Riddle of the Retallack schoolhouse

In January 2021, I received an intriguing email from Abi Marsh asking about a cedar shake cabin on the south side of Highway 31A at Retallack she and husband Gerald Wagner were buying. She wondered if it had once been a school, because a caption in Don Blake’s 1988 book Valley of the Ghosts suggested as much: “Ray and Joanne [McNeill’s] home in Retallack. This may have been the schoolhouse in earlier days.”

I didn’t know anything about the cabin and told Abi it would probably require a title search to determine if the school district ever owned it. She went ahead and ordered one while I tried to find out more about the building through other sources. And boy, did it lead down some interesting rabbit holes (Retallack holes?) that I will get to in a moment.

The cabin in question in March 2023.

But later that year, I was surprised to read the Kootenay Lake school district was being sued over the sale of a different, vacant property at Retallack. While the buyer came to terms with the district in 2020, he couldn’t take possession because of a delay in approval from the Ministry of Education. The case was settled out of court.

Various documents on the school district’s website reveal they actually owned two adjacent parcels on the north side of the highway. The board decided to sell them by resolutions of 2015 and 2019 and they were listed at $49,000 and $39,000.

The Nelson Star quoted the district’s secretary-treasurer as explaining the disputed property “was formerly set aside to be a school in the early 1900s when there was the possibility a mining community might be built at the location. That never happened and there was no need for a school.”

That didn’t make much sense for I knew Retallack had at least two schools. The community was formerly a mining camp called Whitewater and a school opened there at the start of 1901 with Jane Moore as teacher. She had at least eight students in Grades 1-5.

Whitewater, July 1898. (Image A-03747 courtesy Royal BC Museum and Archives)

The Sandon Mining Review of July 6, 1901 described the school’s “closing exercises,” which many townsfolk attended. Students sang songs, accompanied by Miss Moore on organ, and awards were presented for proficiency, punctuality, and “deportment.”  

“Miss Moore must be congratulated upon the discipline maintained in the school-room and the efficiency her pupils have attained, considering the school has only been in existence six months,” the newspaper said.

Miss Moore accomplished this despite lacking teacher’s qualifications. She left that summer for her home in Victoria to write her exams but didn’t return. When the inspector visited the school on March 11, 1902, he found 10 pupils present. His assessment: 

A small library and a few pictures in school-room; senior class backward in several subjects; work of intermediate pupils weak; no oral history as yet; primary number good, but reading poor; considerable interest in school work shown by pupils.

It didn’t help that the school went through three teachers in 1901-02: Miss L.Z. Demmons, Miss J.B. McMillan, and Evaline B. Hobbs, who came from Revelstoke in April. The school closed in 1902 or 1903. If the building (which we know nothing about) was still standing as of 1910, it presumably fell victim to the forest fire that consumed the entire town that year.

The community was subsequently renamed Retallack after Major John Ley Retallack, who leased the Whitewater mine, and had a second life. Another school operated from 1929-53 with the exception of a closure in 1939-40 and possibly part of 1933.

So my working theory was that Abi’s cabin was the second school (despite the fact BC Assessment pegged its construction as 1935) and the contested vacant property was where the Whitewater school had been.

The cabin’s legal description is District Lot 822, Lot A. On the original Whitewater townsite plan, that corresponds to Block 9, Lots 17-20.

Whitewater townsite plan with the location of the cabin circled. (Courtesy Regional District of Central Kootenay)

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We know the names of 31 students who attended the Retallack school in the 1930s because their names appeared in the Nelson Daily News.

