The vivid, personal accounts of four women who lived and travelled as settlers in early British Columbia.

??a cloud passing away from the face of the moon revealed a band of wild horses bearing down upon us at a full gallop. As they came near and saw us they divided into two groups, passing by on either side. Had the moon not come out they would probably have become entangled in our tent ropes, and we should not have lived to tell the tale.??Violet Sillitoe, between Osoyoos and Penticton

The women in this book were trailblazers. The frontiers they lived on were not only geographical but personal. As they left the drawing rooms of England and eastern Canada for new lives in the far West, social patterns were disrupted, and the status quo dissolved. On the wagon roads and river boats of nineteenth-century British Columbia, they found risks, opportunities and freedoms far beyond those familiar to their more settled contemporaries. By Snowshoe, Buckboard and Steamer tells four extraordinary stories of life on the unruly edge of empire.

Winner of the 1998 BC Lieutenant Governor's Medal for Historical Writing.

Kathryn Bridge, PhD, is an archivist and historian who has curated exhibitions and written about Emily Carr for several decades. Her research is focused on the body of Carr's art and writings held in the BC Archives collections. Exhibitions include Emily Carr: Artist, Author, Eccentric Genius (2001) and The Other Emily (2010) at the Royal BC Museum, Victoria; and Intimate Glimpses: The Early Life of Emily Carr (2011) at the Wing Sang Gallery, Vancouver. Writings include the introduction to Carr's Klee Wyck (2004) and the forewords to Wildflowers by Emily Carr (2003) and Sister and I: From Victoria to London, an illustrated manuscript journal by Carr published in 2011. Bridge's Emily Carr in England is to be published by the Royal BC Museum in 2014.

Kathryn Bridge's profile page

"By Snowshoe, Buckboard and Steamer remain[s] engaging, readable, and pertinent . . . it is clear that Bridge spent many hours with the archival collections she draws from, a fact that shines through in her writing, analysis, and choice of artwork and photographs." — Kelly Black, The Ormsby Review