 Rogers Pass, Glacier National Park
M. Naga photo Moving with the seasons, the Ktunaxa secured a good living harvesting the region's natural bounty, navigating the river and trading. For thousands of years prior to European settlement, the Ktunaxa First Nations passed through and camped near an area later known as Fort Steele.
European arrival Fortune seekers opened up the region with the discovery of silver, gold, and other precious metals in the later 1800s. John Galbraith, who ferried miners, merchants and settlers across the Kootenay River during the 1864 Kootenay Gold Rush to Wild Horse Creek, helped establish the small settlement of Galbraith's Ferry. Tensions arose between the new European and Chinese settlers and the indigenous Ktunaxa population. North-West Mounted Police Superintendent Sam Steele helped to negotiate peace between the Ktunaxa and the later settlers. In 1888, the Galbraith settlement was named Fort Steele in his honour. Fortunes were made as millions of dollars in gold were mined. But when most of the gold-bearing ground was claimed the miners moved on. By 1882 only a handful of European settlers lived in the vast East Kootenay District. The legacy of prospectors and pioneers is remembered in the fascinating ghost towns that still dot the silvery Slocan Valley.
Linking past and present The coming railway system did much to draw emerging settlements together in the region. The expansion would begin, however, with a young geographer navigating the Columbia River. In 1811, explorer and geographer David Thompson mapped the Columbia Valley for westward expansion. People travelling west down the treacherous Columbia River during the 1830s rested at the "big eddy," the name first given to the locality of Revelstoke because of a large swirl in the river which had eroded the riverbank. During the Big Bend Gold Rush of the mid-1860s prospectors flocked to its shores. When a route was surveyed westward for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), the area became known as "Second Crossing." By the late 1880s the area was named Revelstoke in honour of Lord Revelstoke, head of the British bank which had helped the CPR avert financial crisis during the building of the transcontinental railway line. The CPR route through Crownsnest Pass in southern BC was completed in 1898. This vital railway linked large areas of southern Alberta and southeastern BC to developing population centres in western Canada and the northern United States. In an attempt to bridge land and water, the S.S. Moyie sternwheeler was ordered by the CPR for a planned "All Canadian Route" to the Klondike. When the bill authorizing the essential railway link failed to pass the Canadian Senate in 1898, the CPR shipped the Moyie by rail to Nelson for service on Kootenay Lake. It was retired in 1957. You can visit the S.S. Moyie sternwheeler, one of the most significant preserved steam passenger vessels in North America, in Kaslo at the edge of Kootenay Lake.
Ingenuity inspired by nature The Kootenay region's four stunning National Parks -Mount Revelstoke, Glacier, Yoho, and Kootenay- offer glorious examples of human ingenuity and natural heritage side by side. Visit Yoho National Park to see the famous Spiral Tunnels, cut through the seemingly impenetrable Rocky Mountains to make way for the railroad in 1909. The Trans Canada Highway still follows sections of the original railbed. The region's abundance of natural hot springs, such as Radium Hot Springs in Kootenay National Park, have also been responsible for the growth of resort towns in the Kootenay Rockies.
|