Gabriel Mattson and Hilda Larson were married in Duluth, Minnesota in 1899. Gabriel was forty years old and Hilda, a Swedish immigrant, was nineteen years younger, an age difference not uncommon in those days. From Duluth, they moved to Port Wing, Wisconsin and then immigrated to Canada in the autumn of 1904. By then, they had four children. They spent their first Canadian winter in Stavely, Alberta where there were many Scandinavian farmers already settled. The family arrived in Jaffray, probably by train, in 1905. Jaffray was much like the areas they had always known, heavily forested, dotted with lakes, and populated with many other Scandinavian families. Jaffray has been occasionally referred to as "Swedetown". They purchased ninety acres in 1907, probably at about one dollar per acre, and Gabriel built a 25'x40' log house with the famous dovetailed corners. This house, one of the oldest in Jaffray, is still inhabited but the property has been subdivided. There were eventually ten children in all; the youngest was born in 1920 when Gabriel was 61 and Hilda was 42.

The history of Jaffray, as a white settlement, had begun a few decades before the Mattsons arrived. Immigrants from all over the world found work building the railroad as it snaked across the nation during the late 1800s. Once the rail was completed across Canada, settlers surged in to the west, and the logging industry in BC was kept busy supplying lumber for building new homes in the prairie cities and farms. There were fifty sawmills in operation between Crowsnest Pass and Kootenay Landing at the turn of the century. Jaffray was one of the many little towns that sprang up around the sawmill sites.

Jaffray, named after Robert Jaffray, Vice-president of the Crowsnest Coal Co., is one of the few that remains. The BC Southern Railroad was completed past Jaffray to Cranbrook in 1898. First it was a water stop for the train but when several sawmills developed within a few miles of each other, residents and merchants followed. East Kootenay Lumber Company was the main sawmill in Jaffray from 1902 to 1923. The 1910 Jaffray Directory of Census, which lists the 90 residents' names, show a mixed community of Scandinavian, Scots, French, and British origin. Although many housewives lived in the town with their families, only one woman, the school teacher, is listed in the Directory. The Canadian census, taken every ten years starting in 1851, recorded the name of the "head of family" only.