MYTHICAL-ERA
HISTORY
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This section makes no attempt to
tell the St'at'imc story of the Creation and account their own cycle of
events, which hopefully someone may create a webpage about someday but
that is not this site's purpose. The mythical-era history
referred to here is all of what might be known or conjectured about the
history of the St'at'imc peoples up to the time of "Contact", either
known archaeologically, geologically or interpolated - guessed at - by
references in certain St'at'imc legends. Mythographical history
is only educated guesswork so anything said here must be discounted as
entirely conjectural. There is no linear context to what little
is known of "the time before time", only fragments as described (or
speculated upon) herein.
Lower St'at'imc here refers to the current
Lil'wat and In-SHUCK-ch governments/historical chieftaincies and
associated communities, Upper St'at'imc to the Fraser River
Lillooet. Lakes Lillooet will refer to the St'at'imc whose
dewscendants are the Seton Lake Band and Nequatque (D'arcy/Anderson
Lake) First Nation.
- The Lower St'at'imc myth of the Great Flood says that
all the people lived around Green Lake (in today's Whistler Resort
Municipality) in the age before the Great Flood. When great rains
began and the rivers and lakes began to rise, a man named Ntanenkin,
who had built a great canoe, was begged by the people to take the
children, which he did, floating on the waters with the children of the
St'at'imc to the level of the peaks. When the waters receded they
found themselves lodged in the high crack in the peak known as "Split"
- Neskato (In-SHUCK-ch Mountain today and in Douglas Trail times as
Gunsight Peak). After the flood they made there home near where
Ska'tin (Skookumchuck Hot Springs) is today at the south end of Liittle
Lillooet Lake. All the peoples of the Lower Lillooet are
descended from Ntanenkin and his descendants and those of the rescued
children, and they spread up and down the Lillooet River from Samahquam
and Douglas to Pemberton Meadows, and up the Birkenhead River to Owl
Creek and Birkenhead Lake and elsewhere in the area.
The
Lillooet River today is green and fertile and warm relative to the
fierce alpine of the mountains surrounding it, but in ages past it was
filled with a huge glacier which at its greatest extent merged with the
great Fraser glacier south of what is today Harrison Lake. When
the ice withdrew, which in this area it must be remembered may be
accompanied by torrentially warm rains or volcanic and tectonic events
(or, conceivably, all three), the sudden melting of the Lillooet
Glacier back up the long trench from Lillooet Lake to today's glacial
till at Silt Lake, 70 miles northwest of Pemberton could easily have
triggered massive floods. Flooding in the same area in the late
1990s generated massive temporary waterfalls and torrents of
gigantic size due to sudden snowpack melt from heavy rain - without any
appreciable difference in the size of the Ipsoot and Pemberton
Icefields. An Ice Age-ending flood, conceivably could have filled
the valley of Wedge Pass, southeast from Green Lake to Little Lillooet
Lake, and when the waters subsided there would have been a totally new
landscape, previously under the crushing weight of the ice, or
inundated by the ancient lake which once stretched all the way back up
to Pemberton Meadows but which has by today silted in (as it continues
to do east of Mount Currie). Whatever Green Lake's climate was in
Ice Age times it could not have been more amenable than the warmer and
drier valley of the Lillooet. St'at'imc people continued to live,
hunt and trap in the area of Alta and Green Lakes and Callaghan Creek
until the building of the railway, and it remains part of their
traditional-lands claim. Despite the usual line that the First
Nations people have been here "since time immemorial", glaciological
history indicates that human time must begin with the withdrawal of the
ice. Concurrently, the same must apply to Green Lake, although
the legend at least indicates that it was ice-free before the huge
riverine glaciers (or their outflow lakes) withdrew.
-
Native legend of the Lil'wat subgroup of the St'at'imc
tells of a girl named Chinook-Wind, who married Glacier, and moved to
his country, which was in the area of today's Birkenhead River.
She pined for her warm sea-home in the southwest, and sent a message to
her people. They came to her in a vision in the form of snowflakes, and
told her they were coming to get her. They came in great number and
quarrelled with Glacier over her, but they overwhelmed him and she went
home with them in the end to her warm country by the sea.
While on
the one hand tells a tribal family-relations story, and
family/tribal history as well, the tale also seems to be a parable of a
typical weather pattern of a southwesterly at first bringing snow, then
rain, and also of the melting of a glacier, perhaps the Place Glacier
near Birken Lake or the once-great Birkenhead River
glacier 10,000 years ago, when most of this region was icefield, and so
also tells of a migration of people to the area, (or a war, depending
on how the details of the legend might be read, with Chinook-Wind
taking the part of Helen in a First Nations parallel to the Trojan
War).
