The R.C. Harris Fonds

The R.C. Harris fonds was accessioned into the UBC Rare Books and Special Collections in 2000; over the next five years, the collection was expanded and distributed among many archives in British Columbia, including the Maritime Museum of BC and the Historical Map Society of British Columbia. In addition, 250 books from his personal library can now be found in the reference section of the West Vancouver Memorial Library. See The R.C. Harris Fonds for an overview of the accession process at UBC Rare Books. 

Relevant articles from BC Outdoors, BC Historical News, and the VNHS journal Discovery can be accessed at Vancouver Public Library. See Publications for more information.

There are two important things to note about the R.C. Harris fonds: first, the fonds contain copies of almost every map of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest to have ever been produced. The R.C. Harris fonds is also a repository of early histories, correspondence, surveys and photographs which pertain to early British Columbia history; particular research interests include The Hudson's Bay Company and The Royal Engineers. 

Second, R.C. Harris was known for his historical maps of BC; he used his research to write seventy-five articles for BC Outdoors, and to organize many trips with both the Vancouver Natural History Society and Federation of BC Naturalists. See A Historical Atlas for more information.

This project features two of the R.C. Harris maps: The 1848 HBSC Trail from Alexandra Lodge and The Hope Trail, North of the Skagit River. These trails can both be found in Bob Harris's published work, Best of BC’s Hiking Trails: Twenty Great Hikes (MacLean Hunter, 1986) and epitomize the combination of field work and research that went into every trip report and article authored by R.C. Harris. For more information on R.C. Harris and his work, see R.C. Harris: A Biographical Sketch. 

To view a full PDF of the Finding Aid for the R.C. Harris Fonds at UBC Rare Books & Special Collections, simply click on the above front page image.

R. C. Harris: A Biographical Sketch

Robert C. "Bob" Harris

"If Bob Harris had been working for [Swan Wooster Engineering], the bridge would never have collapsed,” recalls Louise Irwin, a longstanding member of the Vancouver Natural History Society. 

Robert C. “Bob” Harris (1922-1998) was an engineer by trade and a historian at heart: after twenty-five years of service with the Dominion Bridge Company in Vancouver, Harris joined the Structural Engineering Company of Buckland & Taylor and oversaw the construction of Granville, Oak Street and Port Mann Bridges, as well as work on the Second Narrows and Lions Gate. Bob worked for Structural Engineering from 1975 until his untimely death in 1998; his bridge surveys for Lions Gate in the early 1990s are still kept for reference at the University of British Columbia’s archive for government publications. He served with the Royal Engineers in WWII and received his degree in Civil Engineering from the University of London in 1948; that same year, he immigrated to Canada with his wife Rita.

His English upbringing and move to Canada naturally prompted his interest in the Royal Engineers: a corps of the British Army responsible for the first European surveys in the Pacific Northwest. Bob served with the Royal Engineers during the Second World War, and his interest in RE history consumed his spare time. After his move to Vancouver, Bob made monthly trips to the provincial archives in Victoria to review maps, survey reports, and correspondence. He worked closely with VNHS members Bruce Ward, Bill Hughes and Harley Hatfield. Bruce took over the natural history division of VNHS after Bob passed away, and is listed as the primary donor for the R.C. Harris fonds stored at IKB Rare Books. The pair were often seen pouring over maps on the kitchen table at the Harris family home: a habit that his wife Rita attempted to remedy by confining their workspace to the basement. See The Royal Engineers and Hudson’s Bay Company for more historical context.

Bob was an active member of North Shore Hikers, the BCMountaineering Club, the Vancouver Natural History Society and BC Historical MapSociety. He also volunteered on Bowen Island as Warden for Ecological Reserve No. 48, just west of what is now known as Apodaca Park. Bob was not merely a historian, he was also something of a pioneer: Apodaca Park was largely overgrown by the time the VNHS trudged its way through the undergrowth. It is because of Bob Harris that many of these trails were re-cut and open to the public; see The 1848 HSBC Trail for an example. Largely neglected since the HBC traders cut along First Nations hunting routes at the turn of the nineteenth century, Bob’s expert bush-whacking and his troop of loyal followers paved the way for future exploration. As Louise Irwin recalls: 

“Bob didn’t see rain, snow, or bush-whacking. It was all the same to him, he always had the same stride...Bob said ‘No, I’ve got my eye on that mountain and I’m going straight ahead.” 

