Ntqwixw

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

For the St'át'imc, the late summer into the early fall is the time of the best salmon runs. The Northern St'át'imc move to their traditional fishing grounds along the rivers and lakes to catch salmon. The fishing grounds have Ùcwalmicw names. The salmon was and remains one of our peoples' main source of food. This area is known as "Ntqwixw"; it is one of the places along the Fraser River (sat'átqwa7) where St'át'imc catch salmon. It is the responsibility of T'ít'qet, one of eleven St'át'imc communities, to manage and take care of the site. All who fish here respect St'át'imc traditional laws including: keeping your area clean, fishing for food and ceremonial purposes only, taking only enough fish required to feed your family, and sharing the fishing stations with others who follow the traditional fishing laws.

Please be respectful of our St'át'imc fisher people. It is every person's obligation to keep the lands healthy for future generations.

Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe

(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.

They certainly never got the title to the country from us, neither by agreement nor conquest, and none other than us could have any right to give them title.

In early days we considered the white chiefs like a superior race that never lied nor stole, and always acted wisely, and honourably.

We expected they would lay claim to what belonged to themselves only.

In these considerations we have been mistaken and gradually have learned how cunning, cruel, untruthful, and thieving some of them can be.

We have felt keenly the stealing of our lands by the B.C. government, but we could never learn how to get redress.

We felt helpless and dejected; but lately we begin to hope.

We think that perhaps after all we may get redress from the greater white chiefs away in the King's country, or in Ottawa.

It seemed to us all white chiefs and governments were against us, but now we commence to think we may get a measure of justice.

We have been informed of the stand taken by the Thompson River, Shuswap, and Okanagan tribes, as per their declaration of July 16th, 1910.

We have learned of the Indian Rights Association of B.C., and have also heard the glad news that the Ottawa government will help us to obtain our rights.

As we are in the same position in regard to our lands, etc., and labor under the same disadvantages as the other tribes of B.C., we resolved to join them in their movement for our mutual rights.

With this object, several of our chiefs attended the Indian meeting at Lytton on Feb. 13th, 1910, and again the meeting at Kamloops on the 6th of Feb. last. Thereafter we held a meeting ourselves at Lillooet on the 24th of Feb. last, when the chiefs of all Lillooet bands resolved as follows:

First – That we join the other interior tribes affiliated with the Indian Rights Association of the Coast.

Second – That we stand with them in the demand for their rights, and the settlement of the Indian land question.

Third – That we agree unanimously with them in all the eight articles of their Declaration, as made at Spences Bridge, July, 1910.

In conclusion, we wish to protest against the recent seizing of certain of our lands at "The Short Portage," by white settlers on authority of the B.C. government.

These lands have been continually occupied by us from the time out of mind, and have been cultivated by us unmolested for over thirty years.

We also wish to protest against the building of railway depots and sidings on any of our reservations, as we hear is projected.

We agree that a copy of this Declaration be sent each to the Hon. Mr. Oliver, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, the Secretary of the Indian Rights Association, Mr. Clark, K.C., and Mr. McDonald, Inspector of Indian Agencies.
 

1916 Chiefs Delegation to Ottawa

(SIGNED)

James Nraiteskel, Chief Lillooet Band
James Stager, Chief Pemberton Band
Peter Chalal, Chief Mission Band
James James, Chief Seaton Lake Band
John Koiustghen, Chief Pasulko Band
David Eksiepalus, Chief No. 2 Lillooet Band
Charles Nekaula, Chief Nkempts Band
James Smith, Chief Tenas Lake Band
Harry Nkasusa, Chief Samakwa Band
Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe (May 10, 1911)
Paul Koitelamugh, Chief Skookum Chuck Band
August Akstonkail, Chief Port Douglas Band
Jean Babtiste, Chief No. 1 Cayuse Creek Band
David Skwinstwaugh, Chief Bridge River Band
Thomas Bull, Chief Slahoos Band
Thomas Jack, Chief Anderson Lake Band
Chief Fransois
Thomas Adolph, for La Fountain Indians

Spences Bridge, B.C. May 10th, 1911

Miyazaki Heritage House

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.

