THE KÜTNE READER

Larry Kwong was the first Chinese Canadian to play senior hockey in the Kootenays. But he was not the only one.

I bought the photo below about eight years ago. It shows a group on the lawn of the Outlet Hotel in Procter, long a popular spot for picnics and sternwheeler excursions. But what makes it really interesting is the six First Nations people seated at the front — two men, three women, and a girl. No photographer is listed and no date is given. I have a hard time guessing when it was taken; all I can say for sure is that it was after 1903, when the section of the hotel on the lef

Curious thing: this ad appeared in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on March 26, 1911 and subsequent issues. Koch Siding is a nearly-obsolete name for the area of Slocan Park that’s on the flats across from the cemetery. It was the site of a sawmill built by William Koch that operated from 1906 into the 1920s. Lawrence Twoaxe was a Mohawk from the Kahnawake reserve in Quebec, born in 1885 in Cornwall, Ont. to Thomas Twoaxe and Margaret Hill. In 1935, while living in Oakland, he e

An amazing cabinet card sold on eBay last week for $181.50 US ($240 Cdn), showing two First Nations people in a studio portrait by Rossland photographer Thomas Henry Gowman. I don’t know for sure if these were Sinixt people, but their name for Rossland was kEluwi’sst or kmar k n, the former a generic name for “up in the hills” and the latter a term for “smooth top,” referring to Red Mountain. They knew it as a good area for huckleberries. While we do don’t know the names of

While quite a few postcards show First Nations scenes in East Kootenay, not many exist from West Kootenay. At least, there are only a few we can comfortably say were taken on this side of the Purcell mountains, since the location was not always listed. Although the captions always said “Kootenay Indians,” I don’t know whether these people are Ktunaxa or Sinixt; the photographer probably wasn’t aware of the distinction. We know who he was, though: Allan Lean of Queen Studio in

Recently Doug Jones bought a batch of early Nelson photos from someone in England. There were lots of terrific shots, but what left Doug (and me) slack-jawed was a never-before-seen Neelands Bros. photo of three tipis near the CPR wharf with the SS Nelson in the background. “When I saw the tipi image, I had to get it,” Doug says. “It’s such an amazing undiscovered picture, it just had to come home. The seller was a dealer in England, who kindly included about 20 more local p

Between 1872 and 1923, at least 13 Chinese Canadian births occurred at Rock Creek. This was noteworthy for a few reasons. First, there was perhaps only one other such birth elsewhere in the Boundary during that time. Most of these births preceded the first Chinese Canadian births in West Kootenay (three in Nelson and five in Kaslo during the same period). But even more intriguing: all 13 people were actually of mixed ancestry, part Chinese and part Indigenous. Rock Creek is s