Historic ranching and farming life

The O’Keefes of O’kanagan: The Families of O’Keefe Ranch
by Ken Mather

Victoria: Heritage House, 2025
$34.95  /   9781772035377

Reviewed by Ian Pooley

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Ken Mather’s latest contribution to B.C. history traces the remarkable story of Cornelius O’Keefe and the O’Keefe Ranch near Vernon in the Okanagan Valley. O’Keefe was one of the most prominent of the early cattle ranchers in the Okanagan, and the book’s subtitle directs us to Mather’s motive for writing it.  Mather notes that he “was asked by members of each of the three branches of the family to write a book about their collective history.” O’Keefe had three wives: the first, Alapetsa, was Syilx from the Head of the Lake Band. The second and third, Mary Ann and Elizabeth, both from Ontario, were white. This complex history, combining Indigenous and non-Indigenous women and their descendants, would present challenges to any historian. Mather should be commended for taking on the project. 

Mather, who has worked at Fort Edmonton and Barkerville and in 1984 became manager and curator of the Historic O’Keefe Ranch, is well placed to write on his subject. He is able to draw on the O’Keefe archives and his O’Keefe family contacts, including the Indigenous descendants, to assemble a highly detailed account. He has also succeeded in a lively retelling of the evolution of the ranch over the 110 years of its existence – from cattle ranching to grain farming and then back again to cattle ranching – until its final breakup in the 1970s and the sale of the last remaining remnant to a non-profit society. 

After sketching in O’Keefe’s humble Irish roots, his upbringing on the family’s farm (newly carved from the wilderness) in Nepean, near Ottawa, and his early stumbles as a newly arrived labourer in British Columbia’s Cariboo gold mining district, Mather reaches the turning point in O’Keefe’s life, when he met the ex-Hudson’s Bay clerk Archibald McKinlay, who at the time was running a roadhouse and ranch on the newly completed Cariboo Road. McKinlay, with his deep knowledge of former Hudson Bay trade routes and territories, became a “perfect mentor” for the young O’Keefe. In 1864, McKinlay, about to travel to the Willamette Valley to collect his wife and family and bring them to his new property in British Columbia, hired O’Keefe to accompany him to Oregon. It was on this trip that O’Keefe first saw the Okanagan Valley and familiarized himself with the details of the old HBC trade route from the Cariboo down the Columbia to the Pacific coast. This knowledge would prove to be a priceless asset to O’Keefe. When in 1865 he purchased a herd of cattle in Oregon and drove them north to the Big Bend gold rush in British Columbia, he put what he had learned from McKinlay to good use.  

A series of fortuitous events led to the founding of the O’Keefe ranch. In early July, 1867, O’Keefe set out again from Oregon, this time with three other men whom he had met largely by chance. They had purchased almost 200 cattle with the intention of selling them in the Cariboo goldfields. Three months later, they reached the Canadian border, and near the head of Okanagan Lake, a passing encounter with cattle drovers heading south brought the bad news that the goldfields’ cattle market had collapsed. Realizing that proceeding further north would be futile, the men elected to settle where they found themselves, on a broad swath of fertile land watered by a small creek that fed into Okanagan Lake. By such unpredictable twists and turns, history is made.     

Mather relates how in the early 1870s, buoyed by assurances that a railway from Eastern Canada would soon be built, O’Keefe and his ranching partner Thomas Greenhow continued to expand their holdings near the head of Okanagan Lake. In 1877, this progress was marred for O’Keefe by tensions that developed between white ranchers and the local Syilx over control of land. At the same time, O’Keefe’s personal life was in turmoil. Mather writes that he “dismissed” his common-law Indigenous wife, Alapetsa, adding that white ranchers commonly “discarded” their Indigenous wives. O’Keefe sent Alapetsa and her two children by him back to her parents on the reserve. Mather claims, without providing a source, that O’Keefe paid Alapetsa “money and cattle” when he sent her back and that “this was seen as the fulfillment of the transaction that had taken place between [himself] and Alapetsa’s father.” It would be nice to know more about the transactional nature of the relationship, which, Mather assures us, fitted with Syilx tradition. 

