Becoming Vancouver: A History

A brisk chronicle of Vancouver, BC, from early days to its emergence as a global metropolis, refracted through the events, characters and communities that have shaped the city.

In Becoming Vancouver award-winning historian Daniel Francis follows the evolution of the city from early habitation by the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, to the area’s settlement as a mill town, to the flourishing speakeasies and brothels during the 1920s, to the years of poverty and protest during the 1930s followed by the long wartime and postwar boom, to the city’s current status as real-estate investment choice of the global super-rich. Tracing decades of transformation, immigration and economic development, Francis examines the events and characters that have defined the city’s geography, economy and politics.

Francis enlivens his text with rich characterizations of the people who shaped Vancouver: determined Chief Joe Capilano, who in 1906 took a delegation to England to appeal directly to King Edward VII for better treatment of Indigenous peoples; brilliant and successful Won Alexander Cumyow, the first recorded person of Chinese descent born in Canada; L.D. Taylor, irrepressible ex-Chicagoan who still holds the record as the city’s longest-serving mayor; and tireless activist Helena Gutteridge, suffragist and Vancouver’s first woman councillor.

Vancouver has been called a city without a history, partly because of its youth but also because of the way it seems to change so quickly. Newcomers to the city, arriving by the thousands every year, find few physical reminders of what was before, making a new history like Becoming Vancouver long overdue.

“Finally! The definitive history of Vancouver. Daniel Francis’s Becoming Vancouver is a necessary and long over-due book and a must have for any Vancouverite who truly wants to understand their city.”

“Daniel Francis has written the first complete, chronological history of Vancouver in a half-century, bringing the story up to date with engaging accounts of Indigenous life, politics, entertainment and crime that show the city in all its flawed glory.”

“In the long human narrative of the place, the rise of what we now call Vancouver, itself now part of an even vaster emerging megalopolis that arcs around the Georgia Basin, is a mere blink. Before it was conceived in frenzy of greed, colonial imperialism, escapist dreams, utopian idealism, despair, grief and dashed hopes, it had been home to powerful First Nations for longer, arguably, than the new British colonists had occupied their own homeland. Becoming Vancouver, a new history of the origins of Canada's third largest city, frames its raucous, sometimes unpleasant, occasionally tragic or triumphant, always dramatic story within the context of that larger, often understated past. It's just one of the insights that brings a different take to this lyrical, accessible, exciting and, above all, thoroughly enjoyable history of what's become the brash, supercharged engine of British Columbia. Daniel Francis is one of the province's literary treasures. This remarkable book is affirmation of his deserving place on the bookshelf of anyone who cares to know where they come from and why.”

“Francis shows Vancouver as a city of conflict—not between classes or neighbourhoods but between ideals and values, the things that run to the core of a community. If it has been difficult to find the soul of Vancouver it is because it is one that is torn and uncomfortable with itself. Vancouver emerges from these pages as a more complex place populated by characters who struggle to do the right thing.”

“This history of [Daniel Francis’] hometown provides informed, informative, and enjoyable reading… Let us hope that this excellent book—likely to be the ‘standard’ history of Vancouver for some years—will inspire more Vancouver residents, both new arrivals and old timers, to have greater respect for the city’s natural beauty and its historic built environment.”