Travelling with Bob was something of an adventure: you had to keep up, but the keeners always did. He was not one to pause and describe a particular region to the group, but hiked in view of an endpoint. He organized about three trips a year for the Vancouver Natural History Society from 1977-1996, which ranged in length from three to five days. To his campers, “his quiet good-natured humour was a delight on the trail or around the campfire.” He was a tough, quirky and rigorous trip leader known for sleeping in the rain with nought but his coat and conveniently forgetting to bring his own meals –only to scavenge from the healthy amount of leftovers that campers inevitably offered to him. His hikes began at 8:00 in the morning and went long after supper; when his group had pitched their tents or hiked out, Bob would often hike ahead with Bill Hughes to do field research. His reconnaissance provided the data for seventy-five articles on trails for BC Outdoors, twenty of which were published in a 1986 volume Best Hikes of BC. See Publications for more information.

The Vancouver Natural History Society began leading natural history trips around the same time that Bob joined; he also assisted in their summer camp programs and the Federation of BC Naturalists’ “Exploratory Camps.” These trips were an opportunity for both the leaders and campers to enter unexplored territory; some of these included the Height of the Rockies (1993), Ilguatchuz Mountain, West Chilcotins (1994), Altin Lake in Northwest BC (1995), Lorna Lake, Central Chilcotins (1996), Nonda Creek in Northern Rockies (1997). Louise Irwin was present on the first of these trips listed; at the Height of the Rockies, Bob spotted an inconsistency on the map. His intuition and expertise led him to believe that the lake drained on the opposite side, and when the group ascended the ridge, he discovered he was correct. 

Letter from the BC Geographical Names
Office, naming "Harris Ridge"

“Bob loved to be right,” Louise recalls, “You couldn’t send anything to him without being corrected.” His attention to detail translated well into his research for BC Outdoors and VNHS trips: often correcting topographical inconsistences or tracing his way along HSBC and First Nations hunting trails, Bob’s research, publications, and reconnaissance trips are indispensable to our current knowledge of BC natural history. He passed away quite suddenly of a heart attack in 1998, during an opening performance by the Vancouver Opera; sadly, the performance that night was arranged in his honour. The BC Geographical Names Office assigned a section of the South Chilcotin Mountains, the north Cinnabar Basin, to be named “Harris Ridge,” in recognition of this BC historian. 

R.C. Harris Fonds: Uses and Nature of the Fonds

The R. C. Harris fonds are a compendium of maps, publications, research notes, books and photographs. They are not restricted to Bob Harris’s own cartographic works, but are rather a summation of a lifetime of research. The maps range in date from 1835-1981, and are marked as per a personal notation system developed by Mr. Harris. Ideally, a fond is meant to retain the order of its creator; according to the finding aid, the R.C. Harris maps were filed into trays to honour the “map cabinet” that Mr. Harris himself kept in his work space. This is often difficult in an archive such as UBC RBSC. As senior Archivist Chelsea Shriver states:

 "I think the most important thing to preserve is the intellectual order. As long as we note that in the finding aid, the user would be able to recreate it in order to understand how it was arranged by the creator..."

It took two years before IKB Rare Books finally received the collection in 2000; UBC is only one among many museums and archives who took an interest in Bob Harris’s work. Rare Books has a mostly open policy regarding family donations to the UBC archives; the process typically involves an appraisal, both financially and in terms pre-existing materials which have been stored.

Maritime Archaeologist James Delgado was involved in the distribution process for the R.C. Harris materials in the years after Mr. Harris passed away. When asked about his involvement, he writes that

The key thing here (and then) was that when a person dedicates a portion of their life to research, and amasses a collection such as Bob's, it is essential that it go into a public repository for other scholars and interested parties to consult. Universities are ideal because they are committed to research and ongoing scholarship. UBC was the right place, in my mind, not only for that but because of Bob's interests, which fit nicely into the scope of the UBC library's existing collections.