1930-31: Gene Garrett; Gunnar, Harry, and Ruth Hanson; Annie Koftinoff; Frank Kohar; John and Fanny Sapriken; Gloria, Astrid, Olga, and Theodore Storbo

1931-32: Irene and Douglas Garrett; Annie and Mary Koftinoff; Frank Kohar; Vera, Joe, and Andy Pavlis; John and Fanny Sapriken; Peter Shelling

1932-33: Irene and Douglas Garrett; Frank Kohar; Mary and Annie Koftinoff; Louis Maida; Fanny and John Sapriken; Joe Trinca

1934-35: Billy and Orville Gammon; Douglas, Irene and Billy Garrett; Bernard and Loretta Kelly; Frank Kohar, Mary and Margaret Ryan; Joe Trinca

1936-37: Irene and Billy Garrett; Myrtle, Irene, and Bruce Liness

Of interest are the Doukhobor surnames (Sapriken, Koftinoff).

I recognize Frank Kohar, who was born in Sandon in 1923. He graduated from high school in Nelson and then mined at Zincton before enlisting for the Second World War. Afterward he lived in Sandon until 1954, then worked as an accountant in Castlegar for many years. He died in 2008.

Joe Trinca was also born in Sandon, in 1920, and enlisted during the Second World War. He died in Agassiz in 2006.

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A series of curious ads for teachers at Retallack appeared in The Vancouver Sun in the late 1930s. This one dated Sept. 15, 1938 revealed prospective applicants were required to have two school-age children to round out the class!

Then something really weird showed up on July 18, 1939.

This was followed up by a rebuttal on Aug. 16, 1939.

What was going on? The school was indeed closed 1939-40, regardless of whether the first ad was authorized, but why? I have not figured it out.

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Using annual Department of Education reports, I compiled a table of Retallack’s teachers and the school’s annual enrollment. From 1931-39 enrollment was between six and nine. It peaked at 20 between 1943 and 1945, coinciding with Kootenay Belle Gold Mines Ltd. moving its operation from Sheep Creek to Retallack. No teacher spent more than two consecutive years at the school, although Bessie Bestwick taught there for three non-consecutive years, suggesting she was a local. 

YEAR	TEACHER	STUDENTS (M/F)
1929-30	Miss Jennie Severina Pearson	17 8-9
1930-31	Miss Jennie Severina Pearson	13 6-7
1931-32	Miss Mary M. Maida	7 4-3
1932-33	Miss Mary M. Maida	9 5-4
1933-34	Miss Irene M. MacGillivray	8 6-2
1934-35	Miss Irene M. MacGillivray	6 4-2
1935-36	Jack Peachey	8 5-3
1936-37	Jack Peachey	9 5-4
1937-38	R.R. Butler	8 5-3
1938-39	Mrs. L. Wellsby	8 3-5
1939-40	CLOSED	N/A
1940-41	Miss Frances Evelyn Margaret Noble	11 7-4
1941-42	Miss R.M. Robinson	9 5-4
1942-43	Mrs. Leah V. Munch	13 6-7
1943-44	Mrs. Leah V. Munch	20 9-11
1944-45	Mrs. Bessie Mabel Bestwick	20 10-10
1945-46	Miss Toyoko Matsuzaki	10 4-6
1946-47	Mrs. Bessie Mabel Bestwick	13 8-5
1947-48	Don R. Matheson	10 4-6
1948-49	?	10 5-5
1949-50	Mrs. Bessie Mabel Bestwick	11 6-5
1950-51	R.W. McInnes	18 12-6
1951-52	Mrs. E.C. Clark	18 11-7
1952-53	Miss M.E. Miller	6 6-0

Four other teachers stand out for different reasons.

Margaret Noble was otherwise known as Peggy Bildstein and later taught at Howser. The BC Archives has a recorded interview with her but she said almost nothing about her time in Retallack.

Leah Munch also taught in Vallican, Crescent Valley, Harrop, and Procter. Both of her children were born at Retallack. Her husband Paul was a CPR section foreman.

Toyoko Matsuzaki’s appointment was announced in The New Canadian of Oct. 3, 1945:  

Kaslo, BC — Toyoko Matsuzaki, a sansei, has been appointed teacher at the Whitewater School, a community 15 miles north of this area. Miss Matsuzaki formerly taught in the Kootenay Lake School was which was maintained here by the BC Security Commission.

