In the fall of 1895, the mining camp of Trail Creek Landing was teeming with hopeful prospectors and ragged-trousered industrial workers who had rushed to the British Columbia mining boomtown. They were looking to either strike it rich in the ore-laden hills of the West Kootenay district or find a job at the new smelter, due to open the following year. Joining them were fortune seekers of another kind, including bakers, brewers, launderers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, and several prostitutes. Among the flood of newcomers was a thirty-year-old newspaperman named William Fentress Thompson, Jr., Trail Creek’s first newspaper publisher. Thompson would seek his riches not in the local mines but by starting, in Trail historian Elsie Turnbull’s words, “the only home-print newspaper in the Kootenay country!”1 It was the beginning of a history that carries on today.
“Wrong Font” was not a nickname that Thompson liked. Apparently, he preferred “Wandering Foot.”2 He was part of a breed of mostly men, sometimes called “tramp” printers or publishers, who swept across the Canada-United States border in the late 1880s and 1890s in search of boomtowns where they could set up shop. What motivated him to come north to the rugged and risky mining and smelting towns of southcentral BC? Like those who preceded him, Thompson spied a journalistic business opportunity and set about founding a four-page weekly newspaper to “be published in in Sprague, Washington. On August 3, 1895, fire destroyed the town, including the building. Thompson salvaged a printing press and two cases of type, somehow managing to publish a final edition. But he was not insured and lost $2,000 to the fire. It’s not clear why he chose to steer north into Canada after disaster struck. Perhaps it was the steady news of gold, silver, and copper strikes in the West Kootenay district near the Washington state border. Thompson had no doubt read news reports of fellow Americans trekking through the Selkirk and Purcell Mountain ranges that stretch north of the international boundary, not far from the gold, silver, and copper El Dorado of Rossland.
