Noel, we have communicated before, but I had no idea you had done so much for presrving your hisory. It's great, both the history and the way you are preserving it. If all goes well, there is a good chance you will receive another visitor or two next spring, from over the hills from the direction of the setting sun!
What you have written on these threads should be published in, at least, a national magazine. But I haven't a clue as to any Canadian publication that would be the slightest interested in it. Actually, the Backwoodsman Magazine, printed in Texas, has printed three feature length articles of mine. One was on the homesteading era, one on shooting game for survival and one on wilderness camping. I had a lot of good comment from readers on those, but amazingly, every one who contacted me was from the USA! Not one Canadian contacted me, yet the magazine has wide circulation in Canada. One fellow from Alaska wanted information on raising farm chickens!
I'm a great believer in preserving our history, but it is hard to get it out there. As many of you know, I was able to get a book published a few years ago that recorded considerable history of the life and times in the northern areas of BC. This was only from the era of the 1950s, but that area and way of life has changed so much that younger people just have no idea of what it was like. And so little of it has been recorded. Go to your library and see what you can find on that great age of trappers and prospectors in their little log cabins, all over the place, and the now gone, wilderness trading posts they got their supplies from, in a vast area completely devoid of roads.
I personally grew up in the hinterlands of Saskatchewan in bush homestead country on the extreme northern edge of farm land, in the 1930s. Only someone who has been there can completely comprehend just what things were like. Such as the water pail frozen solid in the morning, if Dad didn't get up in the night to keep the fire going. Or walking two or three miles to the log schoolhouse when it was so cold we all had to move our desks close around the huge barrel stove to kep warm, until the building warmed up. So much history and so much drama.
I wrote a book length story on this, actually, before I wrote the book that got published. Many book publishers have read it. The verdict is always the same. We really like your story and would like to publish it, but, we don't think there would be enough reader interest in it to make it worthwhile for us. In other words, not enough Canadians care enough about our history, to buy a book. One publisher told me that by all means it should be published and the Saskatchewan archives should have a copy.
Noel, don't let this discourage you. You have a great story and are good at telling it. You should get it out there.