02/23/2019
Cayoosh, also known as Cayoosh Flat, was the original name of Lillooet, changed in 1860 by Governor Douglas upon his visit there to inspect the Royal Engineer's townsite laid out on the former tenement town of Cayoosh - also spelled Kayousch and variously and remained the town's common name during the 1860s, as old newspapers viewable via UBC Open Collections demonstrate.
It has a long and storied history, which will be explored on other pages of this site.
The Cayoosh is both the Creek - really a river, and for legal-technical reasons changed to Seton River due to the once famous and rather staggering in daring Bridge River Power Project (note the canal in the aerials, the last phase of the project to the small powerhouse seen on th e Fraser just below the mouth of what is usually known as Cayoosh Creek though legally its name is Seton River. I have used its gold rush-era name as recorded rather than the name it grew into a tenement town where the Royal Engineers had laid out the formal townsite that Governor Douglas was there to approve the name change the local settler population to something the locals didn't really like - Cayoosh was too similar to Cayuse and was in fact the same via-Sahaptian Spanish word "caballo" - horse. The local form with the -sh is used in BC for a particular sort of breed or type or strain of 'mountain pony', built for packing around very mountainous country. But the old name of Cayoosh Creek was the Tukumath (River), story goes that the name of the creek has to do with either someone lost their cayoosh, their mountain pony, into it, or that at high water in the spring the creek is indeed so large that the waves can look like white ponies cresting its last stretch below Cayoosh Falls (now dry due to Walden North q.v. and its small hydro dam) to the Fraser.
But the Cayuse War was a bone of contention for the town's by-then-mostly-American residents due to the Cayuse War in the Washington Territory, which was related directly to the Okanagan Trail and the "Indian troubles" in the lower Fraser Canyon in August 1858 which had it led to slaughter of the brave parties of Americans and Austro-French irregulars, the New York Pike Guards and the Austrian Company, who made it to Kumsheen (modern spelling Camchin) i.e. Lytton which after the Canyon War was named for Lord Bulwer-Lytton, of the 'it was a dark and stormy night' worst-novel notoriety, Secretary of the Colonies at the time.
Surrounded by tens of thousands of warriors who had responded to a call from the Nlaka'pamux through family networks all over the Interior and the northern Columbia basin - only the Stl'atl'imx (St'at'imc is the modern spelling though the other is still used, p**n "Stlatliumh" - which is in fact written on old maps and is fairly accurate to how their name is p**nounced - people of Sat' it means. Setl also that has been spelled, and refers to the Bridge River Rapids or Six Mile Rapids, also just known as Six Mile, that distance from downtown Lillooet to the confluence of the Bridge River with the Fraser just below a set of ledges flanking the "Upper Falls of the Fraser" which are a narrow staircase with a large drop where the salmon have to leap to get up, basically..... and the bravery and skill of traditional salmon fishing is both beautiful and breathtaking. The Bridge River is now dammed and diverted into Seton Lake (Tsalalh in the title of this album is the proper name of Seton Lake, also the name Shalalth of the reserve community of the same name of which the townsite of Bridge River is a part. Sha-LATH. With an AmeriCanadian 'a' rather than a British one i.e. 'cat' not 'bah' fo the length of the a). As a result of the diversion the great fishing rapids which drew tens of thousands of natives from all over the Interior, and similarly to Lytton/Kumsheen also, for the fish who came in numbers beyond count a few times a year, with the best run being the spring salmon (coho, tyee/king salmon).
Nkoomptch, 'water crossing over', is the name of the great gorge where the Cayoosh/Tukumath Canyon and that of the nearer end of Seton Lake/Tsalalh. That spot is today Seton Beach and was in times prior to the gold rush was a large native settlement known as Skimka, "Otter", referring to a story of the Transformers who had come up to this point from the Coast via the Harrison/Lillooet, Birkenhead and Gates/Seton valleys by Coyote, who told them he had already fixed this part of the world, so they went back, One of them was named Otter. During the gold rush this was also Seton-foot and it's had a long history as railway-construction port and sawmill and shipping port for the Portage and the busy Mission Mountain Road to Minto City and Gold Bridge and Brexton and Bralorne-Pioneer Mine in the upper Bridge River basin above its great canyon from the north side of Mission Pass down to Moha, a twisting narrow double-u turn thousands of jagged feet deep separating the Shulaps Range from Mission Ridge. Moha is to the right in the aerials seen here, where the Bridge River is met by the Yalakom River, originally known as the North Fork of the Bridge, and turns southeast sharply towards its confluence with the Fraser at Six Mile - Sat' /Setl in St'at'imcets, which means "language of the people of Sat'.
