Flapjacks and Photographs: A History of Mattie Gunterman, Camp Cook and Photographer

Pauline Carey is the author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Almost 100 years ago, when the Gold Rush was all the news and the
Klondike was on everyone’s lips, the area known as the Lardeau in
southeastern British Columbia was having its own mini-boom in silver
mines and logging camps. One of the people who moved in at that time was
Mattie Gunterman from Wisconsin. She and her husband, Will, arrived at
Thomson’s Landing (now known as Beaton) with their young son in 1898
and began to hire themselves out wherever there was work to be found.
They were both good cooks, and Will was a great candymaker. But Mattie
was also a photographer who carried her camera wherever she went. Much
of her work ended up in the Vancouver Public Library, and Henri Robideau
has now brought it into the daylight in this absorbing account of a part
of Canadian history.

Mattie had started with a simple box camera but she soon switched to a
plate camera, which offered more flexibility. She developed her own
plates, she learned to use magnesium light so that she could take photos
indoors and down the mines, and she figured out how to put herself in
the picture with the help of a long piece of rubber tubing. She took
pictures of her friends and family, of miners and farmers and loggers,
of picnics and swimming parties, of hijinks in the kitchen and houses
buried in snow. There is so much detail in this book that one regrets
the lack of an index.

Interspersed with Robideau’s account of Mattie’s life and the rise
and fall of the Lardeau are Mattie’s photographs. Occasionally we come
across a breathtaking panorama of mountains or a theatrically posed shot
that makes us smile at her humor, but mostly we see casual arrangements
of everyday life that can be achieved only by an artist who knows how
and when to take the picture.