We have seen in previous columns that the “first families” of the Okanagan consisted of a white rancher and his native Okanagan wife with their mixed-race children.
Throughout the early years of settlement in the 1860s, 1870s and early 1880s, these families were in the majority and considered perfectly normal. But as the Interior opened up to more settlers, couples in mixed-race relationships began to find themselves in the minority and subject to discrimination.
White men who had not formalized their relationship through marriage, especially those who had arrived early in the Interior and were owners of extensive lands and “pillars of the community,” were pressured to discard their native wives.
This ugly discrimination that newcomers directed against men with native wives (referred to sneeringly as “klootch,” for the Chinook word for “woman”) is typified in the reminiscences of Sydney Russell Almond, recorded some years later which reveals a disappointingly common attitude.
He says of early Similkameen rancher Barrington Price: “He came of a good family in England and evidently had rich connections ... He married a klootch and wrote home to his friends that he had married an Indian princess. I don’t know what idea his friends had of an Indian princess as they come in British Columbia, but it is safe to say that they had no such picture of her as the actual Indian klootch as we know here, even when married to a self-respecting white man.”
Time did not lessen the discrimination and it seeped into the public domain as well. Henry Bigby Shuttleworth, the son of a major English landowner, Lord Shuttleworth, had married a native woman when he arrived in the Similkameen in the 1870s.
Some years later, he was looking for a teaching position and, after being turned down for several openings, wrote, “I suppose it is because I have an Indian woman but I can assure you and if necessary prove to you that I am lawfully married to her.”
Inevitably, as more and more white women arrived in the area, the pressure became overwhelming and led at best to a discreet hiding of the native woman and her children.
Edward Tronson owned the Vernon Hotel and experienced much discrimination by newcomers over Nancy, his wife of many years, and their six children.
He is described in Valley of Youth, written by C.W. Holiday, who came to the Okanagan in the 1880s, as: “a courtly-groomed old gentleman. But to see him in church looking rather like a saintly old patriarch you would never have suspected that on his ranch he maintained an Indian wife and a large half-breed family; a quite separate establishment, none of them ever appeared in public with him.”
More commonly, the native wife was rejected and sent back to her people, leaving the rancher to feel free to remarry a white woman.
This sad story of the rejection of the native wives by the early ranchers was repeated all through the Interior.
For a time, the story of these “first families” of the Interior was largely ignored in most of the histories of the area.
But, in more recent times, the stories of these founding families of the Interior are finally being told.
Ken Mather is a Spallumcheen author. He can be reached through www.kenmather.com.