It also suggests that the coastal-montane romantic relatinship and
associated tribal dispute may have occurred at the time of the
withdrawal of the Place Glacier. The source specifies the Place
Glacier over the more ancient Birkenhead and Birken-Gates (Seton)
Glaciers which would have receded long before the Place, which is the
only named glacier in the Cayoosh Range.
- In ancient times the people of Seton and Anderson Lakes
were mountain goats, sheep and deer that could take the shape of
humans, and could leap from mountainside to mountainside across the
valley, "and the mountains were closer to each other in those
days". Today's Seton Lake Band are often members of the Crane
clan. Prominent historical clans at Lillooet included the Crane
and the Frog as well as the Bear. A reference to the Deer people
living over the mountain to the north, in the valley of the Bridge
River in four large underground houses may refer either to a
supernatural Deer people or to a lost Deer clan.
- The great slide which formed Seton Portage, splitting a
proto-Seton Lake in two, occurred some time between 8,000 and 20,000
years ago. The Lillooet area was already ice-free in this era,
although the Lillooet and Birkenhead Rivers probably were not.
The mountainside may have been unstable because of the steep grades
carved the ancient Seton Glacier, which had its origins around Mount
Birkenhead and a common col with the Birkenhead Glacier, in long ages
past. Without the ice to support it a combination of the
elements, time and the instablity's own weight plunged it into
"proto-Seton Lake". The impact wave or megatsunami created by
such an event is now known to be on the order of thousands of feet high
and would have funneled along the mountain valleys east and west.
At the lower end of the Seton Valley the wave may have contributed to
the steep overhanging walls of the Inkumptch gorge and the cliffs on
both sides of Seton Lake, and also been the agent by which Seton Creek
began to carve its path through the terminal moraine which divides
lower Cayoosh Creek from Seton Lake. As for the people of the
Seton valley - which doubtless there were given the antiquity of other
human occupation in the region - very few could have survived such an
event, either those up in the mountains hunting or berry-gathering
or just gone for a hike, or those saved by freak circumstances
involving accidental shelters and wave-tossed canoes. The level
of proto-Seton Lake is indicated by the benchlands on the north side of
the lake above Shalalth, and the height of the terminal moraine above
Seton Beach (where Hwy 99 comes down out of the mountains and you get
the first view of the lake). Any possibility of an archaeological
record relating to times before the great slide would be on that
moraine, or on those benchlands. Much of the archaeological
record at Seton Portage, concerning the time since its creation by the
great slide, is known to have been destroyed by tilling for agriculture
and water-sluicing, trenching and other exploratory mining
techniques. It was supposed to have been a great quiggly village
of hundreds of underground houses, their firelights resembling stars
when seen from high on the mountains above.
- .
- At about 9,000 BP a great slide blocked the Fraser River at
Texas Creek, creating the lake whose shores lapped at Keithley Creek
and lower Pavilion, and built the benchlands opposite Lillooet and
those of the Jones Ranch (the Sheep Pasture golf course) as it
withdrew. The higher-elevation benchland of the Airport
correlates to a different, more ancient, slide farther downriver.
Today's Big Slide on Highway 12, about 15 miles south of Lillooet, is
the same slide that once blocked the Fraser. The great slide
which destroyed proto-Seton Lake doubtless impacted the Fraser Canyon
and whatever lakes where formed within it at the time of the disaster.
- So many thousands of years ago, the volcanoes of the upper
Bridge River and Taseko areas, and those of the Itcha-Ulgatcho, were
erupting, causing sudeen melting of the great glaciers and creating
huge ash clouds and lava flows which helped form today's Chilcotin
Plateau. The Lillooet area was devastated by floods generated by
massive lahars pouring down from the still-shrinking Lillooet Icecap,
then much larger than it is now, and perhaps opening the Big Canyon of
the Bridge River to more or less how it looks today, as well as
scouring the bedrock at the confluence with the Fraser River at the Six
Mile Rapids. Pictures of what had been the river's course before
its diversion show a deep, sharp canyon cutting directly into the rock
of the shelf which spans the canyon-bottom at that point, from one side
of the Bridge to the far side of the Fraser. Around the same
time, an eruption of Mount Brew, immediately above Lillooet, was
accompanied by tectonic rivening of the local landscape which helped
create the gorges of Cayoosh Creek and Seton Lake, and probably helped
open the terminal moraine blocking proto-Seton Lake. The same
tectonic activity may have precipitated the Great Slide which formed
Seton Portage.