The name of the site of the tenement town of Cayoosh where today's Main Street and its wide-enough for a draw of oxen breadth is now, this writer is not sure.
The large village that is now on the top bench of town, the high one above Cayoosh Creek and the view of Seton Lake and known as the T-Bird because of its Thunderbird Hall, is that of the Lillooet Band/FN, T'it'q'et (Tl'itl'kt), meaning "white". This writer believes the steep exposed slope of alluvial soils above what is now Main Street, which is where their village was, is of light colour and with whitish patches, and that would be why that name "white" in St'at'imcets (my own guesstimation but makes sense).
As with many such large native villages, they were quickly overwhelmed by the huge influx of miners in 1858-59 when the terror of the Canyon War (even though it was over and things were fine) saw 30,000 miners (or perhaps far more) swarm through the Lakes and Cayoosh on their way to points north and east into Cariboo and then the Omenica and the Big Bend and all the other gold rushes of 'the Gold Colony", which remained British Columbia's name in the imperial capital for decades even after many as a province of the Dominion of Canada after it was fully autonomous.
But in the tenement, non-straight street, large native village, where one traveller or clerk had mentioned that there were "many French about" - yes, the voyageurs like many Kanaka had deserted the fur forts to take up gold mining... these weren't the same French as those who marched up from Yale to Lytton during the Canyon War. There are two French Bars other than the one in the Lower Canyon, one just above Six Mile on the right (there north) bank, the other at French Bar Canyon, near Big Bar Ferry, sixty miles upriver from Lillooet. French Mountain used to be French Bar Mountain and is west of those rapids next to Red Mountain, the highest of the Camelsfoot Range, which runs from the Fountain turn north then south to the Bridge River Rapids between the Fraser benchland-canyons the Bridge-Yalakom Rivers and Churn Creek on the west. The French being referred to would be the voyageurs though some may have been French who also like the Austrian Company came up from California, for theere were many French citizens there - and also deserted French troops from Napoleon III's stab at a Mexican Empire (though that came after the 1858 gold rush).
Mexicans there were also, as packers, and also Salvadorans and others from Latin America and many Chinese, most from the same six towns in Guangdong/Kwantung as later came the railway workers.
About a third of the wave of miners that swept into BC in the initial gold rush were Chinese and they stayed on while most of the initial wave of Americans went back though many of those remained also, and Americans are an important element in the Canadianized entrepreneur and settler "ethnicity" in BC to this day, and in Lillooet's history in particular, in fact.
But this is not the place for so much detail and more could be said about what was said in just that last sentence. It's the scale of the Bridge River-Lillooet Country that needs naming and referring to, and the importance of the town's location and in native history and culture and in being the first large settler town on the inside of the Coast Mountains north of Yale.
Like Victoria and Yale and Port Douglas before it and Barkerville a few years after it, Cayoosh (today's Lillooet) was the largest city north of San Francisco and west of Chicago - 26 years before the opening of the CPR changed the Interior forever. Lillooet had already lost its importance as Mile 0 of the original Cariboo Road to Soda Creek after the opening of the newer Cariboo Road, formally the Queen's Highway, from Yale via Ashcroft to meet the old route at Clinton (43 Mile House, as numbered along the old wagon road from Lillooet/Cayoosh. Actually though the plaque says Mile 0 was on Main Street, the original Mile 0 was in Parsonville on the other side of the river, named for Otis Parsons, a local merchant and partner with Jonathan Scott, an American to***co farmer who married into the Stl'atl'imx and has First Nations descendants today (I think). It was there the freighting companies, British, Chinese and American including Parsons' and Scott's, some originally founded at Port Douglas at the head of Harrison Lake, which quickly became the new port into the Interior instead of Yale because of the Canyon War and the fact that it was a much more physically less strenuous route than the Fraser Canyon until the newer Cariboo Road was built. But it was deemed unsuitable for easy freight due to the many portages and unloading and reloading and so on that would be needed to make it viable for a genuine 'highway' and Lillooet became a backwater, and the Old Lillooet Country of the Pemberton Valley and Port Douglas moreso.
