Seton Portage

Seton Portage
Seton Portage
Unincorporated community
	Church in Seton Portage
	Seton Portage Location of Seton Portage in British Columbia
	Coordinates: 50°42′26″N 122°17′20″W / 50.70722°N 122.28889°W
Country	Canada
Province	British Columbia
Regional District	Squamish-Lillooet

Seton Portage (

community on a narrow strip of land between Anderson Lake and Seton Lake in Squamish-Lillooet Regional District, British Columbia. The community is home to two Seton Lake First Nation communities at either end of the portage and a non-native recreational community between them. Local services include a post office, fire department, library, and general store, among other small businesses. The community is also the location of Seton Portage Historic Provincial Park

, a small provincial park protecting a historically significant stretch of railway.

Geology

"The Portage" was formed about 10,000 years ago when the flank of the Cayoosh Range, which is the south flank of the valley, let go and slid into the middle of what had been a single lake.^[1] The result is a location similar to Interlaken, Switzerland, with two fjord-style lakes flanking a narrow and very short strip of land between them. Remnants of old lake bottom survive as benchlands lining the north banks of Seton and Anderson Lakes. It may be that the glacial moraine at the foot of Seton Lake, which had been at the foot of the Seton Glacier and, after it melted, dammed the older, larger lake in until the slide and its destructive wave (see megatsunami). The inundation then washed part of it away to open Seton Creek and drain the glacial melt to today's lake level, or close to it (since the lake level is 10–12 feet higher because of the power project completed in 1958).

Archaeological issues

Much of neighbouring

quiggly holes (kekuli, meaning "underneath" in the Chinook Jargon

), each of which had been a house with multiple residents.

One witness to the pre-Gold Rush Portage told of coming over the mountain pass which leads into the valley from the north, and looking down on the Portage looked like "many stars in the sky". Such a description suggest a very large population, but no one knows for sure, and between smallpox and other foreign diseases, raids from neighbouring tribes in pre-Contact decades (see

St'at'imc

were already reduced in population before the impacts of colonialism and industry reduced them even further.

Because of agriculture and

band

to restore the church at Nkait.

Population history

Population estimates of the pre-Contact populations of the

Lakes Lillooet people widely vary, with some traditions into the thousands on the Lakes alone. No one knows for sure, and the archaeological record here would be impossible to explore, as the land where the evidence would be has been stampeded and dug up and plowed under many times over, even on the rancheries

.

As concerns the

London Tube stations of the same names.^[2] Within a few years that traffic had disappeared (see Douglas Road

) and the non-First Nations population of the Portage from then until the arrival of the Oblates in the 1880s was few, if any at all, although travellers still occasionally used the route of which the location was intrinsically a part.

The first non-native settlers since the Gold Rush occupied lands at the Portage in the early 1900s, which provoked the

Pacific Great Eastern Railway, which was open through the Lakes by 1914 and which required the housing and feeding of hundreds of men, and with that the beginnings of the Bridge River Power Project

.

During the late 1940s and 1950s, the construction boom caused by the renewal of that project after World War II brought thousands of long-term temporary residents into the valley, with many of these living in temporary trailer camps and prefab houses in the Portage. Following the end of that project, the non-native population has dwindled to 400, cresting to 500 in summer with seasonal residents and visitors. Band population in total, including Shalath and the Portage together, is about 500.

History

The area was traversed by two

Governor James Douglas. Seton Lake, and hence Seton Portage, was named for a friend of Anderson's who had perished in the sinking of HMS Birkenhead. Farther along Anderson's route to the Coast to the southwest, which later was to become the Douglas Road, there is a Mount Birkenhead, the Birkenhead River

and Birkenhead Lake, and also the rural community of Birken and a lake of the same name. Birken Lake is the summit lake of Seton Portage's big twin, the Long Portage, aka Pemberton Pass, which separates the Birken and Seton drainages.

In 1858,

roadgrade

survives today as the main local thoroughfare, Portage Road.

Following the

Shalalth, which is farther east along Seton Lake

.

The valley became an important food supply for the booming goldfields in the

South Shalalth (formerly known as Bridge River

after the name of the project, not because it was on that river).

Land claims issues

land claims

. Shortly afterward, the main railway bridge in Seton Portage was destroyed by an arsonist.

Access

Access to "The Portage" is via a 1,100-metre-high (3,500 ft) pass from the Bridge River known as the Mission Mountain Road, or a 25 km (16 mi) powerline road from D'Arcy at the farther end of Anderson Lake known as the High Line and in recent times dubbed the Douglas Trail, in reference to the old Douglas Road route from Harrison Lake to Lillooet. There is no road connection along Seton Lake, but that route is used by the British Columbia Railway (now CN); the Seton Lake First Nation operates a railbus, the Kaoham Shuttle, between the Seton communities, beginning at the Seton Portage railway station to and from Lillooet, which is at the farther end of the lake. The service sometimes goes to D'Arcy by prior arrangement.

Preceding station	Canadian National Railway			Following station
Terminus		Kaoham Shuttle		Shalalth toward Lillooet
D'Arcy Limited service Terminus		Kaoham Shuttle		Shalalth toward Lillooet

References

^ Seton Portage.ca website Archived 2009-01-13 at the Wayback Machine
^ in Short Portage to Lillooet, Irene Edwards, self-published, Lillooet, various editions, out of print; and various other histories
^ http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/pubs/docs/En/En33.pdf ^{[bare URL PDF]}

"B.C. land claims spur native protests", by Kathleen Kenna, Toronto Star, September 8, 1990
Short Portage to Lillooet, Irene Edwards, self-published, Lillooet, various editions, out of print.
Halfway to the Goldfields, Lorraine Harris, Sunfire Books, one edition, out of print.
The Great Years, Lewis Green, Tricouni Books Vancouver 2001
Bridge River Gold, Emma de Hullu and others, self-published, 1971, out of print

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Seton Portage.

Bridge River-Lillooet Country Archive

[1]

[2]