Interior Designs

I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in Penticton, British Columbia, sixty-five kilometres south of Kelowna. Reading Sharron J. Simpson’s The Kelowna Story has stirred memories of the extraordinary beauty and unique character of the beguiling valley the cities share — attributes often difficult to discern when you visit today. The subtitle, An Okanagan History, evokes the evolution of an entire region: Vernon, at the north end of Okanagan Lake; Kelowna in the middle; and Penticton at the south. In between are towns such as Peachland, Summerland, and Naramata. Further down, along the Okanagan River toward the United States, you find Oliver and Osoyoos.

Simpson is well positioned to tell this story. She’s a local historian who has written extensively about the lumber industry, for example, and Sun‑Rype Products, the central player in the fruit processing business for decades. Five generations of her family have lived in Kelowna, and this background has inspired her book, now in its second edition: “Perhaps a look back will offer the insights and the context we need to make decisions about the future with confidence and wisdom.” If you grew up in this place, Simpson’s description of its transformation resonates. “The population has mushroomed as orchards have become townhouses, and wilderness mountaintops are suddenly laced with streets that deer comfortably saunter down.” The challenge of preserving what makes the city (and the valley) so special is an imperative one.

It’s a difficult task faced by many towns, but Kelowna — particularly since the completion of the Coquihalla Highway in 1990, which made it only a four-hour drive from Vancouver — has had a type of explosive growth shared by few Canadian municipalities. From a population of 19,412 in 1971, it’s now nearly eight times that. The result? “Part of the turmoil is caused by Kelowna no longer having a collective memory.” Yes, turmoil could also typify the rampant growth in places like Toronto, though it feels more poignant in a city with intrinsic natural beauty. As nature is egregiously subjugated, something at the heart of the community is stolen.

While I didn’t have a sense of the valley being isolated when I was young, I knew it took many hours of hazardous driving through the mountains to get to Vancouver and even more if we were heading east to Calgary through the Rockies. The trains weren’t fast (before they stopped running), and flying was not that common. This relative remoteness fostered a highly interdependent population. Back then, everyone who lived here shared a visceral connection to nature. The mountains were always part of the vista, and the lakes and beaches were never far away. Yet the connection was always somewhat tumultuous; before the area became a retirement destination, most residents earned their living from mining, logging, ranching, orchards, or the summer tourism industry. Freak freezing temperatures and hail might destroy fruit, fires might burn forests, and summer rains might discourage visitors. Life in paradise was precarious, and this reinforced a frontier ethos. Even those not earning their living from the land — like the doctors, lawyers, and artists who set up shop — made a particular choice when decamping to the striking but still wild west of the B.C. interior. They were pioneers in spirit too.

“Long before there was a Kelowna,” Simpson recounts, “Indigenous Peoples known as the S‑Ookanhkchinx, the Syilx speakers, were a group of the Interior Salish peoples who lived along the shores of the lakes and rivers that flowed into the great Columbia River.” This area is an ancient crossroads: “ ‘S‑Ookanhkchinx’ means ‘transport toward the head or top end.’ ” The Salish people’s traditional territories began in the Columbia Basin and spread northward along the river known in this country as the Okanagan and eventually to the top of Okanagan Lake. In 1811, the Scottish explorer David Thompson referred to the Oachenawaw people, but he mentioned the Ookenaw-kane the following year. “Other early records note about thirty-five variations of the name, including the Oakinnackin, the O’kanies-kanies, the Oukinegans and the O‑kan‑a‑kan.”

Simpson says that “relations between the Interior Salish and the Europeans were friendly in the early days,” even as the settler influence gradually transformed the original inhabitants. They came to have permanent villages, and cultivation augmented their previous reliance on fishing, hunting, and cattle grazing. “The federal and provincial government established Indian Reserves in the Okanagan during the late 1800s and early 1900s,” she notes, “though they were subsequently reduced in size by a 1916 Royal Commission.” Tensions increased as Salish access to land was constrained, as policies of assimilation were introduced, and as missionaries and residential schools arrived. The Salish story continues, of course, although not extensively in these pages. I lived on a horse farm and orchard where many hired hands were “Indians.” Their stories were often troubled, and my parents tried their best to help. An oral history of reconciliation told through personal anecdotes from both then and now would have been welcome in Simpson’s account.

From the late 1700s, explorers and trappers traversed the valley, which wasn’t otherwise of particular interest. Then, after the last fur brigades in 1847, “God followed.” Perhaps the most consequential of God’s representatives was the Catholic priest Charles Marie Pandosy, who eventually settled in Okanagan Mission, just south of present-day Kelowna. Pandosy and other clergymen “were true pioneers who suffered privations beyond our present-day comprehension: they were frequently close to starvation, often isolated and lonely, and knew few creature comforts.” Simpson emphasizes that “most went barefoot and bare-headed in the summer and used pelts and hides to survive the winters.”

