Printer’s Devils

In this book historian Ron Verzuh examines a little newspaper close to his own heart. The Trail Creek News — now called the Trail Times and one of the oldest continuously published papers in British Columbia — was read by several generations of his family.

Like his grandfather, father, and uncles before him, Verzuh worked at Trail, B.C.’s dominant industry — a gigantic lead-zinc smelter that has been a source of prosperity and pollution since its inception in the 1890s. Back in those days, mining towns and newspapers grew up together in mutual dependence. Industries needed to buy influence; newspapers needed ad revenue.

Upon learning that an ambitious American entrepreneur would soon be building a smelter in Trail, newspaperman W.F. “Wrong Foot” Thompson lugged a portable hand press up from Washington State in 1895 to set up shop in what was then a booming mining camp. Thompson churned out his first edition on borrowed wrapping paper, declaring that smoke from the new smelter would come as “balm to the nostrils of the progressive North American.” In fact, Verzuh writes, smoke and river effluents would soon turn the landscape around Trail into a moonscape.

The newspaper changed hands and names many times over the years, its editorial positions shifting as labour unions, all but ignored at the beginning, became more powerful. Snippets of critical news — like a farmer’s successful 1917 lawsuit over crops ruined by smelter smoke — sometimes found their way in, but most content leaned towards community boosterism, sports, gossip, entertainment, crossword puzzles, and innocuous editorials.

Illustrated with black-and-white photos, Printer’s Devils provides valuable insight into the workings of pioneer newspapers like the Trail Creek News.