Description

---

A collection of extraordinary stories about ordinary people from BC’s wild frontier.

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 small town. Here are the stories of those whose lives left some mark on the community—visitors like Hudson’s Bay Company trader Simon McGillivray and famed painter Emily Carr; and the lesser known pioneers, prospectors, and 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, Mynett’s 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.

About the Author

---

Geoff Mynett was born in England where he qualified as a Barrister. After emigrating to British Columbia in 1973, he became a Canadian citizen, requalified as a lawyer and practiced law until his retirement. His first book, Service on the Skeena (Ronsdale Press, 2019), received a Jeanne Clarke Memorial Award. His second book, Pinkerton’s and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot, and his third book, Murders on the Skeena, were both published by Caitlin Press. All three books were bestsellers in BC. Geoff and his wife Alice live in Vancouver and have two sons.

Praise For…

---

For Murders on the Skeena: “Mynett’s latest book features a series of fascinating and often sensational events in small town Hazelton, BC, during the time of the early Hudson Bay Company settlement into the traditional territory of the Gitxsan First Nations. Through impeccable archival research, Mynett entertains the reader with stories of historic events and precedent-setting legal, political and cultural conflict taking place in one small region of Northern British Columbia.” —Jane Stevenson, author of A Trail of Two Telegraphs and The Railroader’s Wife
 

For Pinkerton's and the Hunt for Simon Gunanoot: “Simon Peter Gunanoot is the iconic Gitxsan outlaw who stands astride a ‘Wild West’ in British Columbia that was wilder than any American pulp writer imagined. It’s a story of colliding cultures, colonial authority, Indigenous resistance and of conflicting concepts of rights, justice and governance that still reverberate through current events. Sifting through secret police reports dispatched during a thirteen-year manhunt, Geoff Mynett sheds a shrewd and discerning light on the social history they inadvertently reveal. As compelling as the best police procedural, his meticulously researched book is an extraordinary and important contribution to BC history.” —Stephen Hume, long-time Vancouver Sun columnist and award-winning author