THE KÜTNE READER

There is no doubt what Trout Lake’s oldest building is. But what about the runner-up?

How a set of lost keys were found inside a fish and returned to their owner.

I bought this photo of the 1909 Gerrard football (soccer) team on eBay last month for a song. (One song = $8 US.) The seller was in Milton, Kentucky of all places. Gerrard was a sawmill town at the foot of Trout Lake. Today its human population is zero but 115 years ago it was able to put together a team that, according to this photo, won the Challenge Cup of Trout Lake City and the Ferguson Medal, from which we might infer that Trout Lake and Ferguson also had teams. What el

In the 1960s, a medal from the 1900 Rossland Winter Carnival was found north of Oslo. Also: how did Ferguson get designated a heritage site?

In 1891, a man blazed his name onto a cedar tree. In 1899, someone scratched their initials on a rock face. Both remain to make us wonder.

Nelson once had a floating dance pavilion and a large clubhouse for the boat club, both at the foot of Josephine Street.

It was the end of the work day at the Abbott mine on Jan. 8, 1896. The property was at the head of Healy Creek, near Trout Lake, on the west side of Abbott Peak at an elevation of 2,075 meters. It belonged to the Lillooet, Fraser River, and Cariboo Gold Fields Co., who drove a 100-meter long crosscut into a limestone bluff in hopes of tapping a half-meter wide streak of galena. The retiring workers headed back to camp, about a mile and a quarter below the mine, but two collea

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

Of the 100 or so cemeteries in West Kootenay/Boundary, two dozen can no longer be visited because they were either flooded out, exhumed, ploughed over, covered by slides, or simply lost. In addition, five cemeteries never actually existed. Three were proposed but didn’t happen and two others entered the historical record in error. These phantom graveyards are detailed below. PASSMORE The Passmore notes of the Slocan Enterprise of July 13, 1927 read: “The Farmers Institute he

There are two curious things about the stock certificate seen below, issued by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Co. of British Columbia Ltd. and dated June 1, 1904. First, this was not the company of (almost) the same name founded in 1906 with the merger of the Canadian Smelting Works at Trail, St. Eugene mine at Moyie, Centre Star and War Eagle mines at Rossland, and Rossland Power Company. That was the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Co. of Canada Ltd., later better kn

The story of pioneer Trout Lake hotelier and prospector Alice Jowett is well told in books such as Circle of Silver as well as on the Arrow Lakes Historical Society’s website . But prior to moving to the Lardeau in 1896, she ran a restaurant in Vancouver. I have found two noteworthy items about that time in her life. Alice Jowett is seen with grandchildren Erma and Helen Godsoe. (Edna Daney fonds 68-18/Arrow Lakes Historical Society) First, Mrs. Jowett advertised regularly i

At a presentation on the history of Slocan Valley sawmills in November 2016, a forester suggested the poles for the original light stands at Yankee stadium came out of the Lardeau. I had never heard this before, but discovered something else in Salmo Stories , p. 197. It’s a quote from a 2010 interview with Les Jensen, who was born in 1942: When I was a kid, we took poles and fence posts down on sleds equipped with steel runners … We took out poles that were sent to Yankee St

Sundown Slim was the champion liar of the Lardeau. The king of whoppers. A master fibber without peer. He had a fabrication for every occasion and was literally a tall tale teller — for he stood 6'3½". Sundown Slim seen at Lardeau, ca. 1951. (Jeanne McCartney photo, courtesy Paul Jeffrey) One of his best and most oft-told stories was how he had been a sheriff for a day in Tombstone, Arizona. He couldn’t remember the year, but said he read an ad for a man to be marshal of Tom

The photo below is probably the second most-reproduced image ever taken in West Kootenay (next to R.H. Trueman’s vertigo-inducing shot of a train stopped at Payne Bluff on the Kaslo and Slocan Railway). This early selfie shows photographer Mattie Gunterman being punished for some transgression at the Nettie L cookhouse near Ferguson by sisters Annie and Rose Williams, ca. 1903. It has appeared in numerous books and magazines since it was first published in Bruce Ramsey’s Gho

Recently I posted the transcript of a letter from a little girl in Rossland in 1898 writing to her father to tell him what she received for Christmas. It was part of a small cache of envelopes, letters, and letterheads connected to the Old Gold Quartz and Placer Mining Co. that sold on eBay. I’ve now transcribed the other material and learned a bit about their author. The three letters were all mailed by Clara Grace Westfall in Rossland to Joe Cunningham in 1898-99. The firs

Did novelist Jack London once work in a tie camp at Lardeau? Jack London (Wikipedia/ Little Pilgrimages , p. 235) The author is best known for his works related to the Klondike Gold Rush, including The Call of the Wild and White Fang. This story appeared with a Vancouver dateline in the Nelson Daily News of Oct. 3, 1929, under the headline “Jack London was no good as BC lumberjack, says [sic].” Jack London may have been in a class by himself in writing about the rugged nort

Three lots sold on eBay today featuring letterheads, letters, and envelopes from the Old Gold Quartz and Placer Mining Co. and Standard Gold Mines Ltd. of Rossland. They’re all interesting, but for my money (which in fact it was), the neatest document was a letter from Grace Florence Cunningham to her father Joe, dated Dec. 29, 1898 and transcribed here with the charming spelling mistakes intact: Dear Papa I will tell you what I got from Santy. I got to dolls and a book, a si