Artie moved upstairs so the Miyazakis could move into the ground floor of Longford House and set up a medical office in one of the front rooms. After the war, Artie moved to living quarters behind the family store and Dr. Miyazaki became the legal owner of Longford House in 1947.

With a practice covering over 4000 square miles of some of the most rugged country on earth, Dr. Miyazaki was known for his optimism and sunny personality. He was a true country doctor who also acted as a dentist, veterinarian & mortician.

To reach accident scenes, attend illnesses and deliver babies he waded through snowdrifts, travelled on horseback, by train and speedboat, dug his way through slides, chopped fallen trees, attached ice hooks to his vehicle to crawl up wintery hills and crossed the Fraser in a cable car. His efforts to get to remote reserves to attend First Nations patients were often heroic and he is credited with saving many lives.

As Police Doctor and Coroner, he and Artie Phair often travelled by train and Miyazaki recorded their adventures together in his autobiography, My Sixty Years in Canada.

During his time in Lillooet, Dr. Miyazaki contributed greatly to the community including garaging and dispatching its first ambulance service, serving three terms on the town council (the first Japanese Canadian to do so), founding and being an active member of the Volunteer Fire Department, keeping the town's meteorological records, serving as President of the Historical Society and being a charter member of the Lillooet Elks. He was a devout member of the United Church and active with the Boy Scouts who met in his home, used his garage for bottle drives and sold Christmas Trees in the yard.

For his public service, Dr. Miyazaki was made Freeman of the Village and awarded the Order of Canada.

In 1983, recurrent health problems forced Dr. Miyazaki to move to Kamloops to live with his daughter. Before he left, he donated his home to the Village of Lillooet and his office remains as he left it.

The Pacific Great Eastern Railway

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.

In 1928, some of the bridges of the North Shore line were condemned and it was abandoned. The PGE infamously became "the railway from nowhere to nowhere" but images of the superlative scenery it traversed in the Saturday Evening Post drew tourists from across the continent.

In 1931, a steel bridge with a 600-foot continuous deck truss span 200 feet above the Fraser River replaced the old wooden trestle. The railbed was re-routed through Lillooet and a two-story train station built to serve the town.

The opening of gold mines in the Bridge River area in 1933 brought a local boom to the PGE. To bridge the road system gap between Lillooet and Shalalth, gas-electric cars sidelined by the closure of the North Shore line were put back into service to tow flat decks loaded with automobiles.

The government earmarked $20 million for PGE development in 1949 and, forty years after it was first planned, the PGE pulled into Prince George in September of 1952.

The missing link between North Vancouver and Squamish was finally blasted along Howe Sound and in the summer of 1956, the first train to travel the whole of the original proposed route passed through Lillooet.

The same year, the first of twelve Budd Cars arrived and the PGE began dedicated passenger service. Barring rock fall, landslides, floods, snowstorms and forest fires, Vancouver was now only five and a half hours from Lillooet.

The next three decades saw the construction of spur lines to several northern towns and the main line pushed northward as far as Fort Nelson. B.C. now had a railway that traversed the province from corner to corner.

In 1972, the PGE was renamed the British Columbia Railway.

A new train station was built in 1986 to serve the public including students from Seton Portage & Shalalth who commuted to school in Lillooet in a dedicated passenger car.

Following the 2001 provincial election, the Budd Cars were sold and their place taken by an excursion train and, between Seton Portage & Lillooet, the Kaoham Shuttle. As the town's only connecting public transit, the Budd Cars are fondly remembered and keenly missed in Lillooet.

The provincial government sold BCR to Canadian National Railway in 2004.

The Fraser River

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.

They camped below the present town of Lillooet north of the clear waters of Cayoosh Creek. Across the creek, stood a fortified village of the St'át'imc who called them "the Drifters" and said their leader had a tattoo of the sun on his forehead and the moon on his chest. It was an uneasy night - some St'át'imc wanted to raid them but a Chief restrained them saying, "They might be able to help us one day."

