Bruce McIntyre Watson, with BCGS President Lorraine Irving and BCGS Book Award Chair, Alice Marwood, at the BCGS Walter Draycott Library, July 2011, Surrey, BC.

Bruce McIntyre Watson’s three biographical volumes on fur traders working west of the Rocky Mountains to 1858, Lives Lived West of the Divide: A Biographical Dictionary of Fur Traders Working West of the Rockies, 1793-1858, was awarded First Prize in the British Columbia Genealogical Society’s first annual 2011 Family History Book Awards, July 17, 2011 at the BCGS Walter Draycott Library’s annual Open House.  Details of some 3500 individuals are in these books; along with more from the results of the author’s twenty years of research into daily life in the fur trade. Although described as a ‘biographical dictionary’, all three volumes should be read together as each contains different information about the fur trade.

These were published through the Centre for Social, Spatial, and Economic Justice and are for sale through Lulu.com. Volume 1 though is free there as an electronic book (PDF).  Also available at Lulu.com is Bruce’s Watson’s previous book, co-authored with Jean Barman, Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006).