It’s curious that they used the name Whitewater instead of Retallack. According to the book Teaching in Canadian Exile, Matsuzaki’s hiring was historic because it “broke the longtime provincial ban against employing Japanese Canadians as public and high-school teachers.”

Although Japanese Canadians taught in the internment camps, Matsuzaki was just the second hired in the BC public school system and the first after the war. The book says Matsuzaki was part of a wave of such teachers, most of whom, like her, had their initial teaching experiences in the camps. She was a few days short of 19 when she began teaching in Retallack. Toyo’s father Isamu had been a fish packer in Steveston. They were interned at Kaslo along with Toyo’s mother Misao, two brothers, and five sisters.

Toyo had another distinction too. You’ll note the New Canadian story referred to her as a sansei, which is someone who is the grandchild of Japanese-born emigrants, or a third-generation Japanese Canadian. The newspaper conducted a search in 1950 for the oldest sansei in Canada. It turned out it was Toyo, who was born in 1926. By that time she was married to Jiro Miyazawa and living in Vancouver with their newborn.

I don’t know if she taught elsewhere after Retallack. She died in April 2021 in North Vancouver, age 94.

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Retallack’s first teacher, Jennie Severina (Sevvie) Pearson, was a Kaslo native who previously taught at Cooper Creek and later worked at schools in Robson, Trail, and the Lower Mainland. (She is pictured below probably around the time she was at Retallack in a photo from ancestry.com.)

That she was exceptional at her job was exemplified in 1958 when she was surprised to find herself winning a contest sponsored by The Vancouver Sun to find BC’s most popular teacher. Then in charge of a Grade 6 class at Canyon Heights elementary in North Vancouver and in the 32nd year of her career, she was the subject of a massive campaign by students who somehow produced 12,594 votes for her — 4,500 more than the runner-up.

According to The Sun, the school “literally trembled with wild cheering when it was announced over the public address system by principal J.S. Terry.” “It just seems like a dream,” she said. “I really can’t believe it … It really amazes me that such a small school could gather so many votes.”

What made her so popular? “She is a very fine person and very much admired by the staff,” said the principal. “She is also very conscientious, pays attention to all the details and has the interest of her pupils at heart.”

But the title wasn’t good for just bragging rights. It came with a 10-day all-expenses paid trip to Japan. A month later, she set off on Canadian Pacific Airlines, accompanied by Simma Holt, a Sun reporter much loathed in the Doukhobor community for her sensationalist book Terror in the Name of God.

The Vancouver Sun, June 19, 1958

Pearson said she dreamed of such a trip but could never afford it. She was also very shy and admitted to having reservations because she was nervous about meeting people. She must have gotten over those fears fast, or at least confronted them head on, because when she landed in Toyko, she was surrounded by radio and television reporters. “It’s as though I walked away from the hearth to become a fairy-tale princess,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to be real.”

She visited shrines, resorts, factories, and gardens, and spoke to a group of schoolchildren through an interpreter. They all wanted autographs (she is pictured below signing them in The Vancouver Sun of July 16, 1958). She did interviews and appeared on a TV game show similar to What’s My Line? She attended the opera, tried the baths of the Fujiya Hotel, and ate at restaurants recommended by Shirley Shudo, one of the first two Japanese-Canadian flight attendants employed by a Canadian airline.

She toured a primary school but was dismayed to find it “dark, unpainted, dingy, and ancient” with up to 55 pupils crammed into classes. In addition to their six-day week, students were expected to be school janitors.

Holt filed regular dispatches about Pearson’s adventures, which was extended beyond its original 10 days when Canadian Pacific decided to send her to Hong Kong. The pilot happened to be the father of one of her Canyon Heights students, so she was seated in the flight deck.

Holt’s final story explained that Pearson planned to further extend her Asian tour and visit an orphanage in Korea that her junior Red Cross branch sponsored. She also wanted to spend more time in Japan and speak with survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. “It has been an experience of a lifetime,” she said.

