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Imagining Difference
Margaret Mead went to Samoa. Louis Leakey found hominids in Kenya.
To make her name in anthropology, Leslie Robertson went prospecting for a myth in the hard-luck town of Fernie. As the former mining centre slowly morphed itself into a destination ski resort, she hung out at the local hospital, at the ice rink, in the Dairy Queen and at the Remembrance Day ceremony, etc., nudging closer to ordinary folks. Trained as an ethnologist, Robertson wanted to investigate possible origins and various interpretations of a curse that was supposedly placed on the community-nestled in the Crow's Nest Pass area, just west of Alberta, in the east Kootenays-by the Ktunaxa Indians more than a century before.
The litany of Fernie's misfortunes since then is impressive.
1902 - an explosion kills 130 men
1904 - fire
1908 - Fernie burns to the ground
1911 - heavy snowfall isolates town, starvation looms
1917 - an explosion kills 35 miners
1924 - bankruptcy of Home Bank of Canada
1897, 1902, 1916, 1923, 1948 - floods
1897, 1902 - typhoid
1902 - smallpox
1918 - scarlet fever, measles, chicken pox, influenza
In the late 1990s, mainly relying on oldtimers, Robertson tape recorded varying accounts of how and why the town was disaster-prone. It was all William Fernie's fault. Or so legend has it.
After stints in Australia and South America, the Englishman William Fernie arrived in B.C. in 1860, looking for gold. Failing to find his fortune in the Cariboo and the Boundary District, he helped construct the Dewdney Trail and gravitated to the Kootenays he met Michael Phillips, a Hudson's Bay employee who had established a trading post at Tobacco Plains, south of Elko, around 1865.
Motivated by wanderlust, Phillips' urgings and the findings of George Mercer Dawson, who had explored the Crow's Nest Past for the Geological Survey of Canada in 1883, the intrepid William Fernie began scouting for huge seams of coal that were rumoured to exist in nearby Elk River Valley, an area considered taboo by the local Indians. The Indians were tight-lipped to Fernie's enquiries, but his passions were stirred when he saw an Indian princess-it's rare that an Indian commoner appears in these stories-wearing a necklace of coal diamonds, or a necklace of coal.
In order to gain the secret of the coal's whereabouts, Fernie asked the chief if he could marry this local Pocahontas. Upon receiving consent to do so, Fernie was shown where he could find the coal.
Then he jilted her. William Fernie generated the Crow's Nest Coal and Mineral Company in 1898. The Indians resented the intrusion of the white men (and later the Canadian Pacific Railway). The girl's mother, or the girl herself, cast a curse upon the emerging community of Fernie, established in 1898 and incorporated in 1904. Forever afterwards, white settlers would suffer "from fire, flood, strife and discord; all will finally die from fire and water"; (according to one source).
In 1906, Fernie retired to Oak Bay on Vancouver Island where he died in 1921. Over the ensuing decades Fernie residents have claimed they can see the shadow of a 'ghostrider' on Hosmer Mountain, depicting William Fernie galloping away from the princess and her father. Local hockey teams are now nicknamed the Ghostriders.
One logical explanation for the origin of the Curse is supplied by an unnamed Ktunaxa woman, born in 1955. When her people travelled into Alberta from B.C., they generally took the route via Corbin and Coal Creek, rather than use the more arduous route via Fernie. Hence the curse narrative could have "fulfilled the practical purpose of warning people about the rigours of travel through the Fernie area.";
In 1964, at the behest of Fernie Mayor James White, members of the Kootenay (Ktunaxa) tribe were invited by Rotarians and the Fernie city council to officially lift the curse on the 60th anniversary of the town's incorporation. "During these years many misfortunes have befallen us,"; said the mayor, "and by many, it is believed that your curse brought these about.";
Chief Red Eagle passed a peace pipe to Mayor White, but it went out. Amid more incantations and puffing, the curse was symbolically vanquished. A month later Mayor Jimmy White dropped dead.
The good citizens of Fernie (pop. 5,000) could have shunned Robertson as a nosey Parker, an effete outsider, but she had family connections to smooth the way, as the fourth generation in her mother's line to live in the town. There was only one key component of the far-from-homogenous town that resisted. Having started her research in May of 1997, Robertson visited the Ktunaxa-Kinbasket Tribal Administration Office on St. Mary's Reserve in August of 1997 to gain permission to conduct her research-but was rebuffed.
