Review By Shirley McDonald

May 27, 2025

Ken Mather’s The O’Keefes of the O’Kanagan: The Families of O’Keefe Ranch offers a pleasurable reading experience from the first page to the last. The volume is a detailed history of Cornelius O’Keefe, his establishment of a ranch in the 1800s, and the experiences of his family as they continued to operate the ranch. It is the culmination of thirty-five years of work that began in April 1984 when Mather became the curator and manager of the Historic O’Keefe Ranch (1). He lived on site with his family “from 1984 until 2004” and after retiring, participated in two O’Keefe reunions (2). The first one in 2000 was “a remarkable gathering”, Mather states, because O’Keefe had married three times and descendants of all three families attended (306). O’Keefe’s first wife, Alapetsa (Rosie) was from the Syilx (Okanagan) nation (172). The fact that they had lived together around 1871 (107) and had two children (108) had been left unspoken for decades. The reunion in 2000 marked an acknowledgement of that part of the family history.

The story begins, however, before Cornelius arrived in the Okanagan. Mather starts with an account of Cornelius’s father, Michael O’Keefe, who emigrated from Ireland in 1819 (7). To give an impression of Michael’s voyage, Mather draws from emigrants’ travelogues and from historians who wrote about the lives of Irish Catholics in Upper Canada (309). Likewise, Mather draws from the diaries of colonists Edward White and John Emmerson to fashion an account of Cornelius O’Keefe’s journey to western Canada (90). Once in the BC Interior, Cornelius formed a partnership with Thomas Wood and Thomas Greenhow and traveled to Portland to purchase cattle and bring them to the Okanagan to sell beef to gold miners (90). To “give a sense of some of the landmarks Cornelius and his partners encountered” as they made the mountainous trek on horseback from the west coast of British Columbia to the Cariboo region, Mather draws from the diaries of drover Myron Brown who had “worked on two cattle drives into British Columbia in 1868” (93). Shortly thereafter, O’Keefe and his partners claimed land at the Head of Okanagan Lake to raise cattle (95). “The area”, Mather writes, “had been and remains part of the Syilx (Okanagan) People’s traditional territory” (95). Drawing from government records and regional newspapers, Mather explains that the government under Governor Douglas sought to make land available to colonists and “set up reserves for the Syilx Peoples” (95). Mather adds that while Governor Douglas “was successful in protecting Indigenous peoples by granting them reserves that promised them a satisfactory living for years to come, he was less diligent in ensuring the legal protection of the reserves”; thus, “[m]any of the reserves were left unrecorded in the official schedules, and settlers regularly encroached on reserve boundaries, without reprisal” (97). In a politically understated narrative, Mather identifies the objectives and actions of settlers.

O’Keefe achieved those objectives. He was active in persuading the government to build roads to transport mail and cargo by stage coach to the Okanagan and the surrounding region (113). O’Keefe became “the Express Agent for the F.J. Barnard & Company Express” and made his ranch a stopping place where the “horses could be changed out” (114). He set up a store and a post office and was postmaster. His wives ran the store while he focused on cattle (155). Around 1890, O’Keefe also began growing grain. In the early twentieth century, he sold thousands of acres to a Belgian syndicate, the “Land & Agricultural Company of Canada”, whose partners began growing fruit (226-27). Mather’s history of ranching and of the fruit industry enriches our knowledge of the region. Wrought by his masterful research and writing, Mather’s account illustrates how settlers like O’Keefe acquired the traditional and unceded lands of Indigenous people and advanced the establishment of the community that became the City of Vernon.