Author: Vivien Lougheed
ISBN: 978-0-88839-811-6 [Paperback]
ISBN: 978-0-88839-810-9 [eBook]
Binding: Trade Paperback
Size: 5.5" X 8.5"
Pages: 256
Illustrations/Photos: 106
Publication Date: 01 Oct 2026

Table of Contents

Sample Chapter

Before dawn on April 5, 1910, three men crept from a hotel in Ashcroft, British Columbia, climbed into a horse-drawn wagon, and headed north. Beneath their seat lay a gunny sack holding $50,000 in cash. They were bankers, racing to open Fort George’s first financial institution in an isolated settlement poised to become the Canadian west’s next boom town.

The Pioneer Bankers tells the story of chief inspector James Anderson, bank manager Lorne MacHaffie, and young Scottish clerk Jock Munro, who spent two weeks driving 280 miles of the Cariboo Road. Travelling through roadhouses, river crossings, mud, and late-spring snow to plant the Bank of British North America’s flag before their rivals arrived before them. They beat the Traders Bank by just twenty-three hours.

Drawing on Anderson’s journals, more than 100 photographs, and Munro’s letters home to Scotland, author Vivien Lougheed follows the journey north and the gripping aftermath. Through land-boom chaos, rival townsites, the railway, war, and the BBNA’s absorption into the Bank of Montreal, The Pioneer Bankers reveals a frontier city finding its feet and the quiet Scotsman who stayed, endured, and made it his home.

Vivien Lougheed started her life of exploration around the outskirts of Winnipeg when, in 1952, she got her first bicycle. She expanded these adventures in 1960 when she left her bookkeeping job at A.B. Dick and jumped on a Greyhound heading to Jasper, where she became totally enamoured with the mountains. She moved to Prince George and met her husband John who encouraged her to follow her passion and explore both the mountains and the world and then to write about it all. She’s trekked many times in each of the Rockies, Andes, Himalayas, Alps, Pyrenees, and Coast Mountains, and once in the Simiens in Ethiopia. In the course of these treks she discovered the St. Elias mountains of Kluane Park, about which she wrote a hiking guide that expanded through four editions.

She also wrote From the Chilcotin to the Chilkoot (2005), a guide to short hikes in Northern BC aimed mostly at tourists wanting to discover more of the remoter areas from their cars. Her international hiking first took her to China in 1983, the first year the Chinese allowed independent travel, and in subsequent years to Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Tibet and Latin America, which resulted in her first guidebook, Central America by Chickenbus. It appeared in 1986, and was reprinted and expanded into three editions between 1988 and 2003. With the encouragement and editorial assistance of Doug Marten, the editor of the Prince George Citizen’s Plus Magazine, she wrote a weekly column from 1991 – 1996 after which she contributed to the Prince George Free Press for three years. This led to her becoming the Latin Correspondent for the American firm, Hunter Publishing for which she wrote fat, comprehensive guides to Belize, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico’s Pacific West Coast, and the Yucatan.

All of these tomes were divided into specialized, regional guides and reprinted. Vivien writes at her home in Prince George, in between trips and treks.

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