Elders gave her a hearty lunch-and a firm denial. "This has happened to our people before,"; complained one elder. "They take our knowledge and say it will just stay put and then they make a book! We give them our knowledge and then what do we have left? Nothing! They take it away! [A writer] asked me a long time ago to tell him about things. I told him he should be speaking to my elders. He came back and asked me to write down everything I knew and he made a book. He used to come to my house. I didn't like him there - it gave me a bad feeling... A man a long time ago came to work on our language. He said he wouldn't publish it; he just sit on it. Now it's a book.";
Rebuffed by others, Robertson later procured of a letter containing some non-committal phrasing that could be construed as a glimmer of assent. It was hardly a vote of confidence, but it allowed her to pursue First Nations informants under the pretence of being politically correct. The idea that she was directly connected to William Fernie as an interloper, another white outsider seeking to enrich herself by extracting valuable material, is not deeply considered in Robertson's otherwise wide-ranging study, Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse, and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town (UBC Press, $29.95).
Imagining Difference could have been called The Curse of Fernie, or A Whole Bunch of Stuff about Fernie. Enemy aliens, graffiti, hate-mongers, video games, Buffalo Bill's circus visit in 1914, skiing, tourism and Italian superstitions are all stuffed together, connected by personal asides, melding academic referendces with the methods of so-called creative non-fiction.
One of her informants tell us, "Ukrainian women took control over their lives. I mean, they used the men in their lives... For example, your husband only works three days a week, there isn't much coming, in, so she takes a boarder, okay? She takes in a boarder, she creates a nice living space for this boarder. Now you have two incomes coming in, right? The first thing you know, there are two or three children who look slightly different and they go right into old age with two men and one woman in a house and they're all happy together. She's the one who is controlling the situation.";
Much of the value or pleasure to be derived from Imagining Difference arises from such tangential excerpts. It's fun to learn, for instance, that in 1909, Fernie police made 188 charges of prostitution, 166 charges of drunk and disorderly, 32 charges of vagrancy, and 20 charges for assault. "Amongst the fine that were levied,"; she writes, "a Chinese launderer was given a fine of five dollars or fifteen days for spraying water from his mouth onto an article of clothing.";
In 1917 there were 30 charges of "abduction"; because local men were seizing women from their work in the whorehouses. During WW I, 306 alleged enemy aliens were arrested and interned in Fernie and nearby Morrissey.
This sort of thing has precious little do to with the Curse, but Robertson's interviews with common folk, and her diggings in the files of the venerable Fernie Free Press, dating from 1898, provide balance to her academic musings on the "politics of cursing.";
While purportedly seeking new ideas, academics are often slavishly conventional in their writing. With its 25-page bibliography, much of Imagining Difference is too stilted to pass for popular history, but this work has an intriguing premise and it shines light back onto a town once known as the Pittsburgh of the West. The Curse of William Fernie is every bit as enduring as Ogopogo myth, or reports of the West Coast sea monster known as 'Caddy,' and Robertson deserves credit for an original undertaking. 0-7748-1093-9
Previous reference works related to Fernie include:
The Forgotten Kutenai (Boise: Mountain States Press, 1955) by Paul Baker.
Backtracking (Fernie and District Historical Association, 1967) edited by Robert Crisafio.
Flathead and Kootenay: The Rivers, the Tribe and the Region's Traders (Glendale: Arthur H. Clarke, 1969) by Olga Weyermeyer Johnson.
A Frontier Guide to the Dynamic Crow's Nest (Frontier Publishing, 1969) by Frank Anderson. Republished as Tragedies of the Crowsnest Pass (Heritage, 1983) by Elsie Turnbull and Frank Anderson). Republished as Tragedies of Crowsnest Pass (Heritage, 1988) by Art Downs. Republished as Triumph and Tragedy in the Crowsnest Pass (Heritage, 2005), re-edited by Diana Wilson.
The Wella Board (Stories of early Fernie) (Argenta, B.C.: Root Cellar Press, 1972) by Sydney Hutcheson. Republished as The Curse and Other Stories from the Wella Board (Fernie: Fernie & District Historical Society, 1973).
