As a stabilizing force in the American West, ranch families play a critical role in our country. They contribute to our nation with the food they raise, the resources they manage, and the environments and heritage they preserve. Award-winning author Linda Hussa offers readers an intimate view into the lives of six diverse ranching families. Photographer Madeleine Graham Blake provides engaging and often moving images that portray each family at work and at play. Chapters on the critical issues facing them, such as grazing rights, water use, and education, set these profiles in a larger context. This is family ranching as it is now, a tracing of how it always was, but made far more complex in modern times. The family ranch in the twenty-first century faces many challenges, from competition with government-subsidized agribusiness corporations to tax laws that encourage development over agriculture and prevent the smooth transfer of land from one generation to the next. By combining their traditions with the tools of modern technology, these people strengthen the ideal of family and give their business a vibrant and viable future. The text and photographs of The Family Ranch will inspire fresh thinking about tradition, values, and responsibility.

In 1888, a prosperous industrial family in Calne, Wiltshire, sent one of its younger sons, a lad judged to have no head for business, to Guelph Agricultural College in Ontario to learn to be a farmer. Joseph Colebrook Harris, the author’s grandfather, didn’t take to Ontario and after visiting a friend on Salt Spring Island, fell in love with BC. Eventually fetching up on the shores of the Slocan Lake, Joe bought 270 acres of hilly land in the Slocan Valley, less than thirty acres of which was really fit for farming, and began clearing the forest to build a ranch. Here is the story of Harris’s life and the next 120 years of the ranch’s, including the discovery of a silver–lead mine on the property, a period as a Japanese internment camp, brushes with American counterculture and the back-to-the-land movement, family conflicts, and an uncertain future. In detail, Ranch in the Slocan is a very particular story, but its elements have repeated themselves across Canada. Settlers lived within bounded space, of which the Harris ranch is an extreme example, and adapted to cultural and social changes. Drawing from letters, diaries, family stories and recollections, photographs, as well as official records, Harris offers a case study in the history of homesteading, and a portrait of his family’s experiences in the Slocan Valley. The Harris ranch produced a little income now and then but was not, and never has been, a commercial success. Its yield was not so much measured by the market as by the more intangible pleasures of living within a diverse local economy in a remarkable place.

An entertaining, fast-paced look at early ranching in British Columbia. Frontier historian Ken Mather is known for his fascinating, in-depth profiles of the men and women who established a distinctive ranching culture in Western Canada over a hundred years ago. Now, in this concise collection of stories—based on Mather’s column in the Vernon Morning Star—readers will meet even more colourful characters, gain insightful tidbits on cowboy culture, and read about little-known cattle drives that stagger the imagination. Ranch Tales highlights the achievements, hardships, and exploits of Newman “King of the Range” Squires, “lady rancher” Elizabeth Greenbow, cow boss Joe Coutlee, the gold-seeking Jeffries brothers who came all the way from Alabama, and many more. This delightful book is a perfect companion to Mather’s other ranching histories and will appeal to anyone interested in the early days of the western frontier.