THE KÜTNE READER

I recently wrote about Holy Grail historical items — things I once saw somewhere and couldn’t find again. I’m pleased to report that I’ve...

Here’s a newscast that aired on KC Radio in Nelson and Creston on Jan. 21, 1975, read by Ray Zinck, who sent it to me quite a few years...

Snow Falling on Cedars, the movie filmed partly in Greenwood in 1998, left a legacy of faux phantom signs, which helped transform the...

This huge, colourful ad was rescued from the old hardware store at 216 6th Ave. (Block 13, Lot 6) in New Denver before it was was torn...

Although I’m rarely on the cutting edge of technology, I was the first person I knew to own a digital camera, purchased directly from...

The postcard below of an old bridge across the Cascade canyon at Christina Lake sold online today. It’s a nice enough image, but it’s the...

Kyle Kusch of the Arrow Lakes Historical Society just finished digitizing more than 800 slides from Wilf (Hufty) Hewat, a pilot and...

Inventor Thomas Edison (seen below in a Wikipedia photo) passed through Nelson 110 years ago. While his visit was fleeting, he told a...

Many’s the time I’ve come across something historically interesting in a newspaper only to: a) Fail to fully appreciate its significance...

I previously wrote about some strange circumstances surrounding the death of Doukhobor leader Peter V. Verigin in a train explosion near...

Mi chael Kluckner ’s new graphic novel, Julia , is a biography of Vancouver’s Julia Henshaw (1869-1937). She was, among other things, a...

One of most poignant epitaphs I’ve ever seen appears on twin gravemarkers in what is probably West Kootenay’s most remote cemetery. The Hamel siblings, Adélia Annee Lilly and Willy Joseph Alphonse, died at Comaplix, on the northeast arm of Upper Arrow Lake, in 1903. Their gravemarkers read in French: Quand on est pur comme à ton âge le dernier jour est le plus beau . Translated, “When one is pure as at your age, the last day is the most beautiful.” I’ve written about them bef

The postcard below is part of a sequence showing Lieut. George Knopp Trim’s flight around Nelson during the fall fair of 1919 — and crash landing in Kootenay Lake. (Greg Nesteroff collection) Originally the Nelson Agricultural and Industrial Association asked Capt. Fred McCall of Calgary to perform acrobatic flying at the fair but he was forced to cancel due to engine trouble and suggested they approach the Vancouver Aerial League to send someone in his place. Trim (often mis

The first newspaper Robert Thornton Lowery was involved in — and the last still in business — is folding after 139 years. This cartoon,...

There are two curious things about the stock certificate seen below, issued by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Co. of British...

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...

Nelson has had three Kootenay Lake Hospitals. The first, built in 1893 near 40 High Street, had a dozen beds. According to Dr. Lorris E. Borden, it was really primitive … On the ground floor was the admitting room and the kitchen; the second floor had a medical ward and the operating room which was very small and narrow; the bird floor was for surgical patients which was considered a poor arrangement [because] there was no elevator and all surgical patients had to be carried

The death of Doukhobor leader Peter (Lordly) Verigin in a train explosion between Castlegar and Grand Forks on Oct. 29, 1924 is the West Kootenay/Boundary’s greatest unsolved mystery. It is also one of the area’s deadliest single incidents, for it took eight other lives in addition to Verigin’s. And if the blast was the result of a bomb, as two coroners’ juries concluded, it was the deadliest crime ever committed in the region. There are a lot of peculiar things about the cas

In 2008, I wrote a story for Route 3 magazine about the Thomas (or Tomas) Higstrim grave at Ainsworth Hot Springs, which dates to 1891...

Did William Randolph Hearst (pictured below in a photo from Wikipedia), the larger-than-life American newspaper publisher who invented...