Pincher Creek history, person by person.
RadioKBPV's Podcast is a regional history show from Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village, centered on Pincher Creek and southwestern Alberta. Its recent Talking Tombstones episodes use researched first-person life stories to recover farmers, townsmen, cowboys, mounties, pioneer women, politicians, chroniclers, miners, railroaders, and local characters.
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RadioKBPV's Podcast is a regional history show shaped by Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village and its attachment to Pincher Creek, Alberta. Its recent Talking Tombstones run turns local cemetery remembrance into narrated biography. The episodes are not broad survey lectures. They move person by person, placing individual lives against ranches, schools, missions, storefronts, creeks, homesteads, rodeo, and family life. A listener might hear how a small watchmaking business became part of a family story. Another episode follows Father Albert Lacombe through mission work, prairie travel, epidemics, conflict, and a lightly comic sense of danger. Marie Rose Smith's story brings Métis family history, language, marriage, children, cattle, and settlement around Pincher Creek into the foreground. Bessie Vroom Ellis arrives through horses, Coalfield School, wartime teaching, family, and a life remembered with warmth. Lionel Brooke's episode has the odd glamour of monocles, sketches, fine horses, ranch partnerships, war service, and a nickname from Peigan friends. Ernie Sinnott's story turns a farm's access to electric power into a larger account of rural invention and wind energy. Bertha Ecklund's episode is darker, following isolation, childbirth, grief, reinvention, and rodeo performance. Bedrock Jim Scott's story brings in wolf hides, trading companies, repeating rifles, Blackfoot tensions, and the rough economy around forts and furs. The show is strongest when it lets a modest local fact open into a whole world. It is also comfortable with theatrical presentation, using first-person scripts and period flavour without losing the museum frame. Ranger Gord's moderation gives the episodes a genial public-history feel. The credited research and writing by Farley Wood and Gord Tolton keep the series oriented toward record, memory, and respect. This is history for listeners who care where stories happened. It favours names, roads, buildings, weather, work, horses, family lines, and final resting places over abstract interpretation.
Made for: For listeners who enjoy local history, museum storytelling, prairie settlement stories, and biographical episodes rooted in specific places. It especially suits anyone curious about southwestern Alberta, ranching communities, Métis history, and remembered lives beyond textbook history.
What sets it apart: The show blends museum research with performed cemetery biographies, giving local figures the space of a full remembered life. Its strength is granular place memory: storefronts, school routes, ranches, homesteads, family names, and cemetery farewells all matter.
RADIO KBPV - Tales of Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village - A podcast about the history of South-western Alberta–presented by Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village of Pincher Creek – a museum complex that document’s the stories of western Canada’s agricultural settlement through the preservation of local buildings and artifacts in a 6-acre park
The china escapes a 1950 fire; you stay for the Pincher Creek family story.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A family jewelry business traces Pincher Creek through streets, records, one fire, and changing generations.
A Blackburn family jewelry business gives this Talking Tombstones episode a clear through line, beginning with the $100 gift that helps the father buy the business in 1936.
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Radio KBPV's final 2025 Talking Tombstones installment records the July 19, 2025 event at Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village in Pincher Creek, Alberta.
Radio KBPV’s “Talking Tombstones 2025” presents Albert Lacombe’s life through a July 19, 2025 performance at Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village.
A podcast presenting walking tours and stories from Kootenai Brown Pioneer Village, focusing on the history of southwestern Alberta.
Bedrock Jim Scott chased gold until he hit bedrock, then joined the violent western fur trade.
Frontier Christmas cards connected isolated Pincher Creek families and became decorations, keepsakes, and historical records.
Peter McEwen joined the Northwest Mounted Police as recruit 233 in 1877, after growing up in Perth, Ontario.
A walking tour of a pioneer cemetery in Pincher Creek, Alberta, sharing stories of early settlers.
A podcast presenting walking tours of a pioneer village museum, sharing stories of local pioneers and historical figures from southwestern Alberta.