- A certain spot at Fountain, near the "great gates" of the
Fraser on the gorge below 12 Mile, is by some tradition one of the
Three Great Homes of Coyote on the North American continent - where he
would habitually reside part of the year with his wives. The
standing limestone pillar above Pavilion Lake known as Chimney Rock
translates from the Secwepemc language as a reference to the great
Trickster's primary genital apparatus. Coyote's domain in the
world ended at the foot of Seton Lake, where he and the Transformers
had met to divide the duties of correcting the World between them, and
the world of the Fraser Canyon is entirely Coyote's as far south as
somewhere between Boston Bar and Spuzzum (maybe at Hell's Gate), where
a similar meeting with the Transformers took place at the end of their
journey up that river.
- In the Seton valley, there is a legend that "long ago,
someone came through the valley who was so good, people say he was
God." This tantalizing scrap of legendary tradition has little
else attached to it, except that the man spoken of was very holy and
instructed people to be good. Needless to say, the Oblate
missionaries seized on this tradition, as was the case with native
"prophets" and prophecies elsewhere in BC, to aid in Conversion
efforts. What may be of interest to cross-reference, by contrast,
is the story of Hua Shen, the Buddhist monk from Jilin (Kabul,
Afghanistan) who is said to have travelled to the New World in the 6th
Century A.D. as part of a company of missionary monks financed by the
Chinese Emperor. This isn't to say this story was not a reference
to some Sioux or Inuit holy man, or even the being who became known
farther south as Quetzalcoatl, and the mounting evidence that Irish
monks and Norse skalds (scholarly poets of the pagan tradition)
migrated as individuals to North America suggests another, remoter, set
of possibilties. The myth is known not to refer to the
Transformers or to Coyote or other beings in the usual St'at'imc
mythical universe.
- The Transformers' journey through the land of the Lower
St'at'imc and Lakes Lillooet can be told in considerable detail, but
mytho-historically, other than their meeting with Coyote at Seton Lake,
the other event of import was in the Poole Creek area of the Gates
Valley just southwest of Birken Lake. There the Transformers were
accompanied by the Lower St'at'imc, the Lil'wat, when they were met by
an emissary to the Transformers coming from the Fraser River Lillooet,
bringing dried salmon and seeking to trade for spatsum (the name-source
of Spuzzum), the reed used in basket-making. One of the
Transformers stamped his foot in a large stone at the spot, and
declared that this would divide the country of the Fraser River people
from that of the Lower Lillooet, but that they would be one people and
meet here to trade salmon and spatsum. The stone exists to this
day, although it is on private property and not open to the public, and
remains the traditional boundary-point between the division of the
St'at'imc into Upper and Lower. The older terms, prior to the
naming of the town of Lillooet in January 1860, were more specific -
St'at'imc and Lil'wat, but with the application of the latter's name to
the town where the former were traditionally concentrated required an
agreement between the chiefs. The situation that has arisen is
that the longtime English name for their mutual political organization
is the Lillooet Tribal Council, aka the St'at'imc Nation, and the
Lil'wat are also known as the Lower St'at'imc. Culturally those
terms apply to non-member nations of the Lillooet Tribal Council, also,
although Lil'wat refers specifically to the Mount Currie people and
their location..
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CONTACT- ERA HISTORY
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The "Contact" era for the
purposes of this article is defined by Simon Fraser's visit to the
Upper St'at'imc in 1808. The St'at'imc world was largely
untouched and uncontacted further by non-natives until a few years
before the gold rush of 1858, with only transits of the area by other
HBC employees in 1828 and 1842 (Anderson). In working terms some
of the events described predate Fraser's visit - or are rather
contemporaneous to it - but the term "Contact" predisposes actual
visitation and absorption into the so-called "civilized world" as
represented on maps. For technical purposes, even though he came
nowhere near the Lillooet Country, the 1793 trip to Bella Coola via the
West Road River by Alexander Mackenzie may be a better definition of
the Contact period.
