Muddling Through

When two thousand British bank clerks, butchers, housewives, saleswomen, remittance men and ex-Boer War soldiers followed the charismatic but inept Anglican minister, Isaac Barr, to the Canadian prairies in 1903 their rallying cry was "Canada for the British."

Despite the Canadian governmentís expectations and Barrís assurances, however, very few of the colonists knew anything about farming. As the granddaughter of Barr colonists, Lynne Bowen grew up on stories of what it was like to be young and green in the huge, raw Canadian west. These are those stories complemented by the diaries memoirs and letters left by the Barr colonists to tell their remarkable story.

Lynne Bowen is the author of five books of Western Canadian history: Robert Dunsmuir, Those Lake People, Muddling Through, Three Dollar Dreams and Boss Whistle. She has won the Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for writing British Columbia history, the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the Canadian Historical Association's Regional Certificate of Merit. Bowen was the Rogers Communications Co-Chair of Creative Non-Fiction Writing at UBC from 1992 to 2006. She lives in Nanaimo, BC.