THE KÜTNE READER

Five envelopes mailed in 1885 by a CPR camp cook working near present-day Revelstoke have sold at auction for nearly $7,000.

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 Queen Victoria on Jan. 22, 1901. It describes the multi-denominational memorial service held for her there. The first and third pages of the letter in question. The letter was mailed to the Rev. Thomas Lerch of Lansdowne, Ont. (if I am reading the last name correctly), who appears to have been the writer’s husband. However, I haven’t been able

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

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

In 1893, a prospector named Baxter wrote two letters to the Northwest Mining Review of Spokane from the Salmo River (then called the Salmon). Both were printed in the May 22 edition and are available through Google Books , but to my knowledge they have never been reprinted. It’s unclear how the letters were mailed, but it was either via Northport, whose post office opened Nov. 1, 1892, or Waneta, where the office opened on May 1, 1893. Baxter comments in the second letter on

Last year I bought three letters on eBay mailed in 1905-06 by Alexander Howard McIntyre from Nelson to his family in Middleville, Lanark County, Ont. I’ve transcribed and annotated them — they’re fun reading, and it was fun to figure out what happened to the man who wrote them. As a preface, it helps to know that McIntyre was born in 1883 in Middleville, the youngest of five children of Alexander Robb (Allie) McIntyre and Mary Somerville. Mary died scarcely two months after H