THE KÜTNE READER

The Arrow Lakes News is dead. Long live the Arrow Lakes News!

A Kootenay teacher was once offered a small fortune by a bride-to-be in Minnesota, sight unseen. Who was he and what happened?

Before the Nelson Daily News moved to 266 Baker St., it was in the building now home to Jackson’s Hole.

On the heels of discovering that the last office of the Nelson Tribune (and probably the Nelson Ledge and Lowery’s Claim ) is still standing, I’ve made two more discoveries about Nelson newspaper offices. (You can read about the other one here .) Much to my surprise, the building home to the weekly Nelson Economist , probably for its entire existence from 1897 to 1906, is also still standing. David M. Carley established and operated this newspaper, which had a much differe

A previous post looked at the last home of the Nelson Tribune , which, much to my surprise, is still standing on Baker Street. Tracking the various locations of The Tribune and its rival paper, The Miner , is not easy. The Miner was founded by John Houston and partners Charles Ink and Gesner Allen in 1890. Through 1892, The Miner was at 14 East Baker Street, although we don’t know exactly where that was. Houston, Ink, and Allen also had their real estate office in this bu

Here’s a story left out of Kootenay News — my exhibit at Touchstones Nelson on the history of Nelson’s newspapers — for lack of space. While the former Nelson Daily News office is a well-known landmark at 266 Baker Street — it was the paper’s home from 1908 to 2010 — it’s not at all well known that two former Nelson Tribune locations are also still standing. The Tribune was the city’s second newspaper, founded in 1892 by John Houston a few months after he sold The Miner .

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

A copy of a short-lived and long-lost Nelson newspaper has surfaced: it’s the Sept. 20, 1913 edition of The Independent , whose existence I only previously knew about because of a few mentions in its contemporaries: Slocan Record , Aug. 28, 1913: The Independent is a new publication issued in Nelson last week. It is a weekly and the first issue is small, but the paper will probably be enlarged as larger patronage comes to it. Whether a paper can be independent or not has yet

I’m not sure who the first woman to work for a West Kootenay/Boundary newspaper was, but one early example was Harriet Haire Smith, a daughter of C. Dell Smith, proprietor of the Ymir Mirror . The paper’s Jan. 30, 1904 edition noted: “Miss Smith of the Mirror business staff is visiting her friend, Miss Adie at Waneta.” I presume she was Dell’s daughter, but can’t say for sure. At the time, Harriet was not yet 16. The family moved to Victoria after the newspaper folded a few

The first newspaper Robert Thornton Lowery was involved in — and the last still in business — is folding after 139 years. This cartoon, showing editor Robert T. Lowery and his pet bulldog mauling a delinquent subscriber, first appeared in The Ledge in July 1900. Lowery (1859-1921) was West Kootenay’s most prolific newspaper publisher during its 1890s and early 1900s mining rush. He founded the Kaslo Claim (1893 and 1895-96); the peripatetic Ledge (Nakusp 1893-94, New Denv

A neat item sold this afternoon on eBay for $192 US (which is $241 Cdn): an envelope from the Sandon Paystreak newspaper. It was postmarked Jan. 3, 1898 — two days after Sandon incorporated as a city — and sent to a J.W. Wheatley, Esq. at 1427 11th Ave. in Spokane. Wheatley was a lawyer, according to the 1900 US census. The envelope’s seller was in Seattle. The Paystreak was one of Robert Thornton Lowery’s many mining-themed papers in the West Kootenay. Although he owned it