Beneath the Coal Dust: Historical Journeys Through the Elk Valley and Crowsnest Pass

Review By John Sandlos

June 23, 2025

The Crowsnest Pass and Elk Valley regions have a storied history as Canada’s most important coal producing regions. Straddling the British Columbia and Alberta border, the coal economy sprung to life here after the Crowsnest Pass agreement of 1897 between the Canadian government and the Canadian Pacific Railway, which resulted in a new railway from Lethbridge to Nelson connecting the new coal fields to markets in southern B.C. and along main continental line. Almost instantly, towns synonymous with the production of coal sprang up in the pass and the valley: Fernie, Frank, Hillcrest, Bellvue, Coal Creek and Coleman. So long as coal remained the primary energy source driving the rapidly accelerating Canadian economy of the early twentieth century, these towns were destined to become home to hundreds of miners who flooded into the region.

Wayne Norton’s new book, Beneath the Coal Dust, is a sole authored collection of essays that recounts the social and cultural life of the mining towns in the Crowsnest Pass and Elk Valley. The author does not pretend that his work is a complete narrative history of the region; nor is the book intended as a scholarly work, as Norton does not develop an argument beyond the assertion that local history is important and interesting.

Nonetheless, Norton offers his readers vivid and compelling vignettes of life in a coal community, with a particular focus on the history of Fernie, B.C. Readers will learn, for instance, that European football was the major sport among coal workers (not hockey, as in so many northern Ontario mining towns), with rivalries so intense that sometimes fights broke out on the pitch. Norton builds additional chapters around other diverse topics such as race and ethnicity (with a focus on Syrian migrants and the virulent anti-Asian sentiments of the period), local beer making (the antecedent of today’s craft breweries but also a magnet for prohibitionists), the local theatre scene, shifting attitudes to sex workers, and the rise and fall of union halls as the centrepiece of working class social life. There are compelling biographical portraits as well, including a tragic account of the unjust internment and eventual deportation of German-born labour activist Herman Elmer, and a fascinating portrait of left-wing labour activist, footballer, and coal miner Albert Goodwin, who met a tragic end when he was shot in 1918 for refusing an order to report for military duty. While mining towns are invariably dominated by male working class culture, Norton offers a fascinating portrait of Fernie’s women’s hockey team, including photos of the huge swastikas on the team’s sweaters, an unavoidably shocking image even as the reader learns the symbol was popular as a marker of spiritual unity prior to the ascendancy of Nazi Germany.

Although popular local mining history books contribute a great deal to our understanding of one of Canada’s most important industries, some descend into cliches about the “good old days,” or alternatively, grim portraits of the hardscrabble life a remote mining town. Norton’s portraits of Fernie and the surrounding region are much more nuanced than this, acknowledging workers’ struggles through their unions, while at the same time highlighting the vitality of working class culture in the Crownest Pass and Elk Valley regions.

Yet, for all of Norton’s successes portraying life on the surface in the Crownest Pass and Elk Valley regions, Beneath the Coal Dust would have benefitted from at least one essay on working life in the underground. Miners in the region died by the hundreds in coal mining explosions and other accidents, but these incidents, and the unique work culture that developed in the mines, get only passing mention in Norton’s book.

Such an omission does not detract from Norton’s valuable contribution to the historical literature on the cultural life of mining towns. Norton’s vivid prose, and his gifts as a storyteller, will richly reward readers with even the most casual interest in the early coal mining history of British Columbia.