Ella Rykert and the Wells Fargo myth

The old Rykert property south of Creston and just north of the US border at 340 Highway 21 recently sold for the first time in over 35 years. The house there is probably the oldest in the Kootenays, although it has never been billed as such and you certainly wouldn’t guess its age at a glance.

Different sources suggest it was built in 1882, 1883, or 1884. Any one of those dates would make it the region’s oldest home by a comfortable margin. (BC Assessment claims it was built in 1901, but that is just code for “We have no idea how old it is.” That’s also the date that was used in an online real estate ad.)

The Rykert estate, date unknown. The house that still stands is seen at upper left. The building in the foreground at left is the original customs office. The tracks of the Bedlington & Nelson Railway are seen at left. (Creston Museum and Archives)

Another view of the Rykert house and the original customs building, date unknown. It’s not known who those people in the group are. (Image C-09429 courtesy Royal BC Museum and Archives)

The Rykert estate, circa 1900, with the home at far right. (Herb Dodd collection as reproduced in Creston Valley Profiles)

The Rykert home in 2026.

Modern siding masks the fact that the house is built of logs. The home was expanded in 1929 with the addition of a couple of bathrooms and a steam heating system.

The online real estate listing gave us a look inside, showing much of the home to have been remodelled perhaps in the 1980s, but the hardwood flooring, especially in the dining room, looks original.

The Kootenay River as viewed from the Rykert estate, many decades apart. (Creston Museum and Archives)

This was the home of J.C. (Charles) and Ella Rykert and it was described in newspapers as “beautiful” and “delightful” while its surrounding gardens and orchards were “all most artistically arranged and carefully kept.”

A description of the estate in the Spokane Spokesman-Review of March 29, 1892 said: “Here we found a handsome residence, in front of which the English flag floated in the breeze, which was surrounded by terraced grounds and beautiful flower beds enclosed by a neat picket fence, adjoining which was the ancient log cabin that has served as a custom house for many years.”

J.C. was the customs agent, for whom the Rykerts border crossing was named in 1893. (It was formerly called Boundary Line. The railway station here was known as Bedlington before it too was renamed in Rykert’s honour.)

The Rykerts are buried in a cemetery on the property, but this detail was left out of the real estate listing. That’s a selling feature in my book!

Ella and Charles Rykert on their porch in the early 1900s. (Creston Museum and Archives)

Ella Rykert on the lawn in front of her house around 1900. The log building in the background is said to have been the original customs house. (Creston Museum and Archives)

The Rykert cemetery, circa 1984. (As reproduced in Creston Valley Profiles)

The Rykerts hosted Theodore Roosevelt in 1888 while the future American president was on a hunting trip to Kootenay Lake. Roosevelt shot a caribou and gave the head to Rykert, who hung it over his fireplace.

When Rykert died in 1931, he left his estate to his housekeeper, Philomena Davis, and her husband Charles, who had succeeded him as customs inspector a few years earlier.

Philomena presented the Roosevelt caribou head to the Royal Canadian Legion in Creston in 1958. They in turn gave it to the American Legion Boundary Post, who displayed it in their hall in Bonners Ferry until it was transferred to the Boundary County Museum in 2013, where it remains.

The Roosevelt caribou head seen in the Boundary County Museum in Bonners Ferry. A brass plaque beneath it reads: “Shot by Teddy Roosevelt in British Columbia and presented to John Charles Rykert in 1888. In 1958 Philomena Snider, heir to the John Charles Rykert estate, presented it to the Creston BC Branch No. 29 of the Canadian Legion, in order that it could be presented by the Canadian Legion to the Post 85 of the American Legion in Bonners Ferry, Idaho.”

Other noteworthy things on the Rykert property include a cairn (which sits in what used to be a fountain) commemorating Ella Rykert as “the first white woman in the Kootenays”; and the second Rykerts customs office, which dates to either 1924 or 1930 depending on conflicting sources, although it’s no longer in its original location.

The Rykert estate was also reportedly home to the first apple orchard in the Creston Valley, although the origin of those seeds or saplings is the source of some debate. (Washington state? Niagara Falls?)

The Ella Rykert cairn

At some point, Philomena Davis had the house renovated and its logs covered with siding. After her first husband died, she married US customs officer Walter Snider and they continued to live there. Walter died in 1955 and Philomena in 1965. 

A few years later, the Creston Valley Rod and Gun Club acquired a 37-acre portion of the Rykert property as a recreation and picnic site for its members and other community groups, known as Mawson Lake or Rykerts Lake.

As for the house and its contents, in his book We Hold These Truths, Wilson Rockwell wrote that “Many Canadians tried to persuade [Philomena] to will the historic mansion and antique furniture to the local historical society or the district so that when she passed away, the legendary place could be converted into a museum. However, when she died … it was found that she had left her entire estate to the Catholic church and to her relatives.”

In his later book Creston Valley Profiles, Rockwell said Philomena left the estate and its contents to her brother in Kansas, without mentioning the church. I haven’t looked up her probate file to see exactly what her will instructed. In any case, the home’s many antiques were auctioned off in Creston in 1974. Who knows where any of that stuff is today.

Since 1990, the Rykert property has been owned and cared for by Thomas Slattery, who embraced its history. It was featured in British Columbia Magazine in 2003 and Look magazine in 2005.

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Much more can be said about the Rykerts — particularly how J.C. and Ella were among the first settlers to encroach upon the traditional territory of the Yaqan Nukiy.

