British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas

A colourful and wide-ranging history of Canada's most western province illustrated with over nine hundred contemporary maps

British Columbia was among the last temperate places on Earth to appear on the map of the world, a function of its position-remote from Europe. When gold was finally discovered in quantity in 1858, leading to the gold rush that created British Columbia as a new colony, the interior was mostly unknown except for the routes blazed by the fur traders seeking the "soft gold" that characterized the exploration of much of Canada. The efforts of the explorers, the fur traders, the gold seekers, and the railway builders all involved the production of maps that showed what they had found, the routes and the settlements, the plans and the strategies that developed the province into what we know today.

In British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas, acclaimed map historian Derek Hayes has curated nearly a thousand maps — the majority of which have never been published before —along with concise text, and extensive captions. Added to numerous other illustrations, the result is a geographically visual history, a unique and fascinating viewpoint on our province's past.