Plenty of her former students in Trail must have followed her adventures in the newspaper, since she had only left the city three years prior, but how about those from Retallack? They would have been mostly in their late 30s by then and living who knows where.

Pearson did not marry until 1969, when she was 64, although she raised two nieces after her sister died. She and husband Henry Forde retired to Mission, where she died in 1992, age 86.

Sevvie and Henry Forde, 1969 or later. (Ancestry.com)

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Remember my original theory about Retallack’s schools? That Abi and Gerald’s cabin was the school from 1929-53 and the vacant property the school district owned was once the site of the Whitewater school?

I modified that theory upon learning that in May 1952 ratepayers in the Kootenay Lake school district approved construction of a new one-room school for Retallack at a cost of $12,500 to accommodate increasing enrollment. But where to put it? According to the Nelson Daily News, “A new school site at Retallack was discussed by [school trustees] and a request for a Crown grant of more level ground was reported.”

The school went to tender the following month. No legal description of the property was provided, nor could I find any sign of a contract being awarded. However, the drawings and specs, designed by the office of Nelson architect Isla Williams, were said to be identical to a new school also being tendered for Ainsworth. (The latter was moved to Kaslo in 1970 and used as a music room and later as a kindergarten. It subsequently became a youth centre until being destroyed by fire in 2003.)

For some reason the Retallack project was re-tendered in August. Could they not find someone to build it? Then Kootenay Belle mines announced in November 1952 it was shutting down. That killed Retallack (population 40) and made not only the new school unnecessary but the existing one as well. I could find nothing in the Department of Education reports or public accounts that indicated the new school was completed. Tenders were awarded in June 1953 for the Ainsworth school and an auditorium in Kaslo, but there was no mention of Retallack.

So I guessed that while a site was acquired for the new school it was never actually built and this accounted for the vacant property sold in 2020. Perhaps if the Nelson Star story that mentioned land “set aside to be a school in the early 1900s” read “early 1950s” it would have been more accurate.

This new theory was also thrown into doubt, however, when Tammy Bradford of the Creston Museum sent me a history of the Creston-Kaslo school district compiled by Fred Martello in 1989. It said a new Retallack school was indeed built in 1952 but closed in 1954, and the following year the building was moved to New Denver and later sold. It wasn’t explained what the building was used for in New Denver (an auxiliary classroom?), nor who it was sold to, nor what became of it, nor where this info came from.

By this time, Abi had also received the results of the title search, which revealed … the school district never owned her cabin!

That left a few possibilities: the cabin was never a school and the caption in the Valley of the Ghosts book was simply wrong. Or perhaps the cabin was built on the site of the Whitewater school from 1900. Or maybe it was the 1929-53 school but the school district only rented or leased it.

The title search was a bit confusing because it involved four lots (Nos. 17-20) that were eventually consolidated and it’s hard to sort out who had what when. But it showed the property was part of a Crown grant issued to Warren Bell in 1898. (Retallack, before it was known as Whitewater, was called Bell’s Camp.)

Mary Ann Wright purchased the property in 1899. On the 1901 census for the Slocan, she’s listed as a baker living near her son Stephen and his family. Her husband was William H. McCready, but she appears to have reverted to her maiden name after his death in 1900. She died in California in 1919.

But it took until 1927 for Lots 17 and 18 to be transferred to Scott Thornburg of Zincton, who had his fingers in all sorts of mining ventures. He died in 1932. He (or his estate) remained the owner until 1941, when Scott’s wife Eva was put on the title along with Sidney N. Ross, who was involved with logging operations in the Salmo area and is the namesake of Ross Spur.

Ross was also Retallack’s postmaster from 1931-42, so the following item in the Kaslo Kootenaian of April 2, 1942 is very interesting: “Mr. John Hagen has purchased the Thornburg house here, which was formerly the post office and store.” Are they referring to Abi and Gerald’s cabin? Maybe … or maybe not, since the title search did not mention Hagen.

