The Xwisten experience – Pique Newsmagazine

Millennia before a flood of gold miners 50,000 strong swept through Lillooet in the 1850s — and in the process changed life in the Sea to Sky corridor forever — there was one big reason a large settlement of native peoples lived where the Bridge River meets the mighty Fraser. St’át’imc tour guide Josh Jack knows why: “Salmon, salmon, salmon.”

The fourth-year Emily Carr University of Art and Design student, who works summers at Lillooet-based Xwísten Experience Tours, was standing beside an archeological dig just upriver from where the blue-green waters of the Bridge and Big Muddy merge in the sun-baked, sagebrush-covered depths of the Fraser Canyon. “At the height of the settlement there were 80 to 95 pit houses here,” he told Pique, “of which three-quarters would have been occupied at any one time. The size speaks to the bountifulness of the Bridge River Valley.”

Repeated excavations led by University of Montana archeologist Dr. Anna Marie Prentiss have slowly unearthed the remains of a village where Jack said his people first settled 3,000-to-4,000 years ago. “Before that, based on carbon dating of a carved soapstone female figure and a male figure carved from bone, nomadic tribes visited here as early as 6,000 B.C.” Chances are good that whether then or now, people converged here in August when sockeye salmon began their upstream migration. That’s the central theme of the traditional fishing rock and archeological village outings conducted daily from June through September.