Mather’s broad knowledge of his subject comes to the fore when he delves into the material aspects of ranching and farming life. I was fascinated to learn that the ranch’s evolution encompassed three different stages of wheat threshing technology – from primitive hand-held flails, to horses (which trampled the wheat), to the appearance of the modern mechanical threshing machine.  O’Keefe’s early grist mill was equally intriguing. Not content with the simple water wheel used in other Okanagan grist mills, he installed an under the floor water turbine that allowed him to keep his mill running in the winter when competing mills had to shut down. 

An important thread in Mather’s book is the central role of land in settler life. It was land, or the lack of it, that likely influenced O’Keefe’s decision to leave the family farm in Nepean in Canada West (present-day Ontario) and head west. Cornelius’s father Michael O’Keefe had already handed over much of his property to his two oldest sons, and although another son, Francis, later took up farming in the neighborhood, there appears to have been no immediate prospect of land for two of the younger sons, Michael Jr. and Cornelius. They would have lacked the cash to make an immediate land purchase on their own. Michael migrated southward to the United States, but Cornelius, attracted by news of the gold rush in British Columbia, headed west.

By the end of the 1890s the O’Keefe ranch had reached over 10,000 acres. Mather devotes much of the rest of the book to examining the financial troubles the O’Keefe ranch faced and the difficulties of keeping it intact and passing it on within the family over the next 70 odd years. When O’Keefe died in 1919, the ranch was in poor shape. The root of the problem was that in the boom years preceding the First World War, O’Keefe had sold off key parts of the property to a land development company for cash, and by the 1920s, there was not enough land left to run a profitable cattle business without buying back some of the sold off parts. To add to the ranch’s difficulties, a number of O’Keefe’s business ventures had gone sour and money was in short supply. The person who emerges as the central figure at this point is O’Keefe’s third wife, Elizabeth. After O’Keefe’s death, it was likely her discipline and financial acumen that saved the ranch from disaster.

Ironically, given O’Keefe’s contentious relations with the local Syilx, it would be a tip from a Syilx cowboy, Narcisse Jack, that allowed Elizabeth to acquire a precious parcel of rangeland that would play a crucial part in rebuilding and saving the ranch. Mather relates that Narcisse Jack looked upon Elizabeth as a trusted ally of the Head of the Lake band and feared that if a competing rancher acquired the rangeland, he would allow his cattle to indiscriminately graze on neighbouring reserve land. Alerted by Narcisse, and with a last-minute loan from a sympathetic local bank manager, Elizabeth got the land.

Mather’s book is a valuable addition to B.C. history, spanning events from the gold rush era to recent times. It sheds light on the ups and downs of an important B.C. cattle ranching family and it demonstrates how an intricate web of social relationships, one that encompassed local Syilx, the surrounding settler community, and members of the O’Keefe family, influenced key decisions that assured the ranch’s astounding longevity.  

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Ian Pooley is an Okanagan historian. His previous articles have appeared in academic journals, and Okanagan Historical Society reports, and include “When the Titans Met, Railway Rivalry in the Okanagan and Kelowna’s Rise as a Fruit-Shipping Centre” (BC Studies, Winter 2012/2013), “(Re)settling the Central Okanagan, 1860-1904: Land Monopoly, Small-Scale Ranching, and Marginalized First People” (BC Studies, Spring 2017), and “A Tale of Three Towns: Transportation and Regional Growth in the Okanagan Valley, c. 1891-1941,” co-written with Patricia Roy (BC Studies, Autumn 2023). Ian Pooley comes from a Kelowna orcharding family; his grandfather, Walter R. Pooley, along with E.M. Carruthers, bought the Lequime Ranch in 1904, and shortly afterwards, along with T.W. Stirling, started the Kelowna Land and Orchard Company. He is currently preparing two studies on Okanagan socio-economic history. [Editor’s Note: Ian Pooley has previously reviewed Sherri Field’s book Cornelius O’Keefe: The Life, Loves, and Legacy of an Okanagan Pioneer for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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