In 1951, George McCready acquired the property, or part of it. He was another of Mary Ann Wright’s sons. You’ll also recall him as the chair of the Retallack school board who took out the strange classified ad in 1939 warning teachers that the school had closed. Is his association with the property significant or coincidence? I don’t know. (McCready owned the Caledonia mine at what was once called Blaylock and at one time was a station agent for the Kaslo and Slocan Railway.)

Then we see several changes of ownership: Dora McKilley in 1953, H.M. Dignan Corp. Ltd. in 1961, Guy Lemay in 1963, Howard Thomas Glanville in 1973, and in 1977, Tim McCrory, who built an extension and installed wiring. It’s here that things take a strange turn.

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On the afternoon of June 23, 1980, three men burst into a Sears store in Burnaby. One, who had a revolver, pounced on a Brink’s guard who had just picked up a moneybag. The robber fired a shot into a wall as the other two men wrestled the guard to the floor, handcuffed him, and took the bag, containing more than $200,000 in cash and cheques ($735,000 in 2024).

The trio then “raced through a crowd of startled shoppers” to a stolen getaway car and took off. Two store employees chased them to the parking lot, where they got the car’s license plate. A few days later, sketches of two suspects were released.

The Province, June 26, 1980

About five weeks later, two men surrendered without incident when RCMP from Burnaby, Kaslo, and New Denver arrived at two cabins in Retallack — including the one that is now Abi and Gerald’s. Police recovered “numerous” weapons and more than $30,000 cash.

Brothers Robert Gordon Crooks, 24, and George Perry Crooks, 25, were charged with armed robbery and other crimes. It was originally thought they might also be responsible for a $400,000 heist of a Vancouver Eaton’s store in 1979 but police ruled it out.

I have heard two stories of what led authorities to the cabin in Retallack. One suggests the girlfriend of one of the aptly-named Crooks brothers was involved in a car accident in New Denver. The other says the brothers aroused suspicion by buying the cabin and lots of expensive toys with their loot.

Oddly, while the Crooks’ arrest was reported in Vancouver newspapers, there was no mention of it in the Nelson Daily News or Arrow Lakes News, the papers published closest to Retallack.

Justice came swiftly. In October, each of the brothers was sentenced to nine years in prison. It sounds like they pleaded guilty but newspaper coverage was vague on this point. The third man involved was never identified or caught.

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The Crooks brothers’ sad saga did not begin or end there.

A few years before the heist, Gordon Crooks argued with David Nevison, a bouncer at the Blueboy Hotel beer parlour in Vancouver, who had been seeing Gordon’s ex-girlfriend. Gordon admitted he tried to get back a fur coat he gave the woman just before they broke up. On April 1, 1974, Nevison, 20, was found dead in his home, shot eight times with a rifle.

Gordon, then 18, was charged with murder and went to trial the following January. The jury heard testimony from a police constable who posed as a cellmate and said Gordon told him: “They’ll never pin this on me because they’ll never find the gun.” Gordon denied making such a statement. 

After deliberating for 22 hours and returning to court three times for further instructions, the jury voted to acquit. Gordon died in Surrey in 1991, age 34, although his death registration didn’t give a cause. He was survived by his girlfriend and her daughter, plus three brothers.

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It’s not clear when the brothers were released following the Sears hold-up. But in August 1993, George Crooks, then 38, was one of two men charged with killing a UBC computer sciences student. He was accused of first-degree murder in the death of Martin Fraeundorf, 29, who was beaten over the head with a baseball bat while cycling on the university grounds.

In 1995, George entered a “surprise” guilty plea to manslaughter and received 19 months, despite a joint submission from the Crown and defence calling for four years. The judge took into account the year George spent in custody before being sentenced. George’s co-accused, Alfred Bailey, was convicted by a jury of second degree murder and received life without parole for 10 years.