Over a hundred St'át'imc men rowed over to shake hands with Fraser and traded more dried salmon & a canoe for a metal file & a kettle instead.

South of Lillooet, the river seethes and roars, its canyon walls "where no human being should venture." Aided by First Nations all the way down the river, Fraser noticed it began to rise and fall with the tide. They had almost reached the salt chuck but were driven away by Musqueam warriors when they tried to land.

Fraser's readings confirmed Tacoutche Tesse was not the Columbia River. If he'd known that at Leon Creek, he wrote, "I would have certainly returned" but filthy, starving and in rags, they all made it back to Fort George seventy-one days after they set out.

In 1971, four Scots led by Sir Ranulph Fiennes navigated the Fraser from Prince George to the Salish Sea without portaging, albeit in sturdy inflatable boats with powerful outboard motors, not birchbark canoes and paddles. As far as it is known, they were the first to do so.

As they have done for many thousands of years, the St'át'imc still fish the Fraser in the traditional manner with dip nets and, in the heat of the summer, make excellent wind-dried salmon on racks along the river.

The Goldrush

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.

Without any formal authority over the vast inland territories of New Caledonia and its multitude of First Nations, Douglas was determined it would not become part of the U.S. He forced the miners to submit to British authority by charging them for permits. California newspapers encouraged miners to travel via Washington Territory saying that within a year New Caledonia would be part of the U.S.

Open warfare raged between First Nations and the US Calvary south of the border. The majority came via Victoria and paid their dues instead.

Douglas travelled to the Fraser Canyon with a small escort of British marines to maintain order between the miners and First Nations with diplomacy rather than force.

St'át'imc assembled at Lillooet rightfully saying that since the gold was in their territory, the miners should pay them to mine it. They also expressed their fear the mining would impact salmon runs but the Boston Men were many and the King George Men few. Douglas could only assure the St'át'imc they would be "treated in all respects as Her Majesty's other subjects . . . magistrates would tend to their complaints (and) they might hold mining claims on the same terms . . . as other miners."

Queen Victoria approved of the measures Douglas took, proclaimed the Colony of British Columbia and the newly arrived Judge Matthew Begbie swore him in as its Governor in November of 1858.

When the miners pushed into the goldfields further north, Douglas sent the Royal Engineers to build a road for them. Lillooet became Mile Zero of the Cariboo Road and blossomed into the largest settlement north of San Francisco with a population of 16,000 at its peak.

Want to learn more of the epic history of British Columbia? Pick up a map of Lillooet's Golden Miles of History Tour at the Lillooet Museum & Visitor Centre or at participating merchants.

The Chinese in Lillooet

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.

While they were criticized for accepting low wages, sending their earnings back to China and importing their own specialized supplies, the Chinese were also respected for their hard work and massive contribution to the development of this province.

When B.C. became part of Canada in 1871, one of the conditions was that the Federal Government would connect it to the rest of the country with a new cross continental railroad. Work started on the railroad in 1881 with most of the tens of thousands of workers needed to push it through the rugged B.C. landscape recruited in China by Chinese labour contractors.

Once the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1884, many of the Chinese workers came to the Lillooet area to re-work tailings left behind by miners who went north to richer strikes in the Cariboo. The Chinese miners patiently sifted the sand & gravel and washed boulders seeking any remaining flakes of gold. Ridges of the piled rocks they left behind can still be seen throughout the District of Lillooet.

In 1884, Chinese miners discovered that Lillooet's Cayoosh Creek had been overlooked. Over the next three years they mined it to a depth of fourteen feet beneath its surface taking out millions of dollars' worth of placer gold.

An estimated six hundred Chinese miners worked the Cayoosh while living in rustic cabins along the creek leaving behind the ruins of traditional Chinese cooking stove in the Seton Lake Campground.

Wo Hing was a prominent Chinese citizen of Lillooet who owned the largest store on Main Street and raised pork at his ranch on West Pavilion Road. A Chinatown sprang up in Lillooet behind his store at the entrance to Fraserview Street opposite Downton Park on Main Street. By the 1930s, most of the merchants on Main Street were Chinese but the boom and bust economy of Lillooet did not translate into a continuous presence here.

