THE KÜTNE READER

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 went in to labour. Letta Holliday was moving from Pullman, Wash. to Edmonton along with her husband Andrew and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter Mattie, but the family’s new addition wasn’t willing to wait for the journey’s end. Near Hall’s Landing, on the upper lake between Galena Bay and Revelstoke, Letta gave birth to a “fine, plump” baby g

In 1992, a classified ad appeared in The Mystery Review , a now-defunct quarterly magazine, that read as follows: Put Rossland, British Columbia in your mystery story and you'll earn a bonus from a BC booster! Here's the deal ... a cash payment for publicizing Rossland in a published (independent publisher, not self-published) mystery book, according to the size of the boost as per the following sliding scale: If you mention Rossland … $25 If your prose demonstrates some rese

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 lots for redevelopment. The Union joins several other Trail heritage buildings and sites that have met the wrecking ball in the last 20 years, including the old Legion (now the site of Lordco), the Tadanac staff house, the Project 9 tower, the Auto-Vue Drive-In (now the site of Walmart), and an entire block of homes in the Gulch (now a tru

When he wasn’t out sleuthing, Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street in London. According to Wikipedia , at the time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his stories in the 19th century, that fictional address did not exist. But when the real Baker Street was extended, the Abbey National Building Society moved into 219-229 Baker, and “employed a full-time secretary to answer mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes.” In 1990, the Sherlock Holmes Museum, at 237-241 Baker, installed a

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

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 tongue in cheek, of course. The Kaslo McGee had nothing to do with Robert Service’s famous poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee , published in 1907. But it’s nevertheless startling to read the name on this weathered wooden headboard — one of a few such remaining markers. The full epitaph is: In memoriam Sam McGee Born Co. Donegal Ireland Died Ma

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

Former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg was assassinated on Dec. 30, 1905 when a bomb exploded at his house in Caldwell. The sole person convicted of the crime — although he implicated others — was Albert Horsely, aka Harry Orchard (1866-1954). Orchard spent time in Nelson and Pilot Bay in 1896-97. We know this because of Orchard’s testimony at his sensational trial and what he wrote in The Confessions and Autobiography of Harry Orchard (1907), p. 14-15. Albert Horsely, aka

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 prominent heritage homes. But fewer and fewer people even remember it existed. The house was at the corner of Front and Cherry streets. This is the description given in Nelson: A Proposal for Urban Heritage Conservation, which listed its street address as 1102 Front Street (formerly Water Street) and its legal description as Lots 1-4, Block 80.

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 recognize it as the spot where Charcuterie Totoche is today. The laundry was in business in Nelson for nearly 60 years. Mar Sam was first listed in the 1892 and 1893 directories as running a laundry on Vernon Street, the west end of which was then Nelson’s Chinatown. At the 1894 Dominion Day celebration, Mar Sam finished first in the “200 yards,

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

Was the Mirror Lake post office once listed by Guinness as the world’s smallest? I first encountered this claim on p. 199 of Kaslo: The First 100 Years (1993): “1970 — Mirror Lake post office moved to the SS Moyie site in Kaslo. The little building was in the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest post office.” The post office in situ , ca. 1960s. (Ellis Anderson photo) It was pretty tiny, all right: 96 square feet (nine square meters). About the size of a tool shed

In Silverton’s early days, Amy Carey was among the community’s leading entrepreneurs. She owned hotels, a grocery store, livery stable, and dairy. A postcard view of early Silverton, ca. 1900s. (Greg Nesteroff collection) But how she honed her business acumen is a mystery. Amy Ellis was born somewhere in Ontario, either in January 1863 or on June 15, 1865, according to conflicting census returns. We know nothing about her upbringing. She married Alfred William Carey, date and

West Kootenay prospector Eli Carpenter (?-1917) was chiefly famous for two things: co-locating the Payne mine, which started the Silvery Slocan rush in 1891, and walking a tightrope across Slocan’s Main St. on May 24, 1897 as part of Queen’s birthday celebrations (depicted below in a mural in the Slocan campground). He is also the namesake of Carpenter Creek, which flows through Sandon and New Denver. Both the Payne’s discovery and the tightrope walk are part of local folklor

Nelson boasts about 350 heritage buildings — commercial, residential, and institutional — based on those listed in 1981 in Nelson: A Proposal for Urban Heritage Conservation . However, the city’s heritage planning webpage identifies 206 heritage sites (not all buildings), including 69 on the Canadian Register of Historic Places, of which 12 are municipally designated. One of the latter ( the CP station ) is also federally designated. There are also 137 more sites on the comm

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

Several places in West Kootenay were named after people who never actually visited their eponymous locales. Lt.-Gov. Hugh Nelson was never in Nelson, Lord Balfour was never in Balfour, and Hudson’s Bay Company governor John Shepherd never saw Fort Shepherd. But what about Ainsworth? The Kootenay Lake community was named for either or both John Commigers and George Jennings Ainsworth , father-and-son capitalists from Portland. In High Grade and Hot Springs: A History of the Ai

A few years ago, I wrote about Koto Kennedy , the only Japanese Canadian living in Kaslo immediately before the start of the internment in 1942. The late Aya Higashi remembered her as “a comfort to the internees” who was “held in awe as a highly cultured gentlewoman.” Although there was some mystery around how Koto came to Kaslo — including a story about a shipwreck — she was probably a prostitute, the occupation held by most if not all Japanese women in the West Kootenay at

This little building in Hills , on the east side of Highway 6, began life in October 1934 as the Hunter Siding school. An earlier Hunter Siding school opened around 1932. According to George Markin’s history of Hills, published in the Arrow Lakes News on Dec. 16, 1981 and reproduced at http://www.doukhobor.org/Hills.html: The first school was opened in a log cabin on the property of Marc DuMont, with his daughter, Rosalie, as teacher. The class consisted of about 12 pupils,