Bruce Ward, then Secretary to the BC Historical Maps Society, donated the collection to IKB Rare Books in 2000. It is an unusual fonds, given that only about ten percent of the materials are originals; the rest consist of copies, maps both complete and incomplete, reference books and ephemera once kept in the Harris family home. About 15 drawers, amounting to about 500 maps in total, were received by UBC in 2004. It is clear both from his articles and from Bob Harris’s own hand-written finding aids that many of these files were intended for future use; either for the historian, or natural history enthusiast. 

A Historical Atlas: Harris Fonds in Context

The earliest maps in the R. C. Harris fonds date from 1778 and largely include maps of the BC Interior and Pacific Northwest. Most of his research focused on the Royal Engineers from 1771-1871, but information on the Hudson’s Bay Company trails, as well as early mining routes, are also an extensive part of the collection. His maps often include both First Nations and HBSC routes in tandem with modern trails. Using his own legend, Harris often drew in railway beds, HBC trails, old cattle roads as well as modern trail routes. As Bev Ramey, Director of the Vancouver Natural History Society states:

My understanding was that Bob wanted to encourage people to get outdoors in BC, and explore its many back-country areas, and with awareness of this history of the area, especially who had ‘built’ or surveyed the trails previously…

These maps were produced both for public interest, and in preparation for one of Bob Harris’s guided hikes. He led trips for the Vancouver Natural History Society and North Shore Hikers, often providing his own maps or annotated versions of topographical charts. Some were included in his articles for BC Outdoors, as well as his published work Best of BC’s Hiking Trails.

The Hudson’s Bay Company

Captain George Vancouver's chart of 
Vancouver Island and "New Hanover,"

or what came be called British Columbia

Captain Vancouver is credited with some of the earliest maps of the Pacific Northwest, but his enterprise was limited to the coast. Many of the major rivers are absent, and only the mouth of the Columbia river is shown in his charts. From 1789-1795 Captain Vancouver and some notable Spanish explorers began to map out the isles of the Canadian Pacific; their names have since become familiar toponyms on navigational charts, from Texada Island, Galiano and the Juan de Fuca Strait.

On the coast, a series of successive archipelagos ranging from Haida Gwaii to the San Juans posed a navigational challenge; in the interior, the foreboding Rocky Mountain range cut across the rolling plateau of the Canadian prairies. It was not until Alexander Mackenzie trudged through to Bella Coola in 1793 that Europeans began to lay claim to the rugged BC interior. Primarily, these first explorers were motivated by the same thing: the fur trade. It was two hundred years before Hudson’s Bay and the North West Company began to build trading forts in BC, headed by Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and David Thompson. These two companies merged in 1821; from thereon, the Hudson’s Bay Company actively made use of the trails, forts, and First Nations trading relationships to expand its commercial territory.

Returning, we ascended the Fraser in canoes as far as the mouth of the Que-que-al-al. where the village of Hope now stands; and thence, hap-hazard, struck across the Cascade Mountains to the Similkameen, which we followed down until we fell in with our horses at an appointed rendez-vous in the open country.¹

 The R.C. Harris fonds includes many of the reports, early maps, and trip logs of these first explorers. The two charts featured here are copies from Captain George Vancouver's travels on the HMS Discovery, and can be found in the R.C. Harris fonds. Explorerers of particular interest include David Thompson, Alexander Ross, Samuel Black and, most notably, A.C. Anderson, the man behind the HBC brigade trails.

George Vancouver's charts of the Queen Charlotte
Islands (Haida Gwaii) 

British Columbia only joined Federation in 1871; the Canadian government decided that a railway could connect the two seemingly disparate poles across the 49^th parallel. The Fraser River and Cariboo Gold Rush led to an influx of new immigrants seeking their fortunes; this put a cultural and economic strain on the new colony. When the United States bought Alaska in 1867, the Dominion of Canada decided to take action: debts were paid, a railway was promised, federal support was guaranteed. The Canadian Pacific Railway soon proved to be a nigh-impossible task, but the “Last Spike” was finally struck by CPR patron Donald Smith in 1885, and the tracks were extended to Vancouver in 1886.

