In new book, B.C. historian traces the mysteries of Sandon’s elusive ‘king’

The King of Sandon: Murder, Myth, and the Man Behind B.C.’s Greatest Ghost Town launched in New Denver on Oct. 4

In the mining boom town of Sandon, B.C., in the late 1800s, John Morgan Harris owned the townsite, the power plant, a steam plant, the water works, two hotels, office buildings, a livery stable, and more, all paid for with proceeds from his silver mine.

In those days Sandon had a population of about 5,000 people (compared to its current population of about 20) with all the amenities of a small city (including an opera house) despite its remoteness and harsh winters. Harris was 28 when he moved to Sandon from the U.S. in 1882.

“Harris’ story is Sandon’s story,” writes West Kootenay historian and journalist Greg Nesteroff in the introduction to his just-published book about Harris entitled The King of Sandon: Murder, Myth, and the Man Behind B.C.’s Greatest Ghost Town, which launched Oct. 4 at the Silvery Slocan Museum in New Denver.

Nesteroff told his audience that in his research into the history and rumours attached to the great Sandon fire of 1900, which destroyed almost the entire town, Harris’ name kept reappearing, each time adding to a mystique that began to fascinate Nesteroff.

“His name kept coming up again and again,” Nesteroff said, “and he seemed to have a whole mythology built around him. I discovered a lot of the things that were said about him were either exaggerated or they just weren’t true. But there were also a couple things that I thought would be false that turned out to be true.”

Nesteroff has a singular talent for persistently and enthusiastically hunting down obscure facts about early life in the Kootenays and presenting them not just with narrative but with news clippings, train tickets, court documents, birth announcements, postcards, maps, letters, messages in bottles, and other original sources from his vast personal archive.

Nesteroff’s website The Kütne Reader: Adventures in Kootenaiana documents regional history. He is also the author of a long-running newspaper column on the origins of Kootenay place names. With Eric Brighton, Nesteroff is co-author of the book Lost Kootenays: A History in Pictures, which won a B.C. Heritage Award and which originated in a Facebook page of the same name. He also authors the blog The Patricks: The Hidden History of Hockey’s Royal Family.

Nesteroff is a former reporter and editor at the Nelson Star and a news director at Vista Radio in the West Kootenay.

In his New Denver talk, he portrayed Harris as a man who built Sandon as a monument to himself and who mythologized his own life. But Nesteroff did this carefully, without disclosing any spoilers. In the question period following his talk, his most frequent answer, given with his signature affability, was, “You’ll have to read the book.”

“I don’t think he had his priorities straight for most of his life, and you’ll learn in the book about one particular instance of extremely bad judgment on his part that has very serious consequences.”

Nesteroff started writing what he thought would be a slim volume about Harris in 2010, and took a sabbatical from his job as a news broadcaster at Mountain FM radio in Castlegar to write it. But as more details and mysteries of Harris’ life emerged, the project grew to the current 500-page book.

“Eventually I ran out of gas and out of money, so I went back to work, and for the next 15 years, really, that became my pattern, my cycle. I’d work a couple of years, save some money, quit, work on the book, run out of money, go back to work.

“The worst part of taking so long is that so many people who would have liked to have read the book, and especially the ones who helped me, are no longer around to do so. I really regret that.”

In 2013, Nesteroff and his then-new wife Anitra Winje took part in a multi-week trivia contest at the Hume Hotel in Nelson. The top prize was 100,000 Aeroplan points, which the pair won in a tie with two others who gave Nesteroff and Winje their share of the winnings as a wedding gift.

“Anitra, bless her heart, suggested that we use those points to go to Virginia and see where (Harris) was born and where he was buried,” Nesteroff said.

Having already made several research trips to Idaho where Harris lived become coming to Sandon, Nesteroff and Wintje travelled to Harris’ home town in Virginia. There they made a web of discoveries and personal connections that took the narrative to new levels.

But you’ll have to read the book to find out what they are.