The King of Sandon: Murder, Myth, and the Man Behind B.C.’s Greatest Ghost Town launched in New Denver on Oct. 4<\/p>\n
In the mining boom town of Sandon,\u00a0B.C., in the late 1800s,\u00a0John Morgan Harris owned the townsite,\u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n
In those days Sandon had a\u00a0population 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)\u00a0despite its remoteness and harsh winters.\u00a0Harris was 28 when he moved to Sandon from the U.S. in 1882.<\/p>\n
“Harris’ story is Sandon\u2019s story,” writes\u00a0West 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\u00a0launched Oct. 4 at the Silvery Slocan Museum in New Denver.<\/p>\n
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,\u00a0each time adding to a mystique that began to fascinate\u00a0Nesteroff.<\/p>\n
“His name kept coming up again and again,” Nesteroff\u00a0said, “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.”<\/p>\n
Nesteroff\u00a0has a\u00a0singular 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,\u00a0messages in bottles<\/a>, and other original sources from his vast personal archive.<\/p>\n Nesteroff’s\u00a0website\u00a0The K\u00fctne Reader: Adventures in Kootenaiana<\/a>\u00a0documents\u00a0regional history. He is also the author of a long-running newspaper column on the origins of Kootenay place names. With\u00a0Eric Brighton, Nesteroff is co-author of the book Lost Kootenays: A History in Pictures<\/a>, which won a B.C. Heritage Award and which originated\u00a0in a\u00a0Facebook page<\/a> of the same name. He\u00a0also authors\u00a0the blog The Patricks: The Hidden History of Hockey’s Royal Family<\/a>.<\/p>\n