(Mrs A. L. Fortune) (1 March 1836?-13 Nov. 1930), pioneer. (age at death 96 also found) In 1862 (date Oct. 1861 also found) Miss Bathia Ross, of Lancaster, GC, was married to A.L. Fortune (Alexander Leslie Fortune, 20 Jan. 1830-5 July 1915), a native of Huntingdon, Que., who set out for the far west from “Beaudette Station, Quebec,” on 2 May 1862. A.L. Fortune, who had recently been a merchant at St-Anicet, Que., was one of the “Huntingdon group” in the celebrated “Overlanders of ’62.” The Overlanders of ’62 travelled to the gold fields of British Columbia from Ontario and Quebec through the wilderness of the prairies and the mountains rather than taking the sea routes preferred by many of their contemporaries. A.L. Fortune mentions in his autobiography meeting Cariboo Cameron “in sore trouble about his sick wife who died some weeks later.” A.L. Fortune did not succeed at gold mining but he took out land in the northern Okanagan Valley, at Enderby, in 1866. The historian Margaret A. Ormsby wrote in 1951 that “It is quite impossible to think of the development of the northern end of the Valley without associating it with the name of Mr. Fortune.… He and Mrs. Fortune are remembered for their good works and for the fact that they exemplified in their lives all the best qualities of pioneer settlers.” She calls him “the first settler in the north Okanagan.”

     Mr and Mrs A.L. Fortune seem not to have met between the years 1862 and 1874. He writes in his memoirs, “My reading friends will bear with me in drawing their attention to my dear wife. I was twelve years in B.C. and she patiently waited till I went East for her in 1874.” As she was approaching her new home the small steamship in which she was travelling flew the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes in her honour because she was, as her husband explained it, “the first white woman up the Spallumcheen River and the first lady settler in this valley.” She is said to have been “the first white woman to settle in the Spallumcheen district.” (Wade, 161) On 15 June1911 the friends and neighbours of Mr and Mrs Fortune honoured them at a banquet in commemoration of his arrival in the Okanagan Valley in 1866 and their many years together in the valley. Mrs Fortune died at her home near Enderby. The original manuscript of the autobiography which A.L. Fortune wrote in 1910-1911 is in the library of the University of British Columbia and was edited and published by the well-known historian Margaret A. Ormsby in 1951.

     Mrs Fortune was the sister of Dr Thomas Ross and of the wife of Dr Andrew Harkness of Lancaster.

“A.L. Fortune’s Autobiography,” ed. Margaret A. Ormsby, The Fifteenth Report of the Okanagan Historical Society 1951, pp. 24-40. *obit. note on Mrs Fortune, repr. 43rd Annual Report of the Okanagan Historical Society (1979) * obituary, tribute, report on funeral, of Mrs Fortune, Cornwall Freeholder 1 April 1931 repr. from Vernon News (by failure to update materials from previous year misleadingly implies she died March 1931) * Mark Sweeten Wade, The Overlanders of ’62, ed. John Hosie (Victoria, B.C., Archives of British Columbia, Memoir No. IX, 1931) 160-161 * Margaret Mcnaughton, Overland to Cariboo (1896, new edition 1973) 146, 148 (portrait of A.L. Fortune) * entries for Overlanders and Margaret A. Ormsby in Hurtig * B. C. death records, Reg. No. 1930-09-444343