To avoid the Black Canyon and Hells Gate section of the Fraser, and the rocky mountain spurs now pierced by the Alexandra and other tunnels, the trail angled northeast over the sidehill, aiming for the lowest part of the ridge and Kamloops. Even today, the section of the Fraser Canyon avoided by the HBC trail requires sixteen railway tunnels, four highway tunnels, three fish ladders and innumerable retaining walls and bridges to get the traffic by, on a reasonable grade.²            

For early settlers, most of the interest lay with either the promise of gold or the profits of trade. See 1848 HSBC Trail from Alexandra Lodge for

more information.

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1 Anderson, A.C. The History of the Northwest Coast. Unpublished transcript, n.d. in R.C. Harris Fonds, Box 66, Folder 5. The Irving K. Barber Rare Books and Special Collections at University of British Columbia Libraries.^↩
2 Harris, Bob. "The 1848 HSBC Trail to Alexandra Lodge." Best of BC's Hiking Trails: Twenty Great Hikes. Vancouver: MacLean Hunter, 1986. 116. ^↩

The 1848 HSBC Trail from Alexandra Lodge

The 1848 HSBC Trail is the longest example of early trading routes; until Bob Harris unearthed it with a team of volunteers from the Vancouver Natural History Society, it remained largely neglected and overgrown. VNHS member Louise Irwin was present on the trip, and recalls clearing away the undergrowth to expose the stone foundation of the Cariboo Wagon Road: they were definitely “in for some bush-whacking.”

The first traders had only two options for long distance travel: either they canoed the river network, or went on horseback. Whitewater rapids and a lack of adequate materials made the latter more favorable; as a result, a network of “horse roads” ran across BC. This trail runs from Fort Yale to Kamloops, which served as the Thompson River District office for the Hudson's Bay Company. The first section, north of Fort Yale, is notorious for its difficult terrain; HBC employees purportedly nicknamed it “Douglas Portage,” making fun of BC’s first governor, James Douglas.

The 1848 HSBC route connects to the First Brigade trail used by the Hudson’s Bay Company. It is listed as Trail 15 in Bob Harris’s Best of BC’s Hiking Trails, and can be readily accessed by hikers today. Not only is this trail a testament to Harris’s further research, in which he cites the “well documented” materials he collected and perused, but it is also emblematic of Bob Harris’s contributions in the field: without his efforts, this route would have faded into history.

The Royal Engineers

Ubi quo Fas et Gloria Ducunt

The Royal Engineer motto, from the Latin for “Everywhere the right and glory lead,” is emblematic of their role in British Columbia history. Judge Howay published the first history of this British corps in Canada in 1910, entitled The Work of the Royal Engineers in 1858-1862. In his papers, he writes:

Taking stock of the work of the Engineers up to the end of 1863, we find that all the important explorations in the colony were performed by them; the whole peninsula between Burrard Inlet and Fraser River was surveyed by them; all the surveys and towns and country lands were made by them; the main roads were laid out by them…¹

The list goes on: The Royal Engineers drafted and printed maps, established a building society by 1862, and were responsible for the first churches and schoolhouses in New Westminster – the first city on the Canadian Pacific Coast. They uniquely provided both military and civil service to the new colony, and most recruits were volunteers. The Royal Engineers came in three waves: the first and second arrivals in 1845 and 1858-1862 were sent as supplementary forces during the Oregon Boundary Dispute. The Oregon Treaty was signed in 1846, intended to resolve rising pressures between Americans and their neighbours to the north; but the boundary wasn’t drawn until four years of negotiation drew to a close in 1862. 

