History
Kootenay Lake is part of the traditional territory of the Sinixt and Ktunaxa peoples. These native populations used the lake and associated river systems as part of their seasonal migration and trading routes.
In 1958 the Kootenay Lake Crossing, an electrical power line, was built, running across the north arm of Kootenay Lake. It was destroyed in 1962 by protestors and rebuilt later that year.
The lake originally tidally and seasonally flooded an approximately 80 km long marsh lying to the lake's south within the Creston Valley. However, this has now been diked and converted to commercial agriculture. A smaller wetland area has been protected in this area.
In 1931, Corra Linn Dam was built at the mouth of Kootenay Lake, where it once again became a river. Just down river was Bonnington Falls, today the site of several hydroelectric dams. In 2003 the lake discharged 16,900,000 acre feet (20.8 km3) of water. High water for that year was a normal 533 metres, the record is 537 metres in 1961. In 1967 as part of the Columbia River Treaty the Duncan Dam was constructed above Kootenay Lake on the Duncan River, creating a 7,145 hectare reservoir for flood control. Also part of the treaty Libby Dam in Montana, was completed in 1975.
Read more about this topic: Kootenay Lake
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)