Fernie at War: 1914 - 1919

Fernie, a small community located in BC’s Kootenay region, entered the First World War in 1914 with optimism and a sense of national pride—it emerged five years later having experienced staggering losses and multiple controversies that threatened to tear their community apart.

As a resource-based economy with unusually large and varied immigrant populations, and exceptionally high recruitment levels, Fernie was profoundly affected by conflicting impulses of labour, loyalty and ethnicity. Demands for internment of enemy aliens, resistance to prohibition and moral reform, the consequences of natural and man-made disasters, the unprecedented banning of recruitment, and the western labour revolt were all issues that contributed to a war-time experience for Fernie that was more dramatic and more revealing of underlying tensions than that of any other Canadian community.

In his new book, Fernie at War, historian and author Wayne Norton explores what it meant to live in Fernie during those confusing and divisive years.