In 1856, the American Northwest Boundary Commission led by Archibald Campbell and astronomer Major J. G. Parke set forth to delineate the official 49^th Parallel. Most of the Commission consisted of Royal Engineers; many of its members are now known to us through the place names in the area. Bob Harris wrote an article on this topic for the journal Canoma, or the Canadian Permanent Committee on Geographical Names, in 1990.

The third arrival of Royal Engineers in 1858-1859 came “in four groups,” in response to rising concerns over the safety of the colony, by Governor James Douglas. The Royal Navy and Hudson’s Bay Company limited their surveillance to the seas; his request for more officers was met immediately by Lieutenant Edward Bulwar Lytton, who writes:

It will devolve upon them to survey those parts of the country which may be considered most suitable for resettlement, to mark out allotments of land for public purposes, to suggest a site for the seat of government, to point out where roads should be made…²

This was not only the largest group to have reached Canadian shores, but it would prove to be the most famous: contending with “the difficult terrain, the high prices and the disorganization,” 165 Royal Engineers, many with wives and children, set to work as the Columbia Division of the British corps. Townships in Yale, Douglas, and Hope were settled in 1859; during this period, trails were cut from New Westminster to Burrard Inlet; Hope to Lytton; Douglas to Lillooet, and access to Boston Bar. In 1863, the Cariboo Road was built from Yale to Barkerville, spanning some 650 km along the Fraser River; this is the same route being used today. 

I proceeded with the party to Burrard Inlet, to commence opening a trail from that place to Lillooet. After exploring for some miles around, we commenced at the mouth of a creek one mile from Moodyville. We found the country very heavily timbered, with very thick underbrush, and boggy for the first mile, which caused considerable corduroying and bridging… 

I tied the horses there one night on what was dry ground, and in the morning we found them standing in water up to their bellies in a lake. We had to wade up to the knees to get them out; we had to send them off the coast to save their lives. ³

The R.C. Harris fonds include many of the initial surveys, documents and correspondence from the Royal Engineers and Public Works reports in the BC Sessional Papers of the Colonial Government; of particular interest were Lieutenant Howard Palmer, as well as the exploration of the Rocky Mountains by John Palliser, and George Dawson’s Geological Survey of Canada.

The Royal Engineers were officially decommissioned in 1863, but many of them remained to form the New Westminster Volunteer Rifles, Vancouver Island Rifle Volunteers and Victoria Rifle Corps. In 1866, the Home Guards and Seymour Artillery Company were established in New Westminster, also largely from former Royal Engineer members. After a succession of debates concerning the way in which the southwest of the BC interior would be policed, the Canadian Engineers Corps, explicitly modelled after their British counterpart, was formed in 1903. Today they are known as the CME, Canadian Military Engineers branch of the Canadian Armed Forces. 

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1 Judge Howay papers, Royal Engineers file, Special Collections division at UBC Libary; in Frances M. Woodward, "The Influence of the Royal Engineers on the Development of British Columbia," BC Studies Vol. 12 (1974): 21. ^↩
2 Lytton to Douglas, July 31 1858, Despatch no. 6 in B.C. Papers, in Woodward, "Royal Engineers," 15-16.^↩
3 George Jenkinson, October 8 1875, Report of Public Works, in R.C. Harris Fonds, Box 11 Folder 2. ^↩

The Hope Trail, North of the Skagit River

"The Hope Trail Played an important role in the history of British Columbia. Over it have plodded the packtrains of the Hudson's Bay Company, miners with visions of riches and the pioneers who settled in the Okanagan and the Smilkameen Valley..." ¹

Bob allows readers and trail-goers to walk with the 4000 gold miners lured by the call of Rock Creek in 1859. The Hope Trail it is listed as Trail 18 in Bob Harris’s Best of BC Hiking Trails, and would have been first among his research interests: it is one of the earliest examples of the Royal Engineers and their contribution to early access to British Columbia communities.