East Kootenay Saga (Nunaga Publishing Co., 1974) by David Scott and Edna Hanic.
East Kootenay Chronicle (Mr. Paperback, 1979) by David Scott and Edna Hanic.
A Short History of Fernie (Lambeth Jeune Dang Research Group, 1979) by Susan M. Lambeth.
Crowsnest and Its People (Crowsnest Pass Historical Society, 1979).
The Life and Times of the Elk Valley Sourdough (Fernie: Self-published, 1983) by Mathias Baker.
Photo Companion: Crowsnest and Its People (Crowsnest Pass Historical Society, 1990).
Crowsnest: An Illustrated History and Guide to the Crowsnest Pass (Altitude, 1995) by Brian J. Dawson.
The Forgotten Side of the Border (Plateau Press, 1998) co-edited by Wayne Norton & Naomi Miller.
A World Apart: The Crowsnest Communities of Alberta and British Columbia (Plateau Press, 2002) co-edited by Wayne Norton & Tom Langford.
la Board (Fernie: Fernie & District Historical Society, 1973).
East Kootenay Saga (Nunaga Publishing Co., 1974) by David Scott and Edna Hanic.
East Kootenay Chronicle (Mr. Paperback, 1979) by David Scott and Edna Hanic.
A Short History of Fernie (Lambeth Jeune Dang Research Group, 1979) by Susan M. Lambeth.
Crowsnest and Its People (Crowsnest Pass Historical Society, 1979).
The Life and Times of the Elk Valley Sourdough (Fernie: Self-published, 1983) by Mathias Baker.
Photo Companion: Crowsnest and Its People (Crowsnest Pass Historical Society, 1990).
Crowsnest: An Illustrated History and Guide to the Crowsnest Pass (Altitude, 1995) by Brian J. Dawson.
The Forgotten Side of the Border (Plateau Press, 1998) co-edited by Wayne Norton & Naomi Miller.
A World Apart: The Crowsnest Communities of Alberta and British Columbia (Plateau Press, 2002) co-edited by Wayne Norton & Tom Langford.
To make her name in anthropology, Leslie Robertson went prospecting for a myth in the hard-luck town of Fernie. As the former mining centre slowly morphed itself into a destination ski resort, she hung out at the local hospital, at the ice rink, in the Dairy Queen and at the Remembrance Day ceremony, etc., nudging closer to ordinary folks. Trained as an ethnologist, Robertson wanted to investigate possible origins and various interpretations of a curse that was supposedly placed on the community-nestled in the Crow's Nest Pass area, just west of Alberta, in the east Kootenays-by the Ktunaxa Indians more than a century before.
The litany of Fernie's misfortunes since then is impressive.
1902 - an explosion kills 130 men
1904 - fire
1908 - Fernie burns to the ground
1911 - heavy snowfall isolates town, starvation looms
1917 - an explosion kills 35 miners
1924 - bankruptcy of Home Bank of Canada
1897, 1902, 1916, 1923, 1948 - floods
1897, 1902 - typhoid
1902 - smallpox
1918 - scarlet fever, measles, chicken pox, influenza
In the late 1990s, mainly relying on oldtimers, Robertson tape recorded varying accounts of how and why the town was disaster-prone. It was all William Fernie's fault. Or so legend has it.
After stints in Australia and South America, the Englishman William Fernie arrived in B.C. in 1860, looking for gold. Failing to find his fortune in the Cariboo and the Boundary District, he helped construct the Dewdney Trail and gravitated to the Kootenays he met Michael Phillips, a Hudson's Bay employee who had established a trading post at Tobacco Plains, south of Elko, around 1865.
Motivated by wanderlust, Phillips' urgings and the findings of George Mercer Dawson, who had explored the Crow's Nest Past for the Geological Survey of Canada in 1883, the intrepid William Fernie began scouting for huge seams of coal that were rumoured to exist in nearby Elk River Valley, an area considered taboo by the local Indians. The Indians were tight-lipped to Fernie's enquiries, but his passions were stirred when he saw an Indian princess-it's rare that an Indian commoner appears in these stories-wearing a necklace of coal diamonds, or a necklace of coal.
