Читать книгу Voices from the Skeena - Robert Budd - Страница 7

The Skeena starts high up on the Spatsizi Plateau in northwestern British Columbia, in a valley between Mount Gunanoot and Mount Thule called the Sacred Headwaters. From this area of rolling grassy tundra that is the traditional hunting grounds of the Tahltan people, the river flows 570 kilometres to the Pacific Ocean, making it the second-longest river in BC. To the Tsimsien and Gitxsan people who have lived alongside the river since ancient times, the Skeena is an essential transportation artery; the communities depend on the health of the river. They understand that the fish, vegetation and wildlife are interconnected. Today, the Skeena remains one of Canada’s pristine rivers. Its strong currents, boiling rapids and narrow canyons are as challenging to navigate as they have always been, and it is with good reason that the Skeena has earned the reputation of being the toughest navigable river in North America. Our goal in sharing these stories is to reveal the Skeena as a national treasure.

The Indigenous people of this area have creation stories that are as old as the tides that rise and fall on the shores of the Skeena. There are stories of the flood. There are stories of the world in darkness before Raven brought the sun, moon and stars to light the world. But the stories in this book begin with the arrival of the first Europeans to the west coast of Canada. It was the fur trade that brought explorers to BC, and in the 1800s the Hudson’s Bay Company built their trading post at Fort Simpson, where the present-day community of Lax Kw’alaams (Port Simpson) is located. The Omineca gold rush brought more travellers to the north, all of them chasing their dreams in the mountains east of Hazelton. The First Nations thought the settlers were poor, so they offered, “Build your store here.” This speaks to the inclusivity of the First Nations people. To this day the pieces of land that were given to these settlers are removed from the reserve. Port Essington and Hazelton were the destination for yet another wave of people who were helping to build the Collins Overland Telegraph line, a trans-Canada highway and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway that was on its way to a new town called Prince Rupert.

Hazelton became the hub of much of the activity in the north. It was the destination for canoes, and later for sternwheelers delivering goods from the south, and pack trains were always waiting to take these goods to any of the various destinations in the North Country. The people Imbert Orchard recorded recall the days when the large Haida canoes were used to navigate the river through to the heyday of the paddlewheelers. It is this short period of BC’s history, roughly between 1895 and 1912, that we highlight in this book.

Sixteen different paddlewheelers navigated the rough waters of the Skeena from 1864 to 1912. The first of these boats, the Union, made the trip up from Victoria to the mouth of the Skeena in 1864, carrying four passengers and twenty tons of freight. However, the trip was declared a failure when the captain, Tom Coffin, decided he could not ascend the river without more preparation and so the boat and its crew returned to Victoria. The Union was hired by the Collins Overland Telegraph Company to try again in 1865, but this trip revealed the draft of the Union was too deep for the Skeena. The telegraph company decided that it needed a new vessel to work its way through the tough water.

Skeena River and Region

The following year, Captain Coffin made three separate trips in the newly built paddlewheeler called Mumford to deliver twelve thousand rations for the workers establishing the telegraph line. It was not a comfortable journey for passengers, as they were given axes and bucksaws and told to chop wood to feed the enormous boiler that kept the boat going. However, the Collins Overland Telegraph Company went defunct once the transatlantic telegraph cable was completed that year, the Mumford returned to New Westminster where it was docked in October, and it was never used again.

Three years later, in 1869, the Omineca gold rush made navigating the Skeena profitable again. Canoes were used to travel up the river to Hazelton, where a 185-kilometre trail went overland and made its way east past Fort Babine and Takla Lake to the Omineca River. This route is known today as the Babine Trail.

In 1889, the Hudson’s Bay Company built a sternwheeler called the Caledonia to make the trip up the Skeena. Captained by George Odin, the Caledonia launched in February 1891 and made her first trip to Hazelton in May of that year, a journey that took nine days. Captain John Bonser was hired to be her captain shortly thereafter and he saw to it that she was overhauled in 1895 to make her more manoeuvrable. Incidentally, Captain Bonser named eleven canyons and rapids along the river, giving them names like Devils Elbow, Graveyard Point and The Whirly Gig Rapids. The original Caledonia was replaced by another Caledonia in 1898 (designed by Bonser himself), when the Klondike Gold Rush was in full swing and many more people flocked to the north.

The railway to Hazelton was completed in August of 1912, which signalled the end of the steamship era. The Inlander left Hazelton for the last time on September 13, 1912, under Captain Bonser, and once the boat reached Port Essington it was brought ashore. Captain Bonser died the following year on December 26, 1913. The Skeena River, born in the mists of time, continues to flow from the mountains to the sea, a majestic icon of the north.