Father Pandosy

Charles John Felix Adolph Pandosy, or more commonly known as Father Pandosy, was the first settler in the Kelowna area. He set up a church and a school and attracted many settlers to the area. He founded the Okanagan Mission which was the first permanent white settlement in the British Columbia Interior aside from the forts for the Hudson's Bay Company and the gold rush boomtowns of the Fraser Canyon.

The Catholic Church wanted a presence in the New Land because the Protestant Church was already well established there in the mid 1850s, particularly around the Oregon Trail. The Catholic Church asked France if they had any priests to send over. Pandosy and a small group of oblates from the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI), left Marseilles in 1847 when Pandosy was only twenty-four.

When the Oblates arrived in the Oregon Territory, Father Pandosy was ordained and became Father Charles Marie Pandosy, OMI. The missionaries had been sent to convert the Yakima Indians to Catholicism. Their arrival was just before the two-year-long (1855-56) Cayuse War. In this war, a dozen white settlers were massacred by the Cayuse tribe. Father Pandosy persuaded the Yakimas to stay neutral during this conflict through his friendship with their chief, Kamiakin. Father Pandosy established two new missions during this time; The Immaculate Conception and St. Joseph's Mission. During the war, St. Joseph's Mission was destroyed. Father Pandosy and the other missionaries began to feel threatened so they left for Esquimalt on Vancouver Island, which now is part of British Columbia.

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