“A treasure trove of early photographs, painstaking research and most of all, marvelous accounts of feckless wanderers and resolute settlers, roadhouse operators, and ranchers in the South Cariboo–tough cookies, bad apples and flashy dudes included! This well-written book shows how luck, land and the climate, good but often bad, solid homesteading skills or a complete lack of them, and the kindness and generosity among neighbours shaped all who lived here, for just a few years or for generations.”

—Caroline Woodward, author of Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper

“In its exploration of life on the Cariboo Plateau, Barbara MacPherson’s The Land on Which We Live offers an important and welcome addition to the existing historiography. […] MacPherson complements the text with photographs from the time, and integrates extensive primary source material, including excerpts from memoirs of, and interviews with, people who lived in the region.”

—Tina Block, BC Studies, no. 203 (Autumn 2019)

“The arrival of this book in the year of a resurgent Indigenous culture is timely. It’s arrival during the tragedy of wild fire is propitious, as it covers the period of early fire suppression that helped to exclude the Tsq’escenemc from the land and laid down the primary conditions for those fires. It is an invaluable document.”

—Harold Rhenisch, The Ormsby Review