THE KÜTNE READER

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...

In Silverton’s early days, Amy Carey was among the community’s leading entrepreneurs. She owned hotels, a grocery store, livery stable,...

West Kootenay prospector Eli Carpenter (?-1917) was chiefly famous for two things: co-locating the Payne mine, which started the Silvery...

Nelson boasts about 350 heritage buildings — commercial, residential, and institutional — based on those listed in 1981 in Nelson: A...

A neat item sold this afternoon on eBay for $192 US (which is $241 Cdn): an envelope from the Sandon Paystreak newspaper. It was...

Several places in West Kootenay were named after people who never actually visited their eponymous locales. Lt.-Gov. Hugh Nelson was...

A few years ago, I wrote about Koto Kennedy, the only Japanese Canadian living in Kaslo immediately before the start of the internment in...

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...

From 1907 to 1911, members of the Patrick family lived in Nelson while operating a lumber company that owned timber limits in the Slocan...

Here’s a gallery of photos I took on March 3, 2003 during filming in Rossland of the Kurt Russell movie Miracle. Columbia Avenue was...

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

In 1989, Donna Bishop and Joan Field produced a report for the Salmo Arts and Museum Society entitled Dewdney Trail 1865. They wrote the...

During its 22 years as a bona fide city, Sandon had seven mayors — and four receivers. Sandon city hall was built in 1900 following a...

I’ve long written a weekly series for the local Black Press newspapers about West Kootenay/Boundary place names. In my installment on...

I just wrote a blog post for Nelson Kootenay Lake Tourism about Nelson’s Big Orange Bridge, which was originally silver, as seen in the...

In 2018, the Kootenay Lake Historical Society reprinted the 1980 book Pioneer Families of Kaslo in a revised and expanded form. My contribution was providing notes about and securing photos of Jim Kee, a Chinese-Canadian merchant. Jim and Annie Kee, 1947. (Courtesy Russel Lang) One weak spot of the original book was that it only contained profiles of white families, and mostly British ones at that (not the fault of the folks who put it together; they put out a call for submi

The last surviving members of what was probably the strangest hockey team ever to play in the Kootenay have died. Terry Cavanagh...

In the early 20th century, Slocan City’s brothels were on the west side of Block 36, at the south end of Main Street between Giffin and...

Last year I bought three letters on eBay mailed in 1905-06 by Alexander Howard McIntyre from Nelson to his family in Middleville, Lanark...

In the summer of 2017, Dian Aylwin made a remarkable discovery in her father’s garage in New Denver: tacked to the wall was the townsite...