In order to gain the secret of the coal's whereabouts, Fernie asked the chief if he could marry this local Pocahontas. Upon receiving consent to do so, Fernie was shown where he could find the coal.
Then he jilted her. William Fernie generated the Crow's Nest Coal and Mineral Company in 1898. The Indians resented the intrusion of the white men (and later the Canadian Pacific Railway). The girl's mother, or the girl herself, cast a curse upon the emerging community of Fernie, established in 1898 and incorporated in 1904. Forever afterwards, white settlers would suffer "from fire, flood, strife and discord; all will finally die from fire and water"; (according to one source).
In 1906, Fernie retired to Oak Bay on Vancouver Island where he died in 1921. Over the ensuing decades Fernie residents have claimed they can see the shadow of a 'ghostrider' on Hosmer Mountain, depicting William Fernie galloping away from the princess and her father. Local hockey teams are now nicknamed the Ghostriders.
One logical explanation for the origin of the Curse is supplied by an unnamed Ktunaxa woman, born in 1955. When her people travelled into Alberta from B.C., they generally took the route via Corbin and Coal Creek, rather than use the more arduous route via Fernie. Hence the curse narrative could have "fulfilled the practical purpose of warning people about the rigours of travel through the Fernie area.";
In 1964, at the behest of Fernie Mayor James White, members of the Kootenay (Ktunaxa) tribe were invited by Rotarians and the Fernie city council to officially lift the curse on the 60th anniversary of the town's incorporation. "During these years many misfortunes have befallen us,"; said the mayor, "and by many, it is believed that your curse brought these about.";
Chief Red Eagle passed a peace pipe to Mayor White, but it went out. Amid more incantations and puffing, the curse was symbolically vanquished. A month later Mayor Jimmy White dropped dead.
The good citizens of Fernie (pop. 5,000) could have shunned Robertson as a nosey Parker, an effete outsider, but she had family connections to smooth the way, as the fourth generation in her mother's line to live in the town. There was only one key component of the far-from-homogenous town that resisted. Having started her research in May of 1997, Robertson visited the Ktunaxa-Kinbasket Tribal Administration Office on St. Mary's Reserve in August of 1997 to gain permission to conduct her research-but was rebuffed.
Elders gave her a hearty lunch-and a firm denial. "This has happened to our people before,"; complained one elder. "They take our knowledge and say it will just stay put and then they make a book! We give them our knowledge and then what do we have left? Nothing! They take it away! [A writer] asked me a long time ago to tell him about things. I told him he should be speaking to my elders. He came back and asked me to write down everything I knew and he made a book. He used to come to my house. I didn't like him there - it gave me a bad feeling... A man a long time ago came to work on our language. He said he wouldn't publish it; he just sit on it. Now it's a book.";
Rebuffed by others, Robertson later procured of a letter containing some non-committal phrasing that could be construed as a glimmer of assent. It was hardly a vote of confidence, but it allowed her to pursue First Nations informants under the pretence of being politically correct. The idea that she was directly connected to William Fernie as an interloper, another white outsider seeking to enrich herself by extracting valuable material, is not deeply considered in Robertson's otherwise wide-ranging study, Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse, and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town (UBC Press, $29.95).
Imagining Difference could have been called The Curse of Fernie, or A Whole Bunch of Stuff about Fernie. Enemy aliens, graffiti, hate-mongers, video games, Buffalo Bill's circus visit in 1914, skiing, tourism and Italian superstitions are all stuffed together, connected by personal asides, melding academic referendces with the methods of so-called creative non-fiction.
One of her informants tell us, "Ukrainian women took control over their lives. I mean, they used the men in their lives... For example, your husband only works three days a week, there isn't much coming, in, so she takes a boarder, okay? She takes in a boarder, she creates a nice living space for this boarder. Now you have two incomes coming in, right? The first thing you know, there are two or three children who look slightly different and they go right into old age with two men and one woman in a house and they're all happy together. She's the one who is controlling the situation.";
Much of the value or pleasure to be derived from Imagining Difference arises from such tangential excerpts. It's fun to learn, for instance, that in 1909, Fernie police made 188 charges of prostitution, 166 charges of drunk and disorderly, 32 charges of vagrancy, and 20 charges for assault. "Amongst the fine that were levied,"; she writes, "a Chinese launderer was given a fine of five dollars or fifteen days for spraying water from his mouth onto an article of clothing.";
In 1917 there were 30 charges of "abduction"; because local men were seizing women from their work in the whorehouses. During WW I, 306 alleged enemy aliens were arrested and interned in Fernie and nearby Morrissey.