It didn't have any monetary value to the other nationalities, but there was another treasure found in the Lillooet area by the Chinese miners – B.C. nephrite jade and they shipped many tons of it back to China. Cut and polished to perfection, Lillooet's Jade Walk displays the beauty and variety of some of the boulders they left behind.

Japanese Historic Sites in Lillooet

As you journey to Lillooet, you can discover historic sites and learn about the history of Japanese Canadian internment and resilience. Laura Saimoto, a third-generation Japanese Canadian, shares her family's story of the WWII Internment and Dispossession in the Lillooet area along the Fraser River in an article on HelloBC.com.

East Lillooet Japanese-Canadian World War II Interment Camp Site

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 onstructed sixty-two tarpaper shacks that came to house over three hundred people while their former comfortable homes, possessions and properties were auctioned off.

Living conditions were inadequate in East Lillooet. Kerosene lamps provided light and wood stoves were used for warmth and cooking.

After resident Sadajiro Asari found and repaired a pump, the Japanese Canadians were able to use an old wooden irrigation flume to carry water up from the muddy Fraser River to wooden storage tanks. From there, water was carried in gallon cans to each household then filtered through gravel, sand and charcoal before it could be used. Drinking water was trucked in separately.

The uninsulated shacks were freezing cold in the winter and broiling hot in the summer but Tokutaro Tsuyuki recognized Lillooet's climate to be ideal for tomatoes and organized an agricultural cooperative enterprise that allowed the internees to eke out a living and survive. To this day, fields the internees pioneered are famous for their superior sun-ripened tomatoes.

The Fraser River which runs through the town of Lillooet is a St'at'imc First Nation fishery so the internees were forbidden to catch any of the spawning salmon teeming in the river below but sympathetic St'at'imc helped by smuggling sacks of salmon in on horseback via a back road into the camp.

Each family had a strip garden and a chicken coop which provided eggs & poultry. Three general stores in Lillooet regularly delivered all other basic supplies. The community built a school where high school graduates instructed young children while older students worked on correspondence courses.

The pride of the Japanese Canadian community was Vancouver's Asahi Baseball Team, winners of the Pacific Northwest Championship for five straight years. Kaye Kaminishi was a rookie on the team who organized baseball games among the East Lillooet internees. Forbidden to cross the bridge into Lillooet, Kaminishi challenged their police guard to organize a team in town for a friendly game. The mutual love of baseball sparked an acceptance of their shared humanity and the town became desegregated.

Due to ongoing racial prejudice, the War Measures Act was unjustifiably extended until 1949 forbidding Japanese Canadians from returning to the coast, so some internees from other camps came to live in East Lillooet until they had the means to start again.

To learn more about Japanese Canadian Internment in the Lillooet area, visit the Japanese Canadian Internment Camp memorial in East Lillooet along Highway 12 South.

An award winning point of view story by a descendant of an internment camp survivor was published on CBC.

Vernon Pick & Walden North

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.

After scouting various locations, at the age of sixty-two, Pick chose Cayoosh Canyon here in Lillooet and proceeded to spend much of his fortune fulfilling this vision.

Pick was secretive about Walden North's true purpose. He told locals who helped build its two-foot-thick walls and install bulletproof windows that he was concerned about forest fires.

Vernon Pick died in 1986 and is still fondly remembered in Lillooet for creating many jobs in the construction of Walden North and then by producing photocopier drums, microchip components and fine furniture in his state-of-the-art workshops.

By all accounts he was a gentle and magnanimous man who embodied the American spirit of rugged individualism and do-it-yourself Yankee know-how.

After his death, most of his equipment and possessions were auctioned off. In 1992, Fortis BC purchased Walden North to run as an independent power project.

In 2016, Walden North was sold to a partnership between Innergex and the Cayoose Creek Development Corporation, the economic arm of Cayoose Creek Sekw'el'was First Nation.

Walden North is not open to the public.

Credit: Courtesy of Vernon James Pick Foundation