Stories of our Past – Visit Lillooet

Ntqwixw

Post category:Heritage & Culture Stories of our Past

Written by Jane Carrico

“For every family in the country – that’s all they use…the salmon…financially, there’s no price you can put on it for you and your family”

Elder Edward Napoleon

“The St’át’imc way of life is inseparably connected to the land. Our people use different locations throughout the territory of rivers, mountains and lakes, planning our trips with the best times to hunt and fish, harvest food and gather medicines. The lessons of living on the land are a large part of the inheritance passed on from St’át’imc elders to our children. As holders of one of the richest fisheries along the Fraser River, the St’át’imc defend and control a rich resource that feeds our people throughout the winter and serves as a valued staple for trade with our neighbouring Nations. The St’át’imc can think of no better place to live.”

Nxekmenlhkálha lti tmícwa, St’át’imc Land Use Plan

“Fishing brings you back in contact with who you are… get back in touch with your identify… your roots… where you come from”

Elder Rose Whitley, 1990

Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe

Post category:Heritage & Culture Stories of our Past

(May 10, 1911)

To Whom It May Concern:

We the underwritten chiefs of the Lillooet tribe (being all the chiefs of said tribe) declare as follows:

We speak the truth, and we speak for our whole tribe, numbering about 1400 people at the present time.

We claim that we are the rightful owners of our tribal territory, and everything pertaining thereto.

We have always lived in our country; at no time have we ever deserted it, or left it to others.

We have retained it from the invasion of other tribes at the cost of our blood.

Our ancestors were in possession of our country centuries before the whites ever came.

It is the same as yesterday when the latter came, and like the day before when the first fur trader came.

We are aware the B.C. government claims our country, like all other Indian territories in B.C.; but we deny their right to it.

We never gave it nor sold it to them.

Miyazaki Heritage House

Post category:Heritage & Culture Stories of our Past

Written by Jane Carrico

In 1877, Irish immigrant Caspar Phair hiked the Cariboo Road from Yale to accept the position of schoolteacher in Lillooet. The same year, Cerise Armit Eyre graduated from finishing school in England and arrived to join her mother & stepfather on a farm near Pavilion Lake that is still a working cattle ranch today.

Caspar & Cerise were married in 1879 and the following year, the first of their two sons, Arthur William Armit “Artie” Phair, was born. Casper came to hold almost every official position in the area including Government Agent, Gold Commissioner, Magistrate, Chief Constable, Coroner, Fire Chief and Game Warden.

Caspar hired master builder William Duguid to build his family a fine home in the Second Empire Style featuring a mansard roof, bell-cast eaves and four unique mansard-roofed dormer windows. They named their home Longford House. In 1887, Cerise bought a general store on Main Street and the Phairs settled into a prosperous and refined lifestyle in the heart of a wild, frontier town.

By age eighteen, Artie was running the family store but the Phair family fortunes rose and fell with the boom and bust economy of Lillooet.

Caspar & Cerise passed three months apart in 1933. Like his father, Artie came to fill many of the town’s official positions including Coroner but scandalized the townsfolk by letting the manicured gardens of Longford House become overgrown and unkempt while he roamed the rugged mountains surrounding Lillooet taking photographs and collecting butterflies and curios. Without him, much of the area’s history would not have been recorded.

In 1944, Artie was taking pictures in Bridge River when he met Dr. Masajiro Miyazaki who was interned there with his family as the result of WWII policies that removed Japanese Canadians from the west coast. The town was without a doctor at the time so Artie drafted a petition signed by many of the town’s leading citizens that allowed them to move into Lillooet.

The Pacific Great Eastern Railway

Post category:Heritage & Culture Stories of our Past

Written by Jane Carrico

“There was a time in this fair land when the railroads did not run. When the wild majestic mountains stood alone against the sun.”

Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian Railroad Trilogy

Construction of the historic Pacific Great Eastern Railway was an epic undertaking vital to the development of 20th Century British Columbia. Promises it would transport endless stands of timber north of Squamish to Howe Sound, open up vast Cariboo ranchlands and join the cross Canada railway system in Prince George fueled a landslide victory in the provincial election of 1912.

Private investors planned the PGE would cross the Fraser River at Lillooet and began construction in two sections – a commuter line serving North & West Vancouver and from the steamship docks at Squamish northward to Clinton. By 1915, the tracks reached Lillooet but bypassed the town by crossing the Fraser on a wooden trestle south of the Seton River.

The wild, remote and rugged Coast Range terrain proved to be “no child’s play” to cross and very expensive. Despite fiscal management that could “squeeze a nickel ’til the beaver screamed” and a $10 million loan from the BC government in 1916, the investors defaulted. By 1918, the government owned the PGE. They pushed the rail bed north to Quesnel by 1921 but the dream to reach Prince George became sidetracked.

The Fraser River

Post category:Heritage & Culture Stories of our Past

Written by Jane Carrico

“In this lash and spill of water, in the slow grinding of rock and cliff, in the perpetual slide of mountain and forest, in the erosion of mountain and gumbo rangeland, in the impact of whirlpool and winter ice, the river is forever mad, ravenous and lonely.”

Bruce Hutchinson, The Fraser

In 1670, the British Crown granted Hudson’s Bay Company control over fur trade in the Canadian Shield. To sidestep this monopoly, independent traders in Montreal founded the North West Company a century later. Their mission: to seek fresh territory westward and find a navigable river route from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.

In 1805, Nor’wester Simon Fraser & his crew crossed the Rockies and built four NWC trading posts as far south as Fort George at the confluence of the Nechako River & Tacoutche Tesse – The Mighty One – a river they thought was the Columbia. In the spring of 1808, Fraser set out from here in four canoes with two Scots clerks, two Dakelh First Nation native guides and nineteen French Canadian voyageurs to follow it to its mouth.

The first day was harrowing and difficulties navigating the river only increased. When warned by their guides that the impassable Bridge River Rapids were ahead, they left their canoes at Leon Creek and portaged “on a regular path” through country Fraser called “the most savage that can be imagined” but the Dakelh guides would not enter St’át’imc territory.

The expedition was soon met by seven St’át’imc warriors “in readiness for attack” but they were able to negotiate for provisions including “excellent dried salmon” and wild onion syrup.

The Goldrush

Post category:Heritage & Culture Stories of our Past

Written by Jane Carrico

“There are all kinds of people on earth that you will meet someday… They will be looking for a certain stone… They will be people who do not get tired but who will keep pushing forward, going, going all the time… They will travel everywhere looking for this stone which our great-grandfather put on the earth in many places.”

Sweet Medicine, Cheyenne Prophet

In 1846, Hudson’s Bay Chief Factor James Douglas sent Alexander C. Anderson to find an all-British route for fur brigades from New Caledonia to the Pacific coast. Anderson explored the series of rivers, lakes and First Nations trails between Harrison Lake and Lillooet but concluded that a short season of unloading & portaging goods made the route as impractical as the Fraser River.

Ten years later, Douglas began supplying First Nations with hand tools to collect placer gold for trade in the Fraser River watershed while American miners trickled in from Oregon Territory. Douglas sent a shipment of gold to the San Francisco mint in 1857, word got out and the stampede was on.

By 1858, there were 30,000 or more miners along the Fraser River and they faced a winter without re-supply.

Douglas contracted Otis Parsons to build a pack trail along the route Anderson explored with labour supplied by the miners themselves. Two years later, the Royal Engineers upgraded the trail into a wagon road and three new steamboats were built to operate on the lakes between Harrison Lake and Lillooet.

Lillooet became an important mining centre & transportation hub with a cable ferry across the Fraser operated by Parsons.

The Chinese in Lillooet

Post category:Heritage & Culture Stories of our Past

Written by Jane Carrico

The Chinese became part of the recorded history of British Columbia during the earliest days of the sea otter trade when they helped independent merchant John Meares build the first trading post on Vancouver Island in 1788. With the market for the valuable pelts in China, British Columbia was part of the Pacific Rim long before it became part of Canada.