The Lillooet, both upper and lower, were some of the most hard-pressed
of all native peoples in BC and, as observed by ethnologist James Teit,
there was a Lillooet/Stl'atl'imx slave in almost every community in
British Columbia, even among the distant Haida, Tlinkit and
Kutenai. This seems surprising given the apparent isolation of
their home valleys, but their location next to warlike neighbouring
peoples left them prey to attack, as they had no regular tradition of
warfare of their own and lived in widely-disperesed mountain
communities. They were attacked by the Euclataws, who came in
over the pass from Toba Inlet, where Lillooet people sometimes wintered
(they were the only Interior Salish people to regularly frequent the
Coast, if only at this spot), and it is likely via that raiding route
that slaves wound up in Haida Gwaii. The Squamish also raided the
Lillooet, and there was some conflict over the hunting and fishing
country in the upper Cheakamus which was frequented by people of both
nations. By historic times the two peoples were on good terms, as
was also the case with the Chehalis and Sto:lo people, who sometimes
had raided up Harrison Lake to attack the people of the lower Lillooet
River. Still, according to Lunden-Brown, it was only with the
security brought by the gold rush that the Stl'atl'imx of the Lower
Lillooet began to live at Douglas, althoug htheir absence from there in
the interim may not have to do with the Chehalis, but (as we shall see)
the Nlaka'pamux. But that is towards the end of our tale, not at
its start.
The timeline of relatively modern history in the Lillooet Country
begins some time in the years before Simon Fraser came down the Canyon
in pursuit of the river's mouth into the sea. Warfare against the
Lillooet by neighbouring peoples to the east was fully underway at the
time of Fraser's visit, noting as he did that their main encampment was
fortified and they were heavily armed, and agitated that Fraser's
native companion, a Shuswap or Chilcotin. The identity of
Fraser's Atnah people has never been confirmed; they may be the Canyon
Shuswap, who were allied with the Chilcotin but also not directly
allied to the mainstream Shuswap (Secwepemc) of the Cariboo plateau and
Thompson-Shuswap Country. Fraser's guide disavowed membership in
the enemies of the "Askettih" (the band of Lillooets they met, as they
recorded the name; this may be the Lillooet chiefly name Retaskit but
that was not a placename; but translation between Fraser and his men
and their guide and the guide with the Stl'atl'imx cannot have been
precise, and it may be that the chief's name was understood as the name
of the village - or rather the fortress, as it was better
described. By the sound of Fraser's account the Lillooets were
not at war with the Thompsons at the time, so it is around that time
that one of the great wars against the Lillooet, by the Shuswap, was in
its last stages, or perhaps only recently over.
The war in question is described in some detail in Lunden-Brown's
transcriptions of Lil'wat-Ska'tin oral histories. The Shuswaps,
apparently those of the Adams Lake area in league with those from the
Quesnel River, attacked the Lakes Lillooet suddenly and even thrust
through the Gates Valley in the Lillooet River, either enslaving the
Stl'atl'imx and Lil'wat or driving them into the hills. The war
may be the same as that alluded to in Teit's history of the Okanagan
peoples, in which a chief of the Interior peoples responds with umbrage
to denials by the Chief of the Lakes (which may mean either the Lakes
Lillooet or the Sinixt of the Arrow Lakes) that there were no such
thing as white people, that the chief was lying to the council.
Oaths were sworn, and soon after they descended on the people of the
Lakes at night, cutting their population to a tenth. The Teit
story has no connection to the Adams Lake or Quesnel River people, and
it is not clear if the Bonaparte were among the raiding
parties. For over a dozen years the Shuswap occupied the warm
valleys of the Lillooet with its rich salmon runs and hunting and berry
patches and wild edibles, so much more benign than their own high, cold
plateau country. Finally those people of the Lower Lillooet who
had remained free, some of whom had taken refuge in the upper Lillooet
River, or farther down towards Lillooet Lake, or in the Green River
country where Whistler is now, began to train their youths spiritually
and physically for the seemingly-impossible war to retake their
homeland from the Shuswap. A campaign of guerilla warfare and
terror tactics was launched, as were artificial floods and other
calamities brought down on the Shuswap by two, as the story goes,
Lil'wat youths who had been raised to the task at the great hot springs
at Meager Creek, and the other at Teiq, near Pemberton Meadows.
At their wits end by the deadly harrassment brought upon them by the
two youths, the Shuswap begged for parley and agreed to withdraw.
