THE KÜTNE READER

In the spring of 1973, you might have met a guy in the Slocan Valley named Bill Lane, who was living in his van. He looked like many...

These Art Deco masterpieces, held by the City of Vancouver Archives, were drawn by the firm of Townley and Matheson, who designed...

Second in a series on signs that outlived the businesses they advertised. This one is on the back of the building at 607 Front St. in...

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...

There is a space between Vernon and Lake streets in Nelson that, near as I can tell, has always been vacant. Several buildings have been...

Last September, a group including scuba diver Brian Nadwidny went looking for a Caterpillar tractor supposedly lost in Kootenay Lake at...

This is the first in a series looking at phantom signs of West Kootenay/Boundary. I thought I would start with a Nelson building that has...

Notorious train robber Bill Miner had a lookalike in Nelson. This story appeared in the Nelson Daily News on Nov. 16, 1911 and was...

Did crooner Bing Crosby (pictured below in a Wikpedia photo) hang out in the West Kootenay before stardom? There are several suggestions he did but, while it’s not impossible, the proof is scanty. Crosby was born in Tacoma in 1903 but his family moved to Spokane when he was three. In Tracks of the Beaver Valley & Pend’Oreille (2002), Anna Reeves writes on p. 61: “Joan and Leo Langergraber were listening to a talk show host interview Bing Crosby concerning Bing’s early boyhood

On Oct. 26, 1892, the sternwheeler Columbia was on the Arrow Lakes, en route from Little Dalles, Wash. to Revelstoke, when a passenger...

In 1992, a classified ad appeared in The Mystery Review, a now-defunct quarterly magazine, that read as follows: Put Rossland, British...

The City of Trail bought the Union Hotel (pictured below) and a neighbouring building last year with plans to tear them down and sell the...

When he wasn’t out sleuthing, Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street in London. According to Wikipedia , at the time Sir Arthur Conan...

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...

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...

Did novelist Jack London once work in a tie camp at Lardeau? Jack London (Wikipedia/Little Pilgrimages, p. 235) The author is best known...

Former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg was assassinated on Dec. 30, 1905 when a bomb exploded at his house in Caldwell. The sole person...

My wife recently surprised me with the gift of a 1978 Robert Inwood print of Malone Manor. For 88 years, it was one of Nelson’s most...

The photo below, taken in 1950, shows the evocative Mar Sam laundry at the corner of Front, Lake, and Ward streets in Nelson. You’ll...

Three lots sold on eBay today featuring letterheads, letters, and envelopes from the Old Gold Quartz and Placer Mining Co. and Standard...