The Spirit Wrestlers: Doukhobors in Russia and Canada, Part I
George Woodcock describes the emergence of a heretical Orthodox sect in eighteenth-century Russia, and their eventual emigration to Canada.
The southern high road that runs close to the American border is the least used way from Vancouver through the mountains to the great Canadian plains beyond the Continental Divide. Yet it is not only a very spectacular route, crossing seven high mountain ranges, running beside line trout rivers and splendid lakes, and following intimate valleys where the pioneer past lapses gently away.
It is also an historic route, made in part by the Royal Engineers who were imported in the early 1860s at the time of the Cariboo Gold Rush, and passing through the half-deserted towns of a later mining boom, that of the 1890s, when the American miners came over the border to prospect the wealth of silver and copper at Rossland and Greenwood and Grand Forks.
But in terms of a history less local and less fleeting than that of the mining booms, the most interesting buildings one sees on this long road through the mountain ranges are the gaunt, square houses of fading pink brick that stand in pairs among the last remnants of dying orchards in the Sunshine Valley at Grand Forks and over the Monashee Range in the Kootenay Valley.
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