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.
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)