Leonard Norris was born on a farm near Brampton, ON., in 1865. His family moved to Langley Prairie when he was nine years old, and he was 17 when he first came to the Okanagan in 1882.
At first working on ranches in the Lumby area, Norris then pre-empted land in the vicinity of Round Lake in 1887. Thoreau's philosophy appealed to him, and he was convinced that farming would give him a happy life. But his "best laid plans" turned out quite differently. He had hardly taken up his land when he was asked to be Provincial Police Constable at Lansdowne (near Armstrong). Assured that the appointment would be temporary, he took on the job, but once he started he found it difficult to break away. Willy nilly, he had embarked on his career as a civil servant.
Described as a man with a "very strong sense of justice," he was appointed Vernon's third Government Agent in 1893 (following Walter Dewdney and Moses Lumby). He was magistrate, collector of land and other taxes, Registrar of the County Court and District Registrar of the Supreme Court, Registrar of Voters, Judge of the Small Debts Court, Official Administrator, and Registrar of Vital Statistics. As such he must have known something of the private affairs of nearly every resident of Vernon, but he was never known to betray a confidence.
He founded the Okanagan Historical Society in 1925, and assumed most of the responsibility for publication of their annual reports for 20 years. He persuaded pioneers to record their reminiscences, researched and wrote numerous articles himself, revised, edited, proofread, and distributed the reports.
After his retirement, apart from his passion for recording Okanagan history, he decided to learn French, listening to French language phonograph records and subscribing to French-Canadian newspapers. A cultivated man, he had an excellent library of historical works, and enjoyed music and poetry. He died April 18, 1945.
Norris loved the natural beauty of the bunchgrass hills and the lakes that reflected them, and expressed some of his feelings in poems published in many OHS reports, including this excerpt from Camel’s Hump:
Rising like an earth-born gnome, a lone sentinel in stone
Watching from your double peak,
Saw the miners come and go, men and horses down below
On the way to Cherry Creek.