This sort of thing has precious little do to with the Curse, but Robertson's interviews with common folk, and her diggings in the files of the venerable Fernie Free Press, dating from 1898, provide balance to her academic musings on the "politics of cursing.";
While purportedly seeking new ideas, academics are often slavishly conventional in their writing. With its 25-page bibliography, much of Imagining Difference is too stilted to pass for popular history, but this work has an intriguing premise and it shines light back onto a town once known as the Pittsburgh of the West. The Curse of William Fernie is every bit as enduring as Ogopogo myth, or reports of the West Coast sea monster known as 'Caddy,' and Robertson deserves credit for an original undertaking. 0-7748-1093-9
Previous reference works related to Fernie include:
The Forgotten Kutenai (Boise: Mountain States Press, 1955) by Paul Baker.
Backtracking (Fernie and District Historical Association, 1967) edited by Robert Crisafio.
Flathead and Kootenay: The Rivers, the Tribe and the Region's Traders (Glendale: Arthur H. Clarke, 1969) by Olga Weyermeyer Johnson.
A Frontier Guide to the Dynamic Crow's Nest (Frontier Publishing, 1969) by Frank Anderson. Republished as Tragedies of the Crowsnest Pass (Heritage, 1983) by Elsie Turnbull and Frank Anderson). Republished as Tragedies of Crowsnest Pass (Heritage, 1988) by Art Downs. Republished as Triumph and Tragedy in the Crowsnest Pass (Heritage, 2005), re-edited by Diana Wilson.
The Wella Board (Stories of early Fernie) (Argenta, B.C.: Root Cellar Press, 1972) by Sydney Hutcheson. Republished as The Curse and Other Stories from the Wella Board (Fernie: Fernie & District Historical Society, 1973).
East Kootenay Saga (Nunaga Publishing Co., 1974) by David Scott and Edna Hanic.
East Kootenay Chronicle (Mr. Paperback, 1979) by David Scott and Edna Hanic.
A Short History of Fernie (Lambeth Jeune Dang Research Group, 1979) by Susan M. Lambeth.
Crowsnest and Its People (Crowsnest Pass Historical Society, 1979).
The Life and Times of the Elk Valley Sourdough (Fernie: Self-published, 1983) by Mathias Baker.
Photo Companion: Crowsnest and Its People (Crowsnest Pass Historical Society, 1990).
Crowsnest: An Illustrated History and Guide to the Crowsnest Pass (Altitude, 1995) by Brian J. Dawson.
The Forgotten Side of the Border (Plateau Press, 1998) co-edited by Wayne Norton & Naomi Miller.
A World Apart: The Crowsnest Communities of Alberta and British Columbia (Plateau Press, 2002) co-edited by Wayne Norton & Tom Langford.
la Board (Fernie: Fernie & District Historical Society, 1973).
East Kootenay Saga (Nunaga Publishing Co., 1974) by David Scott and Edna Hanic.
East Kootenay Chronicle (Mr. Paperback, 1979) by David Scott and Edna Hanic.
A Short History of Fernie (Lambeth Jeune Dang Research Group, 1979) by Susan M. Lambeth.
Crowsnest and Its People (Crowsnest Pass Historical Society, 1979).
The Life and Times of the Elk Valley Sourdough (Fernie: Self-published, 1983) by Mathias Baker.
Photo Companion: Crowsnest and Its People (Crowsnest Pass Historical Society, 1990).
Crowsnest: An Illustrated History and Guide to the Crowsnest Pass (Altitude, 1995) by Brian J. Dawson.
The Forgotten Side of the Border (Plateau Press, 1998) co-edited by Wayne Norton & Naomi Miller.
A World Apart: The Crowsnest Communities of Alberta and British Columbia (Plateau Press, 2002) co-edited by Wayne Norton & Tom Langford.
Submitted on September 28, 2005 in By David.
