Fishing in British Columbia: With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina

In the early 1900s, when British Columbia was still a wild frontier waiting to be mapped, Thomas Wilson Lambert spent twelve years chasing rainbow trout through its lakes and rivers. This guidebook is the record of that obsession. Lambert writes with the particular intensity of a man who has found his place in the world, describing not just techniques and locations but the whole ecology of a region on the verge of transformation. After the Canadian Pacific Railway opened the territory to outsiders, Lambert saw what was coming and wanted to document fishing as it existed in this brief, abundant moment. His prose carries both practical wisdom and a wistful awareness that he was witnessing something vanishing. For modern readers, the book functions as both a period snapshot and a meditation on how we relate to wild places, and what we lose when development arrives. Anglers will find the specific advice still remarkable; historians will find a valuable record of early BC; any reader will find a romantic document of a man and his obsession with a fish.