The Crown said Bailey attacked Frauendorf because he was seeing Bailey’s ex-girlfriend. George was described as the killer’s lookout. I don’t know how long George served but it doesn’t appear he had any further run-ins with the law, at least in BC. There is some indication he may have returned to live in the Slocan Valley in the ‘90s and attended a funeral there in the mid-2010s.

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Looking into the Crooks brothers, I discovered their father Harold had his own problems. In 1944, his girlfriend Helen Bernice Clouse, 23, was found dead in her room in Vancouver of carbon monoxide poisoning. Harold was on the floor beside her. Gas fumes were coming from a stove with an open jet. Harold was taken to hospital and revived. At the coroner’s inquest, he testified he didn’t know what happened. The jury wasn’t able to determine “by whom or how” the gas was turned on.

In 1946, Harold fought and escaped from a pair of muggers in front of his house. He said they shoved a gun in his back and demanded money.

Later that year, Harold was jailed for three months and fined $100 after leading police on a chase on his motorcycle across the Cambie bridge and through downtown Vancouver. He narrowly missed hitting several cars before one of his tires blew out and he crashed into a curb. He broke his leg. Harold’s excuse? He thought he was having a friendly race with the police officer.

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The title search shows George Crooks acquired the Retallack cabin in 1980, but doesn’t provide an exact date, so we don’t know for certain if he bought the place intending it to be the hideout following the robbery or if it was purchased afterward with ill-gotten cash.

The property changed hands four more times in the next two years: Donald Bremner (1980), Nanswhyden Enterprises Ltd. (1981), Herman Aastrom and Elizabeth Thompson (1981), and David Couch (1982). The McNeils, mentioned as the owners in Valley of the Ghosts, acquired it in 1986 and sold it in 1994. (Nanswhyden Enteprises Ltd. was incorporated in 1981 and dissolved in 2009 but I have no idea what the company did. It appears to have taken its name from an estate in Cornwall, England.)

At the end of all this, we still don’t know or at least can’t confirm:

a) precisely where the 1929-53 school was or what happened to it;

b) if in fact the new school was built in 1953;

c) if the new school was moved to New Denver or what became of it;

d) if the property that was the subject of litigation in 2021 was the site of the Whitewater school, the 1929-53 school, the new school, or something else entirely.

(Another distinct possibility: perhaps the new school was not built and it was the 1929-53 school that was moved to New Denver.)

Regardless, it’s wild that the school district still has land at Retallack 70 years after it was last needed. The disputed property, whose legal description is Parcel A, District Lot 1427, is a curious two-acre rhombus, adjacent to but not within the original Whitewater townsite. In fact, it was carved from what was originally the Alpha mineral claim and is now the Easter claim.

You’ll recall at the start I said the school district actually owned two adjacent properties. One document on their website indicated that as of April 2023 the second lot had not sold. Another suggests that as of 2022 they were working on turning it over to the provincial government.

The cabin most likely was never a school but I wonder what led the McNeils to believe it had been one.

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This exploration made me realize how little has been written about mid-century mining towns of this area. Larry Jacobsen wrote a book in 2008 called Jewel of the Kootenays about the Canex operation near Salmo. But you have to look hard to find anything about Retallack, Remac, Zincton, or Sheep Creek from the 1930s to ‘70s.

After Retallack (nee Whitewater) died its second death, what was a ghost town good for? Military exercises, apparently. In June 1958, between 35 and 40 soldiers of the 111th Battery, 24th field regiment descended on the town for Operation Whitehall.

According to the Nelson Daily News, “They blasted their way into the ghost town under simulated attack … and settled in for two days of convoy manoeuvring, night patrols and small arms combat … The fire and movement tactics used took place in deserted and run-down houses …”

A few photos appeared in the newspaper, seen below. It wasn’t clear if the exercises actually caused damage but I’m sure they didn’t do any favours.

Nelson Daily News, June 3, 1958

Daily News columnist Doris Bradshaw did us a good turn by visiting Retallack a few months later and penning an evocative description of what she saw. On Oct. 8, 1958, she wrote the place was nearly deserted but there were a few signs of life. 