The Lil'wat demanded they withdraw entirely beyond the Fraser, and so
also the people of the Lakes and the west shore of the Fraser, the town
of Lillooet and the three main Lillooet reserves, were freed from
Shuswap domination. At the time of Fraser's and Anderson's
journey through the Canyon, though unbeknownst to either of those
outsiders, the natives living on the east side of the Fraser in this
area were Shuswap until the time of the gold rush, although much
intermarriage had taken place between the two peoples, who were
peaceful by then. The people of Pavilion have always been of
mixed blood, and are related to the Bonapartes as well as the Canyon
Shuswap, and Fountain is a community drawn from all parts of
Stl'atl'imx country as well as from Shuswap country, though fully
Stl'atl'imx-ized culturally and politically. Most native
placenames on the east side of the Fraser north of Laluwissen (which is
a Nlaka'pamux word; the place is roughly opposite Nesikep) are Shuswap,
increasingly so towards and around Pavilion.
Some time in the same era, either before or after (but probably after),
the benighted Nlaka'pamux of the Fraser Canyon and Cole Harris'
writings, who came over the rugged spine of the Lillooet Ranges to
attack the Lower Lillooet River communities, even attacking Lil'wat
(Mount Currie). Many people were killed, and many enslaved, and
the Lower Lillooet were weakened greatly by this, although they had
successfully driven off the Nlaka'pamux as had the people of the Upper
Lillooet River and Gates Valley long before. The people of the
Lillooet used the thick forest that was their home to great advantage
against the Nlaka'pamux, who were used to open pine country, and also
used tactics involving ambushes using the river, which is strong and
dangerous everywhere between Tenas Lake and Harrison Lake. This
was not supposed to have been much before the gold rush, as there were
those Lunden-Brown interviewed who had lived through the experience,
which was a harrowing one. Nlaka'pamux and Lil'wat-Ska'tin
peoples have long since reconciled, although the first formal
arrangement between them was joint patronage and custody of the Stein
Nlaka'pamux Heritage Park between Lytton and Mount Currie. Even
in David Spintlum's time, though, the Nlaka'pamux concept of the world
had two of its corner-posts at Lillooet and Cache Creek - in Stl'at'imx
and Bonaparte country, and both locations which the Nlaka'pamux had
waged war against, attacking the communities of present-day Lillooet
simultaneous with their attack on the Lower Lillooet River peoples.
The most famous war known to non-readers of obscure ethnographers and
diarists, however, is the great war of the Chilcotins upon the
Lillooet. Apparently from the same period as the horrific attack
on the Carrier people at Chinlac, the opening of the war was too much
like that incident in its suddenness and bloodthirstiness. The
first victims were the then-large Lakes Lillooet community on the
Blackwater River (Blackwater Creek on some maps), which flows into the
Gates River from the low pass leading to the head of Birkenhead
Lake.. The Chilcotins came over the pass at night and killed
everybody who could not escape, spitting the children like lambs on
spits and devouring the hearts of adults alive. Other attacks on
the Anderson and Seton Lake communities, Lillooet and the Bridge River
people, the Pemberton Meadows people, the Lil'wat and even the people
of the lower Lillooet River at Skookumchuck. The Chilcotins came
not to occupy, as had the Shuswap and Nlaka'pamux, but to enslave and
to kill. A dispute over hunting territory in the upper Bridge
River basin may have been the source of the dispute which launched the
attack, but this has never been proven and as far as the Lillooet
tradition concerning this goes the attacks were completely
unprovoked. Once again the people of the Lil'wat/Lillooet and the
Lakes rallied, and prepared a mountain campaign of retribution and
revenge upon the Chilcotin. Details of the war are not known
except that it went on for many years, until ultimately the Lillooets
came across an encampment of the Chilcotin, somewhere in the Big Creek
country (about 50 miles north of Gold Bridge) and killed them all,
except one to send the message home that the war must end. The
location of this attack is supposed to have been Graveyard Valley near
Lorna Lake and the head of Relay Creek, due to the presence of some
graves there, but this has not been proven.
One oral tradition has it that the leader of this attack, and the
broker of the peace with the Chilcotin, was none other than Chief
Hunter Jack of D'Arcy and Shalalth. This makes sense a bit as it
was
known to the early miners and hunters in the Bridge River Country that
Hunter Jack had learned Chilcotin, expressly to help end a war between
their peoples, and that he was the first Lillooet to have done
so. The
compromise appears to have been a division between Chilcotin and
Lillooet hunting territories, roughly along Gun Creek and east over the
Shulaps via Noaxe Creek, that shows up on some old maps of the
country. As Lillooet still hunted in the country beyond Gun and
Tyaughton Creeks, the compromise appears to have been their right to
hunt over into Big Creek and the Lord River, southeast and south of
Taseko Lake, and in the country in between, and the Chilcotin could do
the same. Jack was apparently fluent in Chilcotin and knew many
Chilcotin songs and dances - signs of someone who had spent a lot of
time in another's culture.The Chilcotin also came to Lillooet in gold
rush tmies and on in sometimes great numbers for annual celebrations
and horse sales and games.
