| Lillooet, British Columbia |
Article Index for Lillooet |
Website Links For Lillooet |
Information AboutLillooet, British Columbia |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT LILLOOET, BRITISH COLUMBIA | |
| district municipalities in british columbia | |
| squamish-lillooet regional district | |
| gold rushes | |
| history of british columbia | |
| fraser river | |
| lillooet country | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
|
Lillooet (formerly '''Cayoosh Flat''') is a small but historic and highly scenic town on the Fraser River in western Canada , about 240 kilometres (150 miles) up the British Columbia Railway line from Vancouver . Situated at an intersection of deep gorges in the lea of the Coast Mountains , it enjoys an extremely arid Climate - 400mm of precipitation is recorded annually at the town's Weather Station , although nearby Microclimate s (some within a few hundred yards of the station) receive almost no precipitation over small patches of benchland flanking the river adjacent to town. Lilloet has a long Growing Season , and once had prolific Market Garden s and Orchard Produce . It enjoys extremely hot summers often breaking 40°C and it vies with nearby Lytton for the title of "Canada's Hot Spot". POPULATION Current population of the town proper today is in the 2,800 range, with another 4,500 in the surrounding region. The population includes three large bands of the St'at'imc or Lillooet Nation whose reserves abut the town on all sides, and another three large reserves within 20 miles. Historical populations have included large numbers of Americans and Chinese, although there are few of either today (although many longtime local families, First Nations and non-First Nations, have some bloodlines from both). The town's non-native population has been historically multi-ethnic in extraction, with a relatively high-rate of intermarriage between all groups. ECONOMY Its economy is based around logging, the railway, ranching, farming, and government services. The town has had several booms and busts, relying on Forestry since the mid-1970s although previous booms were connected with Fraser Canyon and Cariboo Gold Rush es, the building of the Lillooet Cattle Trail , another gold rush adjacent to town in the 1880s and another nearby in the Pacific Great Eastern Railway , and spinoffs from the development of the Bridge River Goldfields from the 1910s onwards. Lillooet's economy also boomed in the 1940s and 50s during the construction of the Bridge River Power Project , which includes a dam, canal and powerhouse on the outskirts of town. HISTORY AND CULTURE Lillooet is an important location in native history and culture and remains one of the main population centres of the St'at'imc (Lillooet Nation), and today it is one of the southernmost communities in North America where Indigenous People form the majority. Just over 1/2 of the people in Lillooet and area are St'at'imc . Considered to be one of the oldest continuously-inhabited locations on the continent, the area is reckoned by archaeologists to have been inhabited for several thousand years. The immediate area of the town attracted large seasonal and permanent populations of native peoples because of the conluence of several main streams with the Fraser and also because of a rock-shelf just above the confluence of the Bridge River which is an obstacle to migrating salmon. This rock shelf, known in gold rush times as the Lower Fountain, was reputedly made by the trickster Coyote , leaping back and forth across the river to create platforms for people to catch and dry fish on. This location, named Sat' or Setl in the native language, is the busiest fishing site on the Fraser above its mouth and there are numerous drying racks scattered around the banks of the river canyon around it. FRASER CANYON GOLD RUSH See Also: Fraser Canyon Gold Rush The town had its start as one of the main centres of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858-59, during which it was reckoned to be "the largest town west of Chicago and north of San Francisco ", a title also held by certain other towns in British Columbia in rapid succession ( Yale first, Barkerville after). Just after this gold rush, the town's layout as it is today was surveyed by the Royal Engineers and its Main Street tied into the original Cariboo Wagon Road to Fort Alexandria, a huge project undertaken as a toll road by Gustavus Blin Wright , one of the many entrepreneurial personalities of the early colony. Much of its tortuous canyon-brink road grade for twenty or thirty kilometres from "Mile 0" remained in use until the 1970s. The route via the lakes to Lillooet and up Blin Wright's wagon road to the Cariboo Goldfields was outflanked within a few years by the now-better known Cariboo Wagon Road via a shorter and less portage-intensive route from Yale to Barkerville via Ashcroft a few years later. Lillooeters still, however, consider their town to be "Mile O" of the Cariboo Wagon Road, and it is true that the numbered roadhouse names of the Cariboo district are measured from the bend in Main Street, where a cairn was erected in 1858 to commemorate this fact. The first stretch of Main Street north from the cairn is said to point due north and at one time was called "the Golden Mile" because of all the gold dust reputed to be scattered along it in its heyday. Lillooet was originally named Cayoosh Flat, a name that was felt to be unsavoury by the residents of the town at the time of its incorporation in 1860. Since it was at the end of the Lillooet Trail , aka the Douglas Road or Lakes Route , and the Lil'wat native people farther southwest along that route spoke the same language as the native bands near town, the governor was petitioned to change the name to Lillooet, with permission for use of the name granted by the chiefs of the Lower St'at'imc at Mount Currie (Lil'wat) and agreed to by the bands of what is now the Upper St'at'imc . OTHER MINING HISTORY There have been a series of gold rushes in the surrounding region since the original one, including a large hard-rock one in the upper Bridge River basin which had its peak from the 1930s to the 1950s, focussed on two main mining towns at Bralorne and adjacent Pioneer Mine and that area's main base town of Gold Bridge . Gold mining and prospecting continues in the area to this day, as do prospects for copper, silver and nephrite jade, though not to the same extent. Until the discovery of even larger deposits of jade near Cassiar , the Lillooet area was the world's largest source of the nephrite form of jade. Unknown tonnes were exported to China before government assayers discovered the nature of the "black rocks" that the Chinese miners found so interesting. In the 1950s, local farmer and teacher Ron Purvis adapted the skil-saw concept by implementing a diamond rotary blade. This enabled the carving of the many immense jade boulders which line the banks and bed of the Fraser and Bridge River s, which were on the one hand immovable and on the other would shatter or striate if blasting was used to break them. Purvis' innovation was revolutionary in the jade mining business and larger versions of his saw are at use in the Cassiar region. There are no major commercial jade mines in the Lillooet area today, although local shops still carry polished jade souvenirs. JAPANESE RELOCATION CENTRES DURING WORLD WAR II There are a number of Japanese-Canadian families in Lillooet today who are descendants of those who remained in the area after their forced relocation to Lillooet and other nearby camps at Shalalth , Minto City and McGillivray Falls during World War II. One of the relocated Japanese, Dr. Masajiro Miyazaki , an osteopath who became the town's coroner and general practitioner, is one of the town's two Compainion of the Order Of Canada . Dr. Miyazaki's Lillooet residence, the Miyazaki House , is still open for tours of the doctor's office (which has been preserved as he left it). ORDER OF CANADA WINNERS Lillooet's other Order of Canada winner was Margaret Lally "Ma" Murray , a Kansas-born farmgirl who moved to Vancouver before World War I and wound up marrying her employer, publisher George Murray, of Canadian establishment stock. They moved to Lillooet in 1931 when George campaigned for the town's seat in the provincial legislature, and launched the once-famous Bridge River-Lillooet News (now the Lillooet News). The paper was known for Ma's saucy wit, daring opinions and spicy language and Ma became closely identified with the town. She was, perhaps, the source of the town's greatest renown. NOTABLE LILLOOETERS (Including non-residents who are somehow connected with Lillooet's history, or who lived in town for a while at least)
NOTABLE VISITORS
REFERENCES
EXTERNAL LINKS
|