Bøger af Geoff Mynett

In 1849, at just 13 years old, Philip Hankin entered the Royal Navy and engaged in campaigns to suppress the trade of enslaved people on the coasts of Africa. His naval career brought him to Vancouver Island in 1858, where he helped survey the coastline. In his journeys on Indigenous homelands, Hankin learned several Indigenous languages, a skill that would prove pivotal in his career. After leaving the navy at age twenty-eight, he walked from Yale to Barkerville to try his hand at prospecting. In this, despite family connections to Billy Barker, he failed miserably. Broke, he returned to Victoria, where within months he was appointed Superintendent of Police for the Colony of Vancouver Island, but the merger of the colonies in 1866 left him again jobless. He served as colonial secretary in British Honduras and later in British Columbia. Hankin was at the centre of BC politics in the years before BC's accession to Canada in 1871. In The Eventful Life of Philip Hankin, Geoff Mynett tells the story of the adventurous and often tumultuous life of this " rolling stone" and reveals his remarkable resilience.

In RIVER OF MISTS, best-selling author and award-winning historian Geoff Mynett returns to the Skeena River community of Hazelton to shed new light on the wide spectrum of characters who left their mark on the area. Delving as far back in time as the early 1820s, Mynett covers over a century of change in the small community which, due to its location at the forks of the Skeena and Bulkley rivers and proximity to mountain ranges, seems destined to be a hub of activity -- always industrious, often prosperous, and occasionally scandalous -- while maintaining the charming nature of a small town. The characters in RIVER OF MISTS may not be those traditionally associated with the written history of the region now known as Hazelton, BC. Here are the stories of those whose lives left some mark on the community -- visitors like Hudsons Bay Company trader Simon McGillivray, Western Union Telegraph medical officer George Chismore, and famed painter Emily Carr; and the lesser-known pioneers, prospectors, and long-time residents like HBC agent turned local business owner Thomas Hankin, and Bishop William Ridley and Jane Ridley, founders of the Hazelton Queek, named after the whistling mountain marmot. Combining folksy, small-town charm and meticulous research, Mynetts River of Mists: People of the Upper Skeena, 1821-1930 is a whimsical and informative chronicle of a century in the heart of Northern BC.

Part history, part true crime, Murders on the Skeena: True Crime in the Old Canadian West, 1884-1914 contains the true accounts of murders, crimes, and scandals--some of which remain unsolved to this day--in small-town northern British Columbia. With a focus on the victims as much as the cases themselves, award-winning author Geoff Mynett relates untold stories of BC's deadly history while providing both the natural and social history of the region. Hazelton, situated where the Bulkley River joins the Skeena River, was one of the most important sites in the interior of northern BC from 1870-1913. The gold rush, the arrival of the telegraph, and the ability for steam boats to journey upriver increased outside interest in the region. As new modes of transport were built, more non-Indigenous people arrived, and as colonial law and governance increased, so did tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. One such case was that of the murder of Amos "Charley" Youmans in 1884--the escalation of a clash between the laws and customs of the Gitxsan and those of the encroaching traders and settlers. Mynett also recounts the stories of the so-called Skeena River Uprising of 1888, a bank robbery shoot-out, and a deadly dispute between two prospectors. Peeling back historical, social, political, and geographical layers, Murders on the Skeena draws almost exclusively from documents from the time to reveal the fascinating secrets and surprising consequences of these captivating true crime tales.