Mattie Gunterman

This past Wednesday, I spoke about Mattie Gunterman at Brown Bag History. Mattie was a truly remarkable woman who lived in Beaton, south of Revelstoke from the late 1890s until her death in 1945. She grew up in Wisconsin, then travelled to Seattle, Washingon at the age of 17. She married William Gunterman in 1891 and their son Henry was born in 1892. Mattie wanted to leave the damp climate of Seattle to ease her worsening lung condition, so the family decided to visit Mattie's cousin in the small mining community of Thomson's Landing, later known as Beaton. William and Mattie, along with 6-year-old Henry and their dog Nero, walked a total of 600 miles, with Will looking for work in sawmills along the way. They arrived in Beaton in June of 1898 and decided to settle there.

Mattie had learned photography from an uncle back in Wisconsin, then received further lessons from Will's brother-in-law, including the art of developing of her own photographs from her glass slide negatives. She began chronicling the life of her family through her photographs, and continued to develop her photographic skills when the family settled in Beaton. Will found work in area logging camps, and Mattie and Henry often went along, with Mattie and Will soon becoming popular camp cooks. Mattie's photographs portray her love of the outdoors, and her connection to her chosen community on the Upper Arrow Lake. Mattie loved to appear in her own photographs, and developed a method for doing this. She used a long piece of rubber tubing attached to her camera’s pneumatic shutter at one end with a rubber bulb at the other. By squeezing with the hand or stepping on the bulb, the shutter would be released and an exposure made at any distance within the tube’s length of the camera.

Will's original occupation in Seattle had been as a candymaker, and he practiced his art in Beaton, providing candy for all of the local children at Christmas time. He shared his skills with Horace Manning of Revelstoke, and provided Manning with the recipe for the famous Manning's Broadway chocolates. Will had not originally been too pleased to be relocating to the isolated community of Beaton, but he did so knowing that Mattie was delighted with the semi-wilderness of the area, and that her health improved greatly in the new environment.

Henry Gunterman stayed in Beaton for most of his life, and raised his family there as well. In 1961, he was visited by Ron D'Altroy of the Historic Photographs divsion of the Vancouver Public Library. Henry helped Ron look for his mother's glass negatives in an old woodshed, and they found them in a box covered with packrat droppings. Henry donated the photographs to the Vancouver Public Library, where they were carefully cleaned and catalogued. The collection is still available at the VPL and many of the photographs were reproduced in the book "Flapjacks and Photographs" by Henri Robideau. You can view the photographs on the Vancouver Public Library website: http://www3.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca/spe/histphotos/