This rough life didn’t appeal to many would‑be settlers, but that didn’t keep Americans from coveting southern B.C. Some claimed that the British part of the Columbia District fell within their Oregon Territory (a historical footnote that would surely appeal to Donald Trump). The colonial government in Victoria knew it needed citizens in the Okanagan and the Kootenays to assert its ownership, and in 1860 it began to grant 160 acres to those who made the arduous trek west. No one had an easy time, many moved on, and the valley filled slowly.

With the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1885, there was speculation that a branch line would soon connect the Okanagan. Real estate boomed. The trains did come, steamboats appeared, and new townsites were founded. Aristocrats began to visit, including Lord Aberdeen (later a governor general) and his wife, who first came in 1891. The exploits of many wannabe robber barons add additional colour to this chapter of the Okanagan’s story.

“Kelowna saw significant development in the 1890s,” Simpson writes. “The townsite, laid out in 1892, grew around the lakeshore and along Bernard Avenue” (which boasted six-foot-wide wooden sidewalks). “The first few decades of the twentieth century were golden years in the Okanagan.” Other milestones are duly noted: an impressive public school in 1913; an opera house and various churches; a remarkable irrigation system that enabled orcharding in a semi-arid climate; and packing houses and canneries that supported the emerging fruit industry. Years later, viniculture changed the valley further. Simpson mentions it, but she misses the point. Fruit growing was blue-collar. The wine business was upscale and brought classier people who wanted fine dining and luxury accommodation, not fast-food joints and roadside motels.

A trove of remarkable black and white photographs gives texture to Simpson’s local history. We see logging and the first bush mills; the majestic steamboats and paddlewheelers on Okanagan Lake; Kelowna’s modernist city hall, opened in 1951, and formidable courthouse, completed four years later; Princess Margaret cutting the ribbon for the Okanagan Lake Bridge, which eliminated long waits for the ferry; and the arts and community college facilities of the 1960s. (There’s also wonderful visual evidence of the lake monster, Ogopogo, “said to be the embodiment of an evil wanderer who murdered a kindly old man.”) The most charming photographs are of the Kelowna Regatta, a summer celebration that became a pivotal attraction. (I recall my family’s annual visit for its parade, though everyone in Penticton knew our Peach Festival was superior.) The regatta’s queen, the Lady of the Lake, went to Vancouver to compete with other beauties (including Penticton’s Peach Queen) for the title of Miss PNE, who could represent the province in the Miss Canada pageant. But colour imagery, especially from the second half of the twentieth century, would have added much. For me, the unique arid and subtly coloured southern Okanagan landscape never suited the monochrome approach of an Ansel Adams. And some events, such as the terrifying forest fires that have threatened to destroy the city several times, have less impact in greyscale.

Even in black and white, the most shocking photograph is of Kelowna’s urban skyline in 2024. “In spite of the growing number of high-rise towers,” Simpson asserts, “Kelowna remains the most beautiful city anywhere. That sense of magic and promise from earlier times still holds.” Really? “I’m reassured that Kelowna will survive the chaos of growing so quickly, and will become an even better version of itself as it settles into its unknown future.” Reassured by what? Tall buildings? Hills covered with suburban homes? Vanishing agriculture? Even if you love the Okanagan, as Simpson obviously does, there’s nothing reassuring about such pictures.

“For newcomer and old-timer alike,” Simpson writes, “it is a challenge to know what is right, or wise, or how to best preserve that elusive quality that makes us all want to live here.” Although most of her book is fascinating, she doesn’t suggest how such preservation might work. Why should we presume development will not continue to be guided by a sensibility that values a shopping mall more than the valley’s rare and fragile nature — or a shared awe of it? People didn’t move to the Okanagan in the 1950s and 1960s (or the 1940s, like my father from England) to live like everyone else. Now it appears that those who migrate want the urban life they left behind — just with a milder climate and a better view. If you came to cultivate or exploit the land, the impact in those days was relatively inconsequential. Not so today. When a place forgets who it is, it doesn’t have a “collective memory.” It becomes prey for profiteers. I’m not nostalgic for a period of zero growth, but I do wish, as Simpson seems to, that the past might actually inform and guide the region’s future.

From those new condo towers, you cease to see the desecration of the earth below. Your panorama may be exquisite — sculptural sage, pine-covered hills, and stretches of the enchanting blue water. But you forget that Eden is being destroyed for everyone but the wealthy.