A new book studies the history of Trail as seen through its weekly newspaper in the years when the city was growing into the leading industrial town of the Kootenays.
Printer’s Devils: The Feisty Pioneer Newspaper That Shaped the History of British Columbia’s Smelter City 1895–1925 is by Trail-born, Castlegar-raised Ron Verzuh and looks at the Trail Creek News (later the Trail News).
Although at the turn of the 20th century Rossland and Nelson had daily newspapers, as a smaller city Trail did not.
“But it covered the landscape,” Verzuh says of the Trail Creek News. “Everything from whether a cow died on the farm up the stream or a fire in one of the local hotels or somebody got arrested for drunk and disorderly in one of the pubs — and there were a lot of taverns in Trail in those years.
“It was this community newspaper that somehow survived a shaky start in the 1890s to become a daily newspaper that is now the Trail Times.”
Verzuh provides biographical sketches of the paper’s first six editor-publishers, beginning with William F. (Wrong Font) Thompson who arrived from Washington state along with his wife Lavinia, an experienced typesetter who undoubtedly contributed to the paper’s polished look, and their adopted son Loss Bernard.
The News was published from a “ramshackle little building” on Bay Avenue that’s memorialized in a mural downtown that appears on the book’s cover. The first issue came out on wrapping paper because the Thompsons couldn’t procure newsprint.
In 1898, W.F. Thompson headed for Alaska, there to establish another paper. He sold the News to a fellow American, William K. (Billy) Esling, who would also run newspapers in Rossland and serve as the area’s MLA and MP.
In fact, of the first six editor-publishers, only one, A.R. Babington, was Canadian.
In addition to writing about the proprietors, Verzuh gives an overview of some of the major news stories that appeared in the News’ pages, including the notorious murder of nurse Mildred Neilson in 1925 in a still-standing building at the corner of Cedar and Helena.
World War I is chronicled along with the distressing number of local men whose lives it took. The flu epidemic of 1918-19 is also recounted along with its devastating toll. Then, as now, vaccine hesitancy was the cause of a major social divide.
“Some people objected to vaccines and were quite vocal about it, including the editor of the Trail Creek News,” Verzuh explains. “It became a battle zone as it has been in the last few years where the paper took a stand in favor of those against vaccines.”
While these are just “snippets of history,” Verzuh said they reveal what people of that era went through and “why they maybe thought the way they did,” with the “attitudes and opinions they developed, political, social, and cultural. All those things come to the fore in this review of the paper.”
Verzuh said reading the pages of the News was fun, not least because his own family occasionally showed up: his grandfather’s obituary appeared on the front page in 1916.
The book is expected out soon and a tour will follow in late May that will see Verzuh stop at the museums in Rossland and Trail and also visit Salmo, Castlegar, and Grand Forks.
Verzuh is also the author of Smelter Wars, published last year, about union organizing efforts at the Trail smelter during and after World War II.