We admired one lovely log home — it was quite a good size, its stained logs carefully bevelled around windows and doors. On its front porch was a small corner cupboard with a curtain of canvas and peeking behind the canvas, we saw shelves of ore samples. Its windows were boarded over like many of the other houses … There was evidence also of a neat garden once, though now the grass had taken over.

In 1952, the Catholic Church on the upper bench in Silverton was dismantled and moved to Retallack for use there. But less than six years later, it had gone to ruin. Bradshaw said the church “sat under its cross, windows broken, steps gone and altar deserted. Its small confessional stood in the middle of the floor, no longer hearing the sins, little or big, of pioneers who sought to wrest a livelihood from the heart of the hills.” The Silvery Slocan Museum has a wooden cross said to be from Retallack. That could be the one she was referring to.

Mining building at Retallack, circa 1960s, with Burt Eckhart standing on the porch. (Ellis Anderson photo)

The same building as above in 1968, with half of the top floor gone. (Greg Nesteroff collection)

A third view of the same building, May 22, 1979. (Jean Spicer photo/Arrow Lakes Historical Society 1999.019.837)

Mining ruins at Retallack, circa 1960s. (Ellis Anderson photo)

The same building as above, 1968. (Greg Nesteroff collection)

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Retallack’s chief remaining landmarks are a couple of two-storey bunkhouses alongside Highway 31A used during mining operations in the 1940s and ‘50s. Local belief was the buildings came from Sheep Creek, near Salmo, where Kootenay Belle Gold Mines Ltd. previously operated.

And indeed, strong evidence appears in the Nelson Daily News of Sept. 13, 1943, stating Kootenay Belle “terminated its gold-mining operation in the Sheep Creek camp and is now removing buildings and equipment to … Retallack.” It must have been a heck of a job cutting the bunkhouses into pieces for transport and reassembly, yet I could find no other details about the move, which reportedly involved truck, barge, and train.

Retallack bunkhouses, looking recently painted, March 24, 1964. (Jean Spicer photo/Arrow Lakes Historical Society 1999.019.840)

The log cabin at left, which is long gone, could be the one Doris Bradshaw referred to in her 1958 column. This photo was taken in the 1960s. (Ellis Anderson photo)

Undated view. (Heather Lyon photo/Galena Publishing)

The bunkhouses seen in September 2000.

I once asked the late Jean Stahl, who moved to Salmo from Silverton in 1940, about these buildings. She didn’t know if they came from Sheep Creek but told me she stayed in one of them in the summer of 1965 or ’66 when her husband Karl worked at a Retallack mine.

The bunkhouses were probably abandoned not long after that. I’m not sure who deserves credit for ensuring they didn’t meet the same fate as most of Retallack’s other buildings, but they became one of the most photographed sites on the road between Kaslo and New Denver.

Around 2008, the late Ken Smith started to restore the buildings and lived there. Joel Hutton, who owns them now, has since put a lot more work into one of them. In June 2023 a mural and panels were unveiled on one of the buildings as part of the Autonomous Sinixt’s Rewilding Piq kiʔláwnaʔ campaign. (Piq kiʔláwnaʔ means “white grizzly” and is the Autonomous Sinixt name for the Highway 31A corridor.)

The bunkhouses in March 2023.

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Two other bits of Retallack trivia.

In 1945, eight unions signed on to support the Khalsa Diwan Society’s campaign to enfranchise Indo-Canadians. Among them were the Retallack Mine & Mill Workers Union, Local 698. Good on them, although I’m not aware that any Indo-Canadians ever lived or worked at Retallack.

And in September 2023, an envelope addressed to the Highland Surprise Gold Mines Ltd. with a 1942 Retallack postmark on the back sold in an online auction for $950. I have no idea why. The postmark is not exceptionally rare, so something else must have been going on.

— With thanks to Abi Marsh, Tammy Bradford, Frances Maika, and Hal Wright