THE KÜTNE READER

Part of the original Kaslo Hotel is hiding in plain sight. This post explains why it has been obscured.

Wherein we use a photo of a long-lost building in Kaslo as a jumping-off point looking at the history of Burns & Co. and Eric’s Meat Market.

For a few years, the largest library in Nelson was in the courthouse basement. Where did it go?

In the 1930s, a Kaslo resident claimed to be the first — and for a time, only — woman in Canada digging graves.

During West Kootenay’s mining boom of the 1890s, newspapers popped up like Starbucks franchises. But lugging a printing press into a...

Pictured here is what is probably the most valuable and coveted baseball card with a West Kootenay connection. In 1897, Kaslo, Rossland,...

Lot Willey had a lot of bad luck. And bad timing. He was a sort of anti-Forrest Gump, with an uncanny knack for arriving in a town just...

Below I’ve transcribed a six-page letter in my collection mailed by a woman visiting Kaslo with her mother shortly after the death of...

Painting signs by hand has largely gone out of style but was once a common vocation. The men (and I imagine a few women) who did it for a...

Fourth of five parts Alexander Zuckerberg of Castlegar’s Zuckerberg Island had an electric car in the mid-1950s. An ingenious man, he no...

One of the most venerable and unique made-in-BC business names ceased to exist on March 22, 2018 after 103 years. The last Overwaitea...

Sam McGee wasn’t cremated in the Yukon — he was buried in Kaslo. Here’s his grave marker to prove it, as it appeared in 2008: I say this...

A few years ago, I wrote about Koto Kennedy, the only Japanese Canadian living in Kaslo immediately before the start of the internment in...

In 2018, the Kootenay Lake Historical Society reprinted the 1980 book Pioneer Families of Kaslo in a revised and expanded form. My contribution was providing notes about and securing photos of Jim Kee, a Chinese-Canadian merchant. Jim and Annie Kee, 1947. (Courtesy Russel Lang) One weak spot of the original book was that it only contained profiles of white families, and mostly British ones at that (not the fault of the folks who put it together; they put out a call for submi

The clipping below from the Rossland Miner of Oct. 11, 1938 is about the Knudsgaard brothers, Einer, Erik, and Frankie. They were not...