What is known about the end of the war is that there was a mutual
celebration including horse races, games, feasting and several dancing
"somewhere in the Groundhog Mountains", at the place called Many
Roots. That location has never been determined, and it could be
anywhere from the upper Bridge basin, the upper Yalakom, or somewhere
in the southeastern Chilcotin such as the Dil-Dil Plateau or the Sky
Ranch-Hungry Valley area. One sketch shows the Grounhog
Mountains, which were Hunter Jack's preferred hunting and guiding turf,
was in the Dash Hill area north of uppermost Relay Creek, just west of
the Mud Lakes pass with the head of Churn Creek. Another
possibility is the Moha area, where one landowner has been told by a
Bridge River elder that the land he has he should hold onto because it
has great power; it was the location of huge gatherings and dancings
and contests and such and was a special place.
It is near this same area that one of Hunter Jack's legendary gold
mines is supposed to have been, at the head of a fork of Tyaughton
Creek. Others say that it was on Marshall Creek, and still others
that it was on Whitecap Creek or somewhere hidden high above Shalalth
on the mountainside, or somewhere else on Seton Lake. A hunting
guide from Shalalth, Mission Peter, once agreed to take someone to the
Tyaughton Creek location but panicked, looking around terrified and
urging them to leave, and he never returned to that area again.
A separate but probably related account mentions the resolution of a
tripartite war between the Chilcotin, Lillooet and Shuswap that was
settled simultaneously, possibly through the mediation of the Canyon
Shuswap, who had friends on all sides. The other accounts of war
with the Chilcotin and Shuswap do not mention a joint war, but it is
possible they were, if not connected, then at least contemporary.
Or there could be an entirely other war that this other account,
brought to my attention by author and friend Terry Glavin, that did
involve groups from all three nations. In that story, the war is
brought to an end when one of the mediators proposes the three warring
parties learn a language completely alien from each of their own as a
way for them to all learn something together; and the rest of the
season was spent learning to speak the Chinook Jargon all at the same
time, so that they would have a common tongue and a way to avoid
misundesrtandings and hostility, and to aid intermarriage. It is
not known if this was the same war as that ended by Hunter Jack's
intervention (and possible ambuscade).
Mohawk princess-cum-poetess Pauline Johnson (Tekahionawake) who visited
the Lillooet country, and addressed it in one of her better-known and
more legitimately lyrical poems, Song
of Lillooet, remarked upon the darker complexion and more
angular features of the Canyon and Lakes Lillooet, so very different
from the lower Lil'wat despite a shared language, and speculated upon
the wars and intermarriage which bred the different bloodlines so
evident even to her native eyes. The darker, copper skin of the
Lillooet Country described the Johnson has a simple explanation - the
strong sunshine of the country east from Seton Lake, and the
accompanying inescapable glare of summer heat. This may not be
ethnographically correct, but comments overheard by the author
concerning family lines in Lillooet and Seton relate to greater contact
with the Chilcotins and groups such as the Nicolas, whereas the Lower
Lilllooet had greater contact with the Squamish, Sto:lo, Chehalis and,
marginally, with the Homalhko (Comox) of Toba Inlet..
Two Hudson's Bay voyageurs travelled through the
Seton-Birken-Pemberton-Douglas route that would become the Lillooet
trail in 1828, but without charting it. That was left to the more
well-known journey by Alexander Caulfield Anderson in 1842. Other
than those two journeys, and the oral histories compiled by Teit and
Lunden-Brown and certain others, little else is known about the region
other than the history of warfare and the scarcity that came with
it. Anderson comments on it, and even 16 years later at the
opening of the gold rush all accounts mention how hungry people were,
one account mentioning how recent wars had brought this about, by
reasons of social disruption and, in the case of the Chilcotin war, a
reduced hunt - partly because the men would have been away in the hills
hunting the Chilcotin in the revengue for the Blackwater, Seton and
Pemberton Meadows massacres, and partly because ordinary casual hunting
in the rich Bridge River Country would have become dangerous, for the
very same reason of the war with the Chilcotins. Indications are
that Hunter Jack (or whomever) brought about an end to the war sometime
in the early 1850s, before any records on the area - or awareness of
the area - by others began to be written. Anderson's notes
concerning the presence of a form of the Chinook Jargon in the Fraser
Canyon and Lakes Route region he gave to a publisher, but denounced the
book when it came out, although his original notes are long lost.
