Bridge River Rapids - History

History

The narrows in aboriginal legend were formed by Coyote leaping back and forth from bank to bank so as to make a barrier for salmon and places for people to fish.

The location is the most important aboriginal fishing site in the British Columbia Interior and historically it and neighbouring sites along the stretch of river between Fountain and Lillooet attracted over 15,000 people at a time to fish at the site during key salmon runs from the many different peoples of the Interior. It was here early in the 19th Century, that an insult by the chief of the Lakes Lillooet to the chief of the Okanagan people, Pelkamulox, led to death of the latter and an eventual war of revenge against the St'at'imc by his son, the famous Nicola in the late 1830s.

During the Fraser Gold Rush the site was the location of boomtown known as Bridge River. That name came from the toll-bridge built over the river at this point in 1859 to replace a native-built pole bridge. The town only lasted a few years, as an easier crossing to the Old Cariboo Road was Miller's Ferry, closer to today's Lillooet, at the site of a 1913-built suspension bridge.

A 1950s era proposal to build a dam at Lillooet Canyon, just above the site of today's suspension bridge, which would have inundated the fishing spot and ended the Fraser salmon runs, was abandoned, along with another at Glen Fraser and an even larger dam at Moran Canyon, which would have backed the Fraser up to Williams Lake and beyond.