Thousands of Chinese nationals flooded into California when gold was discovered there in 1848 but when stringent laws were passed against them many of them headed north to the new Colony of British Columbia where their rights were protected by British colonial law.

As well as being miners, they built roads & wooden flumes, grew vegetables and opened shops, restaurants & laundries. Many were also employed as cooks and housekeepers including by the prominent Phair family here in Lillooet.

Japanese Historic Sites in Lillooet

Post category:Heritage & Culture Stories of our Past

As you journey to Lillooet, you can discover historic sites and learn about the history of Japanese Canadian internment and resilience. One third-generation Japanese Canadian, Laura Saimoto, shared her family’s story of the WWII Internment and Dispossession in the Lillooet area along the Fraser River in this essay.

On Hwy 12 just outside of Lillooet, there is now a memorial to the East Lillooet Internment Camp.

East Lillooet Japanese-Canadian World War II Interment Camp Site

Post category:Heritage & Culture Historic Sites Stories of our Past

Written by Jane Carrico

On December 7, 1941, an event took place that had nothing to do with me or my family and yet which had devastating consequences for all of us – Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in a surprise attack. With that event began one of the shoddiest chapters in the tortuous history of democracy in North America.

Dr. David Suzuki, Metamorphosis: Stages in a Life

When the Second World War extended to the Asia-Pacific regions the Canadian government culminated decades of prejudice against Japanese Canadians by declaring them “enemy aliens” and immediately confiscating their radios, cameras, vehicles and fishing boats. Under the War Measures Act, residents of coastal communities were to be forcibly removed. Men were sent to road construction camps while women, children and elderly were sent to malodorous and unsanitary livestock barns… before being incarcerated in hastily constructed internment camps and abandoned resource towns beyond an imposed 100-mile coastal restricted zone.

Families who were more financially resourceful negotiated to stay together in “self-supporting” camps. The three camps in the Lillooet area – Minto, Bridge River and here in East Lillooet – were all in this category.

Despite inflammatory editorials in the local newspaper opposing their presence, in April of 1942, the first arrivals in East Lillooet constructed sixty-two tarpaper shacks that came to house over three hundred people while their former comfortable homes, possessions and properties were auctioned off.

Vernon Pick & Walden North

Post category:Heritage & Culture Stories of our Past

Written by Jane Carrico

Vernon Pick was one of Lillooet’s most fascinating residents. Born in rural Wisconsin in 1903, he left home at age sixteen and a year later joined the US Marines. After working as a miner in Manitoba, Pick ran an electrical company in Minneapolis for seventeen years before moving back to Wisconsin to build a hydroelectric generator to power a derelict flourmill he converted into an electrical workshop.

Pick had very little formal education – one year of high school and some electrical courses – but he had an appetite for knowledge and spent his spare time studying philosophy, literature, science and religion. He was a multi-talented renaissance man with utopian ideals and a thirst for technological innovation but the quiet, self-sustaining lifestyle Pick and his wife enjoyed in Wisconsin ended in 1951 when a fire destroyed his workshop. The insurance settlement did not cover the cost of its replacement so the Picks decided to buy an Airstream and go west.

They got as far as Grand Junction, Colorado where Pick caught uranium fever. At age forty-eight, he had spent a grueling nine months prospecting in the rugged Utah canyonlands when he made the lucky strike that catapulted him into wealth and fame as the Uranium King of America.

Pick wanted to use his fortune to make a lasting contribution to the future of humanity and converted an estate in California into a research facility staffed with twenty scientists. He renamed it Walden West in honour of his hero, Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden; or Life in the Woods, but his dreams of a nuclear-powered future gradually faded.

In 1965, caught up in the Cold War paranoia and bomb shelter boom of that era, Pick decided to abandon Walden West and build a long-term survival retreat.