The Fraser Canyon Encountered
As Europeans reached into North America, radically different worldviews abruptly encountered each other, a meeting that, the Norse apart, began in the western hemisphere late in the fifteenth century and was repeated over and over again during the next four centuries as the newcomers pushed ever farther into the spaces of those who had always lived there. Little or no evidence survives of most of these encounters, but here and there they can be somewhat reconstructed. The example that follows is of such a meeting in a deep, isolated valley in what is now British Columbia. There, following the crest of the spring flood in 1808, a party of Montreal-based explorers from a fur-trading post far upriver encountered the Nlaka’pamux, the people living along that reach of the river. Neither had seen or, except perhaps vaguely in rumours, heard of the other. Simon Fraser, the leader of
From The Resettlement of British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), 103–4.
