Cities ask to be compared: we go from one city to another and feel immediately the strangeness of the new, of the not-yet-known. But the nature of that strangeness is hard to pin down. When I visited Toronto at the end of the last century I discovered that seats on the buses (and the streetcars) were lower than seats on buses in Vancouver by an inch or more: it was necessary to make an adjustment to avoid falling while lowering yourself into place; a week later I discovered that escalators in Ottawa move at a terrific rate (compared to escalators in Vancouver), and can threaten to topple the unwary. Daniel Francis, eminent historian of the Canadian (eg: the Fur Trade, the Whale Fishery, the Sex Trade, the Imaginary “Indian,” the CPR, etc.), has now published Becoming Vancouver: A History (Harbour), which is set to become the definitive account of the city known variously as the Gateway to the Pacific, the Liverpool of the West, and the Sunset of the Dominion. Now and for the first time, the story of Vancouver is laid out in a clean narrative that begins with the Indigenous stewards of the land and carries on through the usurpation of Indigenous land and culture, the struggle to erase non-British immigrants, the transformation of the earth into real estate owned and administered by the CPR and Queen Victoria, and on to the present day, as the Indigenous struggle for place begins to re-shape the city. Much of the “official” Vancouver story was the work of Major Skitt Matthews, City Archivist, defender of the Union Jack (as opposed to the Maple Leaf), and promulgator of the romance of a city built by sturdy British Empire men and women in an empty wilderness given to them by God. August Khatsahlano, a Squamish elder whose family was uprooted from their home a few blocks from the house that Matthews built on land purchased from the CPR, offered to share with the Archivist his account of the traditions and practices of his forebears—resulting in an invaluable record of pre-CPR times that forced Matthews to enlarge his genesis myth to include non-British cultures, and allows Daniel Francis to find a scaffolding for his multi-faceted narrative. The story of Vancouver has many byways and Daniel Francis, in this excellent history, has illuminated many of them. Of course there are still accounts to be rendered of the money launderers and fentanyl-purveyors whose manipulations help to fuel the rise in home prices and the numbers of homeless people stranded in its streets. This is a valuable and necessary book.