Yellowhead Highway to Prince Rupert, BC

We’ve spent the past two days exploring the Canadian port town of Prince Rupert.  The town boasts the deepest ice-free harbor in North America, and is the nearest major North American shipping port to Shanghai, China (a couple of fascinating factoids we learned when we took a tour of the port authority’s visitor center).

The town was founded in 1910 and many of the buildings from its early days have been preserved.  There are lots of pubs and shops near the town docks in an area called Cow Bay – so named because a farmer once had a herd of cows shipped here via barge.  All of the trash cans, signposts, etc have a dairy cow theme.  Some businesses have taken the cow theme even further, one of the notable cafes is called Cowpuccino’s.

The town’s Museum of Northern British Columbia showcases the town’s history and has a wonderful collection of First Nations art and artifacts, including masks, ceremonial costumes, and traditional cedar bent boxes.  I was fascinated by this shaman’s headdress – made of long pointy Grizzly bear claws.

There was a temporary exhibit on Asian and Pacific Islander masks.  But one of the ones on display looked a little out of place to me.  What do you think?

We also took a tour of the North Pacific Cannery Museum, just outside town.  It was established in 1889 and ran continuously for almost 100 years.

Our tour guide was an elderly man who got his first job working here at age 13 or so.  He took us around all the buildings and explained the entire canning process for salmon.  He was even able to fire up all the assembly line machinery to demonstrate how it worked.  In the early days it could take workers up to 20 hours or more to unload, clean, process and can the fish by hand.  Once electric machinery was introduced, the work took less than 2 hours.

The tour also delved into the daily lives of the workers here, taking us through several bunkhouses and houses for the managers and their families.  Our guide had lots of personal anecdotes about the different groups of workers (Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, and First Nations) and how they all interacted with one another.  The guided tour of the facility really brought this fascinating piece of history to life.