But I want to address something else to do with Ella, whose maiden name was Wells. It has often been said that she was the daughter of the co-founder of Wells Fargo. Virtually any time Ella’s name is mentioned, this piece of trivia is trotted out, including in a real estate ad for the property: “Married to Ella Wells (who’s [sic] father was founder of Wells-Fargo)”; and the ad for the 1974 antique auction, which mentioned an “oak buffet from Rykert-Wells-Fargo Estate.”

The only problem is that it’s not true.

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Sandpoint News Bulletin, Nov. 7, 1974 and Kootenay News Advertiser, June 5, 2025

Henry Wells, who co-founded Wells Fargo, had four children but none were named Ella. In a 1963 Calgary Herald column, Ken Liddell claimed Ella was “a daughter of Mark Wells, one of three brothers associated with the beginning of the Wells Fargo Express.” Henry Wells did not have a brother named Mark, and near as I can tell, none of Henry’s actual brothers (Shipley, Erastus, and Shepherd) were involved with Wells Fargo.

The Nelson Museum has an audio interview with Rykert heir Philomena Snider where she describes some of the antiques in the home and produces photos of three men that she says are Mark, Henry, and Matt Wells and claims they were responsible for starting Wells Fargo.

Ella’s father was indeed named Mark, but he was a train conductor. After he died in Niagara Falls, NY, in 1892, his obituary in the Buffalo Post didn’t mention anything about Wells Fargo. An online family tree says he was born to Robert C. and Mary Ann Wells in 1821 in England. He had seven brothers, but none was named Henry or Matt. Henry Wells (the actual Wells Fargo co-founder) was born in Vermont in 1805 to Shipley and Dorothea Wells. There is no obvious relation between Mark Wells and Henry Wells.

For a long time I wasn’t sure if Ella actually claimed to be an heir to the Wells Fargo fortune. It wasn’t mentioned in her obituary in 1919, but it was mentioned in her husband’s obituary in 1931. So I wondered if it was something her husband or a writer cooked up after her death.

Ella Rykert, date unknown. (Creston Museum and Archives)

But then I came across an illuminating item in the Bonners Ferry Herald of Dec. 14, 1895 about Ella’s mother Rosanna visiting the Rykerts while Ella was severely ill. The key passage reads: “Mrs. Wells is Mrs. Rykert’s mother … The lady is the widow of the late Mark Wells, distinguished as being one of the founders of the Wells, Fargo Express Co.” (Something similar appeared two days earlier in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, although it mistakenly stated Mrs. Wells was J.C. Rykert’s mother.)

This demonstrates the Wells Fargo claim was indeed circulating in Ella’s lifetime (as well as her mother’s lifetime) and it leaves four possibilities:

• Rosanna made it up, and Ella repeated it, believing it to be true.

• Rosanna made it up, and Ella repeated it, knowing it to be false.

• Ella made it up, without Rosanna’s knowledge.

• Ella made it up, with Rosanna’s knowledge.

If Ella made it up without her mother’s knowledge, she was taking a risk, because the newspaper item quoted above was published very soon after Rosanna returned to the United States. Mrs. Wells could well have spotted it en route or someone else could have pointed it out or sent it to her.

As for why Ella and/or Rosanna invented this story, I can only imagine it was to impress people. It certainly worked! No one has questioned it until now and it’s not hard to understand why it was so eagerly believed: it emphasized how unusual it was for a woman from a family of means to move to BC at that time.

By one account, “against the wish of her parents and relatives [Ella] married Mr. Rykert, forsaking all social life to live with him in the wilderness.” Another said: “Mrs. Rykert, the daughter of an immensely wealthy man … could have possibly lived anywhere in the world had she so desired, yet she chose to be with Mr. Rykert pioneering in the Kootenays.” Her supposed Wells Fargo connection was also used to explain all her furniture.

Pete Kovanda of Boswell made another fascinating discovery: a New York Court of Appeals document details a 1908 dispute between Ella Rykert and Emma Wells, the alleged widow of Ella’s late brother Arthur. It presents an unflattering view of Arthur, who wed Emma while still married to another woman whom he had placed in a Chicago asylum, without telling his new bride.

“Maybe this was a reason for Ella to distance herself from her family and attach herself to a more prominent one,” Kovanda speculates. “I think had there been any obvious connections between Ella Rykert and the Wells Fargo fortune, it would have surfaced in this court proceeding.”

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A few other claims about the Rykerts don’t hold up to scrutiny, but I think they were just mistakes in secondary sources, not deliberate falsehoods. For instance, it was said that J.C. Rykert’s father was the last surviving member of the first Canadian parliament. While Rykert the elder was indeed an MP at one point, he actually served in the first Ontario parliament.

Charles Rykert (left) and unidentified man at the Rykert property who sure looks like a Mountie. (Creston Museum and Archives)

It was also said that J.C. Rykert came to BC in 1881 as part of the North West Mounted Police escort for Canada’s governor general, Sir John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, the Marquis of Lorne. In fact, Rykert’s service with the Mounties was from 1875-77 at Fort Macleod, in what is now Alberta. His service file reveals he was disciplined for mouthing off to his boss.

For “Using insolent language towards acting const. King,” he was fined 75 cents and for “Making a false statement against acting Const. King in having stated that King had used oppressive and tyrannical conduct towards him,” he was fined $3.

The Marquis of Lorne did tour western Canada in August-September 1881 and he was in Nanaimo in October 1882, but if Rykert was one of his bodyguards, it must have been a freelance gig.

Rykert’s obituary said nothing about the governor general. Instead, it explained that in 1881 he “could no longer withstand the lure of the west” and joined the Canadian customs department in Victoria before being dispatched to the Kootenay in 1883, where he became all things to all people, including mining recorder and government agent.

— With thanks to Pete Kovanda