One of the community highlights of the winter is annual Christmas gathering of the Salmon Arm branch of the Okanagan Historical Society.
Every year a guest speaker gives a presentation on some aspect of Shuswap history. This year Dave Harper will be presenting a talk and slideshow on wharves, boats, and activities that place in bygone days in the Salmon Arm bay.
Dave moved to Salmon Arm as a youngster in 1961.
“I started grade eight here and I graduated in 1966. I went to the school of hard knocks for a few years and then I went to Capilano.”
He studied media where he learned everything from photography and graphics to audio.
“I came back here as a freelancer for quite a few years - mostly photography and I taught night school. I moved to Vancouver and worked in multimedia production. In the early days of multimedia it was mostly fancy slide shows.”
Then Dave went back to school for a diploma course in computers and technology.
“That set me off in my present path. I moved back here because my parents lived here and not doing so well. I was the only child who wasn’t married and didn’t have kids. I had no problem moving back here, I’m not a city person.”
In the meantime Dave taught computer courses at the college got involved with the museum. He helped with several projects dealing with old photographs.
Through this interest, Dave eventually became something of a serendipitous expert on Salmon Arm’s past.
“I’m not a trained historian, but I love dealing with old photographs. I started talking to people and collecting stories.”
The Historical Society asked him to do a 20-minute presentation on the early activities in the Salmon Arm bay. The only challenge for him is keeping it to 20 minutes.
“It was fun getting stuff together,” he says, adding that he could easily talk for four hours on the subject.
“If we were sitting here 10,000 years ago, the water would be 300 feet above our heads.”
He will talk on the panorama of the valley and how it looked long before the white people came, and what kind of activity the Salmon Arm bay would have seen in the time of the early European settlers.
It would take decades before anyone realized the beauty and potential of the Salmon Arm bay.
“It there was any tourism it was in Sicamous and along Mara Lake - people were heading to the Okanagan. The Shuswap was a dead end destination. The early maps showed Sicamous and they’d say, ‘Yeah more lake…’”
Dave Harper’s talk for the Salmon Arm Branch of the Okanagan Historical Society will be on Sunday, December 3 at 2 p.m., at the Senior Drop-In Centre, 31 Hudson Ave. Everyone is welcome.