Married in Victoria in 1880, Eunice M.L. Harrison (1860-1950) was a B.C. pioneer whose memoirs extend to 1906. While her husband Judge Eli Harrison was busy dispensing frontier justice in the B.C. Interior, she mingled with the Douglas family, met First Nations people, and rode on 'the unfinished transcontinental.' A visit to San Francisco coincided with the 1906 earthquake, and Harrison walked the length of the burning city, through the mobs, to the dockyard for a ship to take her home. The Judge's Wife: Memoirs of a BC Pioneer (Ronsdale 2002 $19.95) was dictated to Harrison's husband, who did the typing. Edited by Ronald Hatch, it's introduced by UBC historian Jean Barman. "The memoir,"; she notes, "is one of the very few by the first generation of newcomer women to B.C."; Queen Victoria sent Eunice Harrison an opera bag as a wedding gift because her maternal great-grandmother Eunice Bagster had inherited a fortune through the Bagster Publishing House, producers of the Ruby Foolscap Octavo version of the Bible in 1812. 0-921870-92-2

[Image: Cover of The Judge's Wife]

[BCBW 2003] "Women"