“Here trees are fewer, mountain meadows larger, and the Skaist River insignificant in its rocky channel below. The pass itself is narrow and level, with the fall east to Whipsaw Creek starting imperceptibly.” ²

 After sixty horses died during a fall crossing, Governor James Douglas decided to redirect the route from the North Cascades from Hope to Princeton. Colonel Moody of the Royal Engineers, among the first four RE divisions to arrive in Canada, received the commission; in 1860, Sergeant William McColl made the cut. Edgar Dewdney provided the brawn, and due to his labors the Dewdney Trunk trail received its name. Dewdney is also a common eponym for landmarks in the City of Maple Ridge.

"Here Captain Grant located the high trail on the south side of the valley, but the north-facing ravines and sidehills stayed choked with snow until too late in the year." ³

The "old Dewdney trail, or Canyon trail" is still in use, but a second trail was cut in 1861 by Captain Grant and Sergeant McColl up the Skagit Bluff river valley; near 37 Mile Creek, the crossing proved to be too treacherous. In 1864 John Allison  rebuilt this "zig zag" into the valley; his trail improvements, Captain Grant's route, and the Dewdney trail are all included on the above trail map.

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1 Bob Harris, "The Hope Trail North of the Skagit River," Best of BC's Hiking Trails: Twenty Great Hikes (MacLean Hunter, 1986), 99. ^↩
2 Harris describing Hope Pass, "Hope Trail North of the Skagit River," 104.^↩
3 Ibid., 102.^↩

Publications

Bob Harris authored 75 articles for BC Outdoors magazine from 1974-1986, and another 23 trails were published in BC Historical News from 1978-1989. Twenty of his articles for BC Outdoors were compiled in a volume, entitled The Best of BC Hiking Trails: 20 Great Hikes (McLean Hunter, 1986) which is now out of print. This book was meant to be part of a series, but due to lack of funds by the VNHS, it remains the only one. Apart from a few minor changes, most of the trails are still up to date; Bob’s rigorous historical research and hand-drawn maps can be seen in this book, which is included in the RBSC R.C. Harris fonds.

His last contribution to Canadian natural history is a database of maps: this was to be Bob Harris’s final contribution to BC history. From over two thousand maps in his collection, one hundred of these were to be selected in a comprehensive historical atlas of British Columbia, up to the year 1871. The remainder of these maps were to be produced in a compendium; but this never made it to print. Instead, Secretary of the Historical Map Society of British Columbia, Bruce Ward, took over the project.

This is now publicly available online, and can be accessed at the Historical Map Society of British Columbia Online Database.

The database is currently overseen by Derek Hayes, author of numerous historical atlases of Canada, including British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas and Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley, both of which made use of the materials in the R.C. Harris fonds.

Acknowledgements

A special thanks to VNHS member Louise Irwin and Vancouver Naturalists Director Bev Ramey for their time and support. Additional thanks goes to maritime archaeologist James Delgado, historian Derek Hayes, and UBC RBSC archivists Chelsea Shriver and Katherine Kalsbeek for providing further information on the accession process for the R.C. Harris fonds. I would also like to express my appreciation for the Bowen Historians at the Bowen Island Museum & Archives for their support during the research process for this project. Finally, many thanks to Rita, Elizabeth and Margaret Harris, for granting permissions for the use of the R.C. Harris maps in this publication.

Works Cited

McGillivray, Brett. "Modifying the Landscape: The Arrival of Europeans." Geography of British Columbia: People and Landscapes in Transition. 2nd ed. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005. 61-72.

Purssell, Norman. “Memories of Bob Harris.” Unpublished work, Vancouver, 1998.

Ramey, Bev ed. “Robert (Bob) Harris, Appendix 09: Special People.” BC Nature (Federation of BC Naturalists History. Unpublished manuscript, Vancouver, 2016.

Ward, Bruce. “The Bob Harris Collection of Papers.” Discovery 29, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 14-16.

Woodward, Frances M. "The Influence of the Royal Engineers on the Development of British Columbia." BC Studies Vol. 12 (1974): 3-51.

Refer also to “Remembering Bob Harris.” BC Naturalist 36, no. 2 (March 1998): 19; “VNHS Tribute: Bob Harris (1922-1998): A Remarkable Naturalist & Historian.” Discovery 29, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 8-19.