On March 29, 1951, Joseph Colebrook Harris died in his sleep at his brother’s house in Victoria. He was eighty years old. For some time, his heart had been slow, around thirty beats per minute, and that night it stopped.1 Arrangements were made to send his body to New Denver, and for a memorial service in Turner Memorial United Church. My father and aunt Heather would drive to New Denver for this service, and I, then fourteen, would accompany them. The drive was long and the road between Christina Lake and Rossland almost impassable. Its surface was thawing and oozing downhill. We got through because we were between Greyhound buses; at the worst spot a tractor pulled us through. I don’t remember any details of the memorial service, but I do remember that the small church was not full and that neither the service nor my grandfather’s death had much impact on me. I had seen him off and on all my life and had enjoyed his affectionate boisterousness, but in any larger sense I hardly knew him. Nor, at fourteen, had I much sense of death.
My grandfather left two wills. In the first, signed in December 1940, he left all his property, except the ranch itself, to be divided among his four children. The ranch was another matter because, in my grandfather’s view, there was no easy way of dividing it:
[The ranch itself] could only be divided in my opinion with great difficulty and expense and would be much damaged if divided up. Water rights & rights of way to make each part accessible would be involved. However this is a matter which the four trustees must decide to best suit themselves. I only desire that the old ranche which has been such a very happy home for us all shall continue as the family centre and be at least a frequent resort for our grandchildren.
Alexander Leslie [Sandy] & Richard Colebrook [my father] have by the valuable improvements that they made established especial claims to the homes that they have built on this property but with no legal standing. This has been possible because we have maintained such friendly relations and confidence in the good faith of each other. I desire this state of affairs to continue and express my equal love and confidence in you all and thank you for your constant kindness to your mother and myself.
Four years later, he replaced this will with another that left all his “real and personal estate,” including the ranch, in equal shares to his children, their spouses, and his grandchildren. The ranch, he again acknowledged, “will present difficulties in division so as to preserve its usefulness,” but held that “by consultation & cooperation I trust that you will arrive at just and satisfactory arrangements.” His four executors—his three surviving children and Marie, Tod’s widow—were given full powers to carry out the purposes of the will.
Although a vivid reflection of my grandfather’s values and of his trust in his children, his will poorly fit his children’s different relationships with the ranch. Basically, my grandfather’s will was symmetrical and egalitarian, whereas his children’s relationships with the ranch were not. Sandy had stayed and the others had left. After his months there in 1924, my father had moved to Vancouver and become a high school teacher. Aunt Heather had married a mining engineer and lived in the Bridge River Valley. Before his death, Uncle Tod worked for the Hedley–Mascot Mine and lived in Hedley in the Similkameen Valley. All of them returned to the ranch as often as they could, but none of them lived there. Sandy and Mollie did. Moreover, for many years Sandy had done much of the practical ranch work, probably with relatively little appreciation from a father who was not good with equipment and whose thought turned toward social reform. My father, who was more bookish than Sandy, may have been the more favoured son. If so, and from Sandy’s perspective, my grandfather’s will would have been yet more evidence that his talents and work on the ranch were undervalued. In Sandy’s mind, the ranch should have been left to him.
Early in 1953 the Vancouver law office handling the will urged the executors to work out the solution for the ranch that my grandfather had left to their best judgment. Sandy twice offered to purchase the ranch, offers that were rejected apparently because my mother and father were committed to the cabin and its surroundings and Aunt Heather thought that her children might want some lakeshore. The ranch could have been divided to accommodate these interests but, surrounded as it was by affection and emotion, the family could never bring itself to discuss the options. Granddad’s will was not addressed, the ownership of the ranch remained much divided, and, when he allowed himself to do so, Sandy became thoroughly fed up.
His feelings emerge occasionally in his weekly letters to Nancy, his daughter. March 14, 1953: There was, he told Nancy, too much ranch work, he could hardly do it, but “hated to see the place going to the devil.” The R. C. Harrises were not really interested in the ranch, and hardly deserved such a place. “The way this place and my time have been mucked up makes me pretty darn mad when I think of it.” June 6, 1954: “The big trouble is that most of the family don’t understand the Ranch problems in the slightest way and they don’t understand that they don’t …” Feb. 23, 1957: The only way to stop worrying about the ranch and all the work put into it, “is to get away from this place, and somehow I think Mums and I would be very miserable if we did that. We have been here too long, and got too involved to be able to walk away from it. On the other hand, it’s stupid to go on the way we are doing. The aggravating part to me is that the Family don’t seem to have a clue as to what they want to do with the place.”
The question of the ranch was still unresolved when, early in 1959, Heather, Sandy’s sister, wrote to him about it.2 She pointed out that their father “couldn’t have left a more complicated situation—nor a more dangerous set-up for blasting a family apart,” that the family was precious, and that “back of that family is the Ranch and all it means.” She hoped that “this will business” could soon be settled.
