In 1899, at the church on the Coldwater Reserve, two widowed mothers and neighbours married two Nicola Valley cowboys. Daniela (Gutierrez) Shuttleworth and Johnny Garcia married in the spring; Pauline (Sisyesq’et) Tinmelsh and Henry Charters married in the summer. Daniela was probably in her 28th year, making her about five years older than her groom. Pauline was probably in her 32nd year, perhaps six years older than her groom.
Johnny and Henry were locals; their brides were not. Daniela was born in Hope; Pauline in Deadman’s Creek, in the Thompson countryside.1 Their parents were present for, and either enabled or contested, the 19th century transitions from what had been a Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trade district into a British gold rush colony, and then into a Canadian province. The women’s mothers were Indigenous women. Three of the couples’ fathers were colonial arrivals and the fourth was an Indigenous man. The marriage of Daniela and Johnny was the marriage of a gold rush packer’s son and a packer’s daughter. Their fathers’ abilities, trail-craft, and horsemanship had been essential to passage through the North American Cordillera north of the 49th parallel.
Packers from Mexico had been wintering their stock in the Nicola Valley since the 1860s. Jesus Garcia, father of Johnny, eventually quit packing to ranch in the valley; Francisco Gutierrez, Daniela’s father, probably packed all the days of his life in BC. In 1881, Jesus and his son Johnny were enumerated at the “Forks” of the Coldwater and Nicola rivers, the location of today’s Merritt.
