Now if you know him you'll know he needs no recommendation.
A proper BC legend for documenting it's history and gold rushes. Going through my books I'm tempted to sell them, these are collectable, highly sought after - but - also still filled with great information, and many a stream that wasn't worthwhile at 50 cents a day is worthwhile now that gold is at $5,000 per ounce.
Anyways, flipping through them and I still find value, and checking the library find they have none of him in stock, so it appears I won't be selling him off anytime soon...
I know, not Bill Barlee, but when I lived in Calgary I made do with what I could find...
Having recently replaced my (stolen) "Bounty Hunter" metal detector with a vintage Fisher "Gold Bug" (an infinitely better machine at a fraction of the price) these have me pulling at the reins to get out and detect some forgotten and unrecovered caches of my own, or merely scope out some abandoned homesteads and ghost towns for what treasures I may find. The exciting thing about Barlee is he reports on Caches that have been found, as well as detailing any number that haven't. Now - back to my current book on the go - Bruce Ramsey's "Ghost Towns of British Columbia", of which any number are related to the gold rush and a good many have been lost and forgotten in the 62 years since it's first printing. So far it's oddly lyrical and pays a poetic homage to all the vanished places (that are waiting for me to metal detect their remains...). A quote from a newspaper at the time describing a ball put on at a (now ghost) town: "I insist that the wines are not made of burnt sugar and lightening...". Like any great book it's putting me on to a whole pile of other contemporaneous authors from the gold rush, and as I'm a sucker for fist person history...
I have the detector, I need wheels. Bad.