Heather’s views were not her brother’s. She thought that Sandy had been given a good deal—a home on the ranch, the New Denver Water Works—and that if he wanted the ranch he should buy it. She asked Sandy to renew his earlier offers to buy, stating the amount of property he would like to own. “Send a copy to Dick and one to me. Then if and when we can come to some terms—lets get a surveyor to complete that part.” Her children, she thought, might have some interest in campsites along the lakeshore, not more. In a note to my father, she hoped Sandy would find her letter sincere, as it was. She knew that “the whole thing upsets him—but I wish he’d realize how very insulting and upsetting he can be.”
Sandy did not reply. In June his daughter, Nancy, saying that she was “very tired of hearing about all the ranch problems which seem to be no nearer settlement than they were ten years ago,” wrote to her aunt.3 Her interests in the ranch, she said, were sentimental, as were her father’s. “Had he not had some feeling for the place he would have left it long ago and the problem of spending a life time of work on something that was not his own would not be so disturbing to him.” Few would have worked as hard on the ranch as her father “for no return at all but purely for the satisfaction of the work and the results.” She thought that if the ranch were used as a ranch, then one person should own and operate it; if used for something else, that should be decided upon so her father knew where he stood. The lakefront, she thought, was unsuitable for cottages. Moreover, her father had received legal advice that any plans to subdivide the ranch would be complicated, and he “refuses to have any agreement that will mean more long legal complications.” She hoped for a concrete agreement soon, was afraid that hard feelings were creeping in, and thought it “very unfair to the person whose problems of the ranch are always his intimate concerns to be left in such a dither as to the fate of something very close to him.” Hopefully, “Harris Common Sense” would prevail.
Yet, when it came to the ranch, Harris common sense was in short supply. My grandfather had not discussed the future of the ranch with his children, and on this topic they hardly talked with each other. Too much emotion was in the air. Doing nothing and assuming that kindliness would prevail was the path of least resistance. The years passed. Marie, Tod’s widow, remarried and moved to Rossland. Heather died suddenly of hepatitis in December 1960; her husband, Bud Rose, had died a year earlier. Effectively, the executors of Granddad’s estate became my father and Sandy, neither of whom had a head for the quick, legal resolution of family conflicts. Marie would do whatever the family wished. My mother, more forward in this regard, was unwell but in the wing.
A resolution of my grandfather’s will was finally reached in the summer of 1964. My parents and Sandy bought the ranch land for $4,500, a sum that, divided fifteen ways, amounted to $300 for each beneficiary. My father acquired title to the land around the cabin including the old ranch house and the slope below the old ranch road to the lake. Sandy acquired the rest.4 The purchase price was based, loosely, on an appraisal done in 1953 of the ranch buildings and land. The value of my parents’ log cabin and Sandy and Mollie’s house was not included in the purchase price (although legally they were part of the ranch), and the old ranch house and farm buildings, which had some value in 1953, were judged worthless a decade later. Not a lot of money changed hands. Beyond my father’s and Sandy’s families (whose shares were waived), $2,400 was distributed among eight beneficiaries. I long suspected that this money came from my parents, and a letter from Dad to Sandy found in a box of Sandy’s papers suggests that most of it did.5 In the interest of reaching a settlement, Mother had offered to pay the whole sum, but my father, considering her offer too generous, suggested that he, Mother, and Sandy contribute equally. Probably they did.
Dad’s letter to the beneficiaries about the offer to purchase the ranch was fulsome in praise of Sandy’s care of the ranch. He began, “It [the ranch] looks like a place that has been cared for and looked after. This maintenance has all been the work, single-handed, of one of the legatees [beneficiaries], A. L. Harris.” And concluded, “I think that all of the rest of us who are legatees owe a debt of gratitude to Uncle Sandy for all he has done on the ranch.”
While largely accurate, this was also an attempt to assuage Sandy’s feelings and a justification for transferring most of the ranch to him. After so much procrastination and family tension, my parents wanted closure, and this, it seemed, was the means thereto. Sandy was virtually given the large part of the ranch; my father obtained the remainder. To whom the “debt of gratitude” was principally owed was an open question.
With this agreement, tensions on the ranch diminished, but never disappeared. There were still those who stayed, and those who visited, and the strong feelings of the former that they did much of the work on which the pleasures of the latter depended. The roots of this feeling stretched back into ranch childhoods and experiences that now can be only glimpsed, and that the belated resolution of an awkward will could not transform. Over the years, the two sides of the family to whom the ranch had fallen would continue to use it differently and to share the land and the work unequally. In these differences, superimposed on long pasts, was an abiding tension that expressed itself most abruptly long after Sandy and Mollie were dead and Nancy was at the very end of her life.