All that only touches on the historical geography of the region, each valley and locality and village and nation having its own history and geology and climate. Yet it's all one region... .Lillooet District is c. 2200, the poplulation of its ecumene 'market' is 5000.
But in former times there were 8,000+ in the goldfield towns of the upper Bridge River Valley, and many thousands including families and children during the building of the Bridge River Power Project in Seton Portage, Bridge River/Shalalth, at the damsite over the mountain and at Lajoie at the upper damsite just above the confluence of the Hurley, the South Fork of the Bridge, adjoining Gold Bridge, a basetown for the big mine towns and Bralorne (including Ogden and Bradian; Ogden was 'black market' and where non-company services and th bar, and the bordellos, were to be found... likewise in Gold Bridge and across frm Minto at Greyrock... ) and Pioneer and Brexton .....
Sucker Creek, Congress, Wayside, Southfork, Frank White's, Rexmount, Beaubien's, Jack's Ferry..... locations of a time now long-lost,with many of those names now under the waters of Carpenter Lake, or like Sucker Creek and Minto, just gone.
Also at Lillooet are two other First Nations, Cayoose Creek FN or Sekwelwas, along Cayoosh Creek and south along the Fraser a ways, and Xwisten, the Bridge River FN, whose Bridge River No. 1 reserve is one of the largest in BC (helps to have a lot of gold, as the gold rush-era clearly did, and charged his own taxes and was sovereign - and they remain so, as do all Stl'atl'imx. It's clear the reserve commissioners did not reduce the Xwisten reserves by much... I think... but generosity in gold at potlatches did a lot to protect the Lakes Lillooet, todays' Seton Lake band, from too much hassle... which began after the murder of Chief Hunter Jack in 1905, by someone who demanded of him the location of his famous hidden mine. About Jack is a longer story for another page.
Xwisten is the name of the Bridge River...also seen as Nxo'isten, the river's name coming both from a native pole-bridge across the great rapids at Sat' and an entrepreneur's gold-rush era replacement tollbridge, during which a short-lived boomtown grew on the west bank - this would have to be at the honey farm where Dickey Creek comes down, partly because of the water supply and because above there nearer the Bridge River confuence there was no room for such a settlemnet and also remained under control of the chief of Xwisten and the rocks flanking the river owned by families from other locations and nations. The tearing-down of the native pole-bridge, which was ancient like the famous Hagwilgyet bridge near Hazelton over the Bulkley, and the putting up of a toll-bridge by the white man must not have sat well with the Xwsiten..... but the toll-bridge was soon gone when the RE replaced Mueller's (Miller's) Ferry, which crossed the Fraser near the site of today's Old Suspension Bridge, with a truss-span (I'm not sure in which year but by 1882 anyway). Parsonville and its original Mile 0 and adjoinined boomtown of Marysville had vanished soon after the sad death of Otis Parsons and family in the wreck of a steamer to California....otherwise Parsonville may have flourished rather than Cayoosh.. but there's more water on the west side of the river, and more shade... so Mueller's Ferry was used until the truss bridge was built, then the suspension bridge in 1913. The remaining mile or so of the Douglas Road, as the route from Port Douglas to Cayoosh was formally known (er...? in usage anyway - also as the Lillooet Trail or Douglas-Lillooet Trail or Lakes Route), ran at easy grade from Seton Lake to Cayoosh Flat, where the native village of T'it'q'et - "White" - had become a bustling entrepot for miners heading through and north .... in such diversity that a judge had difficulty finding 12 Britons to swear in a jury....
So Judge Begbie solved the problem by convening juries of Americans for Americans, Italians for Italians, Chinese for Chinese etc.... in retrospect something like the Ottoman 'milliyet' system, where each community under the Sultan could have its own laws and courts so long as their own religion was observed. But Cayoosh/Lillooet had Italians, Galicians (Ukrainians/Ruthenes/Byelorussians), French, Germans, Scandinavians, Mexicans, Salvadorans, and of those British form North America, Nova Scotians ... Canadians from Upper and Lower Canada also, and Americans from all over... and many Chinese, who remained the main commercial community along Main Street for decades fromn the founding gold rush through seven more in the area and into the railway era (1912-15 and onward) until the late '40s.
