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The first time I recall hearing about Rivers Inlet was sometime in the 1950s when my older brother got a summer job at the Goose Bay fish cannery. The name, Goose Bay, sounded so improbable to my young ears that it awakened a curiosity about the place, and the inlet in which it was located.

Over the years I've never managed to make it to the inlet, unless you count twice passing by the mouth aboard a BC ferry, which I don't. It remains terra incognita. It's not easy to get to if you lack the resources to afford one of those fancy fishing lodges. Neither is it that easy to find out about. Rivers Inlet remains sadly underwritten, something I suppose you'd have to say about most places on our coast.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I just discovered a new book from Caitlin Press. The Good Hope Cannery: life and death at a salmon cannery, by Bruce MacDonald, is a terrific history of one of the fourteen canneries that operated in the Inlet between 1882 and 1957. The book, based on a variety of barely rescued archival records and oral interviews, contains many stunning photographs to supplement its lively text.

Will I ever get to Rivers Inlet? With each passing year it seems less likely. But now at least I have this little gem to give me some idea what I've missed.

Labels: COASTAL HISTORY, FISHERY, RIVERS INLET

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COMMENTS:

Anonymous user said:

hello Dan

as a (probably unworthy) successor to your brother I spent my 17th summer in Goose Bay as a gas boy & general roustabout working for CanFisco.(?) Tasks included scraping paint from the hull of the Asahi H. with a tiny triangular hand scraper for a week or 2, and transporting what seemed like millions of welded steel strap cooking trays from the ocean side of the old cannery to the land side. The accumulated weight of the trays and ancient ovens was causing the cannery to slide gently into the bay.
On my most memorable afternoon I was dispatched by the camp accountant, a mr. Ep Arbeider to single-handedly moor the tanker that was coming in to replenish my gasoline & diesel tanks. Operating as I was on verbal instruction only & having the practical sense of a seagull I of course ran into predictable problems but before the approaching tanker took out me & the wharf completely Mr. Arbeider & co. having thought better of leaving me on my own, came running down to save the day. In retrospect it was probably a small practical joke. Didn't feel that way at the time. While the cannery no longer functioned Goose Bay was still being used as a staging point for gill-netters & so featured a company store, a mechanic's shop, a net loft & a gas barge. We were all royally looked after by our Chinese cook Mah Kong Wing, whose favourite trick was to conceal yesterday's leftover porkchops beneath today's steamed potatoes. I have no idea whether ought remains of the fish camp now; it was old back then in 1961. I would visit it with you any time you want to go

Kip Brealey/Cochrane AB

Dec 06, 2011 at 11:16am