In the mid-1860s Michael Phillipps, a former Hudson’s Bay Company employee, started a trading post at Tobacco Plains, south of Elko. In 1873, while exploring the area, he came across a pass through the Rocky Mountains. Though known to, and used by, the Kootenay First Nations for many years, they had kept the route a secret from outsiders, possibly because they feared that the Blackfeet would use the pass to attack them.

English-born William Fernie arrived in B.C. in 1860 after having been to Australia and South America. He prospected for gold near Revelstoke, in the Cariboo, the Boundary District and Wild Horse where he helped construct the East Kootenay section of the Dewdney Trail. From 1876-1882 he was government agent and mining recorder for the Kootenay district. It was during this period that Michael Phillipps went to Fernie to obtain a grant to build a trail through the Crowsnest Pass. At first, Fernie’s Kootenay First Nations informants denied the existence of the pass, but eventually Fernie realized it was a reality

Based on Phillipps’ information and the findings of George Mercer Dawson, who had explored the Crowsnest Pass for the Geological Survey of Canada in 1883, Fernie began prospecting for coal that was rumoured to exist in the nearby Elk River Valley, an area considered taboo by the local First Nations. When Fernie met a native woman wearing a necklace of coal he asked her father for her hand, apparently in order to gain the secret of the coal’s whereabouts. He located the coal in 1887 on one of the tributaries of Michel Creek and later he found vast coalfields in the Elk River valley and adjacent areas. However, once he knew where the coal was, he left his wife.

William Fernie founded the Crow’s Nest Coal and Mineral Company in 1898. A townsite at what was first called Coal Creek, soon to be re-named Fernie, was laid out at that time. It was incorporated in 1904. Soon the area became the centre of a coal-mining boom that saw the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Crowsnest route and the Great Northern Railway from Montana and the development of a coking industry. Fires, mine explosions and cave-ins killed or injured many people while the mines operated. Labour unrest was rife in the town.

Following a fire in 1908 that destroyed most of the wooden structures in Fernie the city was largely rebuilt in brick and stone. Many handsome buildings now form a heritage enclave along the main street and other streets in the town. Among the most notable are the City Hall (built in 1905 and a survivor of the fire), the Fernie Courthouse built in 1906, the railway station (built in 1908 for the Great Northern Railway, but later bought by the CPR). The Fernie and District Historical Museum is in the 1905 concrete-block former Catholic rectory which also survived the fire.

One of the stories popular in Fernie is that William Fernie’s jilted wife (or possibly her mother) put a curse on the Town of Fernie. Forever afterwards, white settlers would suffer from fire, flood, strife and discord. In the late 1990s Anthroplogist Leslie Robertson studied the legends about the curse and wrote Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse, and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town, which was published by UBC Press. Robertson was sometimes rebuffed by townspeople and many discount the story of the curse altogether. Nonetheless, some Fernie residents have claimed they can see the shadow of a ghostrider on Hosmer Mountain, depicting William Fernie galloping away from his First Nations wife and her father. The local Canadian Juinior “B” hockey team is called the “Ghostriders” and their logo incorporates a view of Hosmer Mountain where the apparition reputedly appears.