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 remote area was no small chore. Consequently, many presses churned out several titles before being retired. In 1962, during land clearing for a resort at Trout Lake, a bulldozer unearthed a hand-cranked press, seen above in the Nelson Daily News on June 23 of that year. The caption read in part: [T]his ancient Washington hand press … appeared f

Pictured here is what is probably the most valuable and coveted baseball card with a West Kootenay connection. In 1897, Kaslo, Rossland, and Spokane were part of a professional baseball circuit known by several names, but generally called the Kootenay Washington League. Nelson was supposed to be part of the loop as well, but dropped out for lack of a suitable field. Trail and Sandon were both considered as replacements, but neither city fielded a team. The league’s most notew

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 before disaster struck. Born on Aug. 19, 1848 (or 1851 or 1855) at Ekfrid, Ont. to Lot W. Willey and Catherine McPherson, he farmed at Ekfrid and Dulwich in the 1870s and 1880s. He married Elizabeth Wells in 1879 at Williams East, Ont., but she died within weeks of the wedding of rheumatic fever — the first of Lot’s recorded misfortunes. Will

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 living sometimes supplemented their income by painting houses but also occasionally created other artwork. In 1880s Idaho and 1890s Montana and West Kootenay/Boundary, if your opera house needed a new backdrop or you wanted to gussy up your hotel (or boat or store), M.D. Cryderman was your guy. Main Street in Slocan City is seen in May 1897

Fourth of five parts Alexander Zuckerberg of Castlegar’s Zuckerberg Island had an electric car in the mid-1950s. An ingenious man, he no doubt built it himself. John Charters wrote in the Summer 1997 edition of BC Historical News : “When he had reached retirement age his back was bent with arthritis and he could no longer ride his black bicycle so he built a concrete causeway to the island for his electric car. The difficulty with this idea was the fact that the car would not

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 tongue in cheek, of course. The Kaslo McGee had nothing to do with Robert Service’s famous poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee , published in 1907. But it’s nevertheless startling to read the name on this weathered wooden headboard — one of a few such remaining markers. The full epitaph is: In memoriam Sam McGee Born Co. Donegal Ireland Died Ma

A few years ago, I wrote about Koto Kennedy , the only Japanese Canadian living in Kaslo immediately before the start of the internment in 1942. The late Aya Higashi remembered her as “a comfort to the internees” who was “held in awe as a highly cultured gentlewoman.” Although there was some mystery around how Koto came to Kaslo — including a story about a shipwreck — she was probably a prostitute, the occupation held by most if not all Japanese women in the West Kootenay at

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 the first triplets born in West Kootenay, but were probably the first to all survive into adulthood. They were born on Feb. 12, 1938. This item appeared in the Rossland Miner that month: Interest in Triplets is Wide-Spread, Progress Good, Sister’s Hospital Three little babies in Mater Misericordia hospital, sons of Mr. And Mrs. Hans Knutsgaar