how few people know about our

great characters and the people who are semi-historical,

semi-legendary that 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.”

IMBERT ORCHARD, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH J.J. MCCOLL, JUNE 1973

WHEN THE Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) hired Imbert Orchard in its Vancouver office in 1955, little did the broadcasting company realize what a legacy he would leave. As a regional editor he was responsible for receiving and reading television scripts, but it was a chance encounter with Constance Cox, an elderly Native woman from Hazelton, that changed his future. The day she walked into his office and declared, “The other day I saw a program about the [Klondike] Trail of ’98; I was there!” then proceeded to tell Orchard how the CBC had got the story all wrong, he had no idea that his decision to write her biography would be the genesis of one of the largest oral history collections in the world. Still, he borrowed a tape recorder from his secretary and began to record Cox’s story.

The interview tapes sat around for a few months until Orchard and CBC producer John Edwards got talking one day, and the two men came up with the idea to do a fifteen-minute radio series about the Skeena River based on Cox’s experiences and the accounts of a few other people Orchard knew in Vancouver. As he became fascinated with the idea of recording more stories from the Skeena River area, he and sound technician Ian Stephen travelled from Prince George to Prince Rupert by boat, “picking out the people who were worthwhile as far as broadcasting was concerned.”

As Orchard explained to interviewer J.J. McColl in 1973: “Once you get into a community, it’s very easy to get from one person to another. Most people who have lived there a number of years will know who the old-timers are, who are the characters who can tell the story from way back. Well, you go and visit these people and you find that one’s memory isn’t half as good as other people think it is… but then you find the really good people who have marvellous recall and are still quite bright, and they feel like talking to you… I’m very interested in the fact that this way of doing things, going through the country in that way, you find the story of the country; you get them to tell you the story of the country and the story of their experiences in the country. So I’m not looking for any particular subject, as a rule.”

Born Robert Henslow Graham Orchard in Brockville, Ontario, in 1909, Orchard had first come to British Columbia as a member of the Canadian Armed Forces during the Second World War. He fell in love with the province right away and set about learning as much about the history of the place as he could. He went to a local library and was surprised that he could find very little information about his new home, and that what he did find was somewhat anecdotal. Years later, in February 1978, he told Derek Reimer at the Provincial Archives of British Columbia: “And that fired me, you know; with a little bit of the background of B.C., immediately I got interested. I could see this was another story altogether, and a richer one than what I was used to in Ontario.

“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:

• TRACK 1 •

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 for low-wage manual-labour jobs, though some Chinese and Japanese people were also independent proprietors—mainly farmers and fishermen. Orchard’s informants, some of whom worked alongside Asian labourers, were acutely aware of the Asian presence in the workforce and their attitudes toward Asians were both positive and negative, reflecting many racial assumptions and some tension in society at large.

Similarly, Orchard had tremendous respect for Aboriginal oral tradition and believed the cultural stories passed down from generation to generation were the property of the nations from which they came. As a result, he did not focus on these stories. Most of Orchard’s interviews with Native peoples fall within the realm of oral history, which is to say their personal recollections about what everyday life was actually like as British Columbia went from a settlement with a hundred or so non-Native people in January 1858, before two gold rushes and Confederation, to almost 400,000 by 1911. As conveyed in the Orchard Collection and in this book, the province’s past is the story of newcomers settling the frontier in western Canada; it is a story of people accommodating to and building infrastructure in B.C.’s vast landscape in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century.

An audiotape copying setup used by the B.C. Archives’ aural history program, 1975. Photo: I-67663/Janet Cauthers

Voices of British Columbia, the book and the accompanying audio recordings, are intended to immerse you in the history of British Columbia: read the introduction to each story, listen to the speakers narrate their own experiences while you follow along in the text and look at the various photos and map. Discover a sense of place and meet the personalities who shaped the province, including Orchard himself who speaks with and prompts his interviewees. Through these audio recordings, Orchard has provided a window into the remembered past, allowing British Columbia’s pioneers to speak for themselves. As he said to Derek Reimer in 1978: “My contribution was to get people to see that… the sound of a person’s voice is an historical thing in itself. And the feeling that’s in that voice, as voice, not what comes on the page afterwards, is historically important.” I am hopeful that these samples from the collection, both audio and visual, will encourage you to look for details about B.C. history in general or even about your own specific family histories amid the material at the B.C. Archives or your local archives.