What the story indicates, however, is that in the Lillooet area of the
Canyon, at least, Chinook was already known, suggesting that the
tripartite Chilcotin-Lillooet-Shuswap war was over, perhaps, or that
the Lillooet knew Chinook in advance of the end of the war (war
was mentioned to Anderson by the locals in the Seton area).
Chinook is only known to have come to BC, in terms of docuemnted
history, with the arrival of the multiracial/cultural HBC staff
transplanted from Fort Vancouver, many of whose wives were actually of
the Chinook people but who otherwise were an amalgam of French,
Iroquoian, Metis, Scots, and Hawaiian and for whom Chinook was daily
speech. And much easier to teach Chinook to the locals of the
lower Fraser than to try and learn the difficult subtleties of
Halqemeylem, the language of the Kwantlen, Sto:lo and Chehalis
peoples. It was apparently in use at Nisqually and Puyallup and
Colville and other HBC establishments, including Kamloops, although it
had not as yet penetrated the Fraser; its presence at Forts Rupert,
McLoughlin and Simpson farther up the BC Coast is not documented but
may be at least partially assumed. It did not appear to penetrate
the New Caledonia "heartland" (north and northwest from Prince George)
until the Omineca gold rush, rather than in fur trade times, since
traders apparently had picked up enough Carrier that Chinook was not
needed. And west of there, Fr. Morice was a capable linguist who
learned the languages of the people he moved among, and did not need to
proselytize in Chinook as would become the case in the southern
Interior under the diocese of Kamloops, which greatly spread the use of
Chinook within the Catholic native population.
But the Lillooet Country was off the beaten track virtually until
the opening of the gold rush per se
in 1858, although there are indications that some HBC staff had
abandoned their posts, either to mine gold or to take up residence, in
the Lillooet area prior to the discovery at Hill's Bar, and during the
gold rush it was noted that "it was extraordinary how many French
Canadians there are about". Their identity, other than those
known during the gold rush, has never been estabished but some may have
been independent of the fur company who followed the route west, upon
news of the area's warm climate and good living, relative to the frigid
realm of the Prairies (an old theme in BC migrations). Another
trace of prior non-native presence in the Lillooet area is the heritage
of Frank Gott, said to be 65 years old at the time of his enlistment in
1914, whose father was a Capt. Gott and whose mother was
Stl'atl'imx. They would have had to have met in 1850 for that to
be the case - but there is no record in HBC files of a trader or
traveller named Captain Gott, and there has been no dispute of Frank's
age or year of birth. The name is either Germanic or French (but
not Canadian French) in origin. It may be that Capt. Gott was in
the American cavalry or other military somewhere in the West and found
a Lillooet slave and rescued and married her, taking her home to her
home country to have their child. A romantic story if it were
true, but the possibility of Capt. Gott having been American is the
only vaguely remote one, as there were not even French and German
mercenaries within three thousand miles of Lillooet at the time (many
would be in the Canyon during the Gold Rush).
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HISTORY FROM THE 1858
GOLD RUSH TO WORLD WAR I
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As already noted, the Lillooet
were often described as destitute at the onset of the gold rush.
They were also known as the Friendly Indians, apposite to their
Nlaka'pamux cousins farther down the Fraser who had warred with white
men and who were known as the Couteau, or "Knife" Indians. The
frontier-period approximations of the aboriginal names are Stlatliumh
and Hakamaugh. Indications are in Lillooet and through the
Seton-Gates corridor that there had been recent war and ensuant famine
and social disarray and, likely, population decay - not just decrease
from the war, but from the social effects of its aftermath. No
one, least of all the remote Lillooet people, could have foreseen
the scale of the transitory invasion that ranged through their country
for a few short years. They had seen invasion before, but never
mass migration by people so alien from themselves or on such a
scale. Numbers vary, but the usual number stated for the
migration through the Douglas-Lillooet Trail is in the range of 25,000
- in a few short months. Natives generally welcomed travelling
parties, although some stories of resentment exist in some of the
journals, but for the most part natives readily took part in the busy
commerce of the route, especially in freight, whether carried on their
backs or by canoes. At D'Arcy (Nequatqua) and Seton Portage,
hordes of miners and hangers-on swarmed through the ports on hundreds
of makeshift watercraft and a handful of small steamers, as also on
Lillooet Lake and even more on the long route from New Westminster to
Port Douglas. In all areas, native communities on the waterfront
were pushed aside, especially at the Portage and in the town of
Lillooet, where today's Main Street, the wide breadth of the Golden
Mile and its vaguely gold rush flavour, is directly on top of the
original main Stl'atl'imx village. Even when the Royal Engineers
were surveying the townsite - at the end of its heyday, after the
original "metropolis of the upper Fraser".dissolved itself in pursuit
of richer goldfields elsewhere -
the chief and council of what is now the Lillooet Band (T'it'kt), whose
main village is on the uppermost benchland at Lillooet now. The
RE had launched their survey atop where the town had grown - no doubt
as miners wound up living in and buying out native residences or spaces
in the Main Street area; the gold rush era town must have been much
more haphazard, and the wide breadth of the road, ready for wagon
trains, was an invention of the Engineers. Actual commencement on
the Alexandria Road via the Upper Fountain and Pavilion Mountain had to
be launched on the farther side of the river anyway, at the
Bridge River or opposite Miller's Ferry.
At Seton Portage, the ancient quiggly village that spanned the short
two kilometres was destroyed as miners tilled over the ground and
water-sluiced it, and traversed across it and camped on it. At
Lillooet Lake it was a bit different; the main Lil'wat community was at
Pemberton Meadows, many miles up the Lillooet River, but the presence
of the miner traffic brought natives down in greaer numbers to live at
what is now Mount Currie. Similarly, Lunden-Brown notes, as also
noted above, that the people of the Lower Lillooet River only took up
regular residence at Port Douglas once the non-native people were
living there and, he suggests, it was safe to to do - as they would be
immune from further risk of enslavement by the Chehalis or others (they
were there seasonally, he says, but not year-round). The arrival
of the Oblates in all areas during the 1860s and their establishment of
missions at Skookumchuck Hot Springs (Ska'tin), Owl Creek (up the
Birkenhead River from Mount Currie), and Shalalth caused a shift in
native population patterns, although even by the 1890s the Oblates were
still having to convince some villages to move into "modern" style
housing (log cabin construction that is very rustic today). The
churches in nearly all communities were built on the village model,
where a group of houses shared a street with their chapel, as at
Nequatqua, Nkiat, Slosh, Cayoosh Creek, Fountain, Pavilion and, until
their destruction by fire, at Shalalth and Lillooet. Leon Creek
has such a church, but its village is long-abandoned.
Immediate and further famine set in over the cold winters of 1858-59
and 1959-60, when the salmon runs disappeared and continued to be
scarce for years, relative to their former abundance. They
protested, rightly, that the harm caused to the rivers had harmed the
magic of the return of the fish, and the famine continued, though
abated by the introduction of non-native vegetables and
livestock. In 1862, the depredations of the greatest of the
smallpox epidemics devastated local populations and society.
Smallpox revisited the area from time to time in the next forty years
but the population rapidly rebounded, though not to pre-gold rush and
pre-war levels. Those are unknown, although apocryphal oral
descriptions put places such as Mt Currie, Seton and Lillooet in the
tens of thousands; other estimates are much lower.
Of the three principal Lillooet chiefs, it was the chief of the Bridge
River Band who openly cut mining licenses and collected taxes,
encouraging the intense and profitable hydraulic mining of the Bridge
River upstream as far as Moha. Chinese miners are supposed to
have sluiced most of the bench in the area of the Hanging Tree, which
is immediately above the core of the ancient village (name unknown by
this author), which was about where today's Post Office and Hotel
Victoria are today. Evangelists - "saddlebag parsons" - led
by the Revs. Lunden-Brown (Anglican) and Turner (Methodist) and
succeeded by others, and
eventually the Oblates - began ....
TO BE
CONTINUED
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20th CENTURY STL'ATL'IMX
HISTORY SINCE WORLD WAR I
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STL'ATL'IMX SOCIETY
TODAY
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LANGUAGE
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CULTURE - BELIEFS and
TRADITIONS
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CULTURE - SONG, DANCE,
STORYTELLING
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CULTURE - FISHING
and OTHER FOOD SOURCES
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CULTURE - CRAFTS,